3D Paper Art with Watercolor + Whimsical Flowers

1. Welcome + Introduction: Hi friends, it's Lisa [inaudible]. I'm so grateful you could join me today for this skill share class. I'm super excited to be bringing this brand new class. That's a mashup of 3D paper art, watercolor, whimsical flowers and beautiful greenery. In this class, you will learn how to paint whimsical flowers, leaves, and greenery with a twist, will explore brush techniques and color combinations to create dimension, depth and texture. Will also hand cut some of the painted elements and use them as layered embellishments to create a 3D look for your painting. I'll work you through each watercolor painting and brush technique, demystifying the how-to use along the way before we start creating the final project together. This project is so much fun with techniques you can apply to your work over and over again. There are endless possibilities to what you can do with the final project, and the paper pieced layered embellishments really dial up the fun. At the end of the class, I have several project ideas that I'll be sharing that you can do with your final piece. May you find pause from the hustle, pure joy and inspiration here. Let's get started and have some fun. 2. Supplies + Class Handout: Let's get started with the supplies that I'm going to be using for this 3D paper project. This is the watercolor paper that I'm using, but you could really use anything that you prefer. This is ready cut watercolor from Strathmore and it sized at five by seven. It's a 140 pound cold press and I really like that it's already sized to the five by seven that I want to work with. Moving on, I'm going to be using some tube watercolor from mission watercolor from Mijello. These are the colors and I'm going to be using. I'm also going to be using some white gel pens, wet paint markers. This is a Posca marker and also the uni-ball signal marker. I've got some water here, two different jars of water. I have two different paint palettes here to mix some colors in. I'm going to be using this acrylic ink, again, another white acrylic ink, and the liquid water colors I'm going to be using in this project are from Dr. Ph. Martin's. I'm going to be using the hydrous and the concentrated radiant watercolors. I just love these and I used them in my last class, you'll see them a lot. Here are a couple of the paint brushes and some alternate. I have a size four and a size eight round that we're going to be using for leaves and greenery, and this is a new paintbrush that I haven't shared yet in any of my classes. This is triangle brush by Silver, and I really like the tip on this brush and it's going to help create some really great angles for the sunflower. Can also use these brushes which are dagger brushes. They have a nice angle as well. I'm sharing them here as a sample alternative for you. You can use a round brush too, but I just want to show you how these work. As I shared in my last class, I also have a supply and a practice handout that you can download in the project area. Let's go ahead and move on to the next video. 3. Selecting Your Color Palette: We're going to move on and talk about the color palette that I'm using for the project that we're going to do today. I also have a place for you to practice the color palette and the mixing of the turquoise that we're going to put together in the practice handout in the project area you can download this sheet. Here is the makeup of the colors that I am going to be using to create that turquoise color. I have ice yellow, ice-cream and turquoise blue. I'm going to take one drop of each of these colors and put it in this palette to mix up a different green, yellow, turquoise, blue. It really only takes one drop of this radiant watercolor to create this in the mixing palette. Now, I could just use the turquoise blue or use a different turquoise. But I really love the vibrancy of the radiant watercolors. It's so super simple to work with.That mixing these three colors together gives me a really nice cool turquoise blue color. That's going to be a great contrast to the colors that we're going to be using for the sunflowers. We've got a lot of warm and a lot of cool colors going here. This turquoise color is going to be a big part of all the leaves and the greenery and the silver $ eucalyptus that recreating as filler pieces to surround the sunflower pieces. Because it's such a cool color and the sunflower images are so warm.This color combination is a really complimentary fun color palette. For the sunflower palette, I'm going to be using the hydrous watercolors. I'm using the hansa yellow, and the Gamboge, I'm also using a mixture of colors from the mission watercolor tubes. I've got yellow orange, and I also have a yellow ocher. I'm also going to be using the golden brown from the radiant watercolor line. I'm just switching these out so I can get a sense of what my colors are going to look like in the sunflower piece. This is also a really great way. Just watch your colors out before you start to work on your project. It helps you get focused and limit your watercolor palette or your paint palette. It also helps you to see what colors are going to work well together and compliment each other. You can see these really warm colors are going to be super pretty up against that cooler turquoise. Now for the flower elements, I'm using the mission to border colors and amusing bright opera, rose madder and then I'm topping it off with a little bit of the yellow, orange. Now sometimes I will just work with these right from the tube and just dip my brush in it. But today I'm just putting them in the porcelain palette so that I can play around with them and mix them up a little bit. But these three colors are perfect for fluorophores. The bright opera gives it that really super hot pink. You can mix it up with the yellow, orange to turn it down a little bit and get more peachy turns. I'm digging this color combination. Let's go ahead and move on to the next video and get going. 4. Painting the Sunflowers: We're going to move on here to painting the sunflower, which is going to be the main image embellishment for this 3D paper art project. Again, here is the sample of the sunflower images that are on the handout that you can download and practice before you get started. Here's a sample of the final project and how we're going to use them. We're going to be painting two of them and cutting them out and using them as the main embellishment. It's so fun, I cannot wait to get going. The brush that I'm going to be using to create the sunflower is this triangle brush. I really, really love the way this brush is angled. It's very different from a round brush, but it gives you a lot of opportunity to create different angles and different petals for botanical and florals. I'm getting started here by doing a little bit of brush dancing with a round brush and taking some of that golden brown radiant watercolors and putting it in the center. Because I'm going to dip my triangle brush in to the hansa yellow, that's the hydrous color. I'm going to drag it through that golden brown so that we can use a little bit of that golden brown and get it to come into the leaves. I'm showing you here how this brush works. You can get these really great angled petals by using the brush on its side. I tend to use a lot of my brushes on their side to get different angles and different ways to use the brush. This brush is really fun that way. I'm dipping it in here into the the gam bows and I'm just showing you on the side here how you just lay the brush on its side and work your way around. You can create these different kind of petal images with this brush. That's because of the angle here. I'm a really big believer in using the angles, or letting the brush or the tool really help you create the kinds of flowers or petals that you want to create and this triangle brushes perfect for that. I'm just going in and adding a little bit more detail to this one. Now, these sunflowers are meant to be interpretive and a little bit wonky and really whimsical and the colors are really kind of blooming and going everywhere. But when we go to cut them out and use them in the 3D paper projects, the final project, you're going to see how amazing they are in creating a lot of added texture and dimension. Here I'm showing you the sunflower again and how I'm dragging that golden brown out into the petals to create that extra level of texture and dimension with the color. This brush makes it really super simple to create these angled petal for the blooms. Let's go ahead and move on to the next video. 5. Painting the Flowers Blooms: So now we're going to move on to painting the flower bloom. This is just a little 3,4,5 petaled bloom that I'm calling a layering flower because it's going to be used as an embellishment in the project. It's also just going to be painted onto the base of the watercolor paper to create a filler flower. It's like an alstroemeria flower or even a rhododendron. It could be any flower with some small blooms. So we're going to go ahead and get started with, I'm just mixing up a little bit of a green here because I don't want to use the turquoise green, so I'm using the ice green, a little bit of the turquoise blue and adding a little bit of the gambosh in there to just get a little bit of a darker green to create the stem and the petals that are going to hold the blooms. This is really super simple. I'm just using my round brush and creating a petal like little leaf effect here, laying the brush on its side and creating this just container to hold the blooms. I'm just illustrating out with a little bit of the light opera, just some really, really loose whimsical petals here and just creating this five petaled flower. I've pulled in a little bit tighter here so that we can see some of the detail. I'm starting out with a really light wash of the bright opera. You could use any of the colors. I'm using the bright opera, the rose madder, and the yellow-orange in this flower combination. But I'm starting out with a really light wash of color and just painting it in a little bit here and there and dabbing it in. My brush is about a medium wet. The paper is completely dry and I'm just adding a lot of water, a lot of paint, and just getting that first layer of color in, and just showing you that right now we're doing a little bit of the under painting, which is that first layer of color that you're adding in to get the base going. So I've got a little bit of color here that I'm taking out and I'm adding a little bit of oranges here in there and just playing with the color combination. I'm not so worried about perfection here because we're going to be adding so much added detail to the final project with this flower by adding some splatter and adding a little bit of white ink to it. So you can see I'm just layering in the colors, but I'm not overly concerned about creating texture and dimension between the petals. I'm trying to get a little bit of colored detail in-between the petal so that you can see that they're different petals. But I'm just laying a little bit of color and then layering a little bit more on top. In this case, normally I let a lot of the color dry in between before I start adding color. But I'm really just working on this where it's still pretty wet. So you can see that the colors are blooming together, but when they dry, it's just so beautiful so that when you go to add added texture and detail to the top, you can start to see the different petals. I just love this color combination. Again, it's a whimsical flower, not meant to be terribly realistic or botanical in any way. But it is a fun flower bloom that adds a lot of complimentary texture and dimension to the whole final 3-D paper art project. So my goodness, I'm just loving this color combination and the way that the oranges are mixing with the rose madder. I'm just adding a few little extra colors here. But this is the basic technique and we'll be doing it again in the final project. So let's go ahead and move on to the next video. 6. Painting the Silver Dollar Eucalyptus: We're going to move on to what I'm calling the silver dollar eucalyptus, and that's the filler greenery that has a round look to it. But because of the nature of the turquoise color that we're using, it kind of has a eucalyptus feel to it. It's also going to be one of the 3D paper embellishments in the final project, but it's also a really great filler piece of greenery that adds a lot of texture and dimension. I'm going to be using that turquoise color that I'm mixed up in the beginning during the color mixing video, and just testing the color over here on the left. Using my eight silver rounded brush, you could use a smaller brush if you'd like, I really like using the round brushes because you can make use of the whole head on the brush. But it also comes to a really fine point so that you can get a really super thin line, like you see here. Starting by painting that really super thin line. To create this eucalyptus like petal, I'm going to take this silver brush and I bend it on its side and make use of the whole head but I get that whole rounded feel by going to the right and around and then going to the left and around. I'm going to go ahead and show you a couple more times as I create this three petal element, and using the tip of that silver round brush, it comes to such a great point that you can get a really nice thin line. I'm bending the tip, the whole head. Using the whole head, I'm going towards the right and then inside and towards the left and then inside. Sometimes you get a little bit our pool of color, which is really great. I just tend to leave that there because when it dries, it blooms and it adds another level of texture and dimension. I'm going to go ahead and paint another one so you can get a really good feel for how to make this brushstroke. Really super thin line, bend the whole brush head to the right and curve it around and then to the left and then curve it around. Sometimes you get this cute little heart-shaped, which is kind of fun, and if you don't want the heart shape, you can just kind of round it out a little bit by painting. But I'm going to leave it in here for this one and just mix this turquoise color around a little bit because when it dries, it's going to be a super beautiful bloom. I just dipped it into a little bit of the yellow because you can, while this is wet and I've got the brush kind of medium wet, you can add a little bit of color on top to get a little bit of a color pop here. I've got a little bit of yellow in here with the turquoise color, and it just kind of adds another level of color to the whole project. I'm going to paint another petal so that you can really see this brushstroke and how I'm using the whole head of the brush, but really the brush is doing all the work. When that dries, it's so pretty and it's a really simple shape to make. Let's go ahead and move on to the next video. 7. Painting Leaves + Greenery: In this video, I'm going to be sharing more about painting leaves and greenery. These are some more filler greenery for the entire composition. I'm using my four and my eight round brush. I'm going to be using a combination of the greens that I've already mixed up in some of the turquoise greens. I know I covered some leaves and greenery in my last class, but I am just doing something a little bit different with this one. Using my round brushes, I'm going to just go ahead and create some elongated lines. Then, using the tip of the round brush to create that teardrop look and feel, to create this whole berry-like greenery. This is a great filler greenery that you can tuck in between leaves and tuck up underneath all of the 3D paper elements that we're going to be using. It's also really super simple. It's just a mixture of really thin line, and then, using the tip of the round brush to create a teardrop look and feel. I'm showing a couple of different samples here with the different color combinations because on the final project, we're going to be doing it in the different color greens, and maybe add a little bit of the berry color to it. The leaf images are super simple to create. You're really using the whole head of the round brush. You can use a size four, a size eight, any kind of size. By using the whole head of the brush, you can get really different sizes of leaves. It's super, super simple to create, and it adds a little bit more of a visual interest against the teardrops. I'm going to be using those also as filler greenery in the final project. Let's go ahead and move on to the next video. 8. Creating Watercolor Background Paper: We're going to move on to creating the watercolor background paper to create this 3D vase that we're going to be cutting out and using to help hold the whole composition together. This is super simple. Really just going to take the brush, get it super wet, add a little bit of color, I'm using the turquoise, blues that I've created, I'm using the greens. I'm also just adding a lot of water to this and doing a wet-on-wet technique and letting that color just pool right in. You can see that I'm adding a little bit of color, adding a little bit of water, and I'm going to be dipping it into the other greens and the yellows and just letting all of these colors commingle together. Because these are the cool colors in the palette, they're going to be a nice, beautiful contrast and complement the warm colors in the sunflowers so well. These are such a great color combination of serene colors. We're going to go ahead and let this dry, and I'm going to move on to the next video. 9. Creating the Final Project Together: Okay, so now it's time to paint and create the 3D paper art. This is going to be so much fun. I'm just going to walk you through all the steps. We've gone through all of the different elements to create this. But look at all this texture and dimension and how fun is this project? It's going to be so much fun. We've created so many different watercolor pieces along the way, and some of these pieces like the sunflower and the eucalyptus, going to be cutting out and using them as embellishments on top of this entire composition. It's going to be so much fun. Okay, so I'm using a little cap from a bottle, I think it's a vitamin bottle where I'm just laying it down here in the middle of the five by seven so that I can get good positioning for the elements that are going to be painted onto the five by seven piece of Strathmore. So starting with the two blooms that we did in the very beginning, the flower blooms, those Alstroemeria-like blooms. We're going to work on both of them at the same time. So one to the left and one to the right, you really can't see my pencil marks and that's okay. You can probably see the bottom one. But I'm really just using that as a guide so that I can paint all these elements that are going to be on the base and then we're going to add the paper 3D art water colored embellishments on top. So right now I'm just painting in some of the petals for the five petaled flower and doing a little bit of the under painting as we're moving along here. Again, I'm using the colors that I used in the example that we did in a couple videos back. So I have a little bit of that bright opera pink and the Rose Madder, the yellow-orange and I'm just mixing these colors together. You can see that it's just really a whimsical approach, not realistic, just getting some color in and getting those petals filled in to create this flower. So a little bit of color and I'm leaving a little bit of white space and I'm going to be working on the one flower and while the one dries, I'm going to work on the other flower. So let's go ahead and watch the flower painting for a bit. And then I'm going to come back in as we move to the next step. Okay, so now it's time to move on to adding some of the filler greenery. I'm starting out with doing the silver dollar eucalyptus here, adding a little bit and I'm nesting these pieces of greenery, are going to get nested around those flower blooms. So I'm using my round brush and just using the silver dollar eucalyptus technique that we did, and just adding a little bit of this filler greenery around that floral bloom. I'm going to be going through and around and just nesting all of this different greenery around the top part and around the bottom part imagining where the sunflowers are going to position themselves. So I'm moving my paper around using a lot of the turquoise-blue that we've created and adding a little bit more of this filler greenery in here. So you can see that I'm working on opposite ends. So I did the silver dollar eucalyptus up there at the top and now I'm just working on the opposite end to create some balance and some symmetry with the look and feel of this composition. So I'm going to move to the bottom left-hand side of this, as I turn this piece around. I'm mixing up a little bit of a different blue and adding a little bit of a different green. I'm going to play with these colors a little bit and add some of the other filler greenery down along the left-hand side, and I'm also doing some of the leaf work. So you can see that the leaves are becoming a big part of just shooting out and creating that. When we put the vase in, it's just going to look like it's spilling over the vase and up underneath the sunflowers. So again, just go in with it and seeing how I feel about it, and putting some of this filler greenery in all around the flowers. So right here I'm doing that little tiny berry-like greenery, where I'm using the very tip of the small round brush and creating that berry look. Instead of adding color like the rose madder color, I'm doing these berries in the turquoise-blue because I really like that color. Adding a little bit more leaves here and there, adding those berry elements that have that huge silver dollar eucalyptus look to it as well, and just adding this filler greenery in all around the composition here, wherever I feel like it. Just remember, you've got that circle element in the middle. You're just going to be working around and just letting those greenery elements look like they're flowing out of the vase. So that's why everything looks a lot bottom heavy right now, even though I have everything turned around. But it's just going to all come together when all the pieces are together. Okay. So I've cut out all of the elements from the sunflower, from the silver dollar eucalyptus, and from the floral piece that we did earlier and these are going to become the 3D paper elements that we're going to add on top. But first we're going to create that vase. So I took and cut a little rectangular piece of that background watercolor paper that we created together and I'm just adding a little bit of white stripes with the white acrylic ink. You could use the white of the Uni-ball Signo, which I am going to be using as well. But I wanted to get a nice good layer of these stripe color down. So I just went ahead and used the white acrylic ink. Didn't draw in any lines, just free handing this and once it was dried, I just went ahead and cut a small vase shape out of it. Now, here's the fun part. We're going to take all of these embellishments and using just a little bit of white glue. This is a Tombow white glue, super simple. Any white glue would work. I'm going to start adhering the elements to the base piece of watercolor. This is going to be so much fun. So just adding a little bit of glue to the sunflowers and putting that first sunflower down and then the second sunflower is going to go right over top of it. Oh, look at all that texture and dimension. I'm using the flower element, just going to tuck that in there as well and going to be tucking in the eucalyptus pieces and also the other extra little yellow petals that we have. What I love about this project is first, I love to watercolor, and I love to just watercolor straight up on watercolor paper and create scenes and blooms and flowers. But what's super fun about this is water coloring different elements with your blooms and your flowers and your greenery, and cutting them out to create these 3D embellishments. So your watercolor piece becomes an instant 3D piece of paper art. It's just a super fun way to get a lot of extra texture and dimension into your watercolor project. I'm just tucking in these little pieces here and there and just deciding where to put them to create the overall composition here. But this vase looks like it's just blooming with some flowers and everything is just flowing over it. It's just so much fun. You could do this project in any color combination with the techniques that we have done today. Now I'm going in and now it's time to add some of the details. So I'm using my Uni-ball Signo pen and I am going over the stripes that we have in the watercolor base, and I'm going into some of the leaves and just adding a little bit of what I call ink scratching so I'm scratching in a little bit of ink to get a little extra texture and dimension. I'm not going to be using the black pen on this, but you totally could. I know that I shared adding details with the black ink in my last class, painting whimsical flowers. So if you're interested in that, you can go over to the painting whimsical flowers class and see how I add a lot of black ink detail to a project like this. But for this one, I'm going to just be adding the white detail. Okay. So now I'm also going to go in. I'm adding a little bit of blue to the bottom of the vase so that grounding the vase with a little bit of blue washed out water color. Just to add a little bit of grounding to it, a little bit of dimension to it as well so it doesn't look like it's just floating on the piece of paper. These are called nuvo drops they're a 3D dimensional product that I'm adding a little bit to the center of this flower and I'm using the tip of it to just stretch that color out a little bit and scratch it in and I'm adding a few of those little drops to the centers of the white stripes to add a little bit of extra texture and dimension to the base. That black right there in the center just really grounds that flower quite a bit with all of those beautiful, bright vibrant colors that are going on. Here is the finishing touch. I'm dipping my round brush into the blue watercolor and into the white acrylic and I'm just tapping it on to the entire project, creating a splatter look in effect. So look at all that texture and dimension for this 3D project. It's so much fun. Okay, so let's move on to the next video and I'm going to share a few ideas that you can do with this project. 10. Project Ideas + Thank YOU!: I wanted to take a minute to share a couple of project ideas. Here is a great idea for your paper art. You can just copy it into a really simple five by seven shadow box and it becomes an instant piece of art for your space. You can also take this design and modify it to an A2-sized card, which is a four and a quarter by five and a half and that would just be a lovely card project to give to a friend or a family member. Here's a glance look at some of the details that we did and created along the way today. Thanks so much for watching and I'll see you in the next class.