How to Draw Bamboo with Watercolor

On behalf of Tvlessson.com, I'm Sherie Tengbergen. In this clip, I'm going to show you the neatest trick for using in popsicle stick. We’re going to make bamboo that looks like one of these two examples that you see here. What you do first is you start by painting a flat wash of either a dark brown or a yellow oker and then you let the stick do all the work.

So, let me show you real quickly. I'm going to take my brush, my flat brush and I'm going to use in yellow oker here and I'm going to go head and I'm going to quickly put down quite a bit of color. And, it’s just with a little flat brush, no big deal. And, that’s about where I want my bamboo to be. So, I'm going to spread that down.

I may want to put a little bit of yellow with that just to get some different colors going. And, here is a key to using your popsicle stick. You're going to lay it a little bit at an angle and you're going to press and lift and you're going to press and lift. And, you want to make sure that your popsicle stick doesn’t stop in the same place every time because if it does, it’s not going to look very normal or natural.

And so, I'm stopping my popsicle stick in different places and the drier the paint gets, the more you're going to have to press to get those bamboos to really show up. So, I'm just going down here and I'm pressing and look at the great bamboo pieces that you get and later on, you’ll add leaves and have a nice bamboo for us, for your painting.

On behalf of Tvlesson.com, this is Sherie Tengbergen and thanks for watching.