Easy Watercolor Tutorial-Paint a Pear!

Hi there!

I just posted my first YouTube tutorial! If you like, you can click the link above to see the video. Or, if you are more of a written word person, follow the instructions below to make a loose style watercolor pear. Let’s paint!

Beginner Watercolor Pear Tutorial

In this tutorial, I am going to show you how to create a loose style watercolor sketch of a pear. The loose style of painting is meant to be casual and fun, which means that we are focusing more on the colors and the impression of the painting, rather than making it super detailed. It also means that this painting will go super fast! And since the whole painting takes under five minutes, if you end up making a mistake or don’t like your results, you can always just start over. Let’s get started!

I have here the supplies that I used, but you can feel free to use whatever you have on hand.

To make this painting you will need:

• Watercolor paper- I am using my Strathmore 400 series watercolor journal
• Paper Towel
• Watercolor round brush, preferably size 8- I am using a Princeton Heritage Round 8
• Palette or mixing area
• Cup of clean water
• Watercolor paint
  • Brown- I am using Daniel Smith “Burnt Umber”
  • Pink- I am using Daniel Smith “Quinacridone Coral”
  • Green- I am using Daniel Smith “Viridian”
  • Yellow- I am using Winsor & Newton “Winsor Yellow”

Before you paint, make a few mixtures that you will use throughout the sketch. Leave each of these mixtures in your palette or mixing tray, ready to use right when you need them:

• Mix green with yellow to make a light green
• Mix green with brown to make a dark, natural looking green
• Mix pink with yellow to make a warm, orangey pink
• Mix your orange-pink with more yellow to create a slightly different shade of orange

To create your sketch, start by drawing a simple outline of a pear. To do this, just draw a small half circle, and then underneath that, draw another more stretched out half circle that faces the opposite direction.

Then load your brush with some of your pink and yellow mixture. Use this mixture to add some color to the top left side and middle right side of the pear. Then add some of your other orange mixture to the paint to give it some color variation. 

Then rinse out your brush and dry it on your paper towel. Now load your brush with some of your green and yellow mixture. Use that color to paint in the rest of your pear shape. Allow the two colors to touch and don’t worry if the paint mixes or slides around! That is totally normal with watercolor paint. 

Now, without rinsing out your brush, load some of the red-yellow mixture into your brush. Use this color to make a transition area between the pink and green paint. You can make this area as big as you want. If you want more of your pear to be green, you can just add a small amount of the paint to the outline of the pink area. 

Now rinse out your brush completely and dry it on your paper towel. You will use this dry brush to lift out some of the pink paint. This will create some highlights on your pear. With the dry brush, lift pink paint off of the middle right side of the pear, right where the shape of the pear bulges out. Then lift paint off of the top left of the pear. While the paint is still very wet on the page, you can gently move it around to make sure you have some highlights and also shadow areas. 

Now let’s paint the leaves and the stem! Rinse out your brush and dry it. Then load it with some of your green-brown mixture.  Make a leaf shape above the pear on the right by dragging the bristles across the paper gently with the tip of the brush, pressing down until the whole belly of the brush touches the paper, and then lifting off to create the tip of the leaf. On the other side, use the same motion to create a leaf shape facing the opposite direction. 

The leaf shapes you just painted are actually just half of the leaf. You can create a highlight effect by painting another lighter leaf shape on top. To paint the top half, rinse out your brush and load it with your yellow-green mixture. Working from the outer end of the leaf on the left, use the same leaf painting motion as before. Make sure you finish your brush stroke right where the darker green shape ends. Then, make the highlight top half of your other leaf. On this side, you can change the shape a little. Press down when you begin your brush stroke, and then quickly lift up to make a long, thin line. Once again, make sure the end of that brush stroke touches the end of your lower leaf brush stroke. 

To make the last leaf, try painting the two halves of the leaf in the opposite order! Use your yellow-green mixture to paint the highlight part of the leaf. Then load your brush with your green-brown mixture to paint the lower, darker part of the leaf. 

Now we are going to paint the stem! Load your brush with more of your green-brown mixture. Create the illusion of a thick stem at the top by pressing the side of your bristles halfway down onto the paper, and drag the brush down toward the pear. Then lift your bristles up so that only the tip is touching the paper and create a thin line that ends right above your pear shape. If any of your leaves don’t touch the stem, make some small connecting lines from the leaves to the stem.

Our last step is to add some shading to the pear! Load your brush up with a good amount of your brown-green mixture and paint a small area on the bottom of the pear, where you would imagine the darkest part of shading to be. 

Now we are going to fade that color up into the rest of the pear. Rinse out your brush and scrape out most of the water on the edge of your water cup. With this wet brush, paint right along the top edge of the dark green color. Make sure your brush stroke extends from one side of the pear to the other. Then use your brush to gently blend the green paint up into the clear water from the brush stroke that you just made. Once again, rinse out your brush but this time, touch it gently to a part of your paper towel that is already wet. This is called a neutral brush. It’s not too wet, but it’s not dry either. Use your neutral brush to make one more brush stroke right above your last stroke. At this stage, you can lift paint off if you got your shadow area too dark, or you can just use the neutral brush to fade the light color up into the rest of the pear. 

We can create one more shaded area on the pear by using the same process over on the top right side, right above where the shape bulges out. Add your dark green mixture to a small area. Then rinse out your brush and scrape most of the water out into the water cup. Use that wet brush to fade the color out into the rest of the pear, just like you did with the shading of the bottom of the pear. 

And there you have it! You have created a beautiful loose style watercolor pear! If you did the painting, please post it on Instagram or Facebook and tag me @joannajenkinsonart and use the hashtag #joannajtutorial so I can see your painting! 

Thank you so much for painting with me. 

Until next time, 

Joanna