5 Watercolor Mistakes Every Beginner Makes (and How to Avoid Them)

1. Welcome! Let's Paint with More Confidence: If you've ever finished a watercolor painting and felt like something just wasn't working, you're definitely not alone. Maybe your painting feels a little stiff or a little muddy or more detailed than you had hoped. Or maybe you've looked at the watercolor painting and wondered, how do artists make them look so effortless? The good news is that those feelings are incredibly common, especially when you're just getting started. Most beginners run into the same challenges and they're definitely much easier to overcome than you might think. In today's class, I'm going to be sharing five simple ideas that can help you paint with more confidence and create a fresher, looser watercolor painting. These are not strict rules, and they certainly aren't meant to make you feel like you've been doing something wrong. Think of them as gentle shifts in the way you approach watercolor that can make a surprising big difference in the results. We'll talk about using water to your advantage, choosing a brush that helps you create expressive marks, simplifying instead of painting every detail and preserving the beautiful white pieces of your paper, perhaps the hardest lesson of all knowing when it's time to stop along the way, we'll do some quick practice studies together so that you can immediately try some of these ideas in a relaxed, no pressure way. Then we'll finish up the class by painting a beautiful loose floral arrangement where you'll bring all five concepts together into one finished piece. This class is designed for beginners, but even if you've been painting for a while and you feel like your work has become a little tight or overworked, I think you'll find these reminders helpful. Remember that watercolor isn't about controlling every brushstrokes. Some of the most beautiful effects happen when we learn to work with the paint instead of trying to control every little thing that it does. So gather your supplies, take a deep breath, and let's get started. I can't wait to paint with you. 2. Mistake #1: Knowing When to Stop: Today's first tip is learning when to stop or let's not overwork our paintings. This is something that a lot of artists and it does not matter if you are a beginner artist or an artist who's been working for years and years and years on their artwork. Knowing when to stop, having the confidence to say it's the right way, don't touch it is so challenging. Probably out of all of my little tips today, I'm going to be starting out with the one that is the most challenging to learn. It's not that you can't learn this, it's that it has to take it takes a lot of practice and a lot of confidence and a lot of self assurance that what you've done is good enough and you need to let it go. So what often happens is you're going to be in the middle of painting. You're going to find one little bloom that you say, I think that could be darker. I think that should be maybe a slightly different color or I needed to have added more contrast with that bloom or that petal and you're going to want to dive back into the paint and paint on top of it. Whether that paint is already dry, slightly wet or very wet, it doesn't matter. If you are trying to fix it, you are probably going to overwork it. Here I have a perfect example. This comes from one of the classes that I just recently uploaded where I overworked my painting. Right here. Let's take a really good close up of this. I'm going to actually zoom in so that you can see that. So let's just take a look at this for a minute and take a look at this painting. Right here, this particular bloom. You can see that not only is it darker where I have added, like, almost a darker color, but it also got muddy because it touched into some of the black that was already there and brought it up into the petals, and it made it a completely different depth from all the other blooms around it. This wasn't a intentional layer. I could have and should have just added in little extra spots like this or a spot like this where it just adds just a little touch of something to create a little variation in the depth. I didn't do any of those. I tried to fix it. And when I tried to fix it, I actually messed up this whole bloom. So now this entire painting feels overworked. So we're going to intentionally look at. I'm going to show you how to overwork your project, how to not stop in time. Even though I showed you this example here, I want to show you in real life what that would look like. Let's say we're using a size ight paintbrush. I have my water on here. I'm going to use some of my teal paint, and we're just going to make a cute little flower here, just a little simple flower with some little buds. Okay, and we're going to go like that. Or maybe we're going to add in another one over here. So we're going to put in another couple petals over here. So something just very, very simple as to what you may be painting at your home. And you can feel free to paint right along with me or just watch whatever you want to do. So we're just going to be painting some of our little buds here, just making a little grouping similar to the yellow one that we just looked at. And then now that I got these little four or five different buds going on here and I'm getting these things going. I'm starting to look at it, and I'm starting to go, Oh, this one is so much darker than all the other ones. I don't really know, I started my paintbrush was full of paint from my pan, and that made this really, really full. So I should probably and really, really but I really like these lighter, more transparent ones where they have more water and less paint. I really should fix that one and maybe I should fix this one too. So we go and we rinse off our paintbrush and we dry it off on our rag here. And then we come in here and we start to manipulate it and we start to lift it up, and we drop it off. Oh, oops. And then that made it into a bigger leaf, so we should probably fix that. So we're just going to make that petal bigger. That's fine. We're just going to, you know, rinse off our paint brush and come back in here and lift because I've heard that we can lift paint, so that's good, right? We should lift that up. And maybe this one's too dark, too, so we're just going to we're just going to change that one completely and just change that around. And, Okay, well, I don't want to overwork it. So I'm going to call that done. Oh, but now this one's too light, so I should probably add some more paint back into it because, you know, that's you can always add more paint back in. Do you see what I just did? I completely overworked this because I let my anxiety over my painting not being perfect control my paint brush instead of just allowing the paint to do what paint does, accepting what was happening on my paper, leaning into it and saying, That's okay. This painting this particular bud is going to be darker, and these other ones are lighter. So if I want to balance it, maybe I could have just put some darker buds over here to balance the whole thing and make these heavier. And then I would have had nice contrast because I would have had lighter buds, a darker bud, a little flower here and a darker one here. And then I could have put maybe some little tiny ones that hadn't completely bloomed. Out to the side. And we could have done something like this and made it really interesting and then added in a green, like a stem and had it coming over like this. And wouldn't that have been cute? But instead, now I have overworked buds that are going to dry crazy, and we're not going to enjoy this painting anymore. So when we are painting, when something happens that isn't expected, we have to remember that this is watercolor and watercolor is not perfect. That is not the medium of watercolor. There are some areas where you can paint perfectly, but watercolor just kind of goes with the flow, and we need to just allow ourselves that freedom and that grace to allow our paintings to become what they're going to become. So if you have realized that you're not sure if you like something, you need to really think about if fixing it is the right solution, or is there a better solution? Should we be adding just a contrast out here and adding something that makes the balance happen better? Or maybe we just lean into it and we say, Oh, let's just create a great big flower over here instead. Wasn't our original plan, but that's okay. Let's not overwork our paintings. Now the next thing that happens with overworking, and we're just going to keep using the same one is if somebody comes in and they're taking a look at this, they're painting, and they go, Oh, gosh, this painting, let's say this particular bud because we haven't messed with this one yet. This bud is too soft. I think it needs to have been darker. And so I come in with my paint brush and I try to paint on top of it. And I try to very carefully get my thick paint, and I try to paint on top of it and coat it and overwork it this way by adding some dark thick paint up on top of it. Now that is also going to be overworking your painting. When that dries, that's going to look really crazy and unfortunate. Where a simple solution instead of going right on top of it, and this is a painting, this particular bud and that one we haven't touched yet. I'm going to come in here with the same paint, and I'm just going to add maybe a little bit of center to it and maybe on this one, add a little outline or a little line in there just creates a second layer. And then all we can do is just have these little tiny lines that creates a look of depth and dimension. And that is really all we need it to have done instead of painting over the whole thing. So when we are overworking our painting, sometimes it happens when it is completely wet like we just did here. Sometimes it happens after it's dry and we add in too much of the good thing right here, like we just did here, or sometimes it happens when it is still just damp. So this one is still damp. And if I come in here and I go, Oh, let's add in a little bit more we're just going to stay with that same color. I go and I put some more in. I really want to get it to look darker. We can add more color right there like that. Now, that may or may not work okay. It might be fine, but we have to be really careful when we are adding layers that you are at the right, the amount of water. And that only comes from practice. So, the more you practice with your water and your paint, the better that you were going to become with knowing when to add that second layer, when to add that second color, so let's just move on and I'll show you an example of what I mean. So if I'm making a bud, get my paint brush full. If I'm making a bud and I go like this, and I'm going to make this little flour, I'm just going to make it a little four petal flour, and I come over here and there's my four petal flour. Gonna rinse off my paint brush. Right now, it is very wet. And if I went to try to put another color in here, it's going to bleed out crazy, and that's going to be too much. So we have to wait for that to dry a little bit. In the meantime, I could be thinking, now what color should I add in here? I think a really pretty blue or yellow would be really pretty. I'm just going to wait and I'm going to watch this and you can see how shiny it is you can start to learn that when it's shiny, too shiny or the paint is rolling, then it has too much paint in there. So when that becomes just the perfect amount of dampness, then I will add my yellow in and let that bleed out. In the meantime, maybe we'll just paint another one. We'll just paint another little petal, just a sweet little four petal flower. If you are learning petals right now, a four petal is something that's really fun to paint because you can just squeeze those petals in however you want to. They don't have to be the exact shape that you can make them whatever shape you want to make them. So we're just going to make a couple. I do like to vary my shapes of my petals, it causes them to have some dimension and some direction so they look like they're facing different ways. So I've got a couple of different petals here, and they're going to be drying at different steps, because I have different amounts of water. So this one is still very, very wet, but this one is almost perfect. Actually, the last one that I painted is almost a perfect, dryness. So I'm going to get my yellow. I'm going to add my yellow to my paintbrush, and then I'm just going to come in here and touch into the middle. And as I go and touch into the middle, I can go, Oh, maybe that's a little too much on my paintbrush, Brush it off, and then I can just carefully touch into the petals so that you can watch them bloom. It's just slowly spread out. So instead of overworking this, I'm just going to allow it to happen, and I'm just going to allow them to flow the way they want to flow without overworking my petals over here like I did at the beginning to show you. So as with watercolor and as with most things in life, there's always exceptions. So I'm going to show you an exception right now. I have cleaned my paintbrush. I have it fairly dried off. I just using this rag and just dabbing it off. And now I'm going to come in here. I'm going to say, if I don't want it to I don't want this yellow coming all the way out, I can kind of stop it by lifting up some of it. I'm just very intentionally and carefully lifting up some of the paint. I'm not moving it around, not manipulating it. Lifting some of it up, and that's going to keep it contained. So go ahead and practice this when you get to the class project at the end, if you are doing something and you realize that you are just about ready to overwork something, just slow down, consider it, think, is it really necessary to fix it? Or if I fix it, am I going to be creating something that looks like this that is overworked and is going to ruin the entire piece. Be careful with that. Come on back to the next lesson and we're going to talk about having too small of a paintbrush or too large of a paintbrush and deciding which paintbrush is the job right tool for the job. 3. Mistake #2: Choosing the Right Brush: So many paint brushes. This is only a little small selection of my paint brushes, but I wanted to talk about the right tool for the job. Oh, my goodness. As you become more and more accustomed to painting, you are going to realize that collecting paint brushes becomes kind of a hobby. I don't know what it is, but every artist that I talk to talks about how they have collected so many paint brushes over the years. So I just gathered up a few just to show you what I'm talking about. We have flat paint brushes that are really good for adding a lot of water across a page, and you can get them in any size. This is a 1 ". This is a half inch. There's different brands, there's different qualities. Paint brushes that are flat like this are really nice. I definitely recommend that you have one of these. A 1 " is fantastic. Sometimes you can get them in a whole set and a whole kit. So that would be one thing that you might want to find. They're also fun for painting with, but I'm not going to be us them on a regular basis. That's not the paintbrush that I tend to go to. But I have seen watercolor artists who love their square brushes. It creates a lot of really beautiful angles when you're painting. So I can see why somebody might like the really flat brushes. Then there are mop brushes, and mop brushes can come in all different sizes. You can get a kit like this that has a whole bunch of sizes from something that's really big to something that's much, much smaller. You can always get a set of mop brushes, and they're really awesome, especially when you're trying to just paint really loose and organically and let the paint brush flow and let a lot of water and a lot of paint hit your paper all at one time and just see what happens as you're painting. So you will often see me painting with a mop style brush, mainly because it's just fun. So I definitely will use mop size brushes. Then we will have the dagger, and the dagger brush is absolutely one of my favorites to paint brush with. I don't usually do very many lessons using the dagger paint brush just because it's a pretty tricky paint brush to learn and I know that most of my students are on the beginner side. So one of the this one is a Princeton Neptune, and this is the three eighth, and this one is a quarter inch. You can also get them from this transonset and this is a set that I really enjoy, especially for beginners because it has all the different shapes. So it has a point. You can see how it comes and it's almost carved like a knife down to a point and then flat down at this end. But the other thing about a dagger is how floppy they are. So they're just really, really floppy, floppy brushes, and this is without it even being wet. Once you wet a paint brush like this, they just get really, really fun and floppy. And just to give you an example of what a dagger paint brush can do, as you are painting along with a dagger, a little too much there, you can drag a really thin line and then you can lay a paintbrush down and you can create some really unusual shaped leaves. Just a fun fun fun fun paintbrush to use. You can also use it to create some really nice looking petals and flowers and you can get really, really organic with it. A great paintbrush, something that you would have to learn how to use. Then after the dagger. So then we have the filber brush, and I got this set and it has a whole bunch of different sizes in them, and a filber paint brush is going to have the traditional it's going to be flat, similar to our big flat paint brush. But as you can see, it is rounded at the top. So instead of being squared off like a flat paint brush, it has a round tip to it, which is really fun to use. I have not been successful with the filber. These I find to be a little challenging, but I'm sure it's because I haven't practiced very much with it. Some people love to make flowers with a filbert brush. So you could give those a try. Then I have this little guy, which is one of my favorites, and I should actually show you this one. This is a mop brush, and you can see, it's just a little tiny has a little tiny tip at the end, and it's small and it's round, but it's almost like a cut off. It's almost as if they've taken a round brush and just cut off the tip so it doesn't get pointy at the end. But what's really awesome with it is that you can just dab it into a little bit of paint, and then you can make these little tiny um, dots. So if you wanted to add little berries, these could be little tiny berries, or if you wanted to add something to the center of a flower, you could add this into the center of a flower. So really a fun little it's almost like a stamp where you can use it to stamp down and make a little design. This is actually one of my favorites. I use it quite a bit when I am painting on my own. Then I have a detail brush. So this one is just the tiniest little thing, and you can use this to create little tiny details. If you wanted to add in little tiny dots into the center of your flowers, you could use something like this. So I like my little detail brush. I can use it for all different kinds of things. And then I have this one, which is a liner brush, and a liner brush or it's also could be called a rigger brush. So if you're looking for this out in the market, you can look for a liner or a rigger, and they're long and floppy. So just these long, long floppy brushes that are really skinny and they can come in all different lengths. Sometimes this line can be really long, sometimes it's shorter. Then how that one works is you fill your paint brush up with it, and then you can create some really interesting little lines. You can create all kinds of swirls, you can even lay it down and create lines like that to create a leaf. Really a fun brush. This is probably one of my favorites as well when I am off painting by myself, because it's just such a fun paint brush to experiment with. That's my liner or my rigor brush. And then you're going to have your standard brushes, which are your round brushes. Now, this is what I will paint with 90% of the time when I'm making classes for you guys because round brushes are on the standard side. This is what you would typically have in your home, and I want to make sure that watercolor is accessible to everybody. So I stay in the round brushes. Round brushes, when you are looking for a really good round brush, I want you to look for something that is, um has a nice handle, but not too long. Sometimes the handles can be really, really long, something like this or even longer, and those can be sometimes a little challenging to use. I like to have my paintbrush about that length. And then I like the fact that these are springy. So as I use them, they spring right back. Uh, and I love the fact that they come to a point, and you can see how nice of a point they are now they're not all wet, let's just get them all wet. You can see that. But all of these have a really nice point at the ends. So I really enjoy a round brush. So now let's talk about sizes of these round brushes. If you were going to be only buying four brushes, and you're like, I don't need all those. I know they're available, but I don't need all that. I just need my top four brushes. These are the four that I would recommend that you get. Now, whether it's this brand or not, I don't care. This is the Princeton Heritage collection, but that doesn't matter. You can use a school supply paint brush, as far as I'm concerned. The paintbrush itself, the quality is nice as you are growing and learning to get better quality paint brushes eventually is nice. That is not going to be your most important supply. So use whatever you have, whatever you have available or easily accessible or something that's affordable. So the four sizes that I would recommend is a size three, a size six, a size eight, and a size 12. If you can't find a size eight, then a size ten is also fine. The reason I'm suggesting those four sizes is because it gives you enough variation between the four different sizes. So that you can do almost every painting with one of these four brushes. You can get a lot of paint. If you needed to fill this entire section up with white with water and you don't have a nice flat brush, you can use a size 12 to quickly fill this whole page with water instead of using a flat brush. If you just want to paint your traditional flowers, a size eight is a great almost always go to size. A size six is great for adding some smaller details, and then a size three, you can use this instead of using your very, very tiny little micro detailer. You can also use a size three to create all of these lines that I showed you from the rigor brush or the liner brush. You can create all kinds of lines using this very small brush. So those would be my four that I would recommend. We have our brush lesson out of the way. I do want to show you some of the classic mistakes or ways that you can make sure that you're choosing the right tool. And that is by one of the biggest, probably the most obvious mistake that I see is using too small of a paint brush when you are painting. So if we are going to be painting, I'm just going to set this one here so that you can see it. If you're going to be painting this painting right here, I was going to be choosing a paint brush and I could only choose one paint brush to paint this whole piece. The one I would select is a size eight. I would not choose the size six and I would not choose a size three. Now you're going to say, but I thought you just said that you could use the size six and three to create all these small details, and you absolutely can. You can use these to create these little tiny small details, but you would not want to use a size six or a size three to create these flowers here. These are too small to create these flowers. You could use the size 12 to create this entire painting, but you would not want to choose a smaller paint brush. Then you're going to say, but this one has all these little tiny details. How on Earth would I paint all those little tiny details with a size eight paintbrush? Well, because we talked about the fact that this paint brush has a tip on the end and this little tiny tip is the same size as this little tiny tip. All we have to do is when we are going to be painting, those little dots is just add little tiny dots to the top. So we just added paint to the tip of this paint brush, and then I can create all those little dots. Then you might say, but how do you create these little tiny flowers, these little pink flowers if you're going to be using a great big size eight paintbrush. I'm going to tell you, because all you have to do is just use this part of the paintbrush from about a third of the way or a quarter of the way to the end, and then you can just create little tiny flowers just like that. Same flowers a little tiny flowers by just using the tip of that paint brush. So using a size eight is going to always be my recommendation if you don't have these other ones. If you do have a size three or a size six and you want to switch between brushes to make different flowers, that's fine. You can do that. But you don't have to have these smaller brushes in order to be able to do this. And then you might ask, well, how do you use a size eight when you're making a flower, like a leaf. So we're going to just fill this up with my green. And because it has that tip, I can make a fairly small thin line. And then I can lay this down and create my leaves using the size eight. I did not need to make this with a smaller paintbrush. So now I'm going to show you the contrast as if you were going to be creating these flowers with a size six or a smaller paint brush like a size three. So we're going to choose a nice orange here, orangey red, and I'm going to put this around so I put my hand in the paint, and I'm just going to be creating a flower like that. So if I paint here. Now, one brush did not create an entire size of brush that petal. It's petal here compared to this petal here. So now I have to add another one here. And then I'm going to create one here, and I have to keep brushing out to create that same petal. Oh, I'm going to create another one here, and then I'm going to create another one here. And you start to see all the lines that are inside of here, where you are creating and you're having to push that paint brush around and you have to work so hard to add and to make that pedal. And then it got too big, it's so difficult because I'm using too small of a paintbrush versus if I switch over and I use my size eight, and I go to make the same petal, the same flour. I can create one, maybe even just add a second thing here. Just like that, I can have my flour without all this overworking. Do you see all the overworking inside of here? That's because I used a smaller paintbrush versus a larger paint brush. Would be even worse if I went and tried to use the size three paintbrush to make that I have to lay my paintbrush completely down, and I'm almost having to scribble to generate that same shape petal. And I do not recommend too small of a paintbrush, go with a larger paintbrush. You could even do the same thing with a size 12. Here I'm going to grab my paint. I'm just going to create a size 12 flower. You can see how size 12 creates almost the whole petal in one go. The larger the paintbrush, the easier you will actually paint. When I suggest to you to use one of your larger paint brushes, this is what I'm referring to. I could even paint a leaf using this size 12, this great big one. Let's go ahead and paint this same thing. But with a size 12, this great big one, I can just make a nice tiny line because it has that nice tip. And then I can create a leaf and a leaf. See how even though it's a great big paintbrush, you can still paint the exact same flower leaf setup or flowers. But you also have the freedom to paint something that's large. When you only have one paintbrush in your hand, you can really move around and you can be like, I'm making this grouping and I'm going to be making this whole painting, but I really want to be able to put a great big leaf in here because you have this great big paint brush in your hand, you can move from painting something like that and adding a great big leaf to adding something with just a little details. You could add little tiny details without having to switch paint brushes. So I highly recommend that you use a size eight, ten or 12 for 90% of your painting, and this will get you the success that you're looking for. Stay away from the smaller paint brushes or reserve them once your painting has dried and you want to add a layer or you want to add some details. Use these smaller paint brushes for that and the larger paint brushes for your main works of art. Come on back to the next lesson and we are going to be talking about water control. 4. Mistake #3: Learning to Read the Water: In today's first lesson, I talked about one of the most classic or most scene concerns, which is overworking your painting. Although that is very, very common for what you see in a finished piece of work, one of the largest challenge that I would think that people have is water control. When you are painting with water, water is one of the key elements. It's probably the most important element that we work with knowing how much water, adding too much water or not enough water is really going to be one of the largest challenges that you need to learn as a beginner, watercolor artist. When I work with water, I have two, sometimes three containers of water. I just usually use my little mason jars. I have one that is mostly clear. I start with all three being clear, but very quickly they become dirty. So my clear one, I'm going to use, if I want to make sure that my paintbrush is 100% clean and that there is no pigment left, no paint left in my paintbrush at all. So that one kind of stays on the furthest away from my right hand. I am right handed, so that one goes on the left hand side. Then I'm going to have a mostly clean jar of water, which is where I might just if I just had a little bit of paint in my paint brush and I just want to quick rinse it off, I might use this one. And then I might have a third one, and you can see this, this one's dirty. This is where I'm like, Oh, my paintbrush is full of water. I've got to get the bulk of it off in here. This is almost like my quick rinse, then my start of my wash, and then I have my third, which is for if I'm really, really being careful and making sure that I don't have any paint. I'm going to use this one the least. So these two being forward here, when you use your paint brush and your water, I like to spray down my paints. I want to make sure that all my paints are 100% wet and activated. Then you're going to have different levels of how much paint and water go together. And when I mix mine, I like to have little puddles so that I can see how much paint and water I have here. The different amount of water in your paint is going to make your paint on your paper darker or lighter. Right here, you can see that this is very liquidt. Look at how I think you can see that in the camera. Yeah, you can see that this is very, very liquidy, and there's lots and lots of water here and just a little tiny amount of paint. When I come over here to paint that, you're going to see that it is very, very clear. It's almost transparent because there's so much water that it becomes very transparent. This is a great background. It's a great way to show layers. It's a great way to introduce a petal or a flower that you then later want to add in another color too. So if I have it like that, but then I decide that I want to add in just a little bit of this lavender color, I could add in just a touch of lavender to it. To add another layer of color. This one we're going to call just your transparent, the most watery. Some people call it tea strength. If you think of iced tea or hot tea, this is tea strength where it's just water with a touch of color to it. Then we can go to more of a coffee strength where we add a little bit more color to it where it's still thick. But you see how when you push your paint brush across it, it does leave a little white line, so it's a little bit thicker. If I'm just using this teal color now and I add this to it, you can see that I am getting just a little thicker in my paint. That will be really great if I want to be able to add in another color on top, using that same teal, but just a darker less water to it. You can see how that's just going to now flow across. Then if you want to make it even thicker, I would call this milk consistency where you're coming in and it's pretty darn thick. It's a lot of paint and just a little bit of water. Now this is going to be a more milky consistency. So you can see how much darker that is in here. Compared to these others. But you will also notice that when I go to add in another color and let's just choose this blue. If I go to add in this color, it will blend continue to blend and bleed out. It's just going to have less contrast because here we were really, really light, and I added in a color. And here we were medium, and I added in a color. So you're just going to be getting less contrast. So you don't have that light background with a little darker on top. You're going to be seeing this. And when this starts to dry, you'll see what I mean, where there's less contrast between the background and that little addition that you added in. Then what I'm going to use next is what I would call cream. That's pretty much when you go right into the wet paint itself, and there's very little water on it. I'm not going down in here into where the water is liquid. I'm just going into where the paint is itself and it's really thick. Let me just use this little palette. This is just a dry palette just to show you this is how creamy it is. So almost like cream that you would put on your face, very, very creamy. And when I put that on here, look at how creamy that paint is. But it also makes it so that it's almost not transparent at all. And if I go and try to add in that blue, that dark blue again, it's barely going to move because it is so dry already. That cream is so dry that that's not going to blend because it's almost too dry of a paint. When cream is really great is when you are adding it to something that is already wet. I'm going to try that again and I'm just going to show you what I mean. I'm going to take some of this more coffee texture where it's still transparent, but maybe not as transparent as this tea. So back to coffee. Then if I wanted to add in this cream, go back to this cream and dipping right into the paint itself. Same color. I'm just going to do the same color. Because this is creamy and this is coffee, it creates just this beautiful flow. Look at that. It's coffee and cream. Cream that you put in your coffee, it as a perfect combination. You will be able to create really nice combinations of color if your original if your original painting was made with a coffee strength of water and paint, and then you add in a cream strength of a second color. We're going to watch how that flows. See how you can watch that and you can see it's just flowing out and growing across. Coffee on the bottom, cream added. So there's a perfect example of all of that. So now I'm going to just show you what happens if we paint with cream. Let's just say I'm not going to I just have this creamy see that creamy texture where it's just paint with a little bit of water added to it. I'm like, Well, that's wet. That's water painting. That's watercolor there, right? That's creamy. So now I go to make my flour. And just look at how difficult that is for me to paint and look how jagged that is. It's not flowing. It's not filling in with the paper. It's just it's too dry. It's too hard to paint with watercolor. And if you are getting this kind of a result, you're probably painting with cream and not enough water. If I just take a little bit of water and I add it to it and I make it more of a coffee strength, watch how much easier it is for me to paint that flour. But then if I want to add that dark color back into the center, I can come back over and dip in and get that creamy part and I can add it right here into the center because I'm adding cream to my coffee. And just look how beautiful that is. That is so pretty. Because it's the right combination of how much water to paint and using it in the right application. I can even because I have cream here on my brush, I can add in some little dots into the center here to finish off those little flowers. Same with if I was going to be painting a leaf. If I used this creamy paint, creamy paint to paint a leaf, spin it around. I try to make a line, and I make this leaf, I make another leaf. Now, that worked. But it's thick and it's dry and I can't make the leaf as nicely as I can, if it is more of a coffee strength where I can create this beautiful flow. So use coffee or tea strength when you are painting the first layer. Add cream when you're adding in some of the details. Now, you might say, but then when on Earth do I use the tea strength? Let's talk about that. You would use the tea strength when you are adding in a background or when you want to add additional leaves and petals that are a lighter consistency, lighter quality. Here we have coffee flowers. And if I wanted to add in, here you can see all the way out here, this is my tea strength, blue. So I'm just going to pick up some of my teeth strength because it's so liquidy. I can create these little tiny tea Flowers, Tea strength flowers. Put one there. Put another one, tiny one over here. We're gonna let those dry. Those there. I'm gonna let those start to dry to show you what tea strength flowers look like. Compared to these flowers. But again, I'm gonna wait. I'm going to add in some cream to my tea. I'll dip back into my creamy paint over here. And you can see that I can add a touch of that creamy paint into my flowers. Because the cream that I'm adding is cream strength and not too watery, it's just going to naturally blend out so beautifully. But you can also see the color difference between these tea strength flowers and these coffee strength flowers. You can also use strength paint as your background. Here I'm using this teal color, strength, and I'm just going to add in some background and around. You can see how you can add in this lighter color because it's tea strength in and around your flowers and that'll create a really beautiful background. So, coffee, milk, cream. Hope that helped. I think the only thing that left that I really wanted to show you is what happens if you try to use your coffee or tea strength on a coffee or tea strength flour. So let's just quick do that one as one last thing just to make sure you fully understand. So here I have this is a coffee strength. I'm just going to make a quick little flour here. Again, just a little a little quick flour, four petal flour. Then let's say you want to come. You want to come in with a coffee strength blue, and you want to add that to the center instead of adding in cream, let's just watch to see what happens. It's always fun to do experiments, so you should be experimenting with this at home. So this is not a problem. You can do this. There's nothing wrong with doing this in your paintings. If you use a coffee strength and a coffee strength or a tea strength and a tea strength, but what you're going to get is a much more subtle combination instead of a much more dynamic, dramatic contrast like this. This remember, this was the exact same color. I use the same blue for my coffee, and I use the same blue for my cream and look at how drastic of a change in colors. This is a tea strength blue with the exact same blue, same paint, but in cream. Tea with cream and coffee with cream. But here I use two different colors and you can see how that second color almost took over the first color. Instead of leaving a really nice dramatic change. So we'll just do it one more time for fun. If I added running out of a little bit of paint here, if I added in, this is just gonna make a three petal because that's what I have room for. A T strength or this is coffee. Sorry. Coffee strength petals. And then doing it again in the same color, it doesn't make sense because it's going to just be more of the same. You see how it doesn't do anything, which is why I had to choose a different color. We're here adding in the same color just made this beautiful contrast. Here, when I added in a complimentary color, it just blended almost out to the tips. I would have to come back in with more cream strength on my brush. Here, I can do this because this is still wet. And add cream to my coffee. I want you to play around with this. This would be so good for you as beginner artists to play like I just did follow along, do this. You can rewind this video and do this again. Get out This is just a scrap piece of paper. This is just a painting I had done for another class. I just use the backside of it. That's what I've been doing all along. It's all these little ones. I just use the backside of something else that I've already done that I'm not going to be framing and I use the backside of the paper for scrap. And I play and I practice, I see if I can create tea strength, coffee strength, milk strength, and cream. Once I have made those four, I start to play around with them and I create little combinations. So we're going to be using this in our final lesson, so make sure you have practiced this so that you have an opportunity to use this skill in our final class because I cannot wait to see what you have learned and what you have put to practice. Come on back for our fourth class, our fourth lesson, which is going to be not painting in every single detail. Or another way of saying that is creating beauty without details. So let's come on back to the next lesson, and we're going to be discussing creating paintings without feeling like we have to get into the nitty gritty detail. 5. Mistake #4: Staying Loose Without Every Detail: If you followed my account for a while, you have probably noticed that I like to paint in a loose watercolor style. Sometimes I call it atmospheric, sometimes I call it loose. Sometimes it's even abstract. The reason that I prefer that and maybe it's the same reason you prefer it is that I am not detail oriented. I personally don't love all the little details that go into a painting when paintings get really, really refined and absolutely beautiful. There is I'm not disrespecting a detailed painting. Those are beyond beautiful, but that is not my style. What I think is really important is that you discover your style. Try a whole bunch of different styles of watercolor paintings. Try painting sceneries and trees and landscapes and houses and buildings, try painting flowers that look realistic. Try painting leaves that have a realistic take a real leaf and lay it out and paint it so that you get it to be as close to realistic as possible. Then also try loose, organic, flowing atmospheric painting and discover what brings you the most joy. Some people look at my watercolors and see how loose and atmospheric and almost abstract that they are. And they go, No, that's not for me. I like it when I can look at it and I can identify that that is a blue cornflower, or that is a pink rose, whereas they might look at my roses and say, well, are they roses or are they peonies, am I looking at it? What is it that I'm looking at? It looks like it's blurry almost. To me and my style, this is what brings me joy. This painting like this brings relaxation. Where there are so many things in my life that the details are so important. I I don't get all my details done right in other areas of my life, then I cause problems, either problems for myself or for my work or for my family. You have to be detail oriented in so many places in your life that when I come and sit down at my watercolor table, the last thing I want is to feel like I have to be detail oriented here too. So for me, painting in a style that allows your brain to just relax, let the paint flow, see what happens, discover a new technique, create something unexpected, add color combinations that you had no idea if they were going to work or not work. Play and have fun. So when I paint in this style, I personally get relaxation and joy. Not everybody does. Some people like control. They like to have the understanding that when they are finished, it's going to actually look like a rose. They look at this and they say, but what flower is it? And their minds need details, definition. And specifics. And that is great. You can go and paint that way, and your work is going to be stunning. And I am so proud of you for knowing who you are and what makes you relax. I find relaxation in this style. What makes you happy? Have you tried all the different styles? Have you looked into all the different kinds of paintings? I encourage you to go and try different styles. Find loose like some of my classes, find some more detailed, try landscape, try buildings, see what's going to be making you happy. We're going to be painting something similar to this today, just as an example of what I'm talking about where we do not need to have the answers, all the details. We just have something that shows shape and form without needing all the details. Now, this particular one is one of my other classes. I'm not going to repaint this one because you can take this one from another class of mine. But what we are going to be doing is using this as the foundation for what I'm referring to when I talk about just letting the paint brush do its thing and painting loose and not worrying about the details. So I'm adding this lesson in here in this class for my tips and tricks or mistakes that people make. I want to be careful because it's not a mistake to be detail oriented. That's not what I'm trying to explain here. What I'm trying to explain is if you are working in a loose way, if you are working in an atmospheric style, if what your goal is more abstract or more loose or more atmospheric, and then you go and try to add your details in, that's when the mistakes are happening. So choose your style and then decide to stay there instead of going and then adding in the details on top. That's where the mistake is coming from. So for example, on here, if I had gone and all of a sudden decided that I needed to draw real petals and show you exactly where every single petal was and draw out maybe outline the leaves and put in all the different vines, I mean, the veins in the leaves, that's where the mistake would have been coming from by adding in too many details on top of a very loose painting. So let's paint something really loose and get into it and see what happens. So when I am painting loose, I definitely like to choose one of my larger paint brushes. Today, I'm going to be using my size 12. And in today's lesson, what we're going to do is just use some paint and we're going to put it down on paper. I'm not going to be painting anything in particular. I'm not looking to paint a specific rose or a specific daisy or tulip or anything like that. I'm just going to, I put a little dot there, so that's obviously where my paint is going to go. I'm just going to add some little bits of paint around here. Maybe this is my first flower. I'm just going to add something like that. Then maybe I want to pick up some blue. I'm going to get my coffee strength, and I'm just going to add in some blue here. I want you to see that I'm holding my paint brush up near the end. I'm at least a third of the way up, and I'm just holding onto it like that. And I'm just dabbing it. Dab dab dab, dab some more over here, switch it up, come back over to my teal. I didn't wash off my paintbrush completely, so now it's kind of a combination. Do you see how I'm I'm not making it particular or detailed. I don't even have real petals here. I'm just putting in some little blobs in a circle. Now I'm going to rinse off my paint brush. I'm going to use the same size 12, this great big giant paint brush, and I'm going to grab some green and I'm going to add in some little lines. Do you see how they're not all connecting? Some of them come all the way down, some of them don't of them touch to the flowers, some of them don't I'm going to add in some little leaves using the same size 12, again, holding it on the top quarter, top third, I'm just going to add in some little leaves. Because we're not going to be making details here. We're just going to be adding in some pretty little leaves. I'm going to mix it up and I'm going to come in and get a different color green and just see if I can add in some extra little bits here and there. Adding different colors of greens really adds to your painting. I'm going to rinse that off. I'm going to just stay with this size 12 because I want to make a point here that you can use your size 12 for everything if that is the way you'd like to go. I'm going to stay with those colors. We're going to add in one other green, but I want this green to be more of a yellow green. I'm just going to grab some of this orangey color. I'm going to pick up some of my green. I'm going to mix them together here on my palette. Pick that up. Again, this is a milky strength right now. I could add a little bit more water to make it coffee strength. Dip it off, and then I'm going to just add a little bit more of the third color. I'm looking very carefully for where a little bit extra of leaves would be beneficial. Okay. That's it. That's all I'm going to do for my greens. Now I feel like my centers need something for my little flowers, using the same great big paint brush because I am going to stay with my size 12. I'm just going to come in and grab some yellow, and I'm going to use that in my cream strength. So I want it to be nice and creamy, creamy yellow. Cream strength. If you skipped over the last lesson where we talked about water, you might want to go back and review that where we were talking about how much water to use. I'm going to use my cream strength. I'm going to come in and look for the petals flowers that can handle some yellow added to it. Just going to add in some yellow here or there as if they are the centers of these flowers. There we go. Now, I did all of this whole painting with a size 12, and you can see this great big paintbrush, there is no way that I could add in details by using a great big size 12 paintbrush. But I've painted something that's really pretty, very organic, very fun and extremely relaxing. So go ahead and paint something similar to this. Use the largest paint brush that you have. Don't add in the details. Don't go back in and add in layers. Just let it be the way it's going to be. Let them blend the paints. So here you can see that my green leaf is blending in with my teal petal, and that's great. I love that. Maybe there'd be more for you. Maybe yours blended in even more, and that would be wonderful. So go ahead and paint something like this without adding in the details. Just drop the paint brush and let the paint brush do its thing and see what you discover. See what you create just by letting the paintbrush and the paint play around on the paper. I think you're going to be surprised once you are all finished and it is dry and you step away from it, I bet you're surprised at how beautiful it actually is and how much fun you had without thinking about adding details or making sure each flower looked perfect. I want to see this painting in the gallery. So when you have finished it and stride, grab a screenshot of it and upload it to the gallery because it's really good to see what everybody is going to be making when they make something like this. Come back to the next lesson, which is going to be our last one, which is regarding white space on your painting and allowing for that white space and allowing for the painting to breathe and for your eyes to wander with intentional white space. Come on back to the next lesson. 6. Mistake #5: Letting White Space Do the Work: So we've gone over so many different things so far. We've talked about not overworking our paintings. We also talked about using too small of a paintbrush and how that can affect our paintings and that actually using a larger paintbrush is going to be helping us be more successful. Then we talked about water control. And if you missed this lesson, please go back and watch this lesson about water control. It's so important. It's probably the most important lesson in this whole class. And then in the last lesson, we talked about not painting every single detail. If you are painting in a loose atmospheric style, the way that I teach, painting the details is where sometimes we get hung up and that a lot of looseness and this flow comes when you are not intentionally creating a specific flower or specific shape. Just like when we painted these little flowers, I was not trying to create a shape or having it face a certain direction. I wasn't doing anything intentional at all. But even so because we just allowed the paint to work and the paint brush to flow across our page, we're able to create something that's really fun. But something that I want to bring into the attention for this next class is controlling the white space. In watercolor, white space is so important. We don't typically have white on our palette. Now, here you do see some white right here. This is actually guash. I don't think, as far as my understanding is, is that watercolor does not actually have a white. If you want white, you have to buy guash Guash is just more opaque watercolor. You still use water with this, but it creates a thicker, more opaque paint. If you are going to be adding this, let's see if I have. If I was going to be adding this squash, I can be adding some guash paint and white and you can add it on top, just like that. Which is fine, and I 100% agree with that, there's nothing wrong with using white to guash. But when you're painting with watercolor, I want you to learn how to not have to need to use the guash and to rather intentionally leave white space around things so that your white space is naturally coming from your paper. So let's take a look at a couple other examples. These are some of the other pieces that I have painted for my classes, so we'll just use these as an example. Here, when I was painting these little flowers, maybe it doesn't matter what kind of flower they are, you can see that I added white space around there. I was not making my petals so solid that we don't have white spaces around. So with this one, you can see how I incorporated the white spaces right into the flowers. Instead of making it solid, I allowed for white spaces in between each of the petals. Even up in here, where these would have been solid petals if you were seeing them out in the wild. But I left little white dots around just to create that little contrast and to add a little bit of white and highlights to my flowers. Even here, you can see that this petals aren't usually shaped like that. But it adds so much interest to allow for that white space. Then even over here, if you want to see in some of my leaves, I intentionally left some white spaces for adding interest into my leaves. Then down at the base, where I was painting and I added in this really soft background for a table, I intentionally used a dry paint brush with just a little bit of paint on it, and I brushed it across and allowed white spaces to be formed all the way across my paper here. And all those little white spots gives it texture. It gives it highlight, gives it interest. If you look inside of my vase, you can see where I just added little bits of color, different blues, different greens, but I didn't fill it in edge to edge. I left white spaces. I even left white spaces around the outside edge where I was painting in my backgrounds and in the centers here where I wanted to allow for some light to be. So when you look at my painting from a distance, you look at it and you don't necessarily see white spaces, but your eye naturally allows you to enjoy those white spaces and almost rest in those areas. Maybe your eye immediately goes to the yellow because that's the contrast, that's the bright one, that's the one that's different. Maybe your eye goes there, but then as your eye floats across, maybe it comes down this direction and it's getting some breath in here with the white space. This one being the lightest is almost a white space all of its own and it feels very relaxed and enjoyable. Then you see all this down and here and your eye goes across because you see that texture and that lightness. So it's really important that we add in and allow for those white spaces, just like on this one that we just did from the last lesson, where I intentionally left white spaces. I didn't fill everything full with leaves. I didn't make sure that every single flower had a stem. I didn't make sure that there was three leaves on every stem. I'm just adding in the stems and the leaves where needed and where appropriate. Where it adds to my painting because there's no obligation when you are painting. There's no obligation to make it perfect. There's no obligation to make sure that every flower is facing the right exact direction. You are the artist and you are allowed to make this however you want to make it. But leaving in that white space certainly allows for your eyes to wander and to rest in different areas and to explore the painting with a fresh new look because your eye is not being bogged down by darkness. So here's another example where I added white. I allowed the white to come in between these petals. When you look at a real rose or a real peony, you do not see white spaces. There is no white in here. But if I hadn't added this white in between here, you wouldn't understand the definition between the different peony petals. Here we have these little white parts to show and indicate where the different petals are. Even on a darker painting, I have intentionally left white spaces. I left a couple of white spaces in these little roses. Then I also made sure that when I was painting my background that I left some areas that were going to be lighter. Now, they're not completely white. As you can see, this is painted. This is Okay. As you can see up close, this is white with a little tiny bit of paint on it. That paint is very, very light. It's that T strength that we were talking about earlier in the other class. This is that T strength. You look at the entire painting as a whole. This allows for a white space for your eyes to rest in, and this allows for some white space for your eyes to rest in. Even though technically that is painted with T strength paint, and this is as well, it is so much lighter than the rest of the painting. That this is your area for rest. I hope that that makes sense for you and that you can intentionally, whether you're painting a darker painting that you allow for some white spaces, even if it's just a few little spots in amongst your rose petals, or if you're painting a much lighter, looser style like this where you have lots of white spaces. But looking at the white spaces in between my petals and in the center of my flowers really adds a lot to this. Come on back to the very next class lesson where we are going to actually build on all five of these tips and tricks and concerns or issues or whatever we want to call them. I don't like to make them called mistakes because in watercolor, I don't think there is mistakes. I think it's just a learning process. Come on back to the next class where we're going to work on our next project and we are going to create a really fun painting where we incorporate not overworking our painting or knowing when to stop. Using the right size paintbrush, which will probably mean a larger paintbrush, maybe even larger than what you're used to. Using the right quantity of water, not too much, not too little, the right amount for the right job. Foregoing those details. Let the rest of your life have details. In today's painting, let's skip those details. Then also making sure that we allow for space for our eyes to rest and leaving in some white spaces. I can't wait to see what you've painted. You're going to be able to choose whatever it is that you would like to paint, but come on back and I will be painting a painting with you where we incorporate those five lessons. See you in the next class. 7. Class Project: Bringing It All Together: So for our last class, what we're going to do is just paint a simple three flower bouquet. You can make whatever you want to. If you want to make roses, go ahead and make roses. If you want to make tulips, go ahead and make tulips. It doesn't matter to me what shape you make your flowers, what style or color, or even the composition. What I'm looking for from this particular class, from the upload that you're going to be giving of your final class project, is that you have listened to the class, that you have taken from that class the five different things that we have gone over in this lesson. That you are not overworking your painting, that you're learning and figuring out when to stop before you go and overwork it, know when to stop and be done with your painting, that you are using the right size paintbrush, which probably means you need to go larger than smaller. Most likely you are using too small of a paint brush, and you should try the next size larger. The third thing was that you are using the appropriate amount of water for the task. Go back and watch that lesson, learn your water control, learn how to use water to your advantage. Fourth, that you are not worrying about every single detail. Today we're painting in a loose style and you can be painting in a way that the flower does not actually have to be recognizable as a specific flower. You do not need to add in every single vein that is inside of a leaf. Today in this lesson, we are just going to paint loose and without detail. It doesn't mean you can't add layers. You're very welcome to add different layers of painting. But we're going to be trying to just skip all the extra details that might be seen inside of painting. And lastly, we're going to make sure that we preserve our white space, the white space around the painting and within the painting, within each flower. Doesn't mean that every single leaf must have a white center or white stripe. I've seen that as well, where every single leaf gets that little extra detail of white. Let me see if I can find that to show you what I'm referring to. So in this one, we talked about how I left some white spaces in my leaves, like a little spot there and a little spot here. Now, if I had done these little white spots in every single leaf, it may have become a little bit too expected, a little too standard. So I was very selective in not making every single leaf had that little white center or a little white highlight. Just add the highlights in some of your leaves. It will just add so much to your painting. So I will paint if you would like to follow my painting and do the exact same thing, that is fine. You go right ahead and follow along with what I'm doing and make it however you would like to. If it looks similar to mine, that's great. If you want to go completely off kilter and do something completely different, that's also fine. I'm just asking that you follow the lessons that were in today's class and that you practice your best to show that you have learned those five challenges that new watercolor artists have experienced and that you are trying to overcome some of those challenges. When you are talking to me about your challenges and the things that you still are struggling with, I would love for you to tell me about that. Create a little discussion in our class here today so that we can discuss the issues that you're having because maybe then I can make an entire class just around the things that you are experiencing. So I would love to hear from you. So in today's class, I have this great big piece of watercolor paper, but I have a piece of tape that comes down here. It's not even centered. I'm just going to be painting on this quadrant over here. This whole other side is going to be reserved for something else. So I'm going to paint with a little flower up here at the top. This is going to be my very, very top flower. And I'm painting with a size eight paint brush. And I'm going to just kind of make this little jagged, see how I'm making it really jag it at the top. I'm going to leave a little open space. I'm gonna create a little base to it, and I'm gonna put a center in here with some little yellow semens coming out of it. I'm just going to create some little lines, some little white lines that come out that direction. Y'all need a little bit more this direction down, coming down, adding in just a little bit of white space here and there. Yeah, that worked. Just to add a little bit more over this side. That's going to be my center of my flour. I'll be adding in some little details, not main details, some light details like the center of a flower in here once it dries. Now I'm going to move on. I'm going to create a little orange flower. I was going again, I'm going to be using my I already had some water sprayed on this palette, which is why I was able to create this puddle of this almost milky texture somewhere between milk and coffee, and I'm going to be creating my base flower over here. And this one, I'm going to create kind of a multiple little leaves around the center. But I'm going to leave in some white spaces as I paint. I left those little white spots all the way around, and I left a white center. Now I will probably come back in with another color in a minute to add into that, but I need to wait for that paint to dry just a little bit because we're working on water control. I'm going to add a little bit of yellow. I'm gonna just create another flower here. This one is going to be kind of a little combination. I want my water to be looser, so I'm making this more on the coffee or tea side so that I have it's gonna be a fairly nice size flour. Something like that, leaving some white spaces in around and possibly maybe I'll add one more down in here. I wasn't going to, but I kind of feel like I want another flower down here. I add in some of my pinks. Kind of like a combination of all the different colors that are going on in here. Just add a little bit of everything. A little bit bigger. Petals. I'm not going to overwork it. Didn't love that one, but it's okay. I'm not going to overwork it. I'm going to leave it the way it is, and we can always add some extra details to it later. I'm just going to extend this a little bit by adding some white spaces to it. Now that this is starting to dry, I'm gonna come back in with this kind of red and add just a little bit of that other color to it, just to allow it to blend together. I'll put some over in this one, too. But now I'm going to go and find some creamier paint and use that cream. Thicker paint, less water and add that in here. So if it does blend, it's going to blend really thick. So I add some of those old dots. Maybe add a couple more up in here. Blend that in together. Okay. Now, my first one looks like that's almost dry. So I'm going to reuse my I'm just I've been rinsing off in this one, and then I have this clean one because I want to go into my yellow. So I'm going to use my clean water to make sure that my paintbrush is completely clean before I come over into my yellow because yellows are so careful, so easy to get messed up with other colors. So I like to make sure my paintbrush is fairly clean before I come in here. Now I'm going to be using that cream texture. So it's nice and thick on my paintbrush. I'm going to be adding in some little lines, some little stamens here. Just little lines and little dots. I even come in here and add some more, but that's still wet. I have to be careful. We're gonna let that dry. Okay. I rinse it off in my rinse bucket. Rinse it off in my white my clean bucket, so I rinse it off in my other one, and then I rinse it off in my clean so that I'm completely dry and clean. Now I'm going to come over and grab some greens. I'm just gonna mix it in with some of that yellow just because I like that earthier color. Again, this is kind of in that milky texture. I'm gonna create a little base. And how that flower stem is coming down. Oh, I want to have this one. It's going to kind of come this direction. This one's going to come that way. This one's going to come this way. And I'm gonna be adding off some little extra flowers, some extra buds, and maybe some little leaves. So I might want to add in a leaf here, and then I'm going to add some white space to that leaf. I'm going to add another leaf over here. Another white space, and I'll add a leaf up this direction. See how I added the little white? It wasn't identical in all of them. They're just similar. Then I can come and grab a different color green. I can add another thing, another leaf here. It's just a slightly different leaf. Slightly different leaf color. If I want to, I can even add some teal to this green. Make it more of a blue green. You can come off in different directions. You have a bigger one. Another big leaf down here. Put one here in the center. I feel like I need something there in the middle. Yours is going to look very different from mine. You're going to have decided to put flowers in different locations, and that's fine. There's no right or wrong. I think before I get too carried away with leaves, I'm going to add in another kind of flower. I'm going to choose to use one of my smaller paint brushes. This time, I'm going to use my size three, and I'm going to grab some a little bit of pink. Again, in my coffee strength, and I'm just going to add in maybe just a little wispness here. I've done this little flower before for you, where it's just these little dots and they just kind of come off in kind of a line with a little arch to them. Wider at the base, skinnier at the top. Yeah. Another one comes off of and here. Maybe what I do is I imagine it. I go, should it come here? Should it come down? Should it be something coming out? Where does it come from? Where Where does this next one come out of? I've imagined it and I decided that it should come up this way. I make the map and then I can make it wider as it comes up out of that. Maybe there's another one over here. Little dots, wider at the base. Well, you can come back in with another color. I'm gonna come in with a creamy, more of a purple color. I'm just going to add that because it's cream, it's going to be thicker and it'll help blend and create a second color. Something like that. Then I think maybe I want to add some go back to my paintbrush. My size eight. And I'm going to add a little yellow to my green and add some longer I have some coming down. I like to group them sometimes. It feels like that's getting dry, so I'm gonna dip back in and get my paintbrush nice and full and wet. This kind of creates this pretty little escape here. Lots of white space, not overworking it. Even though this one I want to come back in and overwork. I want to show you this. Let's take a minute and look at this together. I'm going to bring it up close. Now I brought it up close, you can see how this one my paint brush got a little dry. And so it left some little white spots of my paper showing. Now, the temptation is to come back over here with a fresh paint brush and paint right on top of that. But what will happen is this will then look overworked. And it is best if I leave this exactly the way it is. And then when it is 100% dry, if I still feel like it needs something, I can then come in and add a second layer of, like, just in some of the area, add a little touch of another color on top. But adding more paint right to this is going to add a problem that will make it look overworked. So I'm going to leave it exactly the way it is, even though it bothers me. So now I have my four little flowers, but I feel like I need a little bud. So sometimes I like to have, like, the small little buds coming off of it. So I think I'm going to add little a little green bud right here, kind of like a just kind of like an unformed flower, you know, just like a little small thing there, and maybe it gets another one up here, kind of like a little ball. Um, and then maybe let's see. Maybe I'll put one more over here kind of coming off this direction, leaving some little white spaces. And I'll do three. I think maybe I'll add something here, a little round one. And come back in for more paint 'cause my paintbrush is feeling a little dry. I think that maybe it needs something up in this area just to fully make my balance. Okay. So before those dry too much, I am going to come back in with a second color. I'm going to come back in with a darker color in a creamier texture. My paint is going to be creamy. I'm just going to add to the base before it dries. A darker, creamier green so that they can blend up into it and create that two tone effect. And then I'm going to use that same green and create a little stem like that. And now I'm going to get that two tone effect because I added cream to my coffee. So this is almost dry. Of course, the things that I just added are not dry, but I do want to add in some little green to these pink flowers. I'm just going to come back in with a little tiny. This is my size three paint brush. I'm just going to add in little tiny bits of green and a little stem in between the white spots. Okay. Now I think I want to add in little tiny bits of detail into the centers. I had put in the centers to let them bleed, but now I just want to add in just a little tiny bit of detail with some darker brown. See how I'm not worrying about making sure that every single piece of detail gets added in. I'm being very selective in my details. That's what I'm referring to about staying loose and not feeling like you have to get into all the details. I'm not sitting here saying, Oh, these leaves, they all need to have a center stem, so I have to add in a vein into every single one of these and with all the little veins coming off of them. That's what we're trying to avoid doing. It's fine if you want to add them into some but try not to be too detailed when you're working in a loose style. So I'm going to come back up here to this one that I didn't like, and I'm going to just grab some little bit darker than the shade that it was painted in. And I'm just going to add a small a small smidgen of detail just so that it kind of camouflages the fact that that leaf didn't have enough paint on it when it was done. And then I'm just going to add in just a little bit down in here just so that it feels balanced so that some of the other ones have that. Like I said, it's not when I say avoid the details, I'm not saying don't put a second layer. I'm saying just be very limiting in how much detail you add. Using my smaller paintbrush of size three, I am going to come in here and just add in just a little bit of a second layer to some of these petals. I'm just using the paint that's on my palette. That was very, very loose, very light lines. Okay. I think that's good enough. I'm going to stop while I'm ahead, stop before I've overworked it, stop before I added in too many details. I have left my white spaces. I have white spaces in my centers. I have white spaces in my leaves. I have white spaces in my petals, and I am leaving white spaces all the way around my whole painting. I hope you had fun painting with me today. Come back to the next lesson, and we're going to be putting this all together, reviewing the different lessons that we learned, looking for the challenges, and discussing which one is the one that might be hardest for you. I'd really like to hear from you. I'm also going to take this out of this board and show it to you in a mat because I think when you are finished with your painting, should always mat it, at least if you don't have a frame for it, at least put a mat around it so that you can see it and don't forget to sign your work. This is your beautiful work, and if you don't hang it up in your house, maybe someday somebody else will, or maybe somebody close to you will be able to look at this and find it in a drawer and say, Oh, remember back then when she used to paint? Isn't that so beautiful? So make sure you get your name printed onto this. I sometimes use just a pencil. I just have a mechanical pencil here, and I'll just sign my name a piece with a pencil. Sometimes I even go and I get my little gel pens out, and I sign it in a complimentary color. So you sign it, however, you feel comfortable. A pen works also. So whatever works for you. So come on back to the next lesson where we wrap everything up. 8. Final Thoughts and Next Steps: Congratulations on finishing the class and hopefully you painted your floral arrangement. I hope as you were painting, you found yourself thinking a little bit differently about the process. Maybe you pause before adding that other brushstroke and maybe you let the water create some of the softness for you, or perhaps you noticed yourself leaving a little bit more white space or simplifying a few of your leaves instead of painting all the details. Those small decisions may not seem like much, but over time, they can completely change the way that your watercolor painting looks and just as important how they feel and how it makes you feel. I also hope that you remember that these aren't rules that you have to perfectly follow every time you paint. They're simply ideas to keep in mind as you continue growing on your watercolor journey. Some paintings may need more layers, while others are at their best with just a few confident brushstrokes. The more you practice, the more you'll develop a feel for those decisions. And that confidence comes with experience. Would love for you to upload your finished project into the project gallery. It doesn't have to look like mine. In fact, I hope it doesn't you've chosen different colors, changed the composition, or added your own creative touches, that's wonderful. Those personal choices are all about developing your own artistic style. If you have questions or would like to have feedback, please leave them in the discussion section. I check in regularly, and I truly enjoy seeing your progress and cheering you on. And if you enjoyed this class and would like to continue practicing, I have many more watercolor classes to explore with different flowers, techniques and ways to build confidence with a loose, relaxed painting style. Each class is designed to help you grow one step at a time, and I'd love to paint with you again. I hope you picked up some tips today, possibly a few new things that you hadn't practiced before, and maybe you've discovered something that you will take into your future and enjoy painting well into the time that we have finished painting together. Thank you so much for spending your time with me today and I hope that this class encouraged you to relax, enjoy the process, and trust yourself a little bit more every time you pick up your brush. Happy painting, and I'll see you in the next class.