Painting Japanese Scenery with Watercolour Pencils

After watching a watercolour pencil painting tutorial for beginners, I decided to give it a go and paint three Japanese scnery including Mt Fuji, Torii, and a Pagoda.

Watercolour pencils tutorial

I watched this video by Watercolor Pencils CH on how to paint gradients with watercolour pencils, and remembered I own a set of watercolour pencils from back in high school.

Planning

I decided to paint a set of 3 scenery of Japan, and made a quick mockup with Photoshop to plan out what to paint.

Then I made a colour swatch of the watercolour pencils I owned; The codes with 4XX are Pentel and the single to double digit ones are Derwents. Right right half the swatches are watered.

Draft gradients were made to figure out which colours I’d use.

Here are the colour codes for the gradient skies.

Blue Sky Fuji: 451 –> 445

Sunset Torii: 433 –> 434 –> 427 –> 400 –> D23 (mountains) –> 432 (sea)

Night-time Temple: 451 –> 437 –> 433

Painting

The watercolour paper I used was Chinese Baohong (寶虹) Academy Watercolor Paper Pad, but I’m keen to try out the VifArt Smooth watercolour postcards by Japanese Maruman next time.

And the third painting:

I initially framed it inside a Daiso trio frame, but watercolour paintings are prone to UV and moisture – so a picture frame with glass (not acrylic) pane was purchased from Country Road – because their frames have a rotating clip at the back that makes changing pictures easy.