Pretty Pebbles

If you love a trip to the coast you might well have a visited a pebble beach or you might even live just a stone’s throw away! Either way you can bring the beauty and tranquility of the coast back home with this watercolour pebblescape.

This tutorial is a great way to capture memories of a special place or holiday. Every pebble beach is slightly different and is unique to its geographical location. So you could create a painting of every pebble beach you visit!

Through the erosion of land (usually due to cliff falls) large rocks are gradually broken down and eroded by wind and rain until they are small enough to be taken by the tides. Beautiful smooth, rounded pebbles are the result of thousands of tides, tumbling the rocks over each other as they are dragged in and out until they become the familiar, tactile pebbles we find along the shoreline.

In this project we are going to recreate pebbles from Freshwater West in Pembrokeshire, Wales. In this coastline around 40% of the geological features are protected by SSSI's. The diversity of the rocks has resulted in an amazing array of beautifully coloured pebbles which range from yellows to oranges, pinks, blues, violets and greys. These are somewhat different to the grey flint pebbles which can be found on my nearest beach in Brighton on the south coast.

In the tutorial I will show you how to use a range of different techniques to recreate the texture and pattern of each individual pebble. We will use masking fluid to add speckles and lines. Salt to add texture and pattern. We will build up colour and pattern through layering and develop a sense of form with pencil shading.

To begin, I will show you how to use drawing pencils to add shading as we layer HB, 2B and 4B pencils. This technique will give your painting an instant 3D feel and a rich depth base to apply colour over.

https://www.cassart.co.uk/derwent-graphitint-paint-pan-palette-set-of-12--c/

I have selected these pebbles for their lovely muted colours and we will investigate how to mix different hues to reflect the soft, calm colour palette of the photo reference. If you are lucky enough to own the Derwent Graphitint paint pans (currently on sale at Cass Art (£17.95 or through Derwent on Amazon £13.77 ~ Prices Correct Jan/2026) these will help you to recreate the colours with ease - but they are not essential as many of the colours can be recreated using watercolour paint. The Graphitint colours have a graphite base and give them a rich, muted quality which many of the pebbles possess. They also have a soft sheen with a light sparkle which is created by the particles of graphite (the same substance drawing pencils are made from) suspended in the paint. If you have the Graphitint colour pencils you might like to use these over the top of a dried watercolour base to achieve a similar effect.

To find out more about this project, take a look at the short video below.

I think the final painting has a very tranquil quality about it and I hope it brings a little bit of calm serenity to your walls!

Happy Painting!