15-Day Floral Watercolor Challenge: Create Compositions with Confidence

1. Welcome to Class!: Welcome to the 15 Day Floral Watercolor Challenge. My name is Pria. I'm a watercolor artist, and I've been painting loose florals since 2018. And while I've dabbled in painting other subjects and styles over the years, I always find myself coming back to loose florals. In the beginning of my watercolor journey, I was hyper focused on learning how to paint roses, leaves, peonies, daisies, all different types of flora and fauna. And I was able to progress my skills fairly quickly, but I could only paint those flowers individually. Whenever it came time to put them all together in a composition, I felt totally stuck. Did not know how to create a cohesive piece at all, and I would end up getting really frustrated. So that's what we're here to tackle in this 15 day watercolor challenge. So if you have joined any of my other classes or tutorials before, but you're still struggling with putting it all together, you're in the right place. We'll start by identifying some of the key tips for creating beautiful and balanced compositions, and I'll share with you examples of the good the bad family ugly from my own paintings over the years. And then we'll get started on our 15 floral projects. And in each piece, you'll learn how to paint various flowers, greenery, fillers, and other elements, and we'll arrange them together in beautiful, expressive compositions. We'll start with a couple of super simple pieces with just a few elements here and there. And as we progress through the class, we'll work our way toward more advanced compositions with lots of moving parts and we'll also paint new and unique flowers. By the end of this class, you'll feel confident in your painting abilities, but more importantly in your compositional skills. In each lesson, I will be sharing my step by step process, but there will also be plenty of room for you to make your own creative choices to help your final paintings feel uniquely you. And I encourage you to do that as much as you can in this class, because that's what's going to start to build up your creative confidence. Class is perfect for watercolor artists of any level, and you are more than welcome to work at your own pace. Before we get started, be sure to connect with me on social media. I share a lot of behind the scenes studio content, tips, and tricks, and tutorials, and I would love to have you join the online community. So when you're ready, grab your favorite supplies, and let's dive in. 2. About the Projects: Be completing 15 individual projects throughout this class. The compositions will start out on the easier side and slowly incorporate more shapes and more elements as we go. And you'll also learn a lot of new flower painting techniques along the way. From simple but elegant rose compositions, to wreaths, to wild flower bouquets, cherry blossoms, and more you'll finish this class with a stack of beautiful watercolor paintings you can be proud of. But even more importantly, you'll leave the class with a new found confidence in your composition skills. And while the title of this class is 15 day watercolor challenge, please don't feel like you have to finish at all in just 15 days. Watercolor painting, especially in the loose style works best when you're relaxed and inspired. If at any point, you're feeling like you have to rush or you're feeling like you're falling behind, take a break, take a breather, try painting something else if you have to, and then come back to the class when you're ready to continue. I also encourage you to take some time after each project to jot down what you liked or didn't like about each composition. Oftentimes when I paint, I look at my final piece, and I think, h, I really should have had this filler flower curving more towards the top or I really wish I didn't add so many leaves in this one area because it's looking a little too crowded. Or on the positive side, sometimes I'll think, Wow, I really like how all of these flowers are painting in different directions or I love how these two colors compliment each other. Let me write down exactly what colors I used so I can refer to them again in a future painting. Taking a second to analyze your work and your processes really helps accelerate your skills, and it helps you develop your own unique style as you paint more and more compositions. I used to not do this at all. I would either think Wow, this is a great painting or this painting is terrible. What am I even doing? But there is really something you can learn from each and every painting you create, even if you don't end up liking the final outcome. It does help to at least acknowledge one or two things that you do like about your paintings. That way you can incorporate them into your next projects. In the following video, we will talk about all the supplies that you'll need to participate in this class. 3. Art Supplies: Go over some of the supplies that I'll be using throughout this class. For your convenience, I also included a PDF that has links to all of these supplies, and that PDF also includes detailed color mixtures and color recipes for each of the projects. Feel free to download that if you'd like to check any of them out for yourself. First up is watercolor paper. I'll be using professional grade 100% cotton paper, which I highly recommend. Daily challenges like this one can also be a really great time to use sketchbooks, because it can be fun to track your progress in a flippable manner. If you do that, though, just make sure to choose a sketchbook that has watercolor specific paper in it. Ideally, 100% cotton. My favorite watercolor sketchbook right now is this one from Arch or Arches. This is another good one from Etcher, and again, all these supplies are linked in that PDF below. Brushes, I'm using a variety of round brushes from the Princeton velvet touch and Neptune lines, but any round brushes that you like to use are totally fine. As for watercolor paint, I will share all the colors I'm using at the start of each individual project. But remember, you are welcome to use your own colors if you'd like. Actually, I encourage that because color is one of the easiest ways to start embracing your own preferences and styles and start making your own choices for each piece. Finally, I always use a paper towel mixing palette, and a bowl of clean water. Once you have all your supplies ready, meet me in the next lesson and we will start going over all the ins and outs of floral compositions. 4. Composition Basics: Before we dive into painting, let's talk through some of the key elements that make up beautiful, well balanced compositions, because let's face it. You can't just plop down some flowers on your paper and expect it to look cohesive. But there are a few key elements that can instantly improve your compositions. The first is having a focal point. You want your piece to have one or a few florals that are the stars of the show. These are typically your largest elements that the viewer's eyes go to first. Then you have your secondary florals, fillers, and greenery that play more of a supportive role. If you didn't have a focal point, your eyes wouldn't really know what to focus on first, and your piece might end up looking more like a pattern than a well balanced composition. Speaking of balance, that's the next key element. Balance is super important when you're painting compositions, and that doesn't mean having a perfect symmetrical painting. It just means you want to make sure that the piece isn't lop sided with all of the heavy elements on one side or all of the bold colors on one side. You want to have a mix of sizes, a mix of colors, and also a mix of the types of flowers spread pretty evenly throughout the piece. Next step is white space, and sometimes it can be really challenging to not overdo it, and you can sometimes end up stuffing your piece with all different types of leaves and fillers. But white space is actually really important and you can use it to your advantage. I want to show you this old painting of mine that I cringe looking back on now because you can see that I jammed in all of these leaves in every open space. There's no room for the primary flowers to breathe. Every element is right there in the center. Compare that to this recent composition that feels much easier to look at because there's some white space between all of the flowers and the leaves. You can enjoy and appreciate all these different elements in the painting without it looking so crammed and busy. You also need to consider shape and movement. Floral compositions can come in all shapes and sizes. You can have your traditional straight on composition. You can paint a wreath, a bouquet. There are just so many options. But regardless of shape, it's always important to incorporate movement into your piece. You don't just want the viewer to look directly into the center of your page and then move on. You want to have more of a zig zag shape from one corner to the other so that your eyes can move across the page. And for wreaths or other bouquets, you want to add flowing greenery and leave that curve to convey movement instead of straight lines and symmetry. We'll get a lot of great practice with this throughout the class. Next up is the rule of odds, and I personally think of it as less of a rule and more so something to keep in mind as you paint because I'm not a fan of rules when it comes to creativity. But the thinking here is that pieces are more pleasing to the eye when you work in odd numbers versus even numbers. Let's take a look at some examples. In this old painting of mine that has just two big roses and some greenery around it, it feels very unbalanced because it's just these two big blobs next to each other. And your eyes don't really know where to go next. When you have pairs of two or four flowers, it's really hard to make them look like they're not lined up or symmetrical. Now look at these more recent paintings where I have three primary elements. It just looks a little more organic and flowy. So especially when you're first starting out, I recommend painting three elements first, and then adding your supporting fillers and greenery. But I say it's a suggestion and not a rule because I actually have a couple of paintings like this one. That have two main elements, but I still really love how it looks. And that's because I offset them, so there is still some movement there versus the one where the two roses are right next to each other in the same exact position. And last but not least, we have our color palettes, and color is such a personal choice, but when you're first getting started, the simpler, the better. Start with pieces that only have two or three colors, which might seem like it would be a bit boring, but by utilizing values, which is the relative lightness or darkness of a color, you can still achieve so much contrast and dynamic interest in your painting. Take a look at this one color, which is paraline maroon, one of my favorites. If I pull it straight from the tube, it's a deep, dark, bold maroon, so that is a dark value. But as I start adding more water to my mixture, the color is less concentrated and I can get it all the way up to the super light super transparent maroon, which is a light value. So this entire scale is one color, but multiple values. As long as you vary the total values in your composition, you can get a lot out of just two or three colors. So there you have it. Those are the basics of loose floral compositions. I know that was a lot of information. So if it feels a little overwhelming, no need to panic. We'll get a lot of great practice putting all of these tips and tricks into play as we progress through the challenge. Finally, we will start on the day one painting up next. 5. Day 1: Primary Flower & Leaves: Welcome to Day one. We're starting sweet and simple with a very easy flower that has some leaves and buds coming off of it. This is a great warm up painting for the rest of the challenge. It's only one main element, but the focus is on composition basics like balance and movement, which we can accomplish with our leaves and our flower buds. The colors all will be using our paraene maroon for the flowers and a mixture of deep sap green and paraene maroon for the leaves. But remember, you can use any colors you want. All right, let's go ahead and get started with our composition. Like I said, for this composition, we're having one main flower, one primary element. So we really want to place that in the center of our piece. I'm using a six by eight inch paper for all of these projects. We'll have the flower in the center, and then we want to leave enough space to add our fillers and our leaves. So I am using parain maroon, and we're going to be pulling all of the color out from the center. So we want our center dots to be very pigmented and with plenty of water. So I'm loading that up in my brush. At this point, I'm using a size six round brush, and directly in the center of my page, I'm going to start placing down some dots. It doesn't have to be a perfect circle. We're just going to be pulling color from these center dots. So don't worry about making them perfectly uniform. Just go ahead and tap down some dots. We want to make sure this maintains its moisture. We want it to stay nice and wet because I'm going to rinse off my brush completely, so I just have clear water in my bristles, I'm going to use that clean water and use the color from the center that we just put down to create my petals. You'll recognize this technique if you've taken my other classes or tutorials. I use the tip of my brush to pull out some color. And then I let my brush expand down on the paper to create one half of the petal, and then do the exact same thing right next to it to create the second half of the petal. Go ahead and rinse off your brush again. Every time I create a petal, I'm rinsing off my brush because I don't want my petals to get progressively darker, and each time I paint a petal, some of that color is getting picked up into my bristles. I want to maintain nice and clean bristles and that's why I wash it off after every petal. So you can see that gentle color bleed. I don't have color in my brush. I just have clean water, but because I have plenty of pigment in those center dots, I can use that existing color to create these petals. We'll continue working our way around. Now, if your center dots do dry up, if you're taking your time, that's totally fine. Just go ahead and get lots more pigments onto the tip of your brush and just go ahead and re wet it. You can always rewet those center petals if they ever dry up. Just make sure to rinse off your brush in between, and then we can continue adding our petals. Starting with the tip of your brush, pulling out some color, you can see my bristles expand out on the page when I apply more pressure, and I create these nice fluffy petals, just like this. Pull out some color. Let your brush expand out on the page and lift back up. Now, I had even a little bit too much water there, so I'll show you what you can do. If you don't want any puddles like that, you can see a slight puddle that I have. I'm just drying off my brush and letting my brush soak up some of that extra water. Because I want to maintain that nice translucent look on the petals. I don't want it to be flooded and that's called the lifting technique. I can squeeze in one last little petal here. It's a little smaller than the others, but that's fine. Same thing here. I'm lifting up some of that excess water with a dry brush. Now we have our primary flower. One thing I like to do is while these petals are still slightly wet, I go back in and I just happen a little more color to deepen that center. And I'm making that contrast a little bit more bold. Now, I don't want the center of the flower to be completely blocked in with color, so I am just tapping in a little more pigment. There's our primary flower, and now we can go ahead and add the leaves and the fillers. I'm going to start with a very light value of this green mixture and a light value just means it's more watered down. Now I talked about adding movement to this piece. Because it's a simple composition, we only have one primary element. The way we can add movement is through leaves and fillers, and we still want to have that swirly sense of movement in the piece. I want to be able to add my leaves coming out on either side. I don't want them to be sticking straight out, I don't want them to be static. So I just want to keep all these things in mind as I paint them. So I'm using the same size six brush and I'm going to start by adding a very thin line using the very tip of my brush and a very light value of green, dragging it out just like this, and then I'll create a leaf on the very end. I'm putting heavy pressure down and lifting back up. Now, I'm going to do a few layers of green for this stem. That's why I always say you should start out lighter because you can always add darker greenery on top. If you start too dark, you're not going to really have room to go darker and darker. But if I start nice and light like this, you can layer on darker leaves on top and see how this leaf has c, some movement to it. It's not sticking straight out because that would make the whole piece look a little bit static. I'll do the same thing applying more pressure, curving the edge of this leaf. And I'll add a few more onto this little stem, using the tip of my brush, applying more pressure and lifting back up. And let's add another one right here. Making sure to vary the amounts of pressure. That's looking good so far for the top. Like I said, we're going to do a second layer. Don't go overboard. You want to leave a little bit of white space so that we can layer additional leaves on top. Now I'm going to do the same thing coming off of the bottom. Like I said, one corner to another, that's a great way to structure your compositions. It's not straight up and down or straight side to side, you have a little bit of corner to corner movement. So I'll use the tip of my brush again, swirling that leaf stem a little bit. And then going light pressure, heavy pressure, light pressure to create that leaf at the very end. I'll do the same thing, adding a few more leaves all the way down this stem. One coming off of here, making sure to add lots of good movement and variation. And just adding a few more to this leaf stem, making sure to keep the white space in mind because I do want to be able to add a second layer. And now you can see some good movements starting to show up on this composition. Another thing I want to mention is you don't want symmetry. You want your composition to look very natural and organic, and that means you don't want to have this stem be a flipped version of the bottom one. You see this one has a few more leaves on it. It has a little bit more of a curve there at the end. It's a little longer and the one at the top is a little bit shorter and only has a few leaves. Make sure you're varying all of the elements to keep it interesting and keep your piece from looking to symmetrical and to uniform. All right, so I moved you in a little closer so you can see what I'm doing here. This is the top half, and you want to make sure this leaf stem is dry before adding any additional layers. I want to have very clean separate lines on my greenery. So if I were to put a second layer on top when it's still wet, it would just start to bleed into each other, which sometimes is a nice effect. But in this case, I just really want to keep each layer pretty clean. Now I'm just going to add some additional greenery on top with a slightly darker value. Again, darker value just means it's less watered down and a little more pigmented. I'm using the very tip of my brush and pushing down. You can see a little bit of overlapping there, and I don't want to make the exact same leaves like I did in the first layer. I'm going to have some overlapping. Some are just going to be little wispy strokes like that. I'm really varying the different elements that I'm adding to keep it interesting. I'll have another one overlapping here on top. Because I'm working light to dark, I'm able to cleanly layer this darker stem on top of that first one. I'll have one coming down as well. Just get a sense for your painting. See what you're feeling. Go ahead and take some risks here. You don't need to make the exact same strokes that I'm doing. Go ahead and add some that are just wispy little marks like that, don't be afraid of painting on top of that first layer as long as it's dry. You just want to make this look nice and full. I'm adding these little leaves just by tapping my breast down. I'm not dragging it out too far and that gives you those nice little small leaves and now we can do the same thing at the bottom. See how it's a nice gradient from light to dark up at the top. That's what we want to achieve on this bottom layer as well. Just go ahead and freestyle some leaves. Always maintaining that sense of movements and do your best not to mirror what you did at the top stem. We have some leaves that are overlapping, some that are just little wispy lines using the tip of my brush. Just keep it nice and loose and fluid. It's looking pretty good. I think I'm just going to add a couple of these little small leaves like I did at the top. Again, just barely tapping my brush down. Just tap and let the shape of your brush create that leaf shape. Using your brush in different ways like this can really help add a lot of great variety to your piece as well. I'm going to stop right there because I still want to add some little flower buds and some secondary fillers. For now I'm seeing a lot of good movement. I see some variation in value. I'm liking how it's turning out so far, but I don't want to end up having it too crowded, and I still want to add some buds. I'm going to go ahead and let this dry and then we'll finish off with some more. 6. Day 1: Buds & Details: Now, anytime I add filler flowers to a composition, you'll see this throughout the class, I like to just start with a pencil and just lightly pencil in where I want those to go. That way, I don't have to commit to putting paint on paper and then maybe not exactly liking what I did. Doing it with pencil, again, I'm not sketching out full flowers, I'm just putting lines, and that helps me plan out, make sure I like the direction that I'm going without too much commitment. These fillers, these little buds, they're just going to be a little tiny bits of color. So some of them I'm going to add to these lines that I've already put. I'll have one coming off of there. I want to have one curving. I still want to maintain lots of good movement here. And I'm just probably going to put a couple of these in each of the stems. Have one coming out here to the side. This is another spot where you can really make your own creative choices. If you want to add more buds, go ahead and add more. If you just want a couple on each side, feel free to do that. These are just going to be little pops of color again. You can't really go wrong with adding a few of these. Definitely, feel free to make it your own. Let's see, I have three up at the top, I have two down here so far. I think I want to add one more Let's see. Maybe coming right here down the middle. Now that those are penciled in. I'm going to move to a size five brush. This is the velvet touch brush, so it's a little stiffer than the Neptune that I was using earlier. Again, I'm going to load up a pretty dark mixture of my Perine maroon. I'll bring you in a bit closer so you can see it better. I'm just going to tap the tiniest little bit of color down on my page in a little bit of a shape just like that. I'll rinse off my brush completely. Tap it on my paper towel, so I don't have too much excess water. And I'm going to start gently blending that color up, rinsing off my brush every time I touch it because I want this bud to get lighter and lighter. Have a smooth gradient from dark to light for each of these little buds, and that's all I'm going to do. It's a very simple little pop of color that has that gradient from the bottom to the top. That's going to look a little bit weird for a bit because I'm going to add the stems at the end. For now, I'm just adding in these little buds and they'll be floating for a little bit. I have that color in my brush, I make a little e shape just like that, and then I use a clean brush to gently start pulling that color up and soften those edges, making sure to rinse off my brush every now and then to maintain a light value. Gently bring it up into the shape of the bd. Now, see I originally penciled in my filler to go here. But thank goodness I did it in pencil because now I'm seeing that it's a little bit too symmetrical because I have this one coming out to the left. I'm just going to pencil in again, and I'll do another one coming back up on this side. And that way I can keep it where I have two on one side, one on the other, and it's not directly across from the other one. Again, that's the nice thing about penceling things in is you don't have to commit, and you can make changes as you go. Again, starting with that super dark value, rinsing off my brush completely and gently blending that color up to create this dainty little flower bed. Rinsing off my brush again, maintaining a very light watery value for the top of these buds. I want it to look nice and delicate. So that is looking much better. I'm glad I decided to do that. Now I'm going to use that same brush, but with the darkest value of green, even slightly darker value than that second layer that we did, and I'm using the very tip of my brush here to create these little attachments to each of these buds. I want it to be a very fine line, so I'm not applying too much pressure using the very tip of the brush and connecting it with that little filler. Here's where I like to add a little bit of character to it too because usually when I add those little stems, I also like to add some cute little leaves coming off of it. I might do some little wispy marks here. I also like to add some leaves coming off that base of the bud too. I hugs the bottom of it and add some good character. This is another step where you can really get creative and make these little attaching stems your own. I really don't want you to feel like you have to do the exact same steps or strokes that I'm doing here. This is where you can really embrace your creative freedom, especially once you have all the main elements placed. You can't really go wrong with just adding in those final touches. Again, using the very tip of my brush here to connect that filler with the rest of the piece. Why not add a few more wispy strokes for the leaves. Have fun with it. Let's again make a little base to the bud, help it look more complete. You can also use a smaller brush here if you'd like. These velvet touch brushes have very pointy tips, so this is working fine for me. But if you do have a smaller detail brush, feel free to use that. Let's make sure this third one is dry. Y, we're good to go. If it wasn't dry, then when I connect it with this lactle stem, I'd get some bleeding of the green into the red, which again, that's fine. I like to do that actually sometimes on some of my compositions if I want that very loose effect. But for this one, I want it to have a clean attachment. Adding those little base leaves to help it look more connected, and there we go. This is already looking really beautiful. We only have one main element, but because we have such a lush array of greenery, and we have the fillers is looking like a pretty full dynamic composition. Now we can go ahead and add the last little fillers on the bottom. And we'll do the exact same process that we just did. Again, starting with that very deep pigmented value and pulling straight from the tube and painting a little bit of a U shape at the bottom, rinsing off my brush, so I have clean bristles, and then gently blending it up, making sure to rinse off my brush each time so that I can get that gentle gradient from dark to light. If my brush becomes too saturated, you're not going to be able to get those light values at the very top of the bed. Every time you see my brush go out of screen, that's when I'm rinsing it off to keep it nice and clean. Let's do the same thing on these final two. Again, you are more than welcome to make adjustments as you go. You can change where you want your fillers to be, you can add more, you can add less. If you want it to be more clean and simple, this is where you get to be in charge of how your composition turns out. And I'm liking the balance of this so far, and I have one more pencil than here. That also helps to balance too because I have two on this side, and then I'll have two on the other side. So they're going diagonally again, which is something I always try to do. Be sure you're taking a step back every so often as you paint to just make sure things are looking nice and balanced and you're not overdoing it. That's usually one of the problems I run into is I just keep adding more and more until it looks too busy. Same thing as we did here up at the top, I'm going to give these a little time to dry, and then we'll add our darkest green attachments. These are nice and dry now. I've grabbed my darkest value of green. Again, working light to dark. Every time I add a new layer of greenery, it goes right over the top. I just use the tip of my brush to create these little attachments. Making sure to infuse some character by adding these wispy little marks and the little attachments for the buds. It just helps it look more like it's a part of the overall composition when you have a nice full attachment. You can make that part thicker if you want the bud to be even more closed up. Even when I made this attachment here it's not super straight, but it is a little more straight than I usually like to do. If that happens to you, I'll show you what I like to do to bring back a little bit of that movement and that natural look to it. I grab that same color of green and I'm just adding a little more movement on the leaves so that the entire stem isn't perfectly straight out. It has that nice movement and curve to it through the use of these little attachments. That's a nice little trick. If your stems are too straight, just add some leaves that are very curvy to take away from that straight line. Now because I added those, it doesn't look so straight because it hides that straight line with those curvy leaves. You can always make adjustments like that as you paint. Let's go ahead and add a few more leaves coming off on the side, just making those final details. Don't want to go overboard, but adding one final leaf coming off of this stem. All right. Everything is looking great. Let's take a step back and just analyze this again. Everything looks fairly balanced. The only thing that I'm noticing is that this third layer of greenery at the top dried a bit lighter than the bottom one. It dried quite a bit darker. It looks a little bit off balanced, not a whole lot, but just some of those darker elements that aren't there at the top. I am going to reload my brush with the dark value of green. Again, I don't want to go overboard, but I do want to realign some of these leaves with that dark value. And make it a little more bold. I'm not going to go overboard. I just want to bring back some of that dark color that we have at the bottom up to the top. That's the nice thing about working light to dark is you can always go back in with darker layers. That's why I prefer this actually where it dries a little bit too light than if it dries too dark because once watercolor dries, it's pretty hard to remove any of that color. Now it's looking a lot more balanced because we have dark elements on the top and the bottom. This is our finished piece. Even though this was just one main flower, we were still able to make it a cohesive and interesting composition with the changes in value, the leaves on either side, and the secondary fillers. I hope you're proud of what you painted today, and I will see you in day two. 7. Day 2: Primary Roses: Our day two project is a three piece rose composition with some filler flowers and foliage. This is a great way to not only practice painting loose roses, but also to work in odds to help your composition look more natural and organic. The color palette for this piece is soft pinks and greens. For my pink flowers, I'm using a mix of permanent zarin crimson, yellow ochre, and titanium white. I'm also going to be using some cadmium yellow, deep. And just like the day one project, I'm mixing some of that pink into my deep sap green to get a muted shade for a cohesive look among all the leaves and foliage. For this piece, I mentioned we are going to have three primary elements. We're working in the rule of odds. I'm going to have one rose that is top left, one middle right, and then another down at the bottom that's in between the two, and they're all going to be roses. Let's go ahead and add our first rose. This one will be the top left rose. I'm starting with a very pigmented value of my pink, and I'm going to use the tip of my brush to create tiny dainty little strokes like this. This is what I call a C curve because the strokes are in the shape of a C. I'm leaving some white space in between each little stroke and I'm starting to put these little strokes down on the paper and build out the center of the rows. That's all I'm going to do for now. Now I'm rinsing off my brush completely so I have clean water, and I'll start to feather out those strokes that I just made. I am still following that sea curve, but I'm blending out the dark pink that I already put down and softening it out. That's creating some nice depth within these petals. I want to go from dark to light. The very center of the rose is the darkest. That's where the petals are the tightest, and then we're getting lighter and lighter for these outer petals. I want this to be a very loose look, so I'm wiggling my brush, letting the bristles expand out on the page, and I'm being cognizant of my white space because what I say in all of my classes when I teach roses, is the white space is so critical. If you don't have white space in between your petals, that's when your flower really turns into a blob of color. And you don't have any of that separation or definition. We are still doing a loose style. We're not defining each and every petal. But because we have a little bit of white space, it gives the tiniest little bit of definition and separation that we need to create this style of rows. You can see the depth building out. We have dark in the very center and lighter petals here on the outside. Then I'll go back in and darken the center even more. In that mixture that I showed you, I'm adding a little bit more of the sarin crimson to get a darker value and gently tapping some of that into the very center. Again, I still want to maintain that dark value, and you can see that the petals are still wet, so you can have a little bit of bleeding happening, which is something I love for this style of loose roses. Darkening that center again and gently tapping in that darker value. Then I'll go back into my light pink mixture with a pretty fair value, not too dark. Go back over the top, adding a little more color. Again, you can see that gently bleed out into those petals because they're still wet, and adding the second layer to really make this rose more dynamic and beautiful. Now, how many layers you add is up to you. I usually take a look at how mine is looking if it needs a little extra something, I'll tap in some more, but you really don't want to go overboard because that's when you can get into blob territory, and we definitely want to avoid that. I will do one final tap of really dark pigment in the very center to darken it even more. And make it really nice and bold because that is what I think truly makes a rose pop is when you have the really dark deep center and then it gets lighter and lighter for the outer petals. I'll show you another chick I like to do, and that's to grab a little bit of yellow. You definitely don't have to do this part if you don't want to. But I get a very light value of yellow, and I tap in the slightest bit. You can barely even see it here. But adding in a second layer to your roses makes it so beautiful. And I think this warm yellow compliments our pink mixture really nicely. T because it's wet on wet, those first petals are still wet, so you're not getting any harsh lines, you're just getting that gentle bleed of color. I only put that on the outer petals because again, you want to maintain the very dark center. Our first rose is done. Now we can work on the second one. I want to have a little bit of space because we're going to have three primary roses, and I want a little bit of white space in between them, so we can add some greenery and foliage and I don't want everything to be crammed into the very middle. Let's do this again. Starting with the dark value. This is where the center of the rose will be. And we'll go ahead and make these little C curves. I'll bring you in closer so you can see it better. Just using the very tip of my brush, making these wispy curves and making sure to leave that white space in between for a little bit of definition. You don't want them to be perfectly uniform lines either. You can see some of mine are a little bit squiggly. Then at this point is where I rinse off my brush and gently start feathering out a little bit of that color. Which creates such a beautiful effect. And then I continue adding more petals using a very light value of our pink mixture. And I'm working with quite a bit of water here. You can see I'm holding my brush to the side so that I can get these thick fluffy petals. And roses can be kind of tricky. I have another class on roses if you're wanting to practice that more often. But my key tips are just the white space, and then the change in value from dark in the center to light for the outer petals. As long as you keep that in mind, as you paint, your roses will turn out very beautiful. Again, this is blue style painting, so don't feel like your roses or your petals have to be absolutely perfect. Just have fun with it. And then before they dry, go ahead and add in additional color and watch it bleed out into that first layer of petals. That's my absolute favorite part. Adding some more layers here to help build up this rose. While it's still wet, again, I'm going to grab a little bit of that yellow just because I personally love this part, but if you don't like the yellow, that's totally fine. You can maintain your pink. Just adding the tiniest bit of yellow here to make those outer petals pop. You can see in that first row, the very center is very bold and deep. I'm going in again with the second one with a very bold straight from the tube sarin crimson, so it's very dark and deepening that contrast a little bit So those petals look nice and tight. And so I just work my way around adding a couple more layers to help bring this rose to life. I have a little bit of a puddle here, just like we did in the day one project, I'll use the lifting technique to soak up some of that excess. So we don't have any harsh edges when it dries. And there is our second rose. The nice thing about this composition is it's all roses for the primary elements, but no two roses look exactly the same. It's not going to look to uniform, no matter what you do. Even if you do the exact same technique and use the same colors, those two roses look pretty different. Let's get started on our final rose. We're getting a lot of great practice with roses in this composition, so it might start to feel a little repetitive, but roses can be pretty tricky. I never hurts to get a lot of good practice doing the same thing over and over. So the center of the rows with the little dainty C curves, and then rinsing off my brush to soften out those initial strokes. Making sure to maintain that white space in between them. That part is super important, and then I'm getting lighter and lighter as I work my way toward the outer petals. I'm holding my brush at an angle so that it really expands out to create the big fluffy petals and just taking advantage of all the different strokes I can make with this one brush. While that's still wet, I will grab a little bit of the yellow and tap it on along the outer petals. It's nothing major, but it does add a beautiful little effect. I love how those pink and yellow colors work together. Just like we did with the other ones, I'll go ahead and start darkening the center of the rose. I have a darker value, and I'm just using the very tip of my brush, still being very mindful of my white space in the middle. My advice is to not go overboard. It's better to do less than to do too much. If you're happy with how your rose is looking, then just feel free to stop and move on to the next part. Just really love the center to be very dark and defined. That's my favorite part. There we have our primary elements. If those were tricky for you, try to go easy on yourself. Roses can be very difficult, but for lose style at least, the nice thing is it doesn't need to be perfect. It's just an interpretation of a rose. Like this, first, one, you can see some hard edges. There's not a whole lot of separation in the outer petals, but it's all good. It still looks loose. It still compliments the other roses nicely. As we add more elements to this composition, it'll really start to come together and look like a full cohesive piece. 8. Day 2: Leaves & Rose Buds: Going to switch to a very large brush. It's a size ten round brush. I'm mixing up some of my green. My trick here is when I'm working with colors like this light soft pink, I actually add a little bit of that pink to my green mixture to make it a little more muted, and it pulls everything together. Just adding a touch of that pink to my green, starting with a light value, and I'm going to add some big fluffy leaves here to the middle. It's very light value. We'll be adding more layers on top. So don't worry about making these initial leaves perfect. You're really just blocking in the color. So expanding my brush. You can see this is a big fluffy brush, size ten, so it is perfect for creating these large leaves. And we'll just continue adding some greenery here in the middle. You're basically just indicating that there is some foliage there in between these primary elements, but it does not need to be perfect. So I'll add another leaf coming out of here. You're filling in this base layer of color that will add to in the next layers. I'll have one more coming out of here, applying some pressure and lifting back up to create the leaf shape. The same principles as we did in the previous lesson, you want to have movement. You don't want any leaves coming directly straight out. You want to have some curves. And create a beautiful dynamic look. So that's all I'm going to do for the middle right now. I don't want to overcrowd it. I need some white space to let it breathe, but still show that those primary elements are connected. So what I'm really doing with this first layer is blocking in the main leaves, blocking in the movement and placing where I want the viewer's eyes to move, which usually I do corner to corner. But we will be painting on top of these first light leaves. If you don't like the you're going, you don't need to freak out. You can always change it as you add your darker elements. You can see I'm wiggling my brush as I paint, so my leaves aren't too perfect looking. They have organic edges to them. And putting in these really big fluffy leaves because these first layers, I like to have the biggest leaves, and then I have room to add smaller elements when I come back in with the darker greenery. Again, we'll be doing additional layers on top, so you don't need to fill in every little space. Setting the stage for the shape of this overall composition with this first layer. I'm not having leaves coming out of every single no can cree of each rose. You can see I have plenty of white spaye still, but I'm placing down this first layer of leaves and setting that foundation. Again, to create these leaves, I do a thin line with the tip of my brush, apply more pressure, letting the belly of my brush expand, and then lifting back up. We have a lot of good movement so far and now I want to curve it back down at the bottom. I'll add a curving leaf coming out of this bottom rose. This is definitely another opportunity for you to make some artistic choices of your own. I'm having my piece move from top left down to the bottom, like a little S curve, I guess, or a z curve. But if you want to have yours going a different direction, or you want to have a different style of leaves, by all means, you're more than welcome to do that. The same principles will apply though you want movement, you want some white space, and you want your leaves to look nice and organic. They're not perfect almond shaped leaves. They have a little bit of a rough edge. You can add some wispy little lines coming out of them, and I'll add one final leaf coming off of here. This is looking good so far. This is just the first layer, so we can always alter the shape. We can add more movement, longer leaves and stems. But for now, I'm going to let this dry, and then we'll add our foliage and filler buds. All right. Everything is dry now. Now I'll go ahead and use that good old pencil again. And start adding in where I want these fillers to be. For my fillers, I'm going to use a mix of my cadmium yellow deep that we dropped into the outer petals here, as well as some of the pink mixture. I think those colors will really balance each other well, and we didn't get a whole lot of yellow in the primary roses. I think having those as some of the fillers will be really beautiful and tie it all together. This is your opportunity again to add these fillers wherever you want. Just make sure you're giving plenty of movement. I'm going to have some coming out of each flower, but not going overboard. I also want to have them all balanced in terms of the direction. I already have some going down. On this side, I need to have some pointing upward, and that helps give that swirly sense of movement to your piece. I'll have some coming this way. Another one down here. And let's add one more. Curving out on the left. Now that I've penciled those in, let's go ahead and add in some of the buds. So will be pink, some will be yellow. Let's start with the yellow ones. Same as we did in the day one project, I'm starting by adding a U shape down at the bottom, and then rinsing off my brush completely and blending up that color to be very light at the top. This creates a really soft and delicate effect. I'll do another yellow one across the way, and then we'll have pink at the top and bottom. Again, just thinking about balance here as I add all of these elements. Starting with that U shape, and I'm going to add another one here too. I always encourage you to take a look as you're going and make adjustments. I only penciled in two fillers, but I don't want it to look to similar to the ones we just painted on the left. I added a third one. That's what I'm talking about when I say, make your creative choices. Your painting might need something a little bit different than minds. Feel free to make those choices yourself. That is looking good for the yellow one so far. Let's go ahead and add our pink ones. We have a lot of this very light value pink that has quite a bit of titanium white mixed into it. I'm actually going to go with the medium, darker pink value. I'm still not going full darkness, like the very center of the roses. I want them to look delicate, but I don't want them to get lost and just blend in with these big flowers. I'm going a bit darker. I'm starting with that U shape, rinsing off my brush, and then creating that soft gradient from dark to light. This is my personal favorite way to paint little flower beds. It might not look super realistic, but I think they're the perfect addition to a piece like this. Again, I had this penciled in angled to the right, but this one on top is already angled in that direction. I don't want them both pointing in the exact same way, so I'm going to change my mind here and have this one facing downwards. Again, that's why I always like to pencil it in first because you can change your mind, see how things are shaping up and then make your decisions as you go. You're not really committing to anything when you just pencil it in. But once you put paint down on paper, you're pretty much locked into that. I actually have two more areas that I want to add fillers. Let's go ahead and add these bottom ones first in the same pink color. I'll show you more of a close up view here. Starting with the U shape for the base of the bud. I'll do that for both of these. And then I rinse off my brush completely, dry it off on my paper towel so that I can gently smooth that out and work my way lighter and lighter towards the top of this bd, creating a very gentle gradient. You can see I have a little too much water there. Again, going to use the lifting technique to soak up some of that excess. I have a nice even layer, and I'm going to tap back some color down at the bottom because when I used that lifting technique, it also lifted up some of the color. Just going to add some of that back in and we'll soften the second one too using the same technique, clean bristles and gently blending it. You're creating this very easy gradient. It's not a sharp contrast between the light and dark at the bottom, it's a very gentle gradient and it fits the gentle vibe of the rest of the painting. Now, I pencil in one more area for the buds. Let's do one pink and one yellow. I might as well keep it pretty even. So I'll start with my yellow one up here, adding in that U shape at the bottom. That's your darkest value of whatever color you're using. If you want to use other colors, that's totally fine. And then we'll add our final little pink one right here. Now, we'll add the stems next, and even when you add the stems, if you decide you want to add more fillers, you absolutely can. This isn't the final chance to add any filler buds like this. I'm going to leave it like this, but once I add the rest of my foliage, if it feels like it needs another little bud or there's a gap between here, so maybe I'll end up putting another one, maybe not. But you can always have that option. 9. Day 2: Foliage & Final Details: Now we'll do our second layer of green. First, I'm going to go ahead and attach all of these buds. You can see it's one step down in terms of value. I'm not going super dark here, but it's definitely darker than that first layer, so I can easily add it on top and I'm not worrying about adding anything additional at this point. I am just connecting these little buds with dainty little stems. You can see I chose to have that one overlapping. You don't have to do that if you don't want to, but it helps give a little more sense of depth and movement when you have some leaves that overlap the others. Gently using the tip of my brush and connecting all these little beds. And always remembering to give movement. I never want my buds to be straight out because that's not going to look very realistic. You want to have some curve and movement to it. Now we get a pretty good sense of the movement of our piece, now that we've connected all the main elements, and now we can just fill in the gaps with some additional greenery just like we did in the first project. I have that second level of value. It's a medium green, and I'm going to add some overlapping leaves. Some will be little leaf stems like this. I don't have this planned out in advance. I just am painting intuitively and figuring out what needs to go where. I really liked the little attachments that we did to the buds in yesterday's project. Let's do that again. For that, I have the stem connecting, and then I just place these little marks at the very base of the bud. It hugs the base of the bud. So it just makes it look a little more connected than if it's just a thin little line connected to the bud, you have kind of a place for that bud to rest. So I'm going to go ahead and add all the attachments to the buds, and then we'll meet back up to finish the rest of the greenery. Now that I've attached all the buds. I did point out earlier that there's a bit of a gap between these two, so I'm going to go ahead and add one more little bud in between them coming off of this one stem. It's not going to be as tall as the other two, but just going to bridge that gap between those two. If you notice any spots in your composition that need a little bit more or it feels a little b, and you don't just want to fill it with greenery, you can always add more fillers. I have a little bit too much water in my brush there, so I'll dry it off and soak up some of that additional water. And then I'll go ahead and attach it with one final stem. Now we can really see the general shape of our composition. We have a lot of good movement, but I want to add a few more of these mid value leaves. To make it look a little more full. Now, we've done a lot of the same kind of sharp leaves. We've had some whisky strokes in all of them. But one other type of filler that I like to paint. It's almost kind of like a mini eucalyptus. It's kind of eucalyptus shaped, but like a small version of it. So let's try adding one of those coming out of this rose here. So I have my vid value loaded up. I'm adding a curvy little stem. And then I'm adding these little tiny round leaves. It's almost like the shape of a silver dollar eucalyptus. And adding those coming off of the stem, it's just another fun way to fill up that space, and I'm only using the tip of my brush. So let's go ahead and add a few of these throughout the composition. I don't want to overwhelm it because we have a lot of moving pieces and elements going on here, but I just wanted to add a little bit of a funky, different type of filler in a couple spots. So we have one pointing downward, and let's have one coming off of the side, and maybe one somewhere up at the top. Again, as you near the end of a composition, this is it can be a little bit in terms of overdoing it, not knowing when to stop. So every time I add an element at this stage, when I'm this far into a painting, I like to step back. Take a look at the overall composition, make sure I'm not adding filler just for the sake of adding filler, but that it's actually giving something to the piece. Because the worst thing, not the worst thing, but something that's a little frustrating when you make compositions is if you really like the way it's turning out, and then you keep on adding more and more because you're so excited about it, that you end up not really liking it, and you liked it a little bit more before you added all those pieces. So that's just something to be aware of in these final stages. I'm going to add a couple additional leaves here. And doing one more little eucalyptus branch coming up here. That's a little lighter in value, so I'll darken it a bit. And I'll do one other stem here. So I encourage you to just experiment with different types of fillers. You can't really go wrong with fillers. There's so many different types of leaves and botanicals out in the real world. So even if you're just making something up in your head, you don't actually know, like, for example, I don't know what this specific leave would be called, or if there actually is something out there like this, but I'm just using my creativity. And adding these little elements to the piece. So taking a step back now, everything's looking good. There are just a few pieces that look a little bit disjointed or not super connected to the rest of the piece. So in that case, I just like to add a few more leaves here to make it look more full, or if there's an existing leaf that you want to make a little bit bigger. I do that quite often too, make sure you use a slightly darker value. And this is a pretty light tone too. So even though I am adding more and more to it, it's not an overwhelming amount of color. But it does just help some of those elements that are hanging out on their own. It helps that feel a little bit more like it's part of the overall piece. Doing one final look over. Again, this area feels a little bit sparse. Let me just add a few more here. And this is the point where I probably want to stop and not overdo it. Congratulations for finishing your Day two project. This is one of those compositions or shapes that I find myself painting over and over again. So keep this one in your back pocket for future paintings, and I'll see you in the next lesson. 10. Day 3: Primary Florals & Leaves: On to day three, which is a spring floral composition. This will be our first project with a mixed variety of flowers, and it's going to be a fun one. I also wanted to paint this one to show you that it's okay to break the rules because this piece technically only has two primary flowers, so it's not following the rule of odds. But by offsetting them and making sure we add plenty of interesting buds and fillers, it's still going to look balanced and easy on the eyes. The colors I'm using for this painting include permanent red light, cadmium yellow deep, prussian blue with some titanium white. For the green, I'm mixing together a little bit of everything, including the colors I just mentioned, along with some green gold and panes gray until it reaches this nice, earthy green. Let's start with our first element, which will be the big rose. I'm going to place that in the top left section, and then we'll do our other primary flower down here and we'll fill the rest with buds. For this first rose, I'm going to be using a mixture of permanent red light and cadmium yellow deep. It makes this really beautiful orange peach color. We already painted a rose in the previous lesson. One's going to be slightly different, a lot of the same principles, but just some slight changes. Again, starting with the deepest value of this color, I'm using the tip of my brush to create these very dainty little sea strokes. They're the same sea strokes that we did in the last ones, making sure I'm leaving some white space in between. And creating these really whimsical type of strokes. Now rinsing off my brush completely, I'm going to start feathering a little bit of these strokes out. Then we can start creating the softer lighter value petals towards the outer side of the rose. Still keeping white space in mind, but letting my brush lay down and I'm wiggling it to create these swirly funky shaped petals. Again, you want to work dark to light just like we talked about in the previous project. As I work my way toward these outer petals, they're getting lighter and lighter and I'm still being mindful of those white spaces. I don't want this rose to turn into a blob. The white space is really important. While that's still wet, let's go ahead and go back in with a dark pigment. Because I want to take advantage of that wetness while it's still wet so that you can get these little bleeds of color. Now we're going to make this row slightly different from the one we did previously. Instead of just having these same s strokes expanding out, we're going to add some scoting petals around the bottom. Instead of my C curve petals, we're going to have these ones aiming downwards. That's a little too much pigment, so I'm going to rinse off my brush, get a lighter value. I'm just creating these petals that are falling downwards. I'm still leaving a bit of white space so it's not all connected there. And I'll tap in some more color at the bottom for some shadow before doing the same thing again right next to it. Rinsing off my brush and creating these unique little petals. You can see I'm laying my brush on the side so that I can get these fatter strokes. Then as I work my way toward the top, these petals start pointing a little more towards the top of the page. We're just creating these falling petals. It's not a straight on view of the roses that expand outward, like we've done in the previous projects. It's a rose that is expanding and blooming and those petals are falling down. These petals at the top get a little bit smaller, and then I'll start on the left side petals, again, angling my brush to the side to get those nice big petals. You'll see me go in between tapping in some color, taking advantage of that wet on wet before those layers dry, and I'll continue adding petals most of the way up. And I really love the look of these roses. They have just such a fluffy appearance that I absolutely love. Again, I want to get those nice bleeds. So I'll tap in some darker color before it dries, and I'll also darken the center again. Again, even if you're using different colors, when you go back to tap in and get these bleeds, whatever color you're using, you just want to make sure you add shadows with the darkest value. And I'm going to add one more final layer here. And then smoothing out some of these bleeds. I don't want anything to dry with harsh edges, which can sometimes happen when you use a lot of water like I am here. So I want to smooth those out. And there is our rose. I absolutely love it. You can really see it blooming and opening up. That's going to be one of our primary elements. The next one is going to be a very loose expressive flower, and the center of the flower is going to be the same color as this rose. I am going to create these really dainty little lines for the center. They're barely even there, but that is going to serve as the center of the flower. And you can see it's oval shaped. Our flower is going to be pointing a little bit to the side. All these flowers aren't just directly straight on. Those little marks help set the stage for how you're going to create the petals. Now I'm going to move to my cadmium yellow deep. It's a very bold strong yellow. We used a bit of it in the last lesson. I grabbed my size six neptune brush. It's a very thirsty brush, and I have a lot of this cadmium yellow and I want to create these little lines. Again, we're going to be pulling color from these dots just like we did in the day one project. So I'm making sure there is a lot of pigments and a lot of water. I'm going to rinse off my brush completely, and I'm going to create a really loose expressive flower. Instead of pulling out each of these petals very carefully like we did in day one, I'm going to pull out and bring it right back. So keep your wrist nice and loose, and I'll show you how I'm going to create this first petal. Pull out some color. And then circle back to the center. You can see that color bleed into the petal, which is absolutely beautiful. I'm going to rinse off my brush again and do it the same way. Pull out some color, go out and bring it right back in. You get these really expressive beautiful petals, and I like to make these little wispy marks in between to give it some added character and texture and make it look a little bit more expressive. I can already tell that these initial dots that I put down are starting to dry, so I'm going to rewet that so I have plenty of pigment to pull from. Rinse off my brush again, pull out that color. You're pulling out and bringing your brush back in. It goes out and then circles back to the center, so it has that nice fluffy, really pretty appearance to each of these petals. I'm going to rotate my paper and do another one here on the side. Just have fun. These petals are meant to look wild and free and expressive. You can add those little wispy marks like I'm doing here, and let's go ahead and add a few more here, pulling out and bringing it back in. Don't overthink it. It's not a very controlled approach. You're just pulling out that color and dragging it out along with your brush, and you're going out and pulling back in. Now, while that is all still wet, I'm going to take that dark Cadmium yellow deep again and you know the drill. I like to go back in and tap some of that back into the center because we lost some of that vibrancy when we pulled it out into the petals, so I'm just putting that back in. Now I'm going to add a little bit more of that pink color back into the center. I don't want it all to bleed out. You want to be careful with your water control. It's okay if you get a little bit of bleeding, like you can see a tiny bit there. But I don't want it to overtake the yellow. Now, sometimes I also like to add another layer on top. If the petals are looking a little bit too light, too translucent, you can just go over the top and bring back a little bit of that color with a medium value. Just keep your wrist nice and loose. I'm not exactly tracing over those first petals. I'm just tapping in some additional color to help bring a flower back to life. It's looking very beautiful. We have our two primary elements, and now we can add the fillers in the greenery. I am going to move up to a size ten round brush. I'm still using the Neptune line, very thirsty flexible brush. I'm putting a very, very light value of green here for the first layer, and you'll start to see a lot of these same techniques across all the projects, starting light to dark, starting with the primary elements first, and then adding fillers. But it all just starts to become a natural process as you get more comfortable painting compositions. Starting with this light value of green, and creating these nice, big, beautiful, fluffy leaves for the base layer. Again, wanting to add movement to the piece, so I'm never having leaves that are sticking straight out. I'm always adding a bit of a curve to it. You can see these brushes hold so much water like I said. Sometimes we need to soak up some of that excess so we don't get any pools forming. But I'm going to continue working my way through this composition, adding this very light first layer of greenery. We are going to add additional greenery on top. But for now, we want to fill in some of this white space, not all of it, of course, but just setting the stage for where I want all of these elements to go and how I want the overall shape of the composition. I like to go corner to corner. I have some in the bottom corner, and I want it to twist around and finish up here at the top left corner. And look how far that brush expands out. I just absolutely love these brushes. It's my favorite for loose florals because the paint just flows so freely, and they hold so much water in them. So it's perfect for those loose expressive compositions. I'll just add a few more, we are going to have quite a bit of filler flowers in this piece, more so than we have in the other two pieces. I don't want to overdo it at this point. Creating that movement, creating that nice strong base layer of greenery and indicating that we know there are leaves filling in this whole composition, but you might not be able to see each and every individual one. It's Looking a little bar down here, so I'm going to add a leaf curving like that, and I think that is good for our base layer. 11. Day 3: Mini Roses & Details: So we're going to have a few different types of fillers in this composition, not just the buds that we've done in the previous two lessons. I really want to pencil in where I want all of these fillers to be. I'll have some curving out like I always do and filling in some of these white gaps. I want to strategically place each of these fillers to help add movement to the piece. I'm not fully sketching out flowers. I am penciling in where I think some of these stems would look nice and add to the overall structure. We have some on the right side, some on the bottom. So Let's add one curving upwards. And we are going to start with some bigger rose buds. In the previous two, we've just added some color and then softly blended it up. Now we're going to do slightly more of a full looking rose bud. It's almost like a mini rose. I'm going to use my very light sky blue mixture, which is Prussian blue with titanium white. I'll zoom you in a bit closer so you can see this step better. I'm going to make the start of my rose, using the tip of my brush, making those s curves like we've done, but I'm keeping it very tight. This is just a filler flower. I don't want to create a full bloom rose. I'm making it small just like this. I'm using a size five brush, rinsing it off, and starting to feather that out. Softening some of those lines and not creating a full blown rose, but just a very soft little barely open rose. This will compliment the rest of the composition really well. Making those fine dainty lines up at the top and then a little bit thicker down at the bottom to show that it's barely opening up. While it's still wet, I'll make the center a little bit darker. I still want to maintain that dark to light value that we've been practicing and there is our first filler. It's not a full rose. It's not a little tiny dainty bud. It's in between. I'm going to flip my paper upside down and add one or two more on the bottom. Turning my paper around, loading up some of that same color again. And repeating the process, starting with the sea curves, using the very tip of my brush. I'm not making it too big and then rinsing off my brush and letting the clean water that's in my bristles soften out those lines. I'm making very quick loose strokes here. I'm not overthinking it. It does not have to be perfect. I'm keeping my white space in mind, and I definitely don't want these fillers to turn into blobs of color. So you want to keep that white space in mind. Let's stop and take a look. I love the movement that we have so far. Obviously, the little rose buds we just painted aren't attached yet, but those will be attached soon. And I really like how the colors are complementing each other. I think I'm going to add one more little blue bud at the top, and then we'll add some more fillers. I'm keeping my strokes nice and tight. And repeating the process, keeping my brush loose, my wrist loose. And I'm just adding those little strips before rinsing off my brush to smooth it all out. So I'm loving how this looks so far. Let's add a few more fillers. This is going to be, again, a different type of fillers, so we're learning how to do lots of different types of fillers, which is helpful not just for these individual projects, but also for any pieces you work on in the future. It's really nice to just have a tool belt of all different types of elements and fillers and secondaries that you can put into your pieces to create a beautiful cohesive composition. So I am sticking with the same brush, and I'm going to move back to this peach pink color for some more fillers. So for now, I'm going to use I have a little bit of that color in my brush, but for the most part, it's just water, and I'm going to tap some little dots on the page, and even that's a little more pigmented than I want for now. So I'm going to rinse some of that. And I am tapping, tapping. It almost looks like a little lavender stem or something. But I'm tapping some of that color down and you can barely see it. But then I'm going to go back in with a darker value. I'll bring you in a bit closer. When you go back in and tap in a dark pigment, it creates such a unique and beautiful type of filler that I absolutely love to add to my compositions because that second layer starts to blend with those first clear dots. Once you add a stem, it turns into a beautiful pop of color. But I start light just with some water droplets and then I tap in the dark value. When you add this green, you can see it just gently bleeds with that pink that we already added. It's almost just like a little pop or a firework, little color in the composition, but it still looks cohesive because it's the same color as this rose. I love to add this to my compositions. I'm going to add a few more of this color and some of the yellow. I'll add a second layer of greenery and then we'll call it good. Let's add a few more. I'm going to do a yellow one on this side here on the left. Again, I start with a completely clean maybe a touch of the yellow color, but for the most part, it's pretty clear. And watery. And I just start by tapping in those little dots. You can't even really see it at this point again. But once we go in to tap in that second layer, that's when it really creates those beautiful bleeding effects. Now I'm going back in with my yellow, and it starts to bleed and bloom with what's already there, which I just love. And I'm actually going to add a few more here. I want it to be slightly bigger, and then I go in with that very pigmented yellow, and you can't control how it decides to blend with each other. So just lightly tap and see what happens. That's one of the best parts is that you can't control it. So I just love how that looks and that's going to be curving out of this flower. Now, this one's just about dry, so I know I'm doing a lot of back and forth, but that's just how the process goes when I paint compositions. You can see it's not even dry yet, so I'm going to add a touch of a darker color here. Of course, watercolor does dry lighter. So sometimes it looks a little bit faded or washed out once it dries. Before that does dry, I just like to go back in and deepen a bit of that pigment. The yellow ones still plenty wet. So that is kind of what I like to do as I paint as I kind of pop around into different areas and I see what's drying, what's not where I want to add some more pigment. So it might feel a little bit chaotic at times. But once you get the hang of it and you paint more compositions like this, the whole process starts to feel a little more natural. So this is still wet. So I'll go ahead and go in with my green, and I'm going to create the connecting stem using the very tip of my brush. And I want to be careful because I don't want to turn this entire filler into green. Or a green blob, but I'm just tapping in where it's connecting to the stem and allowing a bit of that green to mix and blend with the yellow. Such a beautiful looking filler, I absolutely love it. I'm going to start adding a little bit of greenery here to this stem and I go back and forth between adding elements and adding greenery so that I can make sure that I'm liking the shape and making sure I add a good amount of fillers, so I don't have any glaring white spots in the piece. Connecting this rosebud using that medium value of green. I'm going to keep saying this throughout the class, but please feel empowered to make your own creative choices as we go. Not all of our paintings are going to turn out the exact same, and that's exactly how it should be. If you don't want to put fillers exactly where I'm putting mine, by all means, put them wherever you want to put them. If you want to use different colors, use different colors. You're always more than welcome to do those things. I'm going to go ahead and add some more of these little fireworks. I guess I can call them little fireworks because that's what they remind me of, but I'm going to have one coming down here at the bottom, starting either super light value or just clear water in your brush. Tapping down that first layer and then going in with the darker value. I'm using my pink mixture and start tapping in that second layer of color. This is a great time to practice water control, too, because if you have too much water and you're trying to do elements like this, it'll just start puddling up and you won't have any definition. It'll just look like a little slug or like a blob of color or something. But because we have some white space, we have room to add our stem. We have room to show that these are individual little petals, even if you can't necessarily define them super well. You want just the right amount of water to where you can get those bleeds and blooms, but not too much to where it just becomes a giant puddle. Let's do one there, and I think I also want to bring in the blue again. Starting super light value. This one's going to be curving upwards and have fun with this part. This is just additions to what you already have. We already have a beautiful composition. Anything you add now is just whatever you want. It's just fun little extras. If you're using the same colors that I am, you can really play around with how much white you add to this mixture. Prussian blue is a pretty strong bold blue. But I added quite a bit of that titanium white to make it more of a sky blue. If you want to have a darker blue, use less white. If you want to have more of a sky baby blue, add quite a bit of white. And now we can go in and add our little stems. Gently using the tip of my brush. Once again, I don't want the entire thing to bleed, but I want to show that there is a stem in between all these little red petals. So barely making little green marks to indicate that. I think we're looking pretty good with fillers. So let's go ahead and add a few final bits of greenery using a slightly darker value than the first layer. And make sure to add a unique variety of marks. I don't want all of my leaves to look the exact same. I want to have some variety. So when you take a step back and look back at your composition to decide what to do next, I can see I have plenty of greenery and fillers down at the bottom, but it's looking a little bare at the top. So that's where I want to spend some time and attention. Adding a little bit more and just beefing up that area. I'm not trying to overdo it, but you do want that sense of balance. And since we have so much going on at the bottom, I want to balance that up at the top, gently overlapping the first layer of lighter leaves with this darker value. And there we go. Thanks for painting alongside me for this project. I hope you're starting to feel more confident in your painting and composition skills, and I can't wait to continue on with you in Day four. 12. Day 4: Primary Flowers & Stems: Welcome to Day four, where we are going to paint our very first bouquet. Bouquets can be a little bit tricky at first. I still struggle with them from time to time. But once you get the hang of them, they're really fun to paint, and they all look so different. The colors I'm using here are paran maroon and then the same pink mixture as day two. So that's permanent illusorin crimson, yellow ochre, and titanium white for the pink flowers, and adding in my tried and true deep sap green for the stems and the leaves. So let's get started. I want my bouquet to have a bit of a curve. I always like adding if you couldn't tell already, I love adding movement to my compositions. I don't want a super curvy bouquet because I still want the stems to be fairly straight, but I do want just a little bit of a curve. I want to keep that in mind as I add my different elements, and I'm going to start with my ros. Usually my roses are the biggest elements, as you've seen in the previous couple of projects. I'm going to start with the rose, and I'm grabbing my paraline maroon. Once again, same technique we've done in the other rose projects. Starting very dark, making the wispy little sea curves, keeping your white space in mind, rinsing off my brush completely, and then starting the process of feathering all of that out using clean water, creating soft and gentle bleeds. You can see that dark maroon bleeding out into the rest of the petal. Although this rose will be the main showstopper element you could say, I still want it to be fairly small because we're not doing a full page composition here. We're doing a bouquet. So we need plenty of room for the stems to come down. Sometimes I get a little carried away when I paint roses and they end up getting bigger and bigger and I add more petals until it takes up the whole page. I want to keep in mind that I'm going to have several other elements in this piece. Same as we did on the previous rose, I'm going to add these little skirting petals coming off of it. I need a little more color in my brush there. Adding some skirting petals coming off of it. Again, I don't want this to be too big, but I do want it to be the main element that really stands out. Scoting petals, they start coming down and then they curve to the side as you make your way toward the top of the rose. I want to take advantage of the wet on wet technique. Go back in and slightly tapping in a bit of that dark paren maroon. I don't want to go overboard, but I do like adding a couple of layers on my roses. And I'm going to call that good for this first element, and now we can go ahead and get started on the second one. I want to have another rows, but I want it a little more of a side view, closed up perspective. I'm going to start by doing my s strokes, but in a flatter sense. You can see they're still s curves, but they're squished and they're more horizontal. They're not making that perfect circular shape. This is a fun way to paint roses that I'll show you. This is the top and that's the only part where you'll see the C curves, and then the rest, I'm going to create a u shape on the left side. Like this. Then I'm going to leave a little bit of a white space in between and paint another u shape right next to it. That's a little bit smaller. Now you can see it's not fully opened rows. It's like the red stemmed roses that you can get at the grocery store. So it's a different way to paint them and to add variety. I don't want to have every element of my bouquet facing the same way and in the same perspective because when you have actual bouquets, you have your flowers and your leaves going in every which way. So I like to add a bit of a variety when I paint them. So I am still keeping my strokes wispy and loose as I paint this, tapping in a little bit of the darker value where there would be, I guess a bit of a shadow. Let's do another one of these pink shade flowers because this main rose is a dark maroon element. I need to make sure. I balance it out with plenty of the soft light pink, and then we'll add some bold pink little fillers as well. I also want to keep in mind that my bouquet is going to have a bit of a curve to it. So I'm already liking the shape because you can visualize the stem coming down here, curving down towards the bottom. So where else would another element be? Probably right around here? This time, I'm going to paint a very simple loose flower like what we did in the day three project. I'm starting by using the tip of my brush. Making these little marks, and I'm using plenty of this pink pigment. Loosely tapping in the stamen there, and then I'm going to rinse off my brush and do that same out and back motion to create these petals. Same process as we did in Day three, watch the brush, it goes out, expands, and you're bringing it back in towards the center. Pull out and come back in. It's one of my favorite styles of flowers to paint. Again, if any of those pink marks dry in the center, just go ahead and add some more, I have my ceiling fan on overhead, so that always impacts my painting because the surface of the paper dries a little bit faster. I'm going to need to rewet that a couple more times. But I'm going to continue adding these very wispy petals. I'm not overthinking it. I'm letting my brush do the work for me, adding some character here, and then let's go back in and tap in some more of that color that we lost just because it's drying so fast. Similar to what we did in the other one, I'm going to go back, these petals are super light, which I do really like, but I want to add a little bit more color. I will get a medium value of this pink and tap on some additional color, not everywhere, but just in some of the petals. Now, while this is still wet, I want to tie in some of this maroon color too because we want this whole piece to look cohesive. I'm going to grab some of my paraline maroon, a very dark value directly from the palette and I'm going to gently tap some of that into the center of this flower. Just like that. Now you can see that ties these two elements together. Let's add one more element here and we'll probably end up adding more, but I'd like to start with a few main pieces before painting the actual stems, and then we can get a better idea of the shape and where we can place the rest of it. Let's go ahead and do one more of these closed up roses and Let's have it coming up here on the top left. I don't want it to be parallel to the first one that we painted. I want to have some variation. It's going to be slightly lower and to the left. I did mention this earlier, but bouquets can be a little bit tricky sometimes because you're just visualizing at this point where things are going to be and how you're going to paint your stems. Sometimes it can be a little bit wonky, but I'll show you. Once you start adding the leaves and fillers and your stems, you can really help fix the shape if there are any shape issues. Take your time and be patient. Once again, I'm going to start slightly lower than that verse one and I'm adding these horizontal C curves. They look flattened and squished compared to our straight on roses. I'll rinse off my brush and smooth out these lines. Then like I did with the other, I'll create these two shapes with a little bit of white space in between them. This one's a bit smaller, so I'm using the very tip of my brush here, letting it expand out and creating a very vertical U shape. Leaving some white space and doing the same thing on the right side. I create that and then I go back in and tap in those shadows. Using a darker value of pink, adding some shadow here on the bottom. Again, we're not painting in the realistic style, so you don't have to worry too much about shadows and highlights and exactly where the light is hitting your flowers. But I do like to tap in a little bit of detail. At this point, things are looking good and I'm going to go ahead and start lightly painting in some stems. I'm always working light to dark. It can feel a little weird, like I said, at this point, not knowing exactly where to place things or what direction your flowers should be pointing. At this point, I really like to lightly and loosely start adding in these stems. The thing with bouquets is you don't need one perfect stem coming from every single element. I add more than there actually are to indicate that this is a very full lush bouquet full of foliage and flowers. But you don't need to see every single element connected to a perfect stem. What I mean by that is, for example, I have this stem coming down, I'll make it slightly darker. I'm giving it a curve so our bouquet can be curvy, and then I'll paint another one coming down here, overlapping that first stem and coming down. Now, this stem isn't necessarily connected to anything, but it could be. It could be connected to the rose, it could be connected to a leaf that's coming out of it. It could be just another stem in the mix of this bouquet. So I just want to make sure you don't feel like you have to have one perfect stem for every single element. Because in that case, it would look a little too perfect. You want your bouquet to look full like you could pick it up off of the page with all those stems. So I start filling in not all of them, but a decent amount at this point. I'm going to add where this one would be coming down and again, starting with a pretty light value of green so that you can always fix mistakes and go darker as you add more and more layers. I'll add another stem here that's not necessarily connected to anything, but it helps build out the shape and the fullness of the bouquet. Let's go ahead and add one coming from here as well, overlapping. That one has a bit less curve to it, but now you can start to see what the direction of the bouquet will be. It's curving. We can see where our primary elements are. We can see where we need to add a little bit more. I definitely want to add some on the left. I'll have some coming off the top. But at least this is a good starting point. That's typically my process as I put some of the main elements down, I do a base layer of stems, and then I add to it as I go. 13. Day 4: Leaves & Floral Details: This point, we have a lot of the soft pink and not a whole lot of the maroon. I want to tie that back in and I'm going to paint another maroon flower down here, a very small little one. It's going to be a similar style to this one, but not a full flower. I'll show you how to paint that. I'm using my size five brush. When I add more flowers, I want to make sure nothing is parallel. When I add this other maroon flower, I don't want it to be directly across from this one, just like I didn't have these two roses at the exact same height. You just want to add a dynamic interest through variation. This will be slightly lower, it'll probably be the lowest flower. I'm going to start adding some very dark little lines for the center of this flower just like that. This maroon is such a bold color. You have to be careful not to add too much and I'll start creating little petal shapes, but I'm only pointing them upwards. You can see have a little too much water. What I do to manage that is dry off my brush and let my bristles soak up any excess water. I don't want any petals forming like you can see there. You can always just dry off your brush, then soak some of that up. I'll rinse off my brush again and let's add a few more petals on the left side. Pulling it upwards, rounding out these petals, and I'll do a few more here on the side. I'm actually going to add one more of those probably up here in the top right corner and then we'll go ahead and do our second layer of leaves and stems. But I really am liking how these colors are working together. I'm liking where we've placed these elements. I'll add one more. Let's see, I want to have it curved. Let's add it right here. Starting with those initial dots. Rinsing off my brush and making sure I have clean bristles here to pull out these little loose petals. I'm not creating the perfect petal shapes. I still want them to look loose and organic. Letting my brush pull out that color and create unique petal shapes. That's another one that's shaped really nicely because then you can visualize where you want that to connect with the stems. Speaking of stems, let's go ahead and add a couple more. Let's have one connecting this top flower again, using a very light value of green and pulling it down. Let's see where this one fits in, pulling it across. Even that one maybe is a little straighter than I would have liked, but again, we can fix that by adding some more leaves and greenery that are curved. That'll help fix that direction a bit. This is looking good. Now let's go ahead and add some darker layer leaves. Some of them will be retracing, basically some of the stems we've already done. Some of them will be brand new, just helping to fill out this bouquet. I have a darker value loaded up in my brush and I'll start basically going off a feel here, for which ones I want to overlap, versus which ones, I want to add new stems. That first layer of very light ones was just to help set the shape. It's okay that you're going over some of them with a darker value. Because having a variation of values, having some stems that are light, some that are dark helps to build up that depth and show that some of these stems are closer to you, some of them are a bit further away. I'll start pulling down some more lines. Again, these don't necessarily connect with anything, but it helps to make your entire composition look a bit more full. Making sure to keep as much of a curve as I can. And then we can go in and add additional greenery to fix anything else. At this point, I'm going to go ahead and start adding some leaves. I want my leaps to also follow this curved shape. I'll have one coming off of this little flower, pulling my brush down towards the stem, and this is where it needed a little bit more movement. That leaf has a good curve to it, which helps take away from that straight stem. Now you can't even tell, and that's a nice way to be able to correct any shape issues. There's always things you can do to fix little mistakes. I'll do it again here, pulling my leaf down and bringing it right towards the stem. Once again, this is a great opportunity for you to make your own artistic choices. I know sometimes it can feel a little bit intimidating or scary to try to figure out on your own where to place all your elements and where you want your leaves to go and where you want your flowers to go and all of that. But the more you do it, the more confident you'll become, and it'll just start to feel like second nature. This is a very low stake, slow pressure project. Even if you end up doing something you don't necessarily love, it's not the end of the world. We're just having fun and practicing here. One thing I will say to be careful here is as you add more and more stems, try to make sure that they dry before you add another one. You can see there's a little bit of bleeding happening there. Not too bad, but just another thing to keep in mind. At this stage, I want to add a couple of fillers. I'm going to do the same pops of color that we did in the previous composition. Once again, I'll grab my pencil and start sketching in where these might go. Let's have one coming out of the left side. On popping up off of the top, maybe two. I might just stick with those for now. I'm going to grab some clear water and drop down some dots of different sizes. I'm not making them uniform. You can barely see it at this point. And then I'll grab that paran maroon directly from my palette. So it's nice and vibrant, and I'll start using the tip of my brush. I'll bring you in closer so you can see it better. But as I tap that in, the maroon blends with some of those water droplets and creates that very beautiful blooming effect. This does help tie in. We have a lot of the soft pink within the bouquet, but I want to tie in enough of the maroon, so these fillers can help do that. I'll do another one right next to it. Dropping down some random little dots. Don't overthink it. Don't make it uniform. If any dots are looking to uniform, just go ahead and smudge them together, and then tap in that second layer using the very tip of your brush. Remember to focus on your water control so it doesn't turn into a big puddle. And Let's do one final one down here. Starting with the first layer, tapping down your dots. By the way, this, actually all of these projects, but especially ones like this. There are a lot easier to do on 100% cotton paper where you can work in layers and you have time before that water dries. If you're working on student grade paper, it's totally fine, but just know that it might be a little bit more challenging because the water sits on the surface of the paper, and you can't blend colors as well. Sometimes it'll also give you harsher dried edges. It's fine to practice on, but just know a lot of these techniques within the class will be a lot easier to do on professional grade, 100% cotton paper. All right. So I'm liking how this composition looks right now. I'm going to grab a darker value of my green. And let's add some darker stems here, connecting everything together and building out that depth. As I do this, if there are any areas where you're feeling like, I want to add a leaf here, absolutely go for it. This is the perfect time to experiment and add your own little embellishments to the piece. I'm going to do that right now. Is going to add a little leaf here, attaching it to the stem. And having leaves throughout, you don't just want to have stems in the middle because in a real bouquet, you have leaves that are kind of trailing and leaves that come all the way down the stem. So don't feel like you can only have straight lines for stems in the middle. You can add leaves however you want. I'm also going to go ahead and add the connectors here to these little fillers. And while I do that, I'm also going to add some leaves coming off of that. It's a little too much white space for my liking. Using the tip of my brush and just have fun adding these things. My favorite bouquets in real life are the ones that have funky leaves coming out everywhere and that are crazy and busy and a bunch of different colors and styles of leaves. You can't really go wrong, have fun with it, experiment with some different techniques, experiment with different placements of things and colors. Make sure you're changing up the value. I want to have a gradient of light value stems and leaves all the way to dark value stems and leaves and a little bit of mid grade values in between to help build up the sense of depth. In this style of painting where you're just kind of intuitively making these decisions. You have a general plan of how you want your bocet to look, but it's not perfectly sketched out, like a very detailed botanical painting. It can feel weird at first and a little scary and uncomfortable. But I promise the more you paint, the more intuitive, everything will start to feel. And hopefully by the end of this class, by getting 15 projects under your belt, you'll really feel confident, and you'll start to feel that natural ability to add things where you want and make changes and just build out a composition that you're proud of that looks cohesive, and that doesn't feel like you need a step by step tutorial to follow along with. It just feels like you know what to do because you're the artist. Bouquets were really a challenge for me for a long time, just because I felt like they were always plopped down on the paper, the flowers, and then I had random stems. I thought every stem had to have a perfect attachment to it. But once I let go of that expectation and just allowed myself to develop my own style and be confident when where I place things, the whole process became a lot easier and a lot more enjoyable. All that to say, just go easy on yourself if you're finding this project a little bit challenging. I really hope you enjoyed this project. We will be painting quite a few more bouquets throughout class, but today was a great starting point. I'll see you in the next lesson. 14. Day 5: First Layers of Leaves: Other day, another painting. For day five, we're going to paint this beautiful wreath using only leaves. We'll paint a floral wreath in the next video, but I wanted to start with a greenery only wreath to get the hang of layering our color values and generating movement within a circular composition. I'm going to be using deep sap green and some ultramarine deep for a very bold, moody green. Remember we talked about color values earlier in the class, and that's going to be very important for this piece because I'm only using this one color mixture, but we'll need to use a light value for the first layer and darker values for the additional layers. First, we need to start out by tracing our circle. You can use anything you like. I have this little roll of masking tape that works well with my six by eight sheet of paper, but if you have a cup or a bowl or the bottom of a candle, anything circular will work just fine. I'm going to center this the best I can and then just trace around it with my pencil. It might be a little bit hard to see on screen, but I have this sketched out lightly in pencil. If you're working with really light colors when you do a wreath, then you might just want to gently erase it, so it's not as bold of a pencil mark. Once you paint on top of pencil, you can't go back and erase it. But for the sake of the tutorial and because I know that I'll be layering darker and darker greens on top, I'm just going to leave it as is. Now, I have mentioned this before. We're going to start with the super light value because we want to make sure we can build a very full and lush looking wreath. So I want to add lots of layers and I want room to be able to go darker. So I want to start nice and light. I have a size eight round brush, and I'm working from light to dark, but I'm also working from bigger leaves to smaller ones. I like to have my lightest greens be a little bit bigger and bulkier, that's the base. And then we'll do some more dainty leaves on top. If you do have a slightly bigger brush, I would recommend using that for this first little layer, and let's see how this looks. I am just going to use the tip of my brush first and then paint this big leaf Like I said, it's very light, it's a little bit hard to see, but I'm going to smooth out any extra water here so there's no puddles. But that's a pretty big leaf, and we're going to just set those around for this first layer. I don't want them all to look the exact same. I'll have some that are pointing a little more outwards. So that are going up, maybe some that have two leaves on one stem. Just doing some various little leaves, maintaining the circular shape overall. Because this is such a light value, I have plenty of room to go darker as I add additional layers. So you can see that one is pointing more towards the center of the wreath while others are a little bit more straight on. So I want to leave a little bit of white space here in there so that I do have room to add plenty more leaves and stems and things on top. For now, I'm just going to work my way around this wreath. And like I said, I'm varying each of the stems. I do not want them to look too uniform. This one has two leaves that are pointing more towards the center. I'll do another big guy right here. T this is going to be a lot of repetition for each layer, which is nice because it gives these leaves, these initial leaves time to dry so that we're not waiting around between each layer. Because by the time I finish this first round of leaves, the first ones will already be dry. So that's kind of the nice thing about painting leaves for a wreath. So I'll do a few more in real time and then I'll speed it up a bit for you. But just take your time, make sure you're varying the leaves. You want every little bit to look slightly different and also being sure to leave white space. One of the trickiest parts of painting wreaths is not overdoing it or overcrowding it. And you'll notice me talking about that a lot throughout the class. Not overcrowding. Simplicity is key. It can be a really great tool, especially for lose floral composition. So we want to make some room for these leaves to breathe, and we also want to be able to add more elements as we go. So I will speed up the rest of this layer, but I'm just going to continue what I've done so far, adding this first layer of very light big green leaves. At this point, I want to take a step back and look at the wreath. I see this space here is a little bit more wide open than the rest of the wreath along with right here. So again, I don't want to overdo it, but the rest of it's a little more. So I'm going to go ahead and add one more little leaf here and same thing down at the bottom. Again, a lot of this will be covered up, and there's another little white space here. But a lot of this will be covered up as we add our additional layers on top of this, but I just want to make sure it's pretty balanced. We already have a good variety here. We have some bigger ones, some smaller, some that shoot out to the side, some that curve inwards or a little more straight, but there's already some great variety here. So I'll give this a little more time to dry just to make sure everything's completely dry, and then we'll add the next layer. All right, first layer is dry. Now I'll add a slightly darker value on top. I don't want to have a drastic jump from super light green to a bold deep green. I want to have an easy smooth transition from light to dark. So I'm moving to a slightly darker color, and I'll go ahead and do the same thing, adding some more darker green on top and remember. It's okay. It's not only okay, but it's encouraged to have some leaves overlapping that first layer. That's why we did it so light so that we can layer on top. Some leaves that I add for this layer will be completely new. Some will be overlapping. So let's go ahead and give it a shot. I'm going to start by showing you one of the overlapping ones. I'll bring you in a bit closer here. I'm going to overlap one right over the top. There's a little transparency there, you can see the layer beneath it. If you don't want that, then just go a bit darker. I personally like a little bit of that translucent transparent layering. I'm going to continue working my way. I might go slightly darker actually than that. But I'm also going to make sure I'm changing up the type of leaves that I add. I don't want this entire wreath to look the exact same. You can see that one's a little bit thinner and I'm going to do a second one coming off of it right here. And evening out that water layer. Let's add a few more in real time and then once again, I'll speed it up so you can work on yours. So there's not too much repetition in this lesson, but also to give yourself plenty of time. This is really honestly one of the best projects for you to make your own choices. You do not have to put your leaves in the same spots I'm doing mine. There's a lot of room for creative freedom. B wherever you see white space or a spot to add a new type of leaf, you are more than welcome to do it. And you really can't mess up a wreath. So I have full confidence that you can do this. But I'm just going to continue adding in some different types of leaves for the second layer. And you can see these are a little too similar. They're both facing the same direction, they're about the same width. So to make sure it's varied, I'll add another little guy right in between. These aren't that different in the value of color. They're both still pretty light, but I really want these first few layers to be big fluffy leaves with a lot of room to add the more fine, tighter details with the darkest color of green on top. At this point, we're really setting the stage and placing those initial leaves. But a lot of this will be covered up once we add the darkest values. That's another good thing to keep in mind is if you make a mistake or not even a mistake, but just maybe a leaf you don't necessarily like, you can always cover that up in the later layers. So I'm going to speed up the rest of this layer, but I'll let you take a look at my process as I go. Be sure to take your time and then we'll meet back up to do the next layer. D. Once again, I'm taking a step back here and I see a little bit of area here that needs a little bit more, and I'm really liking how this is shaping up so far. This is, like I said, the first couple of layers just setting that stage. And now we have a little bit of depth building with the first light layer, the second slightly darker layer. We have lots of good direction going on and movement, so now I'm going to this dry. And then I'm going to go quite a bit darker and we'll add some smaller finer details on top and start to really build out this wreath. 15. Day 5: Final Leaves & Details: Had some time to dry. Now for these darker layers, I'm moving down to a Size five brush. I was using a size ten and eight to get these big petals, but now I'm going to do slightly darker, finer, smaller details. I want to move down to that smaller brush. I'm going to be doing a lot of the same stuff I've been doing, but watch how dark this is. Laying down this first leaf and see how dark that is compared to the rest of them. I don't want to overpower it with this darkness, and that's why I'm going to stick to doing mostly small little accent leaves like this on top. As I work my way around, I'm also going to make little wispy marks. You know I love making wispy strokes in my compositions. We've done a lot of it throughout the class so far. But I'm just adding some texture and some more depth here. I'm not going overboard because you can already tell how dark this layer is, and I still want to maintain those light original layers in the overall wreath. I'm using this color pretty sparingly and just kind of inter weaving this layer between these leaves that we've already done. And you can see I'm not doing it as thick. I'm just dragging out my brush. I'm still doing a little bit of a softer leaf. I'm not doing super sharp point edges. You can see they're rounded off. If you want to go the point route, you can absolutely do that. But since my first two layers are pretty soft rounded edge leaves, that's what I'm going to stick with for all of my foliage. Just to keep it consistent. And I want to maintain the darkness. That stroke was a little too light, so I'm adding more pigment to my brush. If you see any gaps where you haven't actually filled in the circle part of the wreath, as you do this layer, you can fill in any of those gaps with this dark color. One other thing I want to do as I work my way around because this is the final layer, I don't just want to do leaves like that. I want to also add like that eucalyptus type of filler that we did. Earlier in class. I have this little stem coming off, and then that stem has these little circular oval shaped petals coming off of it. Just keep it interesting, keep it dynamic. This is what brings the wreath to life is adding these cool, unique little details. Just have fun with it and be creative. As you do all of these different layers, just make sure everything is curving in the same circular direction. Obviously, some of them are coming off to the side. You can see this one's angling off to the outer edge. But in general, you're still following the curve of the circle. Let's do another one of those little fillers here. Adding tiny little leaf petals. It's just a fun little addition, but it's not overpowering. You can still clearly see the first and second layers, which is exactly what I want to see. I don't want any of the layers to be too overpowering. So I'll speed this next part up again, but be sure to take your time and just have fun adding all these different unique elements. And I will also note here in terms of balance, you want to keep that in mind, just like we've kept balance in mind for the rest of our composition so far in this class. So you can see I'm kind of evenly spacing out these little unique fillers, just because they're a little bit different than the rest of them. I wouldn't want to have all of them on the inner ring or all on the outer edge of the ring or putting them all at the top or all at the bottom. We're kind of evenly spacing them, but not to the point where anything looks too symmetrical. So keep that in mind if you add any unique elements like that. Yes, you want it to look whimsical and expressive and natural, but you also don't want it to look off balance. Because when things start to look off balance in your compositions, that's where it takes away or distracts from the beauty of it. That's another thing to keep in mind as you paint. At this point again, taking a step back, seeing if there are any areas that feel too sparse. I might add a little bit here, but sometimes it can be easy to get so laser focused on reads like this where you don't take a step back, you're just adding more and adding more. Be sure to look at your painting from afar every now and then and make sure you're still on track and that everything looks fairly cohesive. Some of these areas, I'm just going to connect the stem a little bit and adding some final little scraggly lines to fill it out a bit more. I just use the very tip of my brush for these guys. No applying too much pressure down on the paper. Congratulations, Day five is done and we'll get more wreath practice in the next lesson. See you there. 16. Day 6: Mixed Floral Elements: Welcome to Day six. In today's project, we're building upon the last lesson and painting a wreath with flowers and fillers to make it a little bit more interesting. This is one of those projects where I really encourage you to make some of your own creative choices with colors, flower types, and placement. You can't really go wrong with a wreath because we're following a pretty straightforward circular shape, so it's a very safe project to take some risks and start building up your confidence with decision making. For this project, I'm going back to the same color palette as day three. That's a mix of permanent red light and Cadmium mellow deep. A mix of Prussian blue with titanium white. For the green, it's all the colors I've mentioned along with some green gold. Just like we did in the previous lesson, I'm going to trace this little masking tape to create my circle. Again, you're more than welcome to use any circular shape you have. This one just happens to fit really nicely with my six by eight sheet of paper. Now the colors I'm using in this piece are a bit lighter. I'm going back to the day three color pallete like I said, It's a lot of those light spring colors. I am just going to roll my needed eraser over it so that I can still see the line, but it's not overpowering it. It might be a little hard to see on camera, but just lightening that circle a bit so that I don't have to see those lines through the paint. We're going to start by doing our roses. We're doing a few different types of flowers that we've already painted throughout class, but we're going to put them in various areas along this wreath. I always like to start with those flowers first, and then unlike the last wreath where it was a lot of leaves and a lot of greenery, we're just going to fill in the gaps with greenery, but for the most part, it's going to be our floral elements. As always, you're more than welcome to use whatever colors you'd like. I'm going to start with the sky blue for my roses. Same technique that we've done for our roses. But I'm going to keep it pretty small because we're just working on this little circular area, so I can't make ginormous roses, but I'm just going to place them randomly. We don't want to have it be symmetrical. I don't want to have two flowers here or two flowers here. I want to have a couple up here and one down here and just spread out all of our elements so that it looks more natural. I'll start painting my rose with the darkest pigment of this blue mixture. Making my little s curves using the very tip of my brush. And then rinsing off that brush. I have clean water in my bristles and starting to gently feather that out a bit, so you get those soft, fluffy outer petals, always working from dark in the center to light on the outer petals. I'm going to keep this one pretty small. That's about as big as I'm going to make these flowers. I'll zoom you in a bit so you can see it better. While it's still wet, I'm going to go back in with a slightly darker value of my blue mixture and start to tap some of that back into the center to bring back the vibrancy. And there is our first little flower. I'm going to do another blue one, and I'm going to put it down here at the bottom of the wreath, and then we can start adding some of our other yellow flowers as well. Doing the same exact process here. Again, this is a really quick and easy to paint rose because we're keeping everything small and loose, starting with those center strokes, and then gradually doing bigger petals and lighter petals. And creating these fun little roses. These are super loose roses, so I'm not even worried too much about making the perfect se strokes. Just letting my brush move across the page in the general shape of a rose, but not making it too perfect. Now, sticking with the same color palette that we used for day three, I'm going to move to my cadmium yellow deep, and I'm going to add another smaller rose right next to this blue one. The nice thing about finding color palettes that you like is you can really just mix and match all the colors, as long as you like how the colors look together and they work well together. You can really mix and match how you use those colors. Not all my roses have to be blue, and not all my filler flowers have to be yellow or pink. I could have a couple yellow roses. I could have a couple blue ones. I can do some pink filler flowers, and as long as you have a cohesive color palette, your final piece is going to turn out nicely. This is looking good so far and let's add another yellow rose on its own. I'm going to fill in some of this white space here with another one of these yellow roses. Same technique. You're getting a lot of good rose practice within this class. That's because at least in my opinion, roses are one of the most fun to paint, and they're also very versatile. You can add them to basically any composition that you like. And I'm using a pretty small brush. This is a size five brush, but I can still get those pretty thick petals by angling it on its side like this. And then you can see those bristles expand out to create the nice big petals. And same thing as we did with the blue on both of these, I'll go ahead and tap in a little bit of the darker yellow while it's still wet, so you get the gentle bleeds of color in the center. And now I'm going to add one final yellow one down here. We'll also be adding some other loose flowers to fill in those white spaces. But for now, I just want to block in the roses because those are my main biggest elements. So I'll do one more down here. Starting with the pigmented sea strokes. You know the drill, leaving a little bit of white space, rinsing off my brush, and using clean water to feather it out. Having that defined center like that really helps show that this is a rose, because the rest of it, especially in this project, the roses aren't very defined. They're very, very loose. But as long as you have a nice defined center, you can still tell that it's a rose, even if the outer petals are not super defined. They're just loose brush marks. And now we have all our roses. Now I'm going to move to my orange red color that we used in the Day three Composition. We're going to add a couple of just regular loose flowers that we've already painted in the earlier projects, starting with a very pigmented mixture, tapping in those dots for the center in a little tiny ring. I'm still using the size five brush, so it's a very versatile brush. It's one of my most used brushes. Then with clean water in my bristles, I'm gently pulling out some of that color to create the petal. Again, using clean water here, pulling out that pigment from the very center and letting my brush expand out to create these beautiful petals. Again, if any of the center dots dry, just go ahead and rewet them. Add a little more paint to a little more water. One of my favorite things about watercolor is you can always reactivate things and keep on painting. I'm just pulling out color here and I'm making two strokes for each petal, and I don't want every petal to look the same. You can see this one has a little bit of a funky tip. Some of them are slightly thinner. Some are a bit thicker. You just want to give a good variety. And while it's still wet, going back into the center to tap some of that dark pigment, and it gently bleeds out into the petal and creates a stronger contrast. Let's add another one here. This time, I'm going to make it really, really small. Again, you want to vary the elements. I have this rose that's slightly smaller than the blue one. I want to make this flower that I'm working on now slightly smaller than the one we just did to keep things interesting and varied and give our wreath a little bit of a more dynamic look. So I'm just barely using the tip of my brush to create these little petals, and you can see it's much smaller than that first one we did. I'll go back in and tap in some more color. Let's do another big one. I'm going to do it a little bit closer to this yellow rose, so it's not directly across from this one we just did. Tapping in my heavily pigmented center, rinsing off my brush, and using clean water in my bristles to pull out the color and create these petals. And I'm making sure to rinse off my brush every now and then so that I can maintain the nice transparency in the petals. Every time that I paint a petal, it picks up a little more pigment. So if I never rinsed off my brush, by the end of this painting, these flowers would be pretty dark and saturated. Just making sure you're keeping your brush nice and clean. And next up, I'm going to do another little guy right here kind of similar to the small one and one more down at the bottom, and then we can start adding our greenery. So for this one, I'm going to go back to my yellow, and I'll do this same type of flower, but just really small, starting with the pigmented dots, and just doing a tiny, tiny little circle, rinsing off that pigment and painting my petals. And Let's do another little blue flower. It's the same mixture I used for the roses. I'm going to add those little dots in the center and pull out my petals. We have a really nice variety of colors and a variety of different types of flowers. While this is still, I'll in some of that blue, and now we can get started with the green. 17. Day 6: Details & Greenery: Not a whole lot of room for greenery because we have so many nice elements here, but we can just put some leaves in between, we can have some curving out to the side. Let's see what we can do. I grabbed a very light value and I'm going to start placing in some little leaves to start filling in these gaps a little bit. Again, we don't have a whole lot of room to add anything, but just placing in some of these elements. I'll put it first in the very obvious spots. There's a bit of a gap here. I'll start adding some leaves coming off either side. We have a couple more gaps on this left side, and I'm really loving this cohesive color palette. They're just such fun bright colors. I tried to mix it up throughout this class because I tend to go for a more limited color palette, like the pinks that we've been using in the bouquet project where you just have a few different shades of pink and then your greenery, but sometimes it's fun to challenge yourself and add some fun colors like these. I'm just varying these leaves. I'm having some coming off to the side, some going into the middle. Unlike our last project where it was all leaves in this one, they're really just adding a fun touch. They're not the main focus. The main focus is obviously these florals, the roses, the little flowers. But I want to make it a little bit more full and lush with these leaves. I filled in all the obvious spots, and now I'll just have some greenery coming out on the sides of some of these flowers. But I don't want to go overboard. And I'm still using a very light value, keeping this first layer very light, adding some of these wispy strokes. I'm not trying to stuff leaves in every single possible place, but finding those spots that could use a little something extra and adding in these elements. Making sure I'm varying what I'm doing, some of them have leaves. Some of them are whip marks, some have little leaves coming off like a stem, keeping it nice and mixed up. I'm going to make these ones slightly darker. I'm not going to do two full layers of greenery, but I do want to make some of the elements slightly darker to keep things interesting. It's also okay. You can see I'm overlapping here. It's okay to overlap some of these flowers with leaves. But like I said, the flowers are the focal point, so I don't want to take too much away from them. Just finding those areas that could use a little bit of greenery coming out without it looking too busy. Again, you want to balance what's coming on the outside of the wreath versus what's coming on the inside. I have quite a bit going out at this point and not a whole lot coming into the center. I'll add a few more angling into the very middle. I'll add a leaf here, making sure that every element I add gives a sense of movement to the piece. So for these ones, I'm just tapping my brush down to create those cute little leaves. So let's take a step back. Remember to do that every now and then, the only thing that's catching my eye at this point is I don't really love how these two stems are coming up. I want to balance that a little bit and offset it. So I'm going to do that by adding this little leaf stem coming out on the bottom, and that helps to make it a little more like an S shape instead of this shape going outside of the wreath. Just remember to take those steps back as you work, make sure you like how everything is going. You can always make adjustments. Just like I did here, you can still see a little bit of that U, but by adding the second stem, it really detracts from that and helps bring back the shape that I want. I like how everything looks so far. I actually really like this element here and it's slightly darker. I'm going to add a few more of those throughout. I don't want to have it directly opposite or make them too uniform or have all those types of stems on one side versus the other. I'll have to pick and choose where I want to add these. I'll add a same curvy stem using the tip of my brush, and then tapping down my bristles to create these little leaves. Let's see where else we can add that. I'll have one coming off of here as well. Using the tip of my brush and tapping it down for these little tiny leaves coming off of it, and slightly overlapping that flower. Okay, this is all looking really good. I'm happy with how it looks. The color palette is cohesive. All the elements look pretty balanced. The last thing I'm going to do is some of these flowers that we painted in the beginning. The inside, the center of them, has lost a little bit of that vibrancy because we pulled that color out to create all of these petals. I want to go back in and deepen that a little more with some very pigmented values. For example, this blue one looks pretty faded, so I'm going to tap in some darker pigment. And the petals are dry, so you're not going to get any bleeding at this point, but I'm just ping that vibrancy. And making the contrast more bold and interesting. Like I said, watercolors always dry much lighter than when you first apply the paint on the paper. I like to just go back in and restore that vibrancy and help bring these flowers back to life. We're all good for the blues. Let's do the same thing for these pink ones. Making that contrast a little more bold, using the tip of my brush to tap back in that color. I don't want to overwhelm it, but look how it really makes it pop. They look pretty flat before that, but adding a little bit more color really just makes it stand out. And on that last one, the petals also lost a little vibrancy, so I want to add one more layer. I don't want to go overboard because I do like the look of these petals. But just kind of putting a little more color in and then rinsing off my brush to soften any of these edges to bring back that loose effect. And finally, we'll do the same thing for the yellow as well. And the yellow, I think, maintained its vibrancy the best. So we don't even need to do too much here. Adding a little more color in the center and deepening those shadows. One thing I love about working with similar color palettes across compositions is put it next to your day three project and look how great those two look together. Working with color palettes like this, the compositions are both so different and so unique. This one's really a full page top corner to corner. This one's more of a dainty wreath, but the cohesive color palette really brings it all together. Pieces like this would look really cute framed and put up next to each other. We go to nursery. I just wanted to show you how great these look together and the benefits of working with cohesive color palettes. I hope you're feeling more confident in your wreath painting skills. There really are so much fun to paint, and they're a great thing to paint when you're not feeling very inspired, or if you're feeling art blocked because you don't have to think too much. You just paint along the circle and you're good to go. We'll move on to Daisies in the next project. 18. Day 7: Daisy Base Layers: Day seven project is focused on these dainty little daisies. It's similar to our loose floral bouquet that we painted in day four, but this one will be less busy in the overall composition, but we're going to add a few more details on the daisy flowers. It's still a very loose painting, but I really love to make the center of my daisies pop, which requires some shading and layering. But I'll walk you through it step by step. We're also going to add a couple of different perspectives with our daisies. All of the flowers we've painted so far in this challenge have been a pretty straight on bird's eye view. But adding a flower or two with a side or back view can really elevate your compositions. So I want to give you some practice with that in this day seven painting. The colors I'm using in this piece include cadmium yellow deep, raw umber, pines gray, and a mixture of deep sap green and raw umber for the stems and the leaves. We're going to be painting three daisies. As you saw, two of them are a little more full and the other is just the backside. I'm not going to sketch out the entire composition, but I do want to pencil in where I want the center to go. For that main flower on the left, I'm going to lightly pencil in a little half moon shape. It's nothing too crazy, but this just helps me make sure all of my elements are generally in the right position on my page. The second one is up into the right a little bit more. That's going to be in oval shape again. And then the last one is that back facing daisy. So all I'm doing for that is making a little inverted triangle shape, and that is where that stem is connecting with the flower. So again, you don't have to do this part, but it does just help to keep me on track and make sure generally things are in the right place. So now we can get started with the center of the daisy. So I am taking my cadmium yellow deep and I'll zoom you in a bit closer so you can see this process better. I have a medium value of this cadmium yellow deep, and I'm just going to put down a general base layer. I don't want it to be too dark, but making it nice and even. And throughout this painting, you'll see that I'm doing things a little darker just for your benefit mostly, so you can see it better on screen. For example, these pencil marks, if I was painting this on a piece that I wanted to frame or sell, I would want to make sure these pencil marks are a little bit lighter. See how you can see the pencil mark through the yellow. I'm doing things a little bit darker, like I said, just so it shows up on camera a little bit better for learning purposes. But if you are sketching these out, just make sure it's a little bit lighter. But we're going to have the top part of this center be a little lighter. We're not going too crazy with making things very realistic, but I do want some darker shadows along the bottom because that's where it's folding under and that's where the shadows will be. I'm going in and tapping some of that in and then smoothing it out a bit. As the last step for now, I'm taking some of my raw umber, which is a really dark brown, and I'm going to gently tap it along the bottom. And it'll bleed into the yellow a little bit. I don't want it overtaking the yellow though. If you have too much water or you're having trouble managing that, soak up some of that excess water because for now, I just want to tap in a little bit of that color along the very bottom. If it floods the surface, just go ahead and soak it up with a dry brush. It's looking good for now and I am going to get a little more of that dark cadmium yellow deep. I might mix in a little bit of red too to make it a burnt orange. I'll add a little bit more color here at the bottom. Again, I really like to make the center of my daisies pop. So you can achieve that by adding these shadows and layers of color. Let's do the same thing for the one right next to it. Starting with a pretty light value with my cadmium yellow deep and putting down a thin even layer. Again, make sure to erase or lighten the pencil marks if you're penciling it out like I did. Starting pretty light like this, and then I'm going to tap in a little more of that dark warm orange yellow at the bottom. If at any point, you're getting too much bleeding or pool start forming on your paper, just gently rinse off your brush, tap it on the paper towel, and let your dry brush soak up some of that excess. Because, although this is still loose painting, we are adding some details and shadows. So I want to have at least a little bit more of water control as I paint. Again, adding more of that dark orange yellow at the bottom. That is serving as a bit of a shadow. Then taking my raw umber, just a tiny bit of the raw umber because we will go back in later to add more details. But for now, tapping in a tiny bit of the dark brown. It doesn't have to be raw umber if you don't have it, but any dark shade of brown will work or even black is fine, too. And you can already see a little bit of depth building here, and they look a little bit more three D. Now, this third one is going to be facing from the back. You're not going to see any of the center, it's just going to be the back side of the stem. So we can leave that blank for now. Now, for my petals, just like I mentioned with the pencils, I'm going to paint them a little bit darker because when I paint daisy petals really light for a finished piece, it's not going to show up very well on a camera or on screen. So I'm going to be using still a light value of paints gray for my daisy petals, but I am making it a little bit darker so that you can see it better on screen. So don't feel like you have to make your petals as dark as I am. Now, I have my size four round brush, and one of the differentiators with daisies is they have very round petals. I'm not going to create that pointed tip petal like I have in some of the other lessons. You can watch what I'm doing for this first petal, starting with the tip of my brush, and then I apply some pressure down. Do the same thing right next to it. But I round it out, see where they connect, it has a bit of a curve to it. It's not a pointed petal. It's nice and thin. It gets a bit thicker, and then it connects at the end to create a curved tip. Let's do that again, starting with a tip, applying some pressure down, and see how my brush just curves at the end. I'm going to do the same thing and round it out. Now, for these petals, we will be adding more details once it dries, but for now, we're just painting in these petals, working our way around the center, and the petals here on this side are going to be slightly longer. But we'll really get to play around with perspective when we get to this second flower and the backside flower. But for now, it's going to be pretty even and just continue working your way around, making sure those petals are nice and curvy. I'm not making them too thick, and you can kind alternate, not alternate, but kind of vary how each petal looks. So you don't want them to be identical, some are a bit thicker, some have a little more space in between. I'm not making them look too perfect. But in general, they have the same general shape, pushing down, lifting back up, and curving out at the bottom. We have a few more to go here at the top. See that one's a little too pointy. If you find yourself making pointed edges, just use the tip of your brush to smooth it out a bit because that's one of the defining aspects of daisy petals. They're very curved and they don't have pointed edges, and they have some good texture, which we'll be adding once all these initial petals. Again, I'm making these ones slightly smaller. But not too drastically different. If you're working with a bigger brush, maybe you don't even have to do two strokes to create your petals, you can just push down and lift back up. But since I'm using a size four, I'm doing two strokes per petal. Just take your time and make your way all the way around the center. Again, these are a bit darker than I would normally paint my petals, but hopefully you're able to see them on screen a little bit better. All right, so there is our first layer. We will come back to this and add the texture, but for now, let's move on to the second one. The second one is going to be a little bit of a different perspective because we're doing a side view droopy perspective. The difference is going to be these petals that we pull down at the very bottom, they'll be very similar to the ones we just did. But on the side, they're going to be very short and they're going to have quite a bit of a curve to them. And we're not even going to add any petals at the top because those petals If you can imagine you're holding a stem looking at this flower, those petals would be on the backside. So you're not even going to be able to see those ones. Let's get started. I'm going to start with these ones here at the bottom because it's the same technique we did on the previous flower, making them nice and long and pulling down these little petals. Now, this one's directly in the center so that you'll see as I start to work my way to the sides, they'll start to get slightly more curved and slightly shorter. You can already see that curve there, and now I'll move to the left side again. Pulling down that petal and rounding out the bottom. At this point, they're still relatively straight, but now they'll start getting more curvy and a little bit shorter. Let's do this again right next to it. Giving it that shape and making it a little bit shorter because that's getting further back. If you think about where that petal would actually be, it's further back, so it's a little bit shorter and it has more curve to it. I'm going to twist my paper so it's a little easier to do and Making my last little petal here is just hang in there off to the side. Now we'll mirror that on the right side. Creating these nice little petals. They're pretty thin. And the ones on the very side are really, really short. You just barely see them. They're about half or even less than half as long as the ones at the very bottom. Now, once we add the stem, you'll be able to see how this all plays into the bouquet. I'm actually going to add one more little stem on this side too. It's just an indication that there is something going on there, but you're not able to see the full petal. Now, while we give those a chance to dry, I'm going to go ahead and paint some petals here for this backside, daisy. Now you can see this it almost looks like a little funnel or something shape. But we're going to add our green stem later on. But for now, I'm just going to paint some petals. Again, this is the backside of the petals. It's a little hard to visualize, but I'm going to have these petals coming up. That one's a little too dark. If that happens to you, rinse off your brush and lift some of that color off the page. These petals are just facing upward. I'll have some off to the side. Again, you can round out any petals that look a little bit too sharp. Then these ones on the very side will have a bit of character to them. Again, a bit too dark, I'll lift some of that color. And I'm going to have one really droopy petal on the bottom right. This is one where it looks a little bit funky at this point because we don't have the stem attaching to it yet. But trust the process and once we add the stem, it'll come together a little better. 19. Day 7: Daisy Details & Stems: Now, while all those petals dry, I'm going to tap in a little more detail onto the centers here. I have my cadmium yellow deep again. I'm just doing some wet on dry texture here. Tapping in some more color, giving it some texture and vibrancy. Again, the colors dry lighter than when you originally paint them. The base layer also didn't have much texture. We kept everything pretty smooth. I like to go back in and give it a little bit of texture there. I'm also going to grab my raw umber, that is the very, very dark brown. You can also use black, like I said, if you don't have the raw umber and see how that brown already doesn't look as dramatic because it dried quite a bit lighter. I'm going to tap in. It's okay if some of that bleeds with the cadmium yellow that we just added. But I'm just bringing back that vibrancy and deepening the contrast a little bit. Using the very tip of my brush. So I don't overdo it. Let's do the same thing. On the top, daisy, I'm going to reload that color and darken it a bit. Just barely barely tapping the tip of my brush to create this bumpy texture and contrast. Just making the center of these daisies pop a bit more. Now, I brought you in even closer for this next part. You want to make sure that your petals are completely dry when you do this part, and I move down to a size one brush. It's a very fine tip. Again, I'm doing this a little bit darker, so don't feel like you have to do this as dark as I am, but I'm using a darker value of my pains gray, loading it up on my brush and making these super quick imple texture marks on each of the petals. I'm moving my hand quickly and barely grazing the brush on the surface of the paper. You want it to be light, you want it to be barely noticeable, but it adds an extra bit of texture to these daisy petals, which is one thing that daisy petals in real life have, a bit of that rip roughly texture to them, almost like little grooves. You just want these to be very natural looking. I'm not worrying about making perfect lines every time. I'm just barely grazing the top of my paper and letting the tip of my brush create these texture lines. Again, you don't want them to be too overpowering. Keep your hand nice and light, making textural brush strokes. Now, if you don't have a brush this small, just use the very tip of your smallest brush. Just make sure you don't have too much water or paint in your bristle so that it doesn't create too thick of lines. You want to make sure when you're doing this, that that first layer of petals that we painted is completely dry because that's how you're able to get these crisp lines. If any of this petal was still wet and I tried to add these texture marks, it would just bleed into that base layer, and you wouldn't be able to even see them. Make sure that initial layer is completely dry, and this is called the wet on dry technique. Now let's do the same thing for the final daisy. I don't have a set number of lines that I put on each petal, I don't have a set area that I'm placing them, just flicking my wrist and making it look very natural and organic, letting the brush do the work for me. It's a very subtle thing, but it does make a big difference in bringing your daisy petals to life. Now we can get started on the stems. Once again, I'm going to pencil this in. I don't have a perfect composition in mind, but I just want to make sure that before I put any paint down, I have stems in a general composition that I like. So I'll start with this first tell one and start penciling in. You can see going in between some petals here. The nice thing about penciling in. Again, I'm not a big fan of sketching. I'm not very good at drawing. But when I do compositions, I like to use a pencil to just put my mind at ease and just make sure I have things placed where I want because too many times I've had it happen where I really like the flowers that I paint, but then when I go to add in the leaves or the stems, it's not exactly what I had in mind, and I end up not really liking it. So just breaking out the pencil to at least start to place where you would want these stems. It can really help put your mind at ease and make your strokes more confident. That one was a little curvier that I wanted, so I'll just use my needed eraser and try again. That's the best part of penciling in stuff is you can just erase and redo until your composition is exactly how you want, and then you can start painting in your stems. Let's do this last one here. I want this one to have a little bit more of a curve to it. Again, having that kind of funnel shape where it attaches. And then penciling in a curvy stem. Adding that right in between the first two, and then I'll pencil in where I want some of the leaves to go. But that's usually where I can just paint intuitively. And the most important part for me at least to pencil things in is just the stems and the shape of the composition, because that's what really sets up the movement of your overall piece. So in case you can't really see this on screen, the pencil is so light. I have this middle stem coming all the way down. I have the flower on the left, and the stem overlaps it. And then this one on the right, it's the backside daisy. It has a lot of curve to the stem and falls in between the first two. So I have my good old deep sap green and my raw umber, and I'm going to do a couple layers. So you know the drill. I'm going to start pretty light. First things first, I'm tracing over my pencil marks that I just put down, keeping it pretty thin for now using the tip of my brush, and adding in this first little layer, and having it go where it breaks up, where that petal is. It adds to the realism and the depth because you can see that that stem is falling behind those petals that are in front. And now, when I paint these stems, I can confidently paint them because that pencil mark is already there as my guide. Again, I'm not really sketching out necessarily all of my elements, but just penciling in the direction. And that makes me a lot more confident when I actually start putting paint to my paper. I like to also have these stems. I don't want them all to be perfectly lined up at the bottom. So they're all meeting at the bottom at different points. And we'll add more detail to this one later. But for now, I am putting down that initial layer. And now you can see that this is the back side of this flower, and this yellow stamen is on the other side of it, which you can't see from this perspective, but you can visualize it because we're painting the backside. Keeping with the light value, I'm going to place in some leaves. I'll have one, in one coming up at the top. That one is overlapping the daisy petals on the left. I'll be adding more details to this in a bit of a darker layer, but for now, I want to stage these bigger leaves. Feel free to add your leaves wherever you want. Also, if you want to add more stems coming into the composition, you can definitely do that. I'm going for more of a dainty look, so I'm going to stick with three, but this is one of the reasons why I love teaching bouquets because once you have these main elements, as long as you're comfortable with where your flowers are and where your stems are, you can really go crazy with making it your own. Because I don't even have these leaves planned out in my mind necessarily. I'm just going off a feel and maybe I would end up placing a leaf that I don't necessarily love, but that's a great way to practice and figure out what you do like and figure out how to add different elements in different places and put them on your paper in a confident manner. This is definitely one of the times in the class where you can take some risks. The worst thing that will happen is maybe you don't end up liking one of the leaves, and that's not the end of the world. The best thing that can happen is your confidence builds up, and maybe you put a leaf down that looks way better than mine does or that you really end up liking and you implement it into other paintings that you work on in the future. So don't be scared of taking these risks. Just a reminder, you're never going to love every single piece that you ever make, and that's a good thing. So also remember to take a step back every now and then, look at your piece from afar. And now for the last step, I'm going to go in a slightly darker value of green. I'm not going to go over all of it with the darker green, but just adding a little bit of shadow and texture to add some depth to it. Because right now all of the greenery is looking a little bit flat because it's all the same exact value. So I'll use the tip of my brush and deep in some areas. I'm also going to add in a little bit more of that raw umber to make it more of an earthy green and just lining a little bit of the stem. Again, you don't want to go over every single part. Otherwise, then it would look flat just because it would all be the same dark color. Right now it's flat because it's all the same light value. You want to have a variation picking and choosing where I want to add a bit more depth, and giving some texture to some of the stems. I'm also going to add a bit of shadow and texture here at the base of this backside daisy. Adding a bit of this darker value at the base, and I'm going to rinse off my brush and smooth out some of these lines a little bit, softening those edges with clean water, and that will help bring this backside flower to life a little bit more. You did it. Congratulations. As I mentioned, there are so many fun ways to paint daisies. I hope you try this one again sometime and experiment with some different techniques and perspectives. I'll see you for our day eight project up next. 20. Day 8: Anemone Flowers: We're over halfway there. We are on to day eight, and for this piece, we're going to paint a new flower, well, new for this class, the anemone. The process for painting these is pretty similar to some of the florals we've already painted, but they just have a very unique stamen with lots of little details that are fun to paint. Just like we did with the Daisy in the previous lesson, this one will also include a side view perspective. So we'll get some more great practice with that. The colors for this piece are Prussian blue and titanium white for the light blue flower petals, deep sap green with a touch of hookers green to brighten up the stems and the leaves and carbon black for the center of the flowers. So we're going to have three primary anemone flowers in this composition. Once again, I'm just going to use my pencil and place three little circles down on the page. And that just helps me plan out where each of those will be. So I'm going to be using, like we said, the Prussian blue and titanium white mixture. I'm loading that up in my brush and I'm going to start with a very pigmented mixture. Now we're going to do a similar technique to what we've done earlier in the class. I'm going to start by placing down some dots for that top right flower. You'll see I'm using a lot of water and a lot of paint and putting them in a little circle like this. This is where we'll be pulling pigment from for the anemone petals. The actual dots don't really matter. They don't have to be perfect looking by any means, but we want to have plenty to pull from. I'm going to rinse off my brush completely, and we're going to create very rounded petals. So I'm pulling some of this color out and really letting my brush expand out on the page, and I'm creating these big fluffy petals. Now, even when I start doing this, you can see I don't have enough pigment from that center ring. I'll tap in some more because you really want to have enough pigment there to pull from to bring into your petals. If you work your way around and you don't have enough pigment in those center rings to pull from, just go ahead and add more. There's nothing wrong with adding more color and more water as you go. Especially when I'm teaching a lot of times and I'm talking and really explaining things, those center dots start to dry up. But I don't want you to feel like you have to rush yourself or that you're running out of time. You can always just go ahead and add more color in. Rinse off your brush again, and we'll do the same thing right next to it. Now, you don't want to have too much space. You want to have a little bit of white space in between the petals, but not a big gap, and you're just going to continue creating these nice rounded petals. These are similar to the petals that we painted with the daisies. These are obviously a lot thicker, but they both have the very curved rounded edges. I'll go ahead and add some more pigment here in the center. Make sure I have plenty to pull from. It's drying pretty fast. Clean off my brush and paint another big petal right next to it. Now, anemones, I have a hard time with the painting process sometimes because they look really goofy when they're at this stage. Just because there's not a whole lot to them. They're these big petals, but you don't have a whole lot of details yet. But just bear with me and stick to the process, and it'll all come together when we add the center. Now, this color mixture is really drying up fast, so I'm having to tap back in some more pigment after every petal, which is fine. And let's go ahead and add one final petal right in between these two. Good. Thanks. Good bye. And now I'm going to make my petals actually a little bit darker just because this color might not come across on screen as well, because it's very, very light. You don't have to do this part if you're working with a different color mixture, but I just want you to be able to see it well. That's going to be it for now, and we can go ahead and give this time to dry and then we'll get started on the next one in the meantime. Now the next one is going to be a bit of a side perspective. Instead of doing a full circle like we just did, I'm going to do a half circle. So once again, I have plenty of pigment and water in my brush, and I'm starting to tap those dots in a half circle shape. You can see I made it slightly darker so I don't have to go back in with that second layer, but I'll rinse off my brush now, and I'm just going to start adding petals along this little line. So I'll start with the one at the very top. That's going to be the tallest, pulling out that color and creating the same basic petal shape right in the middle. Now, let's do two more, one on either side, pulling out the color, and painting the petal shape. You can see it's butting up next to the first anemone that we did. I'll do the same thing on the left side as well. Again, if your initial drop start to dry, just go ahead and add more pigment. Now we're going to be going over these parts with black details later on. Even if you're constantly adding more and pulling the color out, we don't necessarily need to go back in and have super detailed centers like we've done in the other flowers because that'll all be covered up with black details later on. I'm going to add a few more dots here to extend the half circle, and I'll just do a couple of little side petals. I'm not going to do a full petal like we've done, but pulling a little bit of color off to the side. This one here on the right, you can make a little indication of a petal, but you can pretend that first flower is overlapping it. Now for this bottom petal, that's going to be if you can visualize it, it's going to be folding up. I'm going to tap my brush just like this. Now, our statement of the flower, we want to leave some room for, which is going to be right in here. It's going to be a black circle. So I'm going to use my pencil here and block off a little line for where that statemen is going to be, and that's where I can put my petal. I'm curving this petal upwards. This is another one where it looks funky. It's hard to visualize until you see it together. Stick with me, and this is a petal that's curving upwards, but you can't necessarily see the inside of it and it's also covering a bit of the stamen or the center of the flower. So to indicate that depth, I'm going to tap a bit more color here at the bottom to show that that's where the petal is folding underneath. It's almost like a little shadow. And we're going to leave it be just like this for now. And let's go ahead and add our final flower here, and then we'll start to add the details and really bring the composition to life. So I'm going to go back to my lighter blue mixture here, and same thing, dropping down those dots and painting the flower the same way we did for the first one on the top right. Okay. So now we have these blocked in. Again, they look kind of washed out and weird at this point, they look very lifeless, but it's really the stamen that makes these flowers pop and really come to life. I'm going to make a couple of these petals slightly darker before we move on. I'm working with a pretty light color, so you might not be able to see it as well on screen. So don't feel like you have to do this step. But now that we have our main elements placed, before we get started on the greenery and the leaves, I'm going to actually add a couple of anemone buds. Now, you know the drill, when I add buds, I like to pencil those in first. I'm going to add a couple coming out of the top. I'll have one coming out of the side. And let's see. Let's do one coming out of the bottom right. But feel free to add these wherever you want. Just keep the shape and movement in mind as you do this. Now for the buds, I'm going to make them very general. They're nothing fancy, but it's going to help add to the shape of the composition. I'm going to lay my brush down and create a basic oval shape, and I will go over these with some greenery once we get to that stage. But for now, I'm just painting them almost like little egg shapes and blocking in that color. And I want to be sure I'm adding a variety of values within the buds. So I'm going to go back in and tap in a bit of a darker value. Here at the bottom. It doesn't have as much of the titanium white mixed into it. So it's more of the bold Prussian blue color to add in the shadow and smooth it out at the bottom. And I'm going to do the same thing for all these little beds. And again, we are just setting the groundwork here. This whole piece will start to come to life when we add the stamen and the rest of the leaves in the greenery. Tapping in a little bit of that darker shade at the bottom and using a clean brush to smooth it all out. So you can really see at this stage why it is that I like to use the pencil so much when I'm planning out where these all go because it'll be covered up by greenery later anyways. But at this stage where you have all these elements of floating in space. It can feel a little overwhelming and you might be thinking if you didn't pencil them out, how does all of this connect and what will this piece look like in the end? But having those pencil marks and having a general direction in mind that you can then just color in or fill in with your greenery. It really helps to make your strokes more confident. Make sure that this is all dry and then we'll move on to the next step adding the stamen. 21. Day 8: Stamen & Details: For this stamen, I'm going to make sure I'm using a very bold deep value of my carbon black. I'm almost pulling straight from the tube, and I'll start by painting in a basic circle shape. Make sure the rest of your flower is dry at this point. I'm going to leave a smidge of white space for the highlight. Let's go ahead and add this to all the flowers. Now, this one on the left is going to be a little bit different because that petal is hiding a little bit of it. So I'll just use the tip of my brush and do a little tiny mark and that indicates that the statement is there, but it's behind that front petal. I'll do the same thing on this third and final one. Painting in my circle and leaving a bit of a white space for the highlight. Once you have all of your circles in place, then we can get started adding the rest of the dots and little details and connecting lines. Again, make sure that your flowers are completely dry because we want to have all of these details be nice and crisp. We don't want any bleeding. We're going to give a little bit of space here between the black circle and these dots. I'm going to start placing these in a ring around the center. You don't want them to look too uniform or perfect. You're just tapping down your brush and creating these dots all the way around. You don't want them to look uniform. Make sure you're randomly tapping it in. Some of them are a little bit thinner, some are a bit thicker, just in a ring around the stamen like that. Let's go ahead and do this for all of them. Now for this second one again, because it's a side perspective, I'm just going to do it in this curved shape following that same line of the initial dots that we put down, and we'll do a similar one on this bottom right one as well. I'm letting the brush do the work for me. I'm not really carefully putting down each and every dot. I'm just creating these little brush marks using the very tip of my brush. Once you have all of this in place, I'm going to move to my size one round brush. It's nice and small. You don't have to use a brush that's small, but we are going to be making very thin lines. So it's a little helpful to have at least a fine tip. I'm going to start making these very dainty lines connecting those little dots with the center of the flower. You don't have to worry about actually connecting each and every little dot. You don't want it to look perfect. You're just making these little wispy lines, making sure to leave a little bit of white space in between them because you don't want this entire thing to turn into a blob of black. You want to be able to have some defined lines here, and you can see my my brush is just barely grazing the surface of the paper to create these fine dainty strokes. This is really what brings these anemone flowers to life. From those initial petals to what it looks like now, that's a big difference. I'll do the same thing with these lines on the left side. Loosely connecting them. You can make some strokes thinner, some a little bit thicker. Some of them are overlapping, and you're just indicating that we know that all of these little marks are connecting, but you don't actually have to show each and every circle with a perfect connecting line. We'll do the same thing on this last one. All right, so we have our main anemone flowers. We have the buds loosely placed, and now we can start adding the leaves. Now, the leaves for anemone flowers. They're a little bit weird. They're kind of almost like spiky little coral pieces. I don't know how else to explain it. But I'll show you what it looks like coming off of this top flower. I have a medium value of green loaded up, and I'm going to just kind of add a little curvy stem just like that. And then I'm just going to pull in these little green strokes. So you can see, these are very spiky. It's honestly not my favorite looking leaf. It's a lot different to what I normally do. But that's what the anemone leaves actually look like. Again, using the tip of my brush and pulling my strokes towards the stem to create these spiky little leaves. I'm going to do one coming right here. Pulling my brush toward that initial stem. Again, you want to show in between these flowers that they're all connected in some way. I'm going to add a bit of a stem coming off of this side profile flower. But you don't need to add too much detail. You're just loosely placing that stem. Let's have one coming off at the bottom right. Once again, encourage you to try your own little leaves here too. You really can't go wrong with anemone leaves because they're kind of weird looking anyways. So if you're not confident in how your leaves look, they don't have to look perfect. They're pretty strange looking, just wispy brush strokes anyways. And you'll see the way I do it is I add the first little stem so that I can make sure there's movement there. But then when I actually add the little spiky parts, as I like to call them. I'm not thinking about it too much. So you can see I add the stem there. I make sure there's good movement. And then start to pull in those strokes and create all these little leaf attachments. Now at this point, I'm going to start adding the stems for each of these fillers, and for now, all I'm going to do is place these lines in and make sure they're connected. I will add a little bit of overlap and detail in the next step. But for now, just showing that things are all connected and making sure I like the movement of the overall piece. I really love to see these compositions come together because from that first step where we just had the petals of the anemones, it looks really weird and it looks a little uncomfortable and you're not sure where the piece is heading or maybe you're feeling not confident about it or how it's going to turn out. I definitely have experienced that a lot, and sometimes I feel the urge to just start over and scrap it all. But once you add more elements, and you add in your details, compositions start to come to life, that's one of my favorite parts is seeing it all come together. You add your elements, you add your greenery, you add your stay in details. And most of the time, you end up liking how it turns out. And if you don't, it's at least great practice every time you do it. Now, I want to add a little bit of coverage to these buds. So I'm going to start by making the stem a little bit darker. Make sure your bud is completely dry. And then I'm going to paint over it, and I'm making sure to curve that outer edge. This gives the illusion that your bud is still encased in this greenery or the stem. It's not fully starting to bloom yet. I like to do that on some of the buds just so it's not a random little line connecting to this Easter egg looking bud, but it's showing that it's actually connected and encased in the rest of the flower bud. I don't do that same style to everyone. Sometimes I just add a bit of a connection to the base like this. Put that way. It's not like I said, just a thin little line connecting to the bd. So feel free to experiment with this. Just make sure to change it up on each of the beds so they don't look too similar. So again, I still very much consider my style to be loose watercolor. But loose doesn't mean that you can't add a little bit of detail like this to make it more realistic. Now, I'm going to add a little bit more detail here. I do not want to go overboard, but I'm going to infuse this piece with some more of these spiky leaves. This is another great opportunity for you to infuse your own style. You can also just have someone off leaves like this, similar to the leaves that we've been practicing throughout the class. They don't all have to be the spiky leaf stem. But I do like to add a good amount of those to make it look a little bit more like it does out in nature. Remember, as we've been learning throughout the class, it's important to keep different values in mind. Some of them are lighter, some are quite a bit darker. Some of the leaves are overlapping, the others, some are underlapping. For the most part, the greenery I'm having underlap and fall behind the main flowers and always keeping movement in mind as I add these elements. Now, taking a step back, I really like how it's looking. The only thing is the stem up at the top is a little bit less full than the rest of the m. I would prefer it to be less busy than too busy, so I don't want to add too much, but I am going to add one more stem of leaves coming off of that. I have one leaf coming down, and then adding more of these spiky little branches off to the right. I hope you liked this painting. I think it was a great project for our halfway point, and I will see you in Day nine. 22. Day 9: Expressive Blooms: On to day nine. The past two projects have required a little more detail than I usually do. So we're going back to those loose expressive blooms. So I want you to shake out your wrists, get your softest thirsties brushes, and let's start painting. For my color palette, I am using a mixture of quinacrodone Lake and ultramarine deep with a touch of carbon black for the lavender color, permanent lyserin crimson for some of the pink fillers, cadmium yellow deep, and various values of deep sap green. Okay. We are going to start with the top left flower. What I'm going to do is I'm taking my size five brush and my cadmiumllo deep and I'm going to do a few tiny little marks. This is just for the very center of the flower. You're barely even going to see it. So I'm barely placing those in. Just a few little dots using the tip of my brush. And now we're going to paint the petals, and we're going to do it in a very similar way to how we did it in the day three project with the yellow flower that we did with those rounded loose petals. So I'm taking my purple mixture, and I'm going to make sure I have plenty of pigment and water in my brush. And just like we did in that project, I'm making tiny little marks around the yellow dots that I just put in. I don't really want these to bleed together yet. I'm keeping a bit of distance between the yellow and the purple. I'll rinse off my brush completely, it's the same technique where you pull out and then bring it back in. Pull out, bring it back. I'll show you on this first petal, pulling out the color and bringing it back. I want that to be a little darker. Go over it one more time, out and back. You can see that creates a very beautiful fluffy petal. Now, I'm going to go ahead and tap in a little bit more color here. You'll see it bleed out into the petal a little bit, which is totally fine. Again, I want you to be able to see this well on screen. Anytime I work with super light colors like this, it doesn't come across as vibrant as I'd like on screen. I'll do that again, pulling out some of that color, letting my brush expand, and bringing it back to the center. Now, as I create these petals, sometimes I go over it a couple more times. Sometimes I add wispy marks in between, and I just give these petals a little bit more character. Let's move to the left side. Pulling out some color and bringing it back. So you're just doing a little loop de loop. Brush expands out and I bring it right back. Keeping your wrist nice and loose to create these expressive petals. As you paint your petals, make sure that they don't all look the exact same. This one's a little thicker, this one's thinner and more curvy. This one on the side is going to be a little bit smaller. Same technique for all of them of coming out and pulling back in, but just giving a slight variation to each of them. I'm going to smooth out this edge a little bit. But as you practice these techniques, it might feel a little bit weird at first, and it doesn't feel very natural or fluid. But as you practice that and you do them more and more and you paint more compositions, it really starts to become a natural process and a natural technique, and that's because of muscle memory. When you do things often like this, you learn how your brush works, you learn how to move your hand in different ways, and you know what strokes work best for your style. You can already tell my color is drying up here, so I'll add a little bit more into the center. But yeah, all that to say, just don't give up on yourself. I know lots of times when you're watching other people paint, it looks maybe like it's a lot more effortless than it maybe feels to you right now. But I promise you with some practice and repetition, it'll start to come naturally, and you can also infuse your own style into your paintings the more you learn what you like and what you don't like. There's our first flower. Now the next one is going to be to the right, and it'll be a side perspective. And we're going to do opposite colors for this one. The first one I have the yellow in the middle and the purple petals. This time we'll do it in reverse. Because I want the second flower to be more of a side perspective. When I add these initial strokes, I'm very gently adding them and they're in much more of a flattened oval shape than the initial yellow ones we did on the previous flower. Just barely adding that touch of color. Now we'll do the same process but in reverse. I'm going to take a good amount of the cadmium yellow deep and do the same thing that we did with the purple. Starting by adding in pretty heavily pigmented marks here so that I'll have plenty to pull from. I'll do a little bit here on the bottom, but I want majority of it to be up there at the top or on the right. I'm going to rinse off my brush, so I have clean bristles and I'm going to do the same exact thing. Now, when I do my sideways perspective ones, I want the petals on the left or the bottom to be a little bit shorter than the ones on the top. I'll start with the big fluffy petals expanding the brush and bringing it back. Let's do that again. Pull out color, leave a little bit of white space in between your petals and create these big fluffy, expressive petals. I'm making sure to rinse off my brush every time so that I'm not creating petals that are too saturated because those bristles pick up pigment every time you do a petal. Let's create this side one. I'll rinse off my brush again. I'll do one more here on the side butting up next to the purple petals. Little one here on the bottom. And then this petal at the very bottom, it's just going to be kind of a horizontal shape. It's not a full fluffy petal like the others. Now, let's do our next flower placed down at the bottom. We're working in the rule of odds. It's a little bit easier sometimes to do it that way. And I'm going to go ahead and add my third and final primary flower. And I want the center to be somewhere in between these two. This one's going to be facing more downwards. They're all facing slightly different directions. Adding the smaller yellow strokes first before I go in with a very pigmented, very bold mixture of lavender. You can also play around with different values of the purple. If you want it to be a little bit more smoky, then you can add carbon black or paints gray. If you want it to be more of a pink hue, you can add more of the quinacridone lake or whatever pink you're using in your mixture, have fun with it and try different ratios. Now, let's start adding the petals, doing the same technique, pulling that color out and bringing it back in and creating these really fun expressive petals. And you can see the center of this final flower is quite a bit bigger, so it'll have a little bit of a different look to it. And that's something I always try to do in my compositions. I never want all my flowers to look identical. Because if you have a real floral bouquet in real life, you know that not all the flowers look the exact same. So I try not to overthink it. And especially when you work with quick bruh movements like we're doing in this project, it's pretty difficult to have identical looking flowers anyways. When you try to do it too carefully and looking, then you might run into the problem of having all your flowers look the exact same. So keep your wrist loose, keep your grip on your brush loose, and make these petals expressive and fun. 23. Day 9: Foliage & Filler Flowers: Before I add any filler flowers or other details, I'm going to do my base layer of greenery. With my base layers, I start super light value. It's a very watery mixture, and I just lay down some initial big fluffy leaves. This is just to fill it in a bit and start to build out that shape, and then we'll go back in and add fillers, and for the fillers, we'll bring back some more of this yellow to balance it out. We have a lot of purple, so we want to bring back some yellow, and we'll also add in some of that pink as well. But for now, I just like to fill it up a little bit more with these first layers of leaves. I'm also making it known that all of these flowers are connected by adding some of this green in between them. And when I do these, I'm not even painting a perfect leaf shape necessarily. I'm just filling in some of that white space and blocking in that color so that you can imagine that there is greenery down below. And I'm also making sure that I keep this value very light because I want to be able to add darker layers on top. If I start too dark for this initial step, then I won't leave enough room for myself to go any darker when I add additional layers of greenery. So keeping it nice and light, that way you can always build layers on top. And again, when I do these, I don't have necessarily an exact plan in mind for where all of these leaves are going to go. I'm just feeling it out and filling up some of the space, making sure all the movement is displayed in these leaves and making sure it feels balanced. So that's looking good, and now I'm going to break out my good old pencil again. To start planning where I want these filler elements to go. I'm liking this movement so far from top corner to bottom corner. We have some of a curve there. We have a little bit coming off to either side, but for the most part, it's a corner to corner composition, which, as we talked about in the beginning, is a great way to establish nt. Now, usually when I like to add these, I start penciling them in, and I like to add, let's say purple or pink fillers coming out of yellow. I wouldn't want to do a yellow flower with yellow fillers. Just like on the left side, I want my fillers to be yellow or pink. I wouldn't want them to be purple because it's already pretty heavy on purple on the left side. Like we talked about balance, we want to make sure we have balance with our colors as well. So I have some coming out up there. I'm going to have one coming up on the side, and blocking in where I want all of these little filler flowers to go. Again, I never sketch out full flower shapes or anything like this. I'm just sketching out the stems and where all of those are going to go and where we're going to see the movement in the piece. Now let's load up some yellow and start on the fillers. I'm going to start by tapping in a base layer like this. Even that's a little bit more pigmented than I would like, but just make sure it's a nice light value and haphazardly, start tapping in the base layer for this first filler. And then while it's still wet, I'm going to go back in with a very concentrated value, very similar to what we did in the center of the yellow flower. I'm going to start tapping it in and you can see it bleeding and interacting with that first layer. I don't want to add too much. I still want to be able to see that light value, but just tapping in that bold vibrant value. Let's do the same thing down at the bottom, starting pretty light, leaving some white space in between all these little marks. You want your fillers to have some room to breathe and then going back in with the darker pigment. No overlapping every single part that we did in the first layer, but just adding to it. Now let's move on to some pink fillers. I definitely want to have one down here at the bottom. I'll have one purple one coming out on the right to balance out the color on the left and then some more pink up at the top. Since we're not using pink in the main flowers, I want to make sure I have plenty for the fillers. Again, starting with the light value and very gently tapping in the first layer. That's even a little bit darker than I'd like. I'll rinse some of that off and continue adding these light little marks. Now let's take some of that deep pink and tap it in. Let it interact with that first layer. Let's do some more of that pink. I'm going to have some coming out up at the top. Once again, starting with that first layer, tapping my brush down, and we'll have two sprigs for this one. And then go in with the second layer straight from the tube. It's a very bold mixture and tapping it in right on top. And make sure to have fun with it, especially when you're taking classes and you're just experimenting and learning new techniques. It's really low pressure and it's important to have fun. So I'm adding this purple filler on the right side to create the sense of balance since we have so much purple on the left side. You always want that first layer to still show through on these fillers. When you add your second layer, just make sure you're not adding to too much. Now, I really like how this pink filler has two. It has the shorter one and the taller one. I'm going to add a little bit of that to some of these other elements. I'm going to go back in and add some of this yellow. Tapping it down and it looks like it's peaking up behind this purple petal. Let's also do that on this one on the right. But instead of doing a purple one, I'm going to do a pink one. I feel like there's already so much purple in this piece, and I also really like how the pink looks next to the purple. And remember, you're not even painting petals necessarily. All you're doing is tapping your brush down with different amounts of pressure and letting the colors play with each other. So now let's start adding some little stems. Again, we will add more greenery and details as we go. But for now, I just want to make sure all of these elements are connected. Make sure you can tell that everything is a part of this composition. We don't want anything floating out in space by itself. I'm just using the tip of my brush and filling in a bit of that white space in each of these fillers. I don't want any straight lines coming through them. I'm also going to start adding some little leaves coming off of them as well. These help to contribute with the movement of the piece. I'm not overwhelming it, but just complimenting and following the direction of those fillers. This is very intuitive painting at this point. I don't have a plan for where all these little bits are going, but just seeing what is needed, where. And adding it to the piece as I go. So everything is looking good so far. Everything is connected. So now the last step will be adding some final greenery with a darker value. I don't want to go too dark, but definitely a step darker than that first layer. And again, some of it will be overlapping what's already there. Some of it will be adding some brand new leaves. I don't want to go overboard. There's already a lot going on in this piece. But I do want to build up some depths and sharpen the contrast a little bit. And you can do that by using a darker value of green. And And you can already see that this second layer, it's not distracting, it's just adding a layer of depth and adding some contrast. Because you can still see that lighter layer beneath it, and then this darker layer on top. That's what's closer to you as you look at the bouquet. So it's darker. I'm going to tap in a little bit more of this dark green in between the little fillers. And for example, this pink one lost a bit of the vibrancy, so I'll bring some of that back by using some darker green So let's take another step back. I'm liking how we incorporated some of the darker elements. The only area that's still pretty light is this top right corner. So I'm just going to add a little bit more of a leaf coming out of here and embellishing that greenery a little bit. And let's also add one curving upwards. So there's lots of room to play here, and there we go. This is a very expressive, bright, beautiful bouquet, and I hope you enjoyed painting it. When you're ready, meet me in the next lesson for our day ten project. 24. Day 10: Primary Cherry Blossoms: Day ten of our 15 day challenge, and we are painting yet another new flower. This time, it's the cherry blossoms. But don't worry. The process is pretty similar to some of the flowers we've already painted. I have always loved cherry blossoms. I actually went to college at the University of Washington in Seattle, and it is famous for its cherry blossoms. I'll put some campus photos up on screen. It's a major tourist attraction in the springtime, so I'm really excited to paint these with you today. And we're also going to paint a branch with some fun texture, so let's get started. The colors I'm using for this painting include permanent zarin crimson, yellow ochre, and titanium white for the flowers and various values of raw umber for the dark brown branch. I'm also going to add in some deep sap green for the little leaves. So I'm going to get a very light value to start with. Again, I will be painting slightly darker just so that it can display on the screen a little bit better. But you want to start with your very lightest value, and we're going to be a little more controlled with these strokes than we have in other lessons. Wherever you want the center of your flower to be, that's where we're going to start. I'm going to press my brush down and create a little more of a controlled petal shape. Let me bring you in a bit closer so you can see this better. And I'm going to go even darker here so that you can see it better. But again, don't feel like you have to make your petals this dark. C cherry blossoms are very light and they have delicate petals, so be sure to keep it nice and light. And now I'm going to grab a very dark value of my permanent sarin crimson. I'm pulling straight from the tube, and I'm going to tap a little bit of that down here at the very bottom of this petal. Just like that. I have a controlled bleed. I'm not out of control. There's not a whole lot of water where it's puddling up or anything like that, but it's also enough to where you get a gentle bleed. Now you'll want to rinse off your brush, tap it on the paper towel, and just blend this out a little bit. It is still loose style, but I like to have a little bit more of a controlled blend when I paint my cherry blossoms. That one is coming up to the top. Then the second one, we're going to start with the light value again, and we're going to paint another petal right next to it and pointing toward the right side. I have that base layer done and then you're going to tap in. You can see the gentle bleeds starting to form. It's not anything too crazy. It's very controlled. Then rinse off your brush again so that you have nice and clean bristles. Tap it off on the paper towel and start to smooth that out a little bit. You get a very gentle gradient from that dark pigment in the very center all the way out to the light value at the edge of the petals. I'm going to smooth this first one out a little bit more too. As it dries, if there are any harsh lines that you notice are forming, just go ahead and smooth it out. The nice thing about painting petals like these is we'll be adding little stamen details once everything dries. You don't need to worry about your petals looking absolutely perfect because A, we're just learning and nothing needs to be perfect. But B, it'll be covered by those stamen details. Again, I moved back to my light value. I'm going to add another petal here. Tap in that dark pigment in the center. You'll see the gentle bloom starting to form, rinsing off my brush. And then starting to blend it out. You're getting a lot of great practice with blending and layering and mastering your water control. You can see that each of these petals just has a very easy transition from these outward, light, soft values into these deep dark shadows as you reach the center of the flower, and that's where the stamen will be once everything dries. Now I'll pull a petal downwards. Starting with a very controlled first layer and a very light value. This one's going to be a little bit more around. Go ahead and grab your dark value of color again. And same as we've done on the others, gently tap that dark pigment into the center, rinse off your brush, and smooth it out. Let's add our final petal here, starting with that light value. I'm being a little more careful with my shape, making controlled strokes, grabbing that dark value and adding it to the center. So there's our base layer for our very first cherry blossom. I'm going to let this dry completely, and then I'll show you how to add the stamen before we move on to the next flower. So once the base layer is completely dry, I'm going to mix up some permanent zarin crimson with a little bit of raw umber, and that will get you a very deep dark, bold shade. And I switch down to my size one brush. You can also just use any brush that has a pointy tip. And what you're going to do to create the stamen, I'm going to paint a little line here and then press down at the very end, and that way you get that little bud at the top, and you're going to change the length of each of these little details. So you're pulling out and then pressing down. You don't have to individually paint each little circle in each line. You're doing it in one movement. Pull out, push down. And as you do this, you'll see my brush go out of frame quite often, and that's because I want to maintain that very deep shade of this color mixture. So I'm reloading that color pretty often so that I maintain a bold value. And again, you'll see I'm getting some movement to them. Not every line is perfectly straight, pulling out and pushing down. Stew it again, pull out, and gently tap it down. There is our first cherry blossom. Let's do the other flower that's a little more basic like this one. But this time I'm going to make the petals a little bit more round and it will be slightly below and slightly to the right. What I mean by making these petals a little bit more round and bouncy is just really curving my brush there at the end. You can see the first ones are a little bit more almond shaped. But I want these second flower petals to be a little bit more round. I'm actually going to work on a couple of petals at the same time for this one. Making sure to leave a little bit of white space in between because I don't want those petals to bleed into each other too much. Making the shape nice and rod, I lay down those first layers, and then I go in with a darker value and gently tap some of that into the bottom. You'll see a little bit of bleeding starting to form, and then you'll rinse off your brush and smooth it all out. Same process as we did on the first flower. But this time, I'm just working on two at a time. And continuing to add petal after petal for a total of five. There we have our main petals, and these are staying nice and wet because I'm using cotton paper, so it's a lot easier to add layers and blend. And now I can go back in with the dark value into the center. Again, we don't need to worry about it being perfect because as you can see in the first flower with those stamen details, you can't even see the blends because it's covered up by the stamen. For now, it's just putting those layers down so that you can tell that there is a gradient from dark to light, but it does not have to be perfect. Now, same thing as before. Once this is completely dried, we can start adding the stamen on this one. Again, you can see there's a little bit of a harsh edge line there. I had a little too much water, but it'll be mostly covered up, so no biggie. I move back down to my small detail brush, I have my dark value, pull out color, and tap it down. Let's do that again. Pull out color and tap it down. And make sure when you add these, you're varying the height of each of them. You don't want them to all look perfectly uniform. So, kind of, like what we did with the stamen of the anemone earlier on in the class, you're really bringing these flowers to life by adding these stamen details. 25. Day 10: Blossom Buds: These are our two primary cherry blossoms. I am going to add some of the closed up ones, they're almost half bloomed on either side, and then we'll add the buds. We're going to need to keep perspective in mind as we paint the ones that are a little bit closed up on either side. Let me show you an example actually of how these are going to look. This example is a little bit more of a detailed painting that I did a while ago, so we want to keep ars nice and loose, but this is a general idea of what we're going to create. We have these petals in front and then you have some in the back, and the stamen is coming out from the center. To do that, we're going to be painting the back row of these petals first. I'm going to start with a petal that is not so much shaped like these ones we've already done, but it's a little bit more of a flattened edge. I'll paint my little flat edge like that, and then paint the rest of the petal coming up. Remember, this is in the back, so you're not seeing the full petal. Then similar to what we've done in the first two flowers, I'm going back in with a bit of a darker value to show that this part of the petal is deep down in the center. It's not fully opened up, so you'll have a shadow there. Again, we're not going for super realistic flowers here. That example I just showed you is a little bit more realistic and detailed. We want to keep this one loose, but I do want to still imply that there's a shadow there. That'll be the base petal, and then we'll do the side petals, which will be much thinner. I'm using the tip of my brush for these and they're just curving up a little bit, leaving a little bit of white space in between so it doesn't turn into a blob. And let's do the same thing on the left side. Starting with the tip of my brush and applying a little bit of pressure down, creating a very dainty petal. You can see a little bit of a hard edge there forming, so I'm going to clean off my brush and smooth it out. Then let's go ahead and add the shadow. I'm just tapping in a bit of a darker value at the very base. Again, we want to be able to show that this is sunken in, and it's the very center of the flower that you can't even necessarily see, but by adding some darker tones, you're showing that it's the base of the flower. Now let's do the front petals. The front petal is going to butt right up to that back petal. But because those back petals are still wet, I want to make sure I leave a tiny bit of white space so it doesn't bleed into each other and it's going to be a very similar shape with a flat top. And you're creating a petal that is coming up just like that. Let's add some darker value again because this is where the petal is folding underneath. So I know it looks a little bit weird at this stage, but it's nice to be able to get some practice painting in different perspectives so that you can show different elements in the piece. You don't just want to always have straight on flowers in your compositions. You want to be able to add some interest and perspective. So I'm going to add another petal here on the left side, making sure to leave a little bit of white space so that these petals have definition. And now you can start to see. Again, it is hard to visualize when you're working just one petal at a time. I totally understand that. But now you can start to see this little white gap is where the center of the flower is going to be that we can't necessarily see, and because we can't see it, it's going to be a little bit darker because there's not as much light hitting that spot. Now you can see that this petal is in front and then these ones are behind and to the side. They're all dipping into the center of this flower. Let's give it some time to dry before adding the details. Once it's dry, let's go back to our detail brush and our dark mixture, and they're all starting right here in the center because this is the front flower that's covering the very center. We're only seeing the stamen come up from the center. Again, we're not playing too much pressure on the brush to get these nice dainty lines. I'm making sure to vary the height. I'm giving some of them a little bit of curve. You can really add as many or as few of these details as you want. I like to add quite a bit. Again, pulling it out and tapping down to create those organic little stamen details. Now you can see a little bit better the dimension of this flower. Once again, we're doing as style, so nothing needs to be too perfect, but it does add a bit of a different look. We're going to do one similar to this on the top right corner. I'm going to have it aimed a little bit more to the right. I'm going to start by taking my pencil and very loosely adding a curve, and that's just for my own benefit to remind myself that I want that flower to be angled to the right. This time, I'm going to show you a little bit of a different way. For this flower, we painted the back petals first and then we painted the one in front. Sometimes people find it easier to paint the front petals and then go to the back. That's what we're going to do. I went ahead and added that little pencil mark and that's where I'm going to paint my first little petal. It's the base petal that has a little bit of a curve to it up at the top and I'm going to actually make it a little bit wider, and that'll be the front petal. I want you to try painting this in both ways and see what makes more sense for you. Perspectives can be really tricky. I still struggle with it sometimes. If you like painting the front petals first, and it makes more sense to your brain as you paint, you can go ahead and do that, or if you like the other style, then you can do that, but it's good to be able to practice different methods. And now let's add the side petals. This side one is going to start about halfway up from our first petal. I'm adding a bit of a curve to it, not applying too much pressure, and we'll do the same thing on the other side. But I'm going to make this one slightly bigger, starting with the tip of my brush and applying that pressure down. You're creating this cup almost for the bud where the petals are curving upwards, and that's where it's going to be connecting to the stem. I personally like to paint it this way better just because I like to visualize it from front to back, but a lot of people like to do it the other way around. Just find what works best for you. I'm going ahead and adding in those shadows at the very base of the petals, similar to what we did on the first way. Now I'll start painting the back petal. I'm leaving a little bit of white space because this first petal is still a little bit wet. And we can always add in shadows once everything dries. But blocking in this color first, creating this little petal in the back. Remember to leave that white space because you don't want it to turn into a puddle of pink. You want to have a little bit of definition. I want to show that this part of the petal is going towards the center of the flower that we can't see. I'm adding that depth and shadow by tapping in the darker value. And now let's try adding one more little petal hanging off the side. This one's going to be drooping downwards. I just don't want it to look too similar to the one we just did. I'll add a little bit of this petal off the side. Let's give it some time to dry and then we'll add the stamen, and then we'll start on the buds. It's nice and dry. Using the tip of my brush again and pushing down at the very end to get those little buds, creating very dainty little details here. Okay, so now all the main cherry blossoms are in place, and let's go ahead and add a few little buds too, because those are really fun to paint. I'm going to pencil in some little ovals down here, and this is where I want the buds to be. I just want to have two little buds coming off on the right. They're very simple, nothing too complex. I'm going to start with that first layer, painting a little egg shape, very similar to what we did in the anemone project earlier on in this class. Painting those in and then adding the dark value at the bottom. You can see it start to bleed. You know what's coming next. We'll rinse off our brush and smooth it out a bit. I still want these main flowers to be the primary focal point. I want to keep the buds very simple. They're just complementing the piece overall. Now when you turn your page right side up, you can visualize where those little buds are going to be coming off to the side. 26. Day 10 Branches & Leaves: So now let's go ahead and paint in the branch. Again, it might be a little hard to visualize at this stage because we have our floating elements that are just hanging out in space. But that's why I'm going to use my pencil for this part to start to draw in where I want this branch to go and build up that direction. Because again, when you do this with pencil, you can really visualize, is this what I was thinking for how I wanted my branch to be positioned or did I want it to be a little bit different? But if you just start painting with your brown pigment right away, then if you end up not necessarily loving how it looks, you're kind of stuck. But with pencil, you can always go back in and erase it. This petal is going to be in front of the branch. I want to have a little bit of depth. I don't want the branch to be in front of everything else. Just connecting everything, but having some of the flowers fall in front of the branch. And you can really connect these however you want. You don't need to follow my exact shape, and finishing off by adding a dainty little branch for these buds. Okay, now we can start painting. I'm going to start by putting down a very light wash value of my raw umber. And we're not going to do any details at this point. I'm just making sure that everything is connected, and I have that base layer down. I have a very light value. It's very watery at this point, not too saturated. And I'm using my brush and laying down this initial layer. And as you do this, make sure you have some movement. Just like how we painted our leaves in the previous lessons, we don't want any sticks that are going straight out. You want to have at least a little bit of curve and movement to it. And I really like how the branch is hiding behind this flower on the right. So it gives the ill that this flower is in front. So it's a little bit closer to you. And there is our base layer. Now what I like to do, I'm going to bring you in a bit closer. What I like to do to add some fun texture when I paint wood or branches like this is I'm going to rewet this little section and make sure it has a thin even layer. I don't want any pooling or anything like that. But I'm going to go into my raw umber straight into it, so it's very dark, and I'm going to start tapping in some color along the edge. I'm not going to line it perfectly, but you can see that dark color kind of bleeding out into that base layer, and it almost looks like little notches in the wood, which is a really fun little technique. And this is wet on wet. Adding a bit of that and it gives a really fun texture. You can always clean it up a little bit if you want to smooth out any parts of it using a clean dry brush. I just go back and forth tapping in some more color, making the branch a little bit wavy and imperfect and letting the water color do the texture work for you, which is really fun. You're not controlling it too much. Just make sure you have a very even layer for that base layer that way when you go tap in that darker color, it has gentle bleeds. My dark brown's not flooding the base layer at all. It's creating some good texture and organic blooms. I'm going to continue doing this all the way across my branch. And remember, if you start to have too much bleeding while you're doing this, or it turns into a puddle, you can always rinse off your brush, tap off any excess water on your paper towel and soak some of that up and give it a try again. So it's really forgiving. It's really fun, and you don't really have to think too much while you do it. You're just taping in some color, but look at that really fun natural wood texture it gives you. I'm going to do these two final ones at the same time. And look how fun that looks. Now we're going to finish off the piece by adding some leaves. If you want to leave it like this, you can absolutely do that. You do not have to add leaves if you don't want to. But you know me, I love adding leaves to my compositions. I'm just going to add a few of them starting with a medium value. I'm attaching it right there at the bottom, and I'm going to actually add a little more brown to my green mixture so that it ties in nicely with the branch. I'm not making these too detailed, just tapping in some color and I'll add a few more. I don't want to go overboard. I do really like how the flowers are looking and I don't want to distract from that at all. I just want to compliment it with this green. I always like to have some dainty little leaves coming off of buds like this. I'll have one curving upwards. Just keep that movement in mind because we already have good movement with the branch, and you want to maintain that with your greenery. Feel free to experiment as you do this, you don't need to add your leaves exactly how I'm adding mine. Just have fun with it and compliment what we've already painted. Now, taking a step back, I think the only area I'd like to add is maybe having one in this top left area. I see quite a bit of a gap there. Not trying to fill up every space, but I'll add a bit of a bigger leaf coming up here. Always working from light to dark. I never want my leaves to be too overpowering. Great work finishing up at day ten. By now, you're hopefully starting to feel a lot more confident with your painting skills. We've added quite a few new flowers and arrangements to your tool belt. And hopefully you're also starting to see just how many varieties of compositions you can paint with a little bit of creativity. We'll move on to day 11 up next. 27. Day 11 Lavender Petals: Day 11, we're painting some lavender. There are 1,000,001 ways to paint and arrange lavender stems, but for today's project, we're creating a curved bouquet, and we're going to focus on creating movement and depth in the composition through the use of overlapping stems and leaves and painting with a variety of tonal values. The colors I'm using for the lavender are quinacrodone Lake, ultramarine deep, panes gray, and carbon black, and for the stems, a mixture of deep sap green and raw umber. So for our lavender bouquet, as I mentioned, we want to have some good movement, and I want this to be a little bit more of a curved bouquet. So I'll use my pencil, and I'm going to sketch in some lines for the stems. So I'll start with the tallest one. And I'm going to add a nice curve just like that. And I want to have six stems in total. I'll make some of them a little bit shorter. I'm just going to pencil in where I want these to be, and all of them will have the same curvy shape to it. I'll do one coming through the middle. Again, feel free to add as many stems as you want and add them wherever you want. You don't have to do the exact same amount and the same direction that I'm doing. Just make sure if you wants to be curved as well that you are leaving space for that. And now we can start with the first layer. So I'll bring you in a bit closer and to create our actual lavender petals. We're going to let the brush do all of the hard work for us. So I'll start super light. This is a very watery mixture. And all you're going to do, anytime you create these lavender petals, you want the tip of your brush to point toward the stem, and we're just going to move it around like that. But no matter what you do, that tip of the brush is pointing toward the stem. So I have a light value, and I'm just tapping it down. Simple and easy like that. I'm going to leave some space because we'll be putting more petals on top with some darker layers. But for now, I'll leave a little bit of space for those. You can see I'm moving my brush around at different angles, but no matter where I move it or what I'm doing, the tip of the brush still faces the step. So I'm just going to do that for now because we're going to add more layers on top, like I said. But let's go ahead and add this first layer to all the stems. Just gently tap it down, and we'll build these out layer by layer. So I'm not doing a perfectly even amount on these lavender stems. It's not like I put two petals on one side, so I have to put two on the other side. I'm just sporadically adding some to either side and leaving some gaps so that we can fill it in with darker layers on top. We're just starting out like this. It's better when you're doing lavender stems to leave too much room because you can always add more as you go. But if you fill it and there's too many petals, it just starts to look too busy and you can't really take away petals. So always better to leave more space than you think you need and continue working your way around, adding this first layer to all the stems and you're letting the brush do the work for you. You're not actually painting a perfect petal shape. You're just tapping it down and letting it create those organic shapes. It does look a little bit goofy at this stage because we're working with such a light value of lavenders, and we don't have the stems in yet. So you can't really picture what it's going to look like at this point. But just trust the process, continue adding petals, and then we will add more layers and finish with the stems. We're on to the last couple of ones here. Again, I prefer the more smoky lavender color by adding in some panes gray and carbon black. But if you do want yours to be more vibrant, then just be sure to leave those colors out so they don't get desaturated. If you want it to have more of a blue hue, you can add more blue. That's the fun part of painting lavender and working with so many different colors is you can really make that shade however you want. If you want more of a pink tone, you can add more of that quinacridone lake. It's really up to you. Like I said, it looks a little weird at this stage, but that's why I start with penciling in the stems because if I didn't have that in place, I wouldn't know where the heck anything is going. It would just look like a bunch of random petals. But because I have those stems penciled in, I can at least guide my brush and visualize the end piece. We'll let this dry and then we'll add our second layer with a slightly darker value. Once it's dry, go ahead and load up a slightly darker value. This would be considered a medium value. You don't want to go directly from a super light value like this to a super dark value. You want to have a gradual change. And I'll just start adding in my second layer. Some of them will be in between the ones that we've already placed, some of them will be overlapping. Some of them will be brand new petals filling in that white space. But I'm continuing to tap this in. And I noticed my color is slightly too dark, so I'm going to dilute it a little bit more to make it more of a midtone. Some of them again are overlapping, some of them are new, and I don't want to go overboard still at this point. It is always better to add not enough petals than too many because you can always add more. I'm being pretty picky right now about where I'm adding these, but I'm using the same exact technique. The tip of my brush is always pointing towards the stem, and I'm gently tapping it down. Now, some of these petals will be a little bit shorter. Some of them will be a little bit longer, and that just depends on how much pressure you apply down on your brush. Just be sure to give these lavender petals some good variety. We're going to do three layers in total. So start picturing in your head where you want to leave spaces for that last layer, and that will be the darkest layer of the three. We're also going to have some stems and leaves coming through. That's why I always say it's better to not have enough because we can always go add more. But if we start with too much, it's just going to look too busy and you can't take any of that away. So I'm just kind of working my way through these, some of them overlapping. That first layer. When you overlap like that, like this one, for example, it builds depth because you can see that lighter value in the background, and those petals are a little bit further back. And then these new ones are closer to you, and they're a little bit darker and more defined. Remember to always let the brush do the work for you. You don't ever want to be worrying about painting out a perfect petal shape. We're just tapping the brush on the paper. And now we can go ahead and add our third and final layer. As you go at this last layer, If it's looking too sparse, you can always go back and add some more mid tone values or lighter values. Just make sure that all of your layers are dry before you add more because you want to be able to differentiate all of your different layers. If I go ahead and add my darker layers well, the first layers are still wet, it's going to bleed and turn into a blobby mess. You want all your petals to be nicely defined. You can see how much darker this last layer is, creating some really nice bold contrast. So I did go quite a bit darker as you can see, and I added a bit more of my inacrodone lake into my mixture because it was looking a little bit too desaturated, and I do still want it to look like lavender after all. So you can always alter your vibrancy and your mixture by just changing the ratio of each of those colors. So also remember that watercolor always dries lighter than when you first put it down. So if you find yourself thinking that it's too dark, just give it a minute and see how it looks when it dries, and it might end up drying to the perfect shade that you were hoping for. And I find this process pretty meditative because you can just kind of get lost in tapping your brush down, creating all these little petals, creating some variety, and I'm not really thinking about where I'm placing each petal. I'm just plopping it down and letting my brush do the work for me. I want to have a good balance between all of the layers. I don't want to go too crazy with this third and final layer to where it all looks too dark. I'm very much so giving a pretty even allotment of all the different layers. You can see we have some great movement here because we penciled in those stems. Let's go ahead and let this dry and then we'll add the stems. 28. Day 11: Lavender Stems & Leaves: I have a mid value of my deep sap green and I'll use the tip of my brush. For now, all I'm doing is lining my pencil sketch just for the stems. I'm not drawing a solid line for each of them. I want to show that there are lavender petals in front of the stem in certain areas. Behind the stem in certain areas. You can see I'm painting in the stem and leaving little gaps here and there, because I want to show that these petals are in front. I don't just want a solid line because that just wouldn't look very realistic. I'm going to go a bit lighter here for the second stem and continue on. I'm not fully painting in a stem. Again, I'm showing that it's broken up by those petals. And I'm making it nice and dainty. I'm not applying a whole lot of pressure down, and I'm only using the tip of my brush. And up at the top here, I have a lot of petals, and you're barely going to even see the stem. It's mostly just petals up there at the top, so I'll continue adding in this stem, mostly at the bottom. And so we're going to paint these stems, and then we'll go in and add some leaves for the final step. But for now, I want to add all these stems and make sure I have the shape exactly how I want it. And let's add our final one for this little baby stem. Using the very tip of my brush, keeping it nice and dainty. And now we can start adding our leaves for the final touch. So I have a similar medium value, same round brush that I've been using, and I don't want to go overboard because I really want these lavender stems to shine, not the leaves. So I'm just going to lightly press down and lift back up for all of these leaves. And I even want to go lighter than that, so I'll water down my mixture a bit more, and I'll work my way through this little tiny bouquet, finding some areas that can use a little more something something, not going overboard, but just barely adding in these little wispy lines. And I'm still following the same general direction that we want to have for this piece. But I'm not doing anything too crazy. Just some little accents. So let's have one coming down this way to add some more variety, and just have fun adding some different little strokes here. Again, you don't want it to look too messy because we do have already so many different layers and a lot of different pieces with all the three different layers of lavender petals. Just go easy, keep a light hand and create some variation in your greenery. Now it's looking a little bit flat. Just like we've done in previous lessons, I want to go in with a darker value and select only a few pieces here and there to darken. I don't want to turn the entire piece into dark greenery. Just picking and choosing some stems to darken, some leaves to darken, and that way we can add depth to the piece. Using the tip of my brush and going over some of these stems that I've already painted, I'm not adding anything new. I'm just darkening some of these existing stems. You can already see a little bit of depth getting established here because we have lighter layers and we have darker layers. Just helps to bring your painting to life a little bit more, add some depth, add some contrast, but still keeping in that loose style. It helps the piece overall look a little bit more interesting when you have different color values for your eyes to look at. Let's do one stem here. I'll do this little baby stem on the right, and there we go. It's a simple step, but it really helps bring your piece to life. Great job with this project, as I said, Lavender is one of those flowers that you can paint and arrange in so many different ways. This is another project to keep in your back pocket to paint whenever you're facing a creative block. When you're ready, I'll see you in the next lesson for Day 12. 29. Day 12: Horizontal Florals: Made it today 12. In today's project, we're painting a horizontal floral piece. Now, horizontal compositions are definitely less common than vertical ones, but the same principles will apply. Today we're practicing a pretty simple one with just a few types of flowers and leaves, so let's get started. The colors I'm using in this project include a mixture of quinacridone red and permanent red light, cadmium yellow, deep, pains gray, some pression blue with titanium white, and as always, my deep sap green. All right, so I have my six by eight paper, but this time it is formatted horizontally. And as we place our elements, again, we're using all the same techniques we've done, but we're going to be placing it from left to right. I don't want anything to be perfectly horizontal or perfectly vertical or diagonal. I want to place these elements in a variety of areas and add my greenery to really convey that movement. I'm going to start with my rose. So we have painted several roses throughout the class, so I won't go step by step super in depth, but I'm going to start with this lower left corner. Starting with those same delicate sea curves, using the tip of my brush and keeping white space in mind as I add these dainty little center strokes. Now, while it's still wet, rinse off your brush and use your clean bristles to start smoothing that out. Always working from dark to light when you paint your roses, darkest values in the center, and then you get lighter for your outer petals. While it's still wet, I'll take some very pigmented dark value and deepen that center again. So I'm darkening the center strokes, and then you can watch the color gently bleed out into that first layer. Moving on to the next flower, as I said, nothing directly to the side or directly above or perfectly diagonal. I'm going to go slightly to the right and slightly up. And for this one, we're going to paint one of our standard five or six petal flowers where I start with the pigmented dots in the center. I create that little ring. Rinse off my brush, so you have perfectly clean bristles to work with. Pull out some color and create these very soft loose petals. Rinsing off my brush once again. Using the tip of your brush to pull some of that initial color out and then apply more pressure down to create your petals. Rinse off my brush, do the same thing on the other side, and I'm just continuing to work my way around this flower. I just absolutely love this bright cadmium yellow deep. It's one of my favorite colors you can probably tell because I've used it in so many different projects in this class, continuing to pull out some color and lifting back up. Again, not all these petals look perfectly similar. Some of them are a little bit thinner, some are a little bit thicker, but we're going for the loose style. So make sure you're adding some variety to your petals. Now, I'm going to go back in and tap in some of the red color that I used for the rose. I don't want it to bleed and overtake the entire thing because I do like that yellow, but I do want a little bit of gentle bleeding. So see how that pink is just barely bleeding out into the yellow. That's the exact effect that I'm looking for. Really focusing on my water control here and just barely tapping it down. You can see it expanding a little bit out into the petals. Once it dries, I'm going to go back and darken the center even more, but I don't want too much bleeding, so I'll leave it as it is for now and go to the next flower. The next one is going to be that beautiful blue color that we've been using, Prussian blue with some titanium white. And we're going to do another one of these simple loose flowers. Again, moving slightly to the right and slightly below. I'm going to do more of a horizontal oval shape for the center dots to get a slightly different perspective. For these ones, the top petals pull out just like we've done for the other styles of flowers, but the bottom one will be more of that horizontal petal to convey a different side perspective. So I'm just barely pulling out these wispy petals, making very expressive strokes. It's overlapping a little bit with that yellow flower, which is perfectly fine. I'm not overthinking it. I have my wrist loose and working quickly. Then again, this bottom petal will be more of a horizontal almond shape. Because again, I don't want every single flower to be straight on like the yellow one. You want some diversity, you want them to look slightly different and look like they're coming in at different angles. While that's still wet, I'll grab some of my dark prussian blue. Keeping water control in mind as always. I don't want to make this flower too dark, so I'm gently adding it to the very center. Okay, so we're getting some good variety. I'm going to add another one of these pink roses up in the top right and then we'll kind of fill in the gaps. So let's grab some more of that pink and let's do another rose. This time I'm going to do it right about here. You can see nothing is in line. Nothing is perfectly aligned, and that's exactly what we want when we paint these compositions. So same as we've done before, just work on adding your s curves and then blending it out. To do Now I'm going to add some of those skirting petals here. We've done some of these skirting petals in previous lessons. So I have my main circle like we did for the left rows. But then I add these other little petals to make it look more full and open. I lost a little vibrancy here, so I'm going to pull some of that back and add a second layer. Being super quick with my strokes, and I'm not creating perfect petal shapes. I'm not thinking about each and every stroke. I'm just loosely adding these petals and bringing this rows to life. So everything is still really nice and wet because I'm using 100% cotton paper. And that way when I add in these additional layers, the color still bleeds and creates such a beautiful effect. Let's go back in and darken the center a little bit more. Whatever color you're using, it doesn't matter if you're using the same color palette I am. You always want that darkest value to be in the center where the petals are very tight and closed up. There's a lot of shadows and not a whole lot of light reaching there. So things are looking good so far. We have an equal amount of white space on the edges. I'm going to just start to fill in a couple of little flowers here to finish it off. I want to do for sure another yellow one. So let's start with that for now. I'm going to do a similar flower over here, but a little bit smaller. I want some white space there too. I'll start my center petals here. You can tell I'm keeping it quite a bit smaller. I'll bring you in closer. Tapping in that pigment, rinsing off my brush, making sure I have clean water and clean bristles, and then create these little dainty petals. I actually have some of that red still stuck in my brush from the rose. I'm going to rinse that off even more. Tap in some more yellow and really make sure my brush is nice and clean. And then I'll continue adding these little petals. The size of your flower is another great thing to keep in mind as you paint compositions. I never want all of my flowers to be the exact same size. I want to have some that are smaller, some that are bigger. So that are a little bit more full and open like this rose compared to the one on the left. You just really want to keep that variety in mind to make sure your compositions are interesting and dynamic. And let's do the same thing we did with this first one where you take a tiny, tiny bit of that red pink mixture, and using the very tip of your brush, you're darkening that center. So you get really beautiful blooms of color. So for now, I'm going to add one more yellow flower right here, and then I think I'll do a little blue guy up here. And then we'll start adding our greenery. Let's do one more yellow one first. Since we're already working with that color, I have it loaded in my brush. I'm going to do another very small one right here, starting with the center dots, rinsing off my brush and creating those petals. Go back in with your red pink mixture and carefully tap that into the center. Keeping water control in mind. Let's move on to the blue flower, and then we can add some final details on the flowers before adding our leaves. For this one, I'm going to do another interesting side perspective, but facing the top left corner. That's one area where I feel like it needs a little attention. It's a little bit bare. For these ones, I'm making my dots in the center a little bit more of an oval shape. I have plenty of pigment and water in my mixture and we'll do the same thing. Remember those top petals are coming straight out, and then the bottom one is more of a horizontal petal. With my blue mixture, I always tend to lose pigment quite a bit faster, I think because we have titanium white in there. Often when I'm painting with mixtures like this, I have to rewet and bring in more pigment into the center so I don't lose at all. This is looking great for now. I am going to add a little bit more color to this blue flower, like I said, The blue tends to fade quite a bit. I'm just going back in with one additional layer to bring back that vibrancy. And then I'll grab that darker prussian blue to tap into the very center and watch it bleed out into the petals. That's my favorite part. This is looking pretty good. These ones are maybe a little bit to lined up, but we can fix that and add more movements when we add our leaves. Once your flowers have had some time to dry, we can go in and add some more details. You don't have to do this part if you don't want to, but as you probably have seen by now, I like to really deepen those centers. For the yellow ones, I'm going in with one more layer of that bright pink red. And I'm gently tapping some dots in the very center. Being careful not to overdo it, I just am bringing back that vibrancy and making the contrast more bold. Definitely don't want to go overboard, so I'm just using the tip of my brush and I'll do the same thing for these other yellow flowers. Let's do the same thing with the blue flowers, but this time I'm going back in with some of the panes gray. This is a really deep dark gray blue mixture and it's going to bring a lot of dramatic bold vibrancy. A Those details really just helps all of these flowers pop a little bit more. And I'm going to do a similar thing to the roses. The centers are already pretty bold, but I'm going to add one final layer. These are very dark strokes, and I'm only adding them to the very center to really deep in the depth. Let's do the same thing on this right flower. Do not want to go overboard. I don't want this rose to look too messy. I'm only bringing back some of that vibrancy in the center. So now you can really see those colors pop, and it's such a simple step, but it brings the whole piece to life. 30. Day 12: Leaves & Flower Buds: Now let's start adding the leaves. So I'm going to move to a slightly bigger brush. This is a size eight round brush. And remember with the first layer of leaves. When we add these, you're always starting super light because we want to be able to add several layers on top. So take a really watered down mixture. I might even water mine down even more and start adding in this base layer of leaves. Again, we want to save space to be able to add more layers on top. So make sure you're not adding to too much. But blocking in those colors, adding in this first layer and setting that stage for how you want your composition to look. And I like to go corner to corner, so I have this one pointing up to the top right. Now I need to make sure I have some coming down to the bottom left. I'm curving this way. Making sure each leaf that I add is contributing to the overall movement of the piece. You can really start to see this composition come together, which this is just my favorite part where you're questioning yourself in the beginning stages because things look a little weird and disjointed. But again, once you start adding piece by piece, you can see everything coming together. And I absolutely love that part. Make sure you also add some greenery in between all of these flowers. Remember these don't need to be perfect leaves. You're indicating that there is some foliage underneath these, and that's what's connecting them all, but you don't need to paint perfect leaf shapes. So that's good for now. Let's let this dry for a little bit, and then we can pencil in where we want the fillers to go before adding those and the final layer of details. So our leaves are nice and dry now, the first layer at least. And now breaking out the good old pencil, again, I'm going to start sketching in where I want these fillers to go. Our piece is already full with our primary flowers and some leaves. So I really don't want to go overboard. I'm liking the simplicity of it, but I'm still wanting to add just a little fillers. I'm penciling in those coming up at the top. Let's have some on the bottom right. And then I want to balance that out with one or two little stems coming out on the left. I think that's going to be good. Again, we can always change our mind. It's just a pencil. It can be erased, but we're going to start with that. Now I want to have a good mix of colors. Like I said, we do have three yellow elements. We only have two of the blue and pink. But because the pink ones are pretty big, I think they balance out fairly well. So I definitely want to start by adding some of the blue fillers and maybe some other pops of yellow since those ones are pretty small. Starting with the blue, I'm going to do a standard bud. The same kind that we've been doing throughout the class, where I start with a pigmented base, and I paint a little u shape just like this. I'm actually going to make it a little bit more pigmented, rinse off my brush and start the process of blending that color upwards. You get a very smooth gradient from dark value at the bottom of the bud to light value at the very top. So Let's do another one of these this time with the Cadmium yellow deep. I love how these two look together, starting with the very pigmented value, painting in that U shape, and doing the same exact thing using a clean brush and blending it upwards. I don't want these buds to be too big, so keep that in mind. I'm keeping my strokes nice and small. I'm actually going to lift some of that color up. It was a little too pigmented, too saturated. You can always use that lifting technique that we've been practicing if your colors are too strong. While those are drying, let's do some more. And I actually like just the blue and yellow. I think they look really pretty together. We'll stick with that and then we'll just leave the pink for those primary roses. I've said this so many times throughout the class, so you're probably getting sick of me saying this. But please please start practicing, making your own choices, especially when it comes to fillers like this. It's such low stakes. If you're at this point in your piece where you like your composition, you can't really go wrong with adding some little dainty fillers like this. So if there is somewhere else you want to try adding them or you want to try with different colors, please do it. It's not going to ruin your painting. And like I mentioned, I don't even have a perfect plan in my head for where I want all of these to go. So there could absolutely be better places for these buds to go. Just feel free to experiment and make your own creative choices. Because the more you start to do that, the more confident you'll get. Okay, so again, I'm so glad I used pencil because I can tell I have these two fillers coming out on the right and these ones that I penciled in are pretty much the same thing, and I never want to have That symmetry in my elements. Good thing is pencil. I can just erase it with my needed eraser and figure out a different place to add these. So we have these two that are curving towards the right. I'm going to add one little guy here. And let's also add one or two coming down off the left side. Let's start on the left side with my cadmium yellow deep, making an upside down U shape. Do you see how that is so reflective? That's because that's a puddle. Again, I used too much water, too much pigment, so I'm going to soak some of that up using the lifting technique. These are really great projects to master your water control, as I've mentioned. Because the more you get the hang of working with just the right amount of water, especially when you're layering, the more natural it'll all become, just like that. I saw a puddle. I knew it was going to be flooded with water. I soaked some of that up before I make my next move. O in the other case, if you have too little water, you can always go back and tap in some more, like we've done when we paint these flowers. Whenever those center dots start to dry, we can always rewet it to be able to pull out that color again. So you're really getting a lot of great practice with techniques like water control. And that's why I love painting composition so much is because you're not just practicing painting flowers and painting flower arrangements. You're practicing so many fundamental watercolor techniques that can be applied to really anything you paint. Now, I'm going to do a blue filler here because it's right next to a yellow flower. I don't really want to ever have a yellow filler next to a yellow flower. I'm going with blue here. If you want, you can also use your third color with the red. I just want to keep my fillers nice and simple, so I'm sticking to the blue and yellow, and that's looking great. Now let's take our slightly darker value of green and we can start connecting the buds. As always, I start by just connecting them. I'm not adding any additional leaves yet. I just want to make sure that I like the direction of everything and that everything feels connected. I really like that because you can see that this yellow petal is overlapping the stem, which provides a good sense of depth. Oh. And now I'm also going to start adding the little base to these buds. Like we've done in previous projects. We add a little bit more to the very bottom so that it looks like it's really connected to that stem. I never want to leave it like this, where it's just a straight line connecting to the egg shaped bud. It just looks a little bit disjointed. So I'm going to add a base to each of these little beds. And I really like how dark these are because it makes the fillers really since the rest of the leaves at this point are pretty light. All right, so everything is connected, and now we can go ahead and add our final layers of greenery. So again, using a darker value pretty similar to what I just did for the little fillers, and this is where intuitive painting really comes into play. I don't have anything in mind at this point for where I'm going to place everything. I'm just going to start working my way throughout the piece, filling in what needs to be filled in, trying to identify any gaps that need a little bit more something something. And helping this piece look more full and lush and just starting to add all these little embellishments. Again, sometimes when I add elements, they're overlapping on top of leaves that are already there. Sometimes I'm adding completely new ones, and sometimes I'm just adding on to these little fillers that we've already painted. I'm using quick strokes. I'm not applying too much pressure. I'm keeping my wrist nice and loose to achieve these very expressive, wispy leaves. And also be sure that you're changing the type of foliage that you're adding. Some of these are big fat leaves. Some of them are little tiny, dainty stems. Some of them have a few leaves coming off of the stem. Just really make sure you're adding a variety to keep things interesting. Don't forget to take a step back every now and then when you're at this point, look at your painting with fresh eyes and make sure you're not overdoing it. Great job with this painting. As I said, it does take some getting used to if you've only painted vertical orientation compositions, but all the same elements still apply. Don't forget to also jot down your thoughts or notes after each painting. I mentioned it at the start of the class, and it's something I do almost every time I paint. Even if it's just something as simple as, wow, I love the way I painted this petal shape, or I don't really like the shade of green I used here. It's too dark. Even a short analysis like that can really help you develop your style even faster. 31. Day 13: Spring Florals & Stems: Welcome today 13. We're already nearing the end of the challenge. And today's project is another fun floral piece. We're going to use a lot of the same techniques we've been practicing throughout this class to create a dainty, vibrant bouquet of spring flowers. The color palette I'm using is Quinacridone Lake and ultramarine deep for the lavender, carbon black for the centers, cadmium yellow deep and a mix of deep sap green and raw umber for the stems. All right, we want to start by placing the flowers down first and then we'll fill in the leaves and the stems. We're going to have seven or eight flowers total, but most of them will be front and center, and then we'll have a few that are a little bit more filler style. So I'll start by using that same vibrant lavender shade that we've been using We're going to start with the same basic flower technique that we've been using quite a bit throughout this class, so you're getting a lot of great practice with it, starting by tapping down those dots in the center, and I'm going to keep this fairly small. I want my petals to be nice and controlled and even and making these petals all the way around this flower. I want plenty of room to add quite a few flowers in this piece without it looking too busy. So I just want to keep that in mind as I create these petals, keeping it small and contained. We're getting so much great practice with this technique because it's the same technique we've been using basically in all of our projects throughout this class, but we're doing a bunch of different variations of it. But in general, it's starting with those pigmented center dots and then pulling out the petals. All right. So starting with a very simple flower just like that, and now right next to it, I'm going to do another one. This one is also going to be in that same lavender shade. It's basically going to be the same thing we just did, but to the right of it and slightly higher. Again, we never want our flowers to be directly next to each other. This one's going to be a little bit more of that side view perspective. So for this technique, as we've done throughout class, we're starting with these dots a little bit more squished or flattened, more of a oval shape. When we do this, we start by creating these similar petals on the top and the side. But then that bottom petal is a little bit more of a horizontal almond shape. You can see just that slight difference in petal really changes that perspective of the flower. Now the way that we're going to add variation to this piece because most of the main flowers will be various shades of the same purple, but I've mixed up this color by mixing quinacridone lake and ultramarine deep. You can get a more blue shade of purple by adding a little bit higher ratio of the blue, or you can get a more pink shade of lavender by adding more of the quinacridone lake. You can add variation to your piece just by changing that ratio of your mixture. That can just help you bring a little bit more interest to your piece when you're using a lot of the same colors. Let's go ahead and add another one in between these two. Again, going to be a very similar technique to what we've been doing. Tapping in the center dots, not making it too big, keeping size in mind, and then pulling out these very controlled petals. This one is going to be just another one of those straight on flowers. You can see I added more of the Quinacridone lake for this mixture, so it's a little bit more of a pink purple hue than blue. This one's a little bit more blue because I used more of the ultramarine deep. That's why I really like to mix two or a few different colors to get one color because then you can make it more interesting by altering the ratio. Now let's add one that is a little bit more blue and this time it's going to be slightly lower. Just like we've done in other lessons, I never want to have flowers directly below or directly to the side. I want to have them placed and scattered randomly so that when we add the stems and the leaves, it can look like an organic little bouquet that you just picked up, and not something that's too uniform or too perfect. Let's do another with the side perspective. Again, for the side perspective, I make oval shapes for the center instead of circular shapes. Tap in those pigmented dots and start pulling out the petals. I know this is a lot of repetition, but this repetition is what's going to build up your confidence, so that by the end of this class, you're going to feel very confident with your brush strokes and your supplies. I'm just going in and deepening the center of some of these since it lost a little bit of vibrancy. Now, take a look at all of these flowers. They're all pulled from the same general area of my palette, but this one's a little more pink. This one's a little bit more blue. These two are more equal parts of each color to get the medium value of lavender. It's still all within the same color scheme, but you can make slight variations based on how much of each color you add. That's a nice little trick, and it's fun to be able to experiment with that in pieces that use a lot of similar colors. Let's add another flower here is going to be quite a bit smaller. Making a very small center, and I'm not applying as much pressure and I'm not pulling it out as far because I want these petals to be super dainty. I never want all my flowers to look the exact same, especially when you're doing a bouquet with a very similar color palette like this. You want to have some variation in size, in shade, and in perspective. Let's start adding some stems. Remember, we can always add more flowers as we go. But at this stage, I like to at least block in where these primary stems will go. I have a very light value of a green and I'm going to start pulling down some stems. Using the tip of my brush and connecting these. Remember to overlap some of them. Some of them will just have little offshoots on the primary stems. Just loosely start blocking in these stems. I want this bouquet to be very dainty and very delicate. I'm not applying too much pressure. I'm starting with a very light value so we can layer darker green on top. Now at least we have the basic shape of this, so now we can add some more little flowers and fillers that'll be shooting off. 32. Day 13: Filler Flowers & Leaves: Actually going to add some of the Cadmium yellow deep here because I like how that yellow compliments the purple, and I want to have some pops of color and variation. I'm going to start adding some little tiny flowers, and I do want these yellow flowers to eventually have a black center, but I don't want to add that until the yellow is fully dry because I don't want any of that black to saturate these dainty yellow petals. For now, I'm just going to start adding these little tiny yellow flowers using the same technique, and then we'll let it all dry before adding a bold carbon black center. I'm making sure all the petals look slightly different as I add these. Again, I'm going to leave it like this. Like I said, I will add some black for the center almost like a black eyed season flower, but I want to make sure that that is completely dry before doing that. Let's add another one here. This will be more of a side perspective one, keeping it nice and small. And then pulling out these little petals. This is a great project for you to make your own choices in color in terms of where you're placing these flowers, how you paint your stems, where you put your leaves. So you can definitely follow my steps as a guide, but start to make some of those choices yourself, and that's really the only way that you'll start to build your confidence with creating compositions like this. So at this point, I want you to take a quick look at my piece and take a few seconds to think if you were to add one or two more flowers, where would you put them? Look for any spots that maybe have some extra white space or need some balance and color. And let's see if we were thinking of the same spot. I was going to put one more yellow one right here on the left to finish off this piece, and then we'll add some more stems. Again, that's not the only answer if you thought maybe you want to add some up at the top. By all means, you can do that. I just think it's really important to start practicing stepping back, looking at your piece, and identifying what you can do to make it better. Okay, so now that these have had some time to dry, we can add the black centers. I really don't want the black to overtake the nice bright yellow. So I'm going to practice a lot of water control here. I'm not going to have too much water in my brush as I load up the carbon black. And I'm only going to use the tip of my brush and start gently tap in these dots in the center. I don't want to fill in the entire center with black, but I want to add a little bit of texture and make that contrast bold. Using the very tip of my brush here and making these tiny little marks. I'm not placing down perfect dots. I'm not filling in a perfect circle. I'm tapping my brush, applying different amounts of pressure to get different looking marks. And lifting back up. Now to tie it all together, I'm also going to add a very similar thing to the center of these purple flowers too. I want these all to have a very bold, vibrant center. That's just a personal preference. If you want to leave yours nice and light, by all means, you can definitely do that. I just have always liked the look of going back in to tap in extremely dark centers of flowers. I think it makes it pop and just adds a nice bit of contrast. I also think that having those deep dark centers between the purple and yellow flowers really ties it all together. And now that all the flowers are done, let's continue adding some more stems and leaves. I don't want to add too many here, but I do want to make sure that each element looks like it's a part of the piece. Just like I've said in other bouquet projects that we've done in class, not every single element has to have a perfect stem leading down to the bottom. You can fill it in as you like. You can add stems in the middle. You can have leaves coming out the side. And now I'll just start to add some leaves in the middle to start making it look a little bit more full. And I'm going to start going darker in value at this point as well. I don't want to go too dark, but just filling in these cute little leaves and deepening some of these stems to help build out the illusion of depth. I'm creating these leaves by just pushing down on my brush and lifting back up. You can create so many different leaf and foliage elements just by varying the amount of pressure that you put down on the paper. Remember to keep in mind your variety of values as you add these leaves, some of them are a bit darker, some are a little bit lighter, and that helps to really bring the bouquet to life and convey depth. You're just picking and choosing where you want those elements to be, which ones you want to have a little bit, which ones should be lighter? Not overdoing it with the leaves, but definitely making it nice and full. So this is definitely one of those projects where you have basically all the same flowers. We made slight variations, but they're pretty much all the same, but you can still make it vibrant and beautiful and interesting, just by changing little things, like the perspective and the colors, the shades, we made some more pink, some more purple, some more blue. And then we're adding volume to this piece by really filling it in with a lot of dynamic stems and leaves. And just bringing it to life by adding depth. Congratulations for completing another project. This is one that can be varied in so many different ways, like we've talked about, depending on the colors, the types of flowers, the height. So definitely give this one another try sometime soon and see how it turns out with some slight creative variations. When you're up for it, I will see you on day 14. 33. Day 14: Border Florals: 14 is here. Today we'll be painting a curved floral border or partial wreath. This will be a great way to practice movement and variation, and we'll use a lot of the same methods that we used in our floral wreath earlier on in this challenge, so it'll be a good refresher as well. These types of bordered compositions can be great for greeting card designs, book covers, notepads, and they allow for a lot of creativity. Purple flowers will be the same mixture we've been using, which is Quinacridone Lake, ultramarine deep, and a touch of carbon black. I'll also be using our pink mixture, which is permanent sarin crimson, yellow ochre, and titanium white, and our fillers will be cadmium yellow deep. As always, our leaves and greenery will be a mixture of values of deep sap green. So I have my paper in the portrait orientation, and in the other wreath projects in Day five and six, we traced that masking tape to get the perfect circle. Not tracing anything for this one, but I did just start to pencil in a very loose crescent moon shape to help keep me on track when I start painting. You don't have to do that part, but I tend to get off track sometimes when I'm painting projects like this. I just have that as a loose guideline. I want my primary element to be sitting right here in the bottom left corner since that's the center of this partial wreath. That's what I'm going to start with. Now, we've gotten a lot of great practice already with roses in this class. Again, I'm not going to go to in depth as we paint this, but it'll be the same process as we've been doing, starting with the dainty C curves with my light lavender color, using the tip of my brush, making sure you're varying these strokes and leaving a little bit of white space, and then before it dries, rinse off your brush and start feathering it out. So remember you're working from dark to light, darkest in the center, lighter on the outer petals, and making sure to always keep white space in mind. And then to create these bigger outer petals, what I'm doing is angling my brush to the side like this so that you have more surface area of the brush on the page. And that's how I like to create the very big outer petals. Now you know the drill, while it's still wet, we go back in with a darker value and bring back that vibrancy in the very center of the rose. I'm pulling straight from my palette here to get the bold pigment, and you can see that color gently bleeding out into the first layer. If there's any harsh edges, you can also start to smooth those out. And just continue adding layers until you feel happy with how your rose looks. As you paint more and more roses, since we're nearing the end of the class, you're going to start to develop your own style too. Maybe there's a certain step in my process that doesn't feel right to you. Maybe you want to go about it in a slightly different way. Maybe you don't like tapping in these additional layers. Those are all creative choices that you can start to make as you develop your confidence and your own style. Let's start with that and then we'll move on to another rose. I'm going to start with the pink rose on either side to keep it balanced. Going back into my pink mixture. Let's start up here. I want to give a little bit of space because just like we did in our floral wreath earlier in class, we do want to leave some room to be able to add leaves in between, so I don't want all of my elements butting right up next to each other. Let's go ahead and do a slightly smaller rose up here. Same process, but I'm using my pink mixture instead. Start pigmented, rinse off your brush and feather it all out. And I'm going to keep it nice and small just like this, because I don't want it to take away from this purple one, I still want that one to be the main element in this piece. So I'll keep it small and bring back some of that color by adding additional layers. Now let's go ahead and do the same thing here on the right side. So adding another little dainty and delicate rose here, starting with the darkest center sea curves. And because the main elements of my wreath, at with the color palette that I'm using, the main elements are just going to be pink and purple. So I want to make sure that there is good balance. I don't want to have any purple elements right next to each other. I don't want to have any pink elements right next to each other. You want to make sure it's nice and balanced. And I will be also adding some of the cadmium yellow accents. But those will be more so just little tiny buds. I'm not going to make any primary flowers yellow, so I just want to make sure I have a good balance between all these pink and purple primary flowers. So for the rest of these flowers, Really want this to be the main section, and then the rest, they're just going to be little dainty fillers almost. So I'm just going to switch it up and I'm going to start painting little tiny five or six petal flowers, but they're going to be very small, and I'm just going to alternate them lining the top edge and the bottom edge. So let me bring you in a bit closer. This will be more of the same process that we've been doing, but on a much smaller scale. Again, making sure to leave a little bit of space between all these elements so that we have room to add leaves and greenery to make this partial wreath or border look very full. So I'm rinsing off my brush and I'm going to start pulling out these little dainty petals. I want these flowers to be very small and delicate. I'm being quick with my strokes and making little tiny petals. I'm not extending my brush. I'm not really brushing down, so I get big fat petals. I'm keeping everything very small. Now let's go back in while it's still wet to tap in some more color in the center to make it really pop. And I'm going to continue since I already have that purple on my brush, I'm going to continue with the purple flowers, and then we'll go ahead and add the pink ones in between. I'll give plenty of space and I'm just going to make these flowers look like they were scattered or tossed on there. I don't want anything to be in a super perfect line. I'm going to give it a little bit of space and make it a little bit off of that main line so that when I add more leaves, it can look very full and lush and wild. Go ahead and continue pulling out your little petals, making them dainty and almond shaped. Go back in to tap in the dark center. I'm also going to do that to the first one since it's still wet. Let's add one more purple one here at the top. Now I'm moving down to the bottom, and we're doing a whole lot of the same thing. The bottom section is not necessarily as long as the top, so for now I'm going to start with only two. Again, I want to vary the pink next to the purple, so I am not going to put another pink one right here because I want to create that sense of balance, so I'm starting with purple. Putting down those dots, rinsing off my brush, and pulling out those petals. This is where you really start to build up your muscle memory because we're painting a lot of the same flowers. We're getting to know our brushes and our materials, and it'll all start to feel like second nature, the more you do it. Remember to keep your water control in mind as you do this part. You don't want so much water to where it turns into a really dark flower because that deep pigment floods the petals. You want a perfect amount to where it gently bleeds, but doesn't overtake. Let's do another flower here slightly off of that line that we sketched in at the very edge of this border. We're getting a lot of similar practice here to what we did in the wreath projects in day five and six, but it's not a complete circle, it's more of just this border on the corner of our page. Like I said, this can be a great design for greeting cards or notepads, different types of stationary. It's just a lot of fun to paint. And now let's go back up to the top and we'll fill in the rest of the space with a few of these pink ones. I don't want it to be too far off of that line because I do want to maintain that overall curved shape. As I mentioned before, I don't want all these flowers to be directly on that line we sketched out because it just would look a little bit too perfect. And I want to be able to add my greenery and make it look wild and lush and like a full wreath of elements. And now you can see since this flower was quite a bit higher, it's lost a little bit of the arch or the curve that I want. So I'm going to add one more down here and maybe a little bit up at the top to help bring back that curvy shape. So let's add one right here. Again, you can really use these elements to help bring back movement and to fix any shape issues as you go. You can also do that once we add the leaves as well by bringing back that shape by twisting your leaves and making sure every element you add has good movement to it. This will really help bring that arch back by evening out the curve a little bit and making one last flower here between the two purple ones. I know that projects like these can sometimes feel a little bit repetitive as we go because we're doing a lot of the same flowers, but that truly is what builds up your muscle memory is painting the same things over and over, really honing your technique, practicing those strokes, and then it will all start to feel more natural. So let's go back down to the bottom and do the same thing. I'm going to try to stay a little bit more towards the line for these ones, tapping in those dots, rinsing off my brush, and pulling out my petals. So for now, I'm going to add one more little pink one up at the very top. We can always add more as we go. I do that a lot, as you've seen to fix any shape errors or to help fill it out a little bit more. But for now, this will be my last one. So taking a step back, you can still see that we have the bordered kind of half wreath shape. But this one did get a little bit off track, which is totally fine. At this point, it looks wonky because we don't have any other leaves or surrounding greenery. But I do want to match a little bit of that fullness up at the top that we don't necessarily have at the bottom. So let's go ahead and add a couple more flowers at the bottom. And again, it looks a little weird like it went way off track. It's really not that far off track, and especially once we add the greenery and we add the fillers, we can bring back that curved shape. And I actually prefer some of the wild flowers like this rather than having it directly on the line because that's what brings that loose whimsical look to the overall piece. It's the perfect example of a trust the process piece because, yeah, it does look weird at this stage, but we'll add our leaves, we'll add our buds, and the whole thing will look more full. So I don't want every single element to be perfectly on that crescent shape. I want there to be some variation like this because that's what makes the whole piece look more lush and full. But if I have that on one side, I want to have it on the other. So that's why I'm going back into the bottom and adding a few more. 34. Day 14: Leaves & Flower Buds: That it's had some time to dry, we can get started with the first layer of leaves. I'm going to use a slightly bigger brush. This will be a size eight, because you know when we do those first layers of leaves, I like to have it a little bit bigger and fluffier. Let's start around these bigger elements. We want to have some leaves in between the elements, indicating that there is some greenery there, but you don't have to fill it in perfectly. You're just blocking in that color and making it known that there is greenery in between the elements, but you don't need to see the full perfect leaf shape. Because the whole point of this first layer is to block in the shape, make sure there's movement in the piece and block in the colors so that you know that there is greenery there and then you can add the detailed pieces of foliage and fillers on top. So at this point, all I'm doing is adding in these leaves as I go. I don't want to have the exact same looking leaves coming out of every single flower. I'll have some that are a little bit wonky, pointing at different directions, and leaving some space as I go. Because I'm also going to be adding some little yellow fillers and buds. So if I go too crazy on this first layer and I add too many leaves everywhere, I'm not going to have a whole lot of room to be able to add more to it. So I'm taking it easy and just filling in some of those main white spaces, but not going overboard. And now, even just by adding that simple step, you can see the shape a whole lot better. So that's why I always say, don't freak out when you just have the flowers placed because at that stage, it looks a little scary. It looks like it's not all going to come together. You might start to doubt yourself or feel like starting over. But once you add in the layers and you bring more elements to the piece, you can bring back that shape. So, some of these flowers are off the line, like we intended. But it looks wild and organic and whimsical and add some character to the piece, too, rather than having everything perfectly on that line. So try your best to finish out your pieces before you give up on them because there's always going to be kind of an ugly stage of painting that you just have to push through. And now I'm going to take my pencil and I'll start adding in where I want some of these yellow filler flowers to be. These aren't going to be big buds like we've done in the past. They're basically going to be little dots, and these will be even more off the line than some of these pink and purple flowers. Don't be afraid to pencil these in wherever you want. I'm making my lines a little bit darker than I would want you to. Again, I want you to be able to see where I pencil these in. But be sure to use a light hand if you are also sketching these out. You don't see those pencil marks underneath the paint. So I'm continuing to add some in, and you can see they're going pretty far off the line, and that's going to help these ones that are off the line not feel so out there. And you should also vary the fillers. Some of them will have three little dots coming off of it. Some of them might just be one or two. But I really want to compliment this pink and purple color palette with a good amount of yellow because the yellow really plays well with the pink and purple. It doesn't overpower it, it just complements it. You can see that all of these ones are pointing in this direction and the bottom ones are pointing upwards, and that really just helps it all feel like it's curving towards the center. L et's add a few more of these little fillers here. Remember, this is pencil, so it can always be erased. You're not locked in when you do this step. You can always change your mind as you go. You also want to make sure like we talked about in the previous projects, you want to have a balance. I don't want all my fillers to be pointing towards the center. I want to have some of them on the outer edges as well. Keep all these things in mind as you go. And continue to pencil in these little fillers. This is going to be quite a few fillers, and I'll show you what technique I'm using. We've done a lot of different fillers throughout the class so far. This is the time where you can choose to do the firework ones. You can do the buds. You can do little mini roses if you want. You can do really any of them that you like. But the ones I'm going to do, they're super simple little dots. They're almost like little mini Easter egg shapes, just like that. Some of them will be a little bit darker, some of them will be a little bit lighter. But I'm just using the tip of my brush. And placing down that color and that yellow goes so well with the pink and purple, it adds a fun pop of color. Again, my pencil marks are much darker than I would want yours to be. But I'm also not too worried about it because I am going to go in and add a second layer of greenery and stems to connect all of this, and that will be a much darker green, so I can go right on top of those pencil marks. The reason I'm doing my fillers like this, super small, pretty much just tapping my brush down is because I don't want it to take away from any of the other elements. We have our three primary roses. We have these secondary elements that are still small and dainty, and then these yellow ones are a third level of filler. And so I really want these to just be complimentary. I don't want them to take away from the rest of the flowers, but I do want to add that final pop of color and round out that shape. And you can really start to see this thing come together, which I absolutely love this part of creating compositions. Let's start going the other direction here, doing the same thing, tapping my brush down in that little egg shape. And adding in these simple, simple little fillers. I said this earlier in class two, but adding fillers like this. It's a great way to bring the shape back into your piece because you can go off the line. You can correct a curve, say, for instance, if this one was looking too straight. I could add these little fillers to bring back that curve and the shape and movement. Not only are they great additions to the piece, it's also a way that you can fix any directional mistakes or challenges. Let's take another step back. I think this is looking really great so far. We have a good amount. It's not overwhelming. I do want to add A couple more of these coming out of here. Let's do one on the bottom. I just don't feel like there's enough in this center area. I'll go back in and add these final little details adding that pop of color. Once those buds have had some time to dry, we'll go in and add the connecting stems and the second layer of leaves. And this will be quite a bit darker value than that first layer. So I'll start by just connecting all the little buds, making sure that they've had some time to dry so that my green does not bleed into the yellow. I want to maintain the light vibrant yellow color. And we will be able to add some more details and leaves. But for this step, all I'm worried about is connecting all of the fillers and making sure all the elements of this piece are connected and feeling cohesive as an overall part of the composition. So now that everything is connected, we can just do the final step, which is adding some more greenery and making this whole piece feel robust and lush. You know what I'm going to say. I've said it in almost all the lessons, but this is where you have to start making some of your own choices, getting creative, not being afraid to add things where you want to, maybe in a spot where I'm not adding things. Because I don't even have any of this planned out necessarily. I'm just filling it out. I'm painting intuitively, trying to figure out what spots need some more and adding things where I want. But if you want to add your leaves in different directions or different areas, by all means, you're more than welcome to do that. Sure to take a step back every now and then to make sure the shape is still looking good. You don't want any lines that are too straight. But also to make sure that you're not overdoing it, I really want the flowers to be the focal point here. I'm going to connect some of these, but I don't want it to become so leafy to where the flowers get lost. I want the leaves to compliment the flowers that we've added because I really love how those flowers all turned out and having the pink and purple color palette be the focal point. Make sure you also keep a consistent direction. Again, these ones are all pointing toward the top right. These ones are coming up on the bottom and upwards. I want to make sure those are all facing the same way to keep a consistent path of movement. I'm adding a few more leaves here to the middle. That's one area that looks a little bit more bare. Take a look at yours and see what's needed. So I can see this area looks a little too light. I'll add an overlapping leaf here, nothing too crazy. Just making these fine little details. Be sure to vary the types of leaves that you're adding to. You don't want them to all look the same. I don't want this entire wreath to look to perfect or symmetrical. Be sure to change the types of leaves you add. For example, some of mine are just wispy lines like this. Some of them are elongated leaves. Like these ones, sometimes I'm adding little buds coming off of the leaf stems. Just be sure to keep everything nice and varied and interesting. I can't believe we just finished day 14 already. The class is flying by. We painted so many different types of flowers and compositions, but we're not done yet. Meet me in the next lesson for Day 15 when you're ready. 35. Day 15: Mixed Wildflowers: Made it today 15 of our 15 day challenge, and we're ending the class with one final bouquet. In this time, it'll be a dainty bouquet of wild flowers. Now the one we painted at the start of class was pretty busy and full of leaves and big flowers, but this one will be daintier and more delicate. Since wild flowers typically grow nice and tall, we're going to focus on painting wispy stems and just a few delicate leaves, making sure they don't take away from the simplistic beauty of the flowers themselves. Know it might seem like the bigger, busier compositions are harder, but at least in my opinion, these dainty minimalistic pieces can be even more of a challenge sometimes, simply because it's hard not to overdo it. We'll need to be very cognizant of our use of white space in this painting. The colors I'm using for this piece are the same ones we've been using throughout class. The pink ones will be a mixture of permanent zarin crimson, yellow ocher and titanium white. And our leaves and stems will be different values of deep sap green. Now, these wild flowers are going to be very tall and delicate and dainty, so I'm going to sketch out a couple of the main stems first to make sure I make them tall enough. So I'll start with the first flower that will be a little bit to the right, and I'm going to pull down the stem. It's pretty straight. I'm not adding a whole lot of curve to these ones. I'll have another stem coming off to the left. That'll be a little offshoot, and I'll have one that curves and overlaps the stem. One more little branch here, and I'm just sketching out these little lines. I'm not sketching out the flowers or anything too intense, just placing down some very tall stems so that I can make sure we get the length that I need. Let's do one final one here. Like I always say, you're more than welcome to create this bouquet however you want, especially now that we have lots of experience with bouquets. The difference with wild flowers is I'm making them very tall stems with just little flowers on top. I'm not going to make it super full. But in terms of the layout, I'm just sketching out some lines. I don't have a super cohesive design already in mind. Feel free to experiment with where you place your stems, and we'll go from there. I'm going to start with the two flowers on this side. These will be my two main flowers, and the rest will be little buds and fillers, and I'm going to have my first one with my permanent sarin crimson. I want it to be nice and bold and vibrant, and I want that to be the center flower. It'll be a very basic one. Same style as we've done before, starting with the very delicate dainty center dots, and then using clean water in the bristles. The only difference is I'm going to make these petals, I'm not going to perfectly pull out each petal, like the other ones I've done. I want them to look a little bit more wild. It's not a perfect petal shape, but that's one of the things I love about wild flowers, as you can just make them unique and messy and they look really beautiful. I'm still pulling out that color like we have, but the petals are looking a little bit more loose and expressive. I'm using quick strokes and adding some little wispy marks in between to really make them look unique. Same as we've done before. I'm going to go back in and tap in a little more color in the center while it's still wet. So you get those gentle bleeds, and that's going to be one of our main wet flowers. And this one's going to be a little bit more of a side perspective like we've been practicing. So I'll start with an oval shaped center. Was this one was a little bit more circular. This one's going to be a little more on its side. Usually when we do ones like that, it means that we have those petals like we've been practicing coming off the top and off to the side. You can see I'm doing very quick expressive strokes. I'm not making the perfect petal shapes. But then that bottom petal is one that's a little bit more of a horizontal almond shape like this. It shows a little bit of a different perspective than the first one. While it's still wet, I'll go back in and darken that center, and I'm actually going to pull some of that permanent sarin crimson so I can tie these two flowers together a little bit more with the bold deep center. So just gently tapping that in. They look pretty similar, but this one is a little bit lighter because I added more titanium white to my mixture. Now, this whole bouquet is going to be different shades of pink. Experiment with the ratios of each. Sometimes I'll pull directly from my crimson. Sometimes I'll add more titanium white. Sometimes I'll add more of the yellow ochre to give it more of a warm, burnt orange feel, but that's going to help this bouquet look unique and interesting and not just all the same flat shade of pink. Now, for this one on the left, I'm going to do a variation of our flower buds. I'll have one coming off of the very top. You'll recognize this technique from some of the earlier lessons where I paint the U shape at the bottom with a very pigmented mixture, rinse off my brush, and then gently start blending that color up. Into the shape of a bud. And I'm going to work on these two at the same time. I don't want either of them to dry. So I'll switch between the two, continue rinsing off my brush and softly blend that color up until it's soft and very transparent up at the top. So you have a very pretty gradient from dark to light. And you can add as many of these buds as you'd like to your wildflower bouquet. I'm going to stick with two for now. And again, you can see I had more yellow ochre in that mixture, so it's a little bit more of a warm orangy tone than these two flowers. I really like the look of these, so I'm actually going to do one more coming off of this main flower branch, just in between the two stems, starting with the heavily pigmented u shape at the bottom, rinsing off my brush and blending it up gradually. Rinsing off my brush again, so it's not too saturated, smoothing out those edges and creating that gradient. Remember, if you have too much color like I do here, I'm drying off my brush and then using the lifting technique to soak some of that up and lighten that area that I want to have as a highlight. So there's our first three buds. And now the last thing I want to do is add a few little stems. And those will just have a little bit of permanent sarin crimson. I want these ones to be very vibrant bold pops of color. So I'll load up some of that pigment directly from the tube. I have the stems drawn out. They're very light. And I'm going to start loosely tapping my brush down. It's a little bit like we did for the Lavender project. Tapping my brush, making these imperfect little marks. They'll all look slightly different. But once we add in those stems, it's going to be a beautiful little pop of color for these wild flowers. Let's do another one. I'll make this one a little bit taller. Angling my brush in different ways applying different amounts of pressure to get these very unique, dainty little flowers, leaving some gaps in between, not making it too perfect. Again, for wild flowers, I don't have specific flowers in mind. I'm just thinking of how I can paint these very expressive looking blooms, just thinking what I could imagine growing on the side of a mountain, but I'm not necessarily thinking ahead of time of specific flowers that I want to paint. More so thinking of colors and shapes that I might see out in nature. Let's do this last one here, making sure I have some movement and curve to it, creating these very dainty little strokes. I'm not even pulling out color. I'm just tapping my brush down onto the paper and letting it create unique shapes. Now, I want to keep balance in mind for this piece as well. I have some of these warm orange pink buds on the left. I'm going to add one final one coming off at the very bottom right, and this one's going to be a little bit smaller. If you have other areas too that you want to add buds, by all means, go for it, or if you want to add more of these little pops of color, you can do that. If you want to add more wild flowers, go for it. I just really want to maintain my delicate dainty feel of this bouquet, where it's mostly those tall stems, utilizing our white space and making the overall look very delicate and dainty. 36. Day 15: Stems & Leaves: Now I'm going to start painting in the stems, and we're not going to do like we've done in the other bouquets where we're adding lots of individual stems. I'm going to start by connecting those main elements that we painted, and then just adding a little bit more to it. But I do not want to go overboard on this one. Starting with a fairly light value and the tip of my brush, I'm going to start painting in these stems, connecting these elements and working my way from left to right. Now, these red ones haven't fully dried yet, so I'm being very careful to not touch any of that so I don't get too much bleeding. And we're going to just focus on the attachments for now. So you know from the previous lessons that I'll add a little bit more of a base to all of these buds. But for now, I just want to focus on attaching everything and figuring out the shape of this. And as I do this, I'm keeping all of my strokes very delicate. I'm not applying a whole lot of pressure down on my brush. So I get these fine little lines. And the final stem here will be this little red filler, and then the bud coming off of it. I'm loving how this is looking so far, and now we can add some additional leaves and really build it out. Again, I want this to maintain the light and delicate feel, so I don't want to go too much darker, but I'll go slightly darker and start adding a few leaves here and there. Not going too crazy. I still want to maintain the delicate look, so these leaves that I'm adding are very slender. I'm not applying a whole lot of pressure. And I want to experiment with adding some spiky, weedy little leaves coming off of the stem. Feel free to add whatever you want here. Wild flowers come in all shapes and sizes, so you can't really go wrong. Just using the very tip of my brush to make these wispy little marks. And then, as I said, adding a little bit of a base to all of these buds to help them look more connected. Again, I don't want to go too dark, but slightly darker value here to add some depth. And I'll add some leaves coming off here and there, but keeping it very small and very dainty. Remember to take a step back. Every time you add something at this point when you're working with a delicate piece like this, it's important to take a step back. Fairly often, make sure you're not overdoing it or adding too much and also make sure you're adding various types of elements. I made those spiky little weed looking leaves and now I'm going to add these ones that almost look like mini eucalyptus leaves, tapping my brush down to create them. I'm really making this interesting by adding a lot of unique types of foliage, but not overdoing it. And if you remember our other bouquets, we really went crazy adding stems and making it look super full and lush. But for ones like this, where you want to have that delicate look, that's the vibe that I'm going for. I really want to make sure I keep it very simple and dainty just like this. I'm liking how this looks, but I do want to darken a few of these areas slightly. I'll add a touch of raw umber to my green mixture. It's looking pretty flat, which is fine. But some of these very interesting little elements like this. I'm going to go over with the darker green to help them stand out a little bit more. Again, not creating any new stems, just darkening ones that are already there. I'll make that part darker and maybe one other section. How about these little interesting spiky leaves. Go over it one more time, using a slightly darker value of green and gently lining it. And the last thing I'll darken is this stem on the very right to keep things balanced. A lot of those dark elements we've already added are on the top left, so I want to darken some on the right. And there we go. Congratulations on finishing all 15 of the projects. I truly hope you've enjoyed it so far, and I will see you in the next lesson. 37. BONUS: Create Your Own Composition: Surprise, I'm back with a bonus challenge for you to create your very own composition with no step by step guidance. Take everything you've learned in this class and give it a shot. But if you're not sure where to start, here's an easy way to get started in three simple steps. Number one, pick a general composition shape. Do you want to paint a wreath, a border, a bouquet, or a simple composition? Having at least a basic shape in mind will help you from the very beginning and at least help create a visualization in your mind of how you want that final piece to look. Number two, choose two to three flowers or other elements to focus on. For example, you could say, I want my composition to just have roses or I want to have a mix of lavender and daisies, or maybe I just want it to be leaves. Of course, you can always add more to it as you start painting, but at least having a couple florals to focus on first, it helps take the pressure off of a blank page. Number three, choose two to three colors to use in your piece. In doubt, the simpler, the better. As you can probably tell throughout the class, I prefer simple color palettes myself, and it's definitely an easier way to go when you're first getting started. Finally, I want to remind you that it does not need to be perfect. Even today, I paint compositions all the time that I'm not proud of, but if you don't take risks and experiment with your creativity, you're not going to get very far. So take a stab at it, have fun with the process, and go ahead and get that practice in. 38. Resources & Final Thoughts: Give yourself a pat on the back. You made it through 15 days of loose floral compositions. So which one was your favorite? I'd love to hear what you enjoyed the most and maybe what challenged you the most. I personally enjoy the basic super loose compositions like this one. They don't always turn out perfect, but I love getting lost in the process, and that's really what drew me to watercolor in the first place. I hope you enjoyed learning how to paint all these different types of flowers and fillers and leaves, how to arrange them together in a cohesive manner, and also how to build your confidence along the way. We painted simple flowers and leaves, wreaths, bouquets, and a whole lot of other compositions in between. Throughout the class, you were able to find out what you liked, what you didn't like, and how to infuse your own style into all of these floral projects. Now that you have these skills, you can fill your sketchbooks with compositions. You can paint unique floral designs for greeting cards or stationary. Turn them into fun and trendy stickers or even open up a print shop and start selling your artwork. Take it from me in 2018, I was just getting started with watercolors, and I was learning how to use my supplies and how to paint leaves and roses. And now only a handful of years later. My designs are being sold in stores across the country. And more importantly, I'm getting the chance to share my love of watercolors with you. So whether you join this class to simply have fun and relax while painting, or if you joined with a dream of becoming a professional artist, I truly hope you've come away with tips and tricks that you can implement into your own creative practice. If you'd like to continue on in your watercolor journey, I do have other classes available for you to join along with shorter tutorials on YouTube to keep your creativity going. So I hope to see you again soon. Thanks so much for painting alongside me in this 15 day challenge, and as always, happy painting from me to you. T.