Christmas Watercolor Botanicals - Paint A Lush Holiday Festive Wreath

1. Introduction: Hi guys and welcome to my Christmas botanical class. I'm Emily was also a watercolor artist and educator based in the UK. Today we are going to be painting Christmas botanical. So that's things like Holly and IV employee Satya. And then we're going to be painting them as individual elements. And then we're going to be putting them into a festive Christmas wreath. So these are perfect if you are wanting to paint your own holiday cards, christmas greetings cards, gift cards, if you want to pay you, I'm wrapping paper where if you just want to paint something to get you in a bit of a holiday spirit. And this is exactly the cluster you please don't forget to share your work in the project section on skill share, I'd love to see what you create. And if you want to post it on Instagram, you can tag me as well. I'd love to share anything I see in my stories. Okay, let's get Painting. 2. Supplies You'll Need: Alright guys, we're gonna talk about supplies before we get started. So I'm gonna run through everything you need for this class. So essentially we need what's called a paint, what's called a brushes, watercolor paper and some cups of water and a paper towel. And now I'm gonna talk you through what I'm going to be using. But you don't need these exact supplies to take this class. You can use whatever you've got to hand. So I use Winsor Newton professional watercolor paints. So I buy these in tubes and I squeeze them out into this cheap plastic pallets and just let them dry for a couple of days. And then I can just go in and reactivate them with a wet brush. I'm gonna be using legion Stonehenge article press paper. So this particular paper, watercolor paper, which is really important and if you want to get good results with your painting, it's best to use paper that's designed for what color? This is a 100% cotton, which means that it's a really nice fine finish and it's cold pressed, which means it has a little bit of texture, as you can see, which just gives a nice effect. This is in a block, which means that the edges are glued. It just holds it down still while I paint. If you don't have a block, you can use masking tape or what she taped or something like that to just hold paper down while you paint. And then for brushes, I'm using Princeton heritage 40-50 around brushes. And these are nice synthetic brushes. They have around Farewell in a little pointy tip that they're really handy brushes to paint with. And the ones that are used most, most days when I'm painting. So I've got a size eight, size five, and the sludge to full details for the water cups, I have to you can see they're really dirty, but I have one for warm colors. So that's your Reggie oranges, yellows. And I have one for washing off cool colors like blues and greens. The reason that I do this is that because we bring the water back to the pilot to mix the colors. If the water gets all muddy and brown and dirty, they can make the colors look doll. So it's helpful to start using two cups and get into the habit of Washington brush-off separately. However, if you don't have that or you don't like to work like that. You can use one cup and just change the water more regularly to stop it getting all muddy and Brown. I've also got some cheap paper towels there just for damming off the brush if there's too much water on it or picking up any mistakes as well. So that's everything that we need for this class. 3. Colour Mixing: Okay, before we get started with painting, I want to talk to you about mixing colors. And primarily for this class, we're going to be using greens for the barnacles. Essentially all greens are a mixture of blues and yellows. So if you want to mix up a simple green, you can simply take a yellow and your pilot, this is lemon yellow deep. And then we just add a bit of blue. If we add, say, some Prussian blue and we mix up a green color. And so the more yellow you have in the mixture, the more it will be a yellow, green, and then the more blue you add, the more it will be a kind of blue-green. So you can mix up lots of different variations with that. Many Palace also have a good green in them. And one of my favorites for this is Sap Green, which is what we would consider a mid green. So it's a sort of equal balance between blue and yellow and it creates a mid College Green. And what you can do is add yellow to this if you want to do a yellowish green. And then you can add to it to create a more blue toned green like that. Another one I really recommend if you paint a lot of botanical is Huck is green, which is a much bolder kind of forest green. And again mixes up quite well with yellow and blue. So play around with the colors that you have. Try mixing up some different greens and see what you prefer. And you can experiment with different blues as well. You know, a Prussian blue is gonna give a very different tone to a cobalt blue. So you can definitely play around with those. The other thing you can do if you've got quite a strong green, like a hook is green or of a radian. And you think it looks a little bit kind of unnaturally green if you're doing something that you wanted to be a bit more muted, what you can do is add a bit of red to that. And the reason is that red is the complimentary opposite color on the color wheel. So if you add a little touch of red to green, it will tone down the green and give you more of a muted color like that. And you only need a tiny bit of red for this to work. If you use too much red, it will turn brown because the two colors will cancel each other out. But if you want to mix more kind of mossy forest greens, then adding a little bit of red or even some pink can just tone that down to get it more of a natural green color. So that's all that we have on color mixing. Let's go painting. 4. Fir branch: Alright, now we're ready to start painting on photonic goals. So the first one we're going to do is a third branch. So these are great for if you want to do wreaths or decorations hanging off a Christmas tree branch. And so for this, I'm going to be using a mixture of Sap Green and a little bit of Prussian blue just to make it a nice deep color. How to enroll that? I'm plenty of water as well. So we're going to use a few different values of this are going to be adding more paint or more water as we go along to create variation. And we're also going to be using burnt umber, which is a brown color. And this is a nice warm, reddish brown. So this will be for the stem. So we're gonna start with the stem. And for this, I'm just going to stick with my size two because it's a nice thin brush and it's easier to control. And what we're going to do is do a arc curve stem like that in the burnt umber and rinsed off really well and pick up the green. And then we're going to get painting the spines or I don't think that really leaves. So what we're gonna do for this is used the tip of our brush and just touch it against whether stem is pressed down, pull and left up. And we're going to do that to create a framework for the leaves. Now what you can see here is that these are not coming straight out perpendicular from the stem and following the same direction as the stem and curving up an N. So both sides are coming out and then curving up in the same direction. So you can use kind of pushing motion for the ones on the top and then oppress and pull the ones underneath. Now, what you can see I'm doing here is just laying out the framework of what the shape will be. Further branches are very dense, they have a lot of spines. And so to capture about what we're going to do is use different layers as we go back through. So all of that so far is in a kind of light to mid value. What I'm gonna do is add more water to create a really light value. And then start filling in some of those gaps. Can you see they're worth touched the paint that was still wet, it's all blending. It's my favorite thing about watercolor. I'm going to go back in and just fill in some gaps with a really light pale value. It's also okay to let them overlap. Helps make them look more natural when you do that because nothing is perfect or organic in nature. And then what we're going to do is add a tiny bit of Prussian blue to get a nice deep mix. And I'm going to add a dark value in the gaps. Overlapping, filling that and making sure there's a good variation of dark values, light values. If we paint them all in the same column x, what will happen is that they'll all blend together and then they'll look just like one big blob of color. So it's really important that we work in kind of layers and just create mixtures and variations of the value. As we get closer to the bottom, what I'm going to do is shorten some of the spines like that. And if you create a section like that, whether all a similar color, you can go back in with a dry brush to just rinse off socket on a paper towel and then just lift up some of that color. I have a few more midterms and just fill in some gaps. And just make it look nice and dense. One final touch to add to this is just to go back over the stem and dark and it, and it will, should bleed out a little into some of the spines that are still what. And then we have it. Now there is another style of this that you can do that involves a shorter stem and longer spines. So we'll do that one as well to hit a short stem and then back to our green. And we're going to do belong in a sort of long curved shaped like that. So you can see I'm putting down quite a gappy framework at first, just so that I can get the composition right. And then we go back with the light of values and just fill in there. I'm also going to extend a few of these as well. And then finally, we can add the doc values. I love when these all blend together. Create so many interesting mixtures on the paper. If you don't like the blending, you can also do this in layers and just let them dry. It's often a personal preference, rarely go. And then we'll do one last darkening lengthening of the stem as well. And the, pull that down here. And then just push the up. There we go. Have it. That is two ways to paint further branches. 5. Ivy leaves: Okay, so for our next festive botanical, we're going to be painting IV. Now we're going to use a different technique for this, where we do the outline first and then we fill in with color. And to go through this, what I've brought along as a, an Ivy Leaf, the I pinched from a neighbor's garden just to look at the shape of them. Because when we're painting in a loose style like this, getting the shape right is most important and then we don't need all the detail. So first of all, they start from a central point where it meets the stem here, and then they come up like a heart. And they have a fairly straight edge with a bit of a flick out to a point and then they come back into a long point at the bottom. So that is going to be the essence that we try and capture. And what I'm gonna do is pull a stem down and paint some leaves coming off both sides, essentially. So we're going to be using my size five for this. And I'm just going to paint the light stem just to give me some idea of where the leaves are going to go. You can always go back over this at a later date. So I'm going to add a bit more subgrade and make this one more of a mid-term green than a blue-green. So then what we're going to do is imagine that the stem comes out here. So I'm going to start from where the stem would meet the leaf. I'll put this up here so you can see. And then we come out with the heart shape. They're out for a flick like that. And then we come back in for the long point like that. And what I'm going to do is divide this in half so that we fill in 1.5 each time. And I'm going to try and leave a small white gap in the middle. This will just make sure that it doesn't all turn into one big blob. So then I'm going to use mostly water and a lite bit of paint just to go over and fill in those lines. Same on the other side. If your lines have dried, you sometimes you need a bit of water and to go over that with your brush to just blend everything together. And then once you've got the shape filled out, then we can have some fun with wet. And now you can always go back over these edges if you don't like the way it's sitting. And then we can pick up a darker. But if paint and go over and start adding that along the edge there or down the center. I'm just allowing for some color variation and value variation more than anything. And then I'm simply going to connect to that up to the main stem. And then we're going to do the same thing on the other side, but coming out from a different point. Come out, they're gonna do this one in a light of value. So plenty of water. And then the heart-shaped first, down and out. And then what I'm gonna do is come down in the center. And that can sometimes help you direct to where the point should be. How we go. Fill this in with plenty of water and other kind of light value. And then carefully leaving whitespace for a vein, it just stops it all becoming warm color and helps it to create variation. Light tone. And then I'm going to add some really dark colors there. Just like that blend. And maybe we'll do one more little one at the bottom here. So out from the stem. If you find loose painting quite tricky or it doesn't come very naturally to you. One of the best things you can do is to try and paint something really quickly. Because it forces you to make quick decisions. And actually stay loose because you don't have time to fuss about the details or be second guessing yourself. And I sometimes when when I was practicing and sometimes even just as a warm-up has set a timer and say five minutes, and then I have to complete the painting in that time. And it means that you don't have ages to be going over things, over working things. So you can see I've sped up quite a bit here to get this last one in. Can also go and just tap your brush and create a bit of texture. And then what I'm gonna do is go back over the stem line with a dark color here. Keep polling around. So there we have some IV. Now if you want, when these dry there not quite dry enough for me to show you that you can also use a dark color and pull out some vanes or you can go over it with white gel pen. It, it's a nice way to details, but it helps to do it properly Andre, otherwise it will simply blend out and smudge. So I really like how they turned out. So I'm gonna stop there before I overwork it. 6. Holly and berries: All right, then the next botanical, festive botanical that we're going to look at is Holly. Um, these are really lovely plants to paint because there's such a fun shape and we're gonna use a similar technique for the IV. So I'm gonna grab some more sap green. In this instance, I'm also going to add Prussian blue together as a nice blue tone. Nice deep on that. What I'm also going to do is add just a tiny touch of red to turn that down and make it a nice deep forest color. Okay, Brill. And we're going to do the same technique with the outlining, first with the brush. So holly have a spiky shape that essentially is lots of little curves. So for example, if we draw the center line in first, and then all we're going to do is start from the top and come out to a point. And then we're going to do a little loop and little half circle and come out to another 0.5 circle, come up to a 0.5 circle to a point and then come down to an endpoint that so that's half of it. And then we're going to do the same thing on the other side. So come out to 0 and another, and another, and then come along here. Now, while you've got the outline, you can always go back over and change any bits that you don't like the look of. And then we're going to do the same thing with filling that in. You can use this point in the painting to kind of tweak any shapes that you don't like. Go back over any lines that have dried and just lift them reactivated so you don't get lines in it. And then we'll do the same thing with the long white center as well with the vein. And that's essentially how to paint Holly. You simply need to half circles with the pointy edges. Now, the best way to create contrast with this is to put the darkest paint right at the tips and let it bleed out. You can also dark and along that center line as well. And then the final addition to any Holly Little Red therapies. For this, I'm going to use scarlet lake. Mix that up on my palette. And you want to read that's quite bold because it needs to contrast with the green. And then what I'm gonna do is paint a circle, but leave a little dot for highlight. To make the berries look nice and fresh. You can also use a lighter value and then just touch it to allow a little bit of blending. So let's do another holly leaf underneath. I'm going to add a bit more green to this one. That most sap green. I'm going to come out in the other direction. So central line first and then up to a 0.5 circle, half circle. And we're going to have a little one at the end. So you can turn your paper so that makes it easier. I'm trying not to so that it doesn't disrupt the video. But if you're struggling with getting your arm in the right place, it's sometimes easier to turn the paper around. And then we fill in. Can also go back over and extend any points as well if you want those to be super spiky. And then we'll do the same thing on the other side. If you like the Western wet sometimes it helps to fill it in with a lot of water and then you can add to the colors as you go. Could be pointed to and that could be appointed as well. To the points to the center to right. Now it's time for our little berries are red. And then we do the circles with the highlights. And it helps not to touch the red berries to the green leaves. And it seems how it would grow in nature. And it does. But when we do that with wet paint, what will happen is they'll blend together and create a sort of brown color. And it won't look very appetizing. So that is our holy. 7. Poinsettia: Okay, now the last botanical that we are going to paint is one of my favorite Christmas plants. It is the point sector. So I'm going to use a larger brush for this. This is a size eight and we're going to mix up a red to start so I've got some Scarlet Lake in here. So we get the brush nice and load it up with a thick color. There we go. And then what I'm going to do is imagine a center point where the little yellow parts are. And I'm gonna paint around that with some leaves. They leave. So I'm not sure. I'm gonna do this in two hops or popup. And he took my class and skills. This is the splitter technique that we talked about. A little highlight. And then again in this direction. So a nice little pointy tip. And I'm going to add a bit more water. Do some of the gaps. With a similar shape, took some of the leaves, brackets, whatever they are officially are between. Difficult to do this without turning paper. So you can see what we've got is three in a kind of triangular shape. And then we have something similar in the gaps. So we always work in threes for this one. You can see I'm using lots of little strokes just to get the shape right for this one and I think these colors are looking at light. So what I'm gonna do is go in for some wet and wet and create that value contrast there. Some in the shadows and the tip as well. If you're struggling to know where to put contrast or shadows, the best places along the edges, in the tip and in the shadows where it would naturally sit under other petals or leaves, barracks, whatever these are. So what we're going to do then is add the greens so point seti is they start off red as they come out and then as they open up, they become green. So then we're going to add a blue-green and so we're gonna use Sap Green and Prussian blue and a bit of water just to make sure it's a light ish value. And then post and green. What makes these plants so brilliant and Christmas is the red and green contrast. Why everyone loves them. I also find that they, one of the few Christians plants that actually survive. If you buy them in December they can survive all the ways Christmas Day Whereas so many of the Christmas things that I by including the Christmas tree, have a tendency to die on me kind of mid month. So I like points SEOs because they're easy. You can see that I'm trying to work around the existing shapes and then just fill that in with a nice pointy leaf. Shadow's. If you do get any blending like that and lending too much, you can always use a bit of paper towel just to lift. In fact, color up, tweak the shape of it. And then we will add one more. In this direction. We go, I've got a little bit of a blend of that, but it's not going muddy, so I'm going to leave it. But if it starts getting too much and we will just pick it up with a paper towel. And then with the green, you can do as many of these leaves as you want. You can fill in any gaps. I might do a smaller one day just to stop at looking to perfect unbalanced, maybe one of that as well. So they just want to be shadows of leaves in the background so that we get the impression this is a top-down view. D1 here as well. So you can see I'm leaving some whitespace between these to stop them all kind of touching on blending into each other. I actually quite like colors blending up, so I'm going to leave it. And then finally, another list will want to pair as well. So using a deeper tone, we're just gonna go back into some contrast on these. You can also wait until they dry and add vein details if you like. I'm quite impatient with layering icon above it. Wait for it to dry if you like that and you still want to do lots of layers. My advice would be to get yourself a hair dryer and you can use that to speed up the drying. You need a low heat and a little bit of patients, if you try and rush it, you'll probably get the hairdryer to close and and blow the paint. And it can create spotters. Or it can also walk the paper if you let it get too hot. So you need a low heat and hold the hairdryer above and just keep it moving around so that you're not drying it in patches. But it's quite a good tip. If like me, you've got the patients of a toddler. Okay, the very last touch for this, I'm going to switch to my size font if is to add the little yellow stems or stamen or whatever they are in the center. And so I'm going to use a mixture of cadmium in lemon yellow to create a good bold medial m. And then I'm just going to use the tip of the burner. You can use your size too as well if you want. And just fill in the center there. The bit of yellow I've now the reason I'm using cadmium is that it's quite an opaque pigment, which means it can layer on top of the red like that. What colors usually transparent, but cadmium pigments are quite opaque. If you don't have cadmium and you find that it's not layering very well. You can use Gosh or acrylic or red, yellow gel pen, whatever you've got. Other mediums if you want to try that. And then we have point Satya. 8. Wreath project - Part 1: Alright guys, now we're ready to paint our wreath. So what I've done is draw a circle in pencil. I've just drawn around a little bowl. And you can see that I've chosen a circle that's quite a bit smaller than the paper, just to give us some room to kind of spread out without hitting the paper edges. And then I've been over and erase the pencil eyes, you might not be able to see it very well on the video. The reason I've done that is that you can still see pencil lines through what color because it's transparent. So it helps to erase, it's get really fine lines because you can't get them off once you've painted over the top of them. Okay? So for the composition, what we're going to do is create a focal point here with a point set here. And it's going to be the largest one. And then we're going to create another focal point up here with a smaller point set here. And then I'm going to go in two directions so that we have a curve up this way towards that point psi2 and up this way to meet there as well. So I'm going to put the first point's idea in and to get us started. Sometimes easiest to start with the focal point and then work out from that. And so I'm going to mix up a nice thick red color. And then I'm just going to stop painting it. Haha. So remember we're doing this in a triangle shape. So with three red petals, leaves, whatever, I really should have looked at what they are and get those down. And then we go out and light to fill in some of the gaps and also let them touch like that so that they pulled up. And I'm going to do one rule. Down. Here. We go. I'm going to come back and add the yellow to that relater. Just gonna tidy that up a bit. Okay, now we're going to add a couple of green leaves around it. I'm, so for this I'm going to be using the Sap Green with a little bit of Prussian blue. So one that comes up around here. Just to get started. I'm gonna allow for little bit of bleeding, but if I find my going a bit muddy, I'll go back in and pick it open a bit. Kitchen towel. And another nice big one that's gonna come out here. And if you're struggling with leaf placement is sometimes helps out a little dot way you want the point of the leaf to be. And then you can aim towards it. And it doesn't go off pieced quite as much. A little vein in there as well. I can see that spreading a bit too much and not one. So I'm going to draw them brush-off and just lift it back up and try and lift the paint from where they meet. And then one more time destinations, nice. Lifted. Give that I'm in it to dry and then we'll fill in that gap. And I'm gonna put one last leaf out here. And then fill in the space line up. I'm going to come back and add a little bit darker paint just in the shadows to create some nice contrast. Okay, what I'm gonna do next is odd a holly leaf. So I'm going to use a light sap green for this. Just mix up a nice light tone. And then I'm going to pull it up here. So with holidays we pay in the center. And then we come out for our little semi-circles like and come up fellow point there as well. And what you can see is that I'm touching against this leaf here so that they can blend together. We get hope fill about n. Just gonna tweak some of these bits to make them at that point here. And then fill that in. And you can see where this is starting to believe it is pulling out really nicely. Next we're going to do an Ivy Leaf. So for this, I'm going to add green to my leftover blue mixture to make it really deep. And then we're going to pull two IV leaves out this way. So I'm just going to sketch out the outline. And for the point and then down to the tip. And then this one ham I gave him pull out up and rule to fill that space up to that flick and then come down. You can see that I'm sketching the outline here first, and then I can correct any lines as I fill it in. And then on this other side, two. And again, I'm just going to make that central line a bit and and the same on this side. Just fill that in. I really like to do IV and a deep forest green color. And then we can add a little bit of darkness outside and just tweak some of those lines. If you want to create a nice watery effect, you can also go in and just add a little touch of water and just let that spread. While we're here. I'm just gonna go in and darken the point t that it's on my Holly. You can do this with a small brush. If you haven't got very pointy tip to your brush. Make some of them are 0.2 than others. With it down that center as well. Okay, I like how this is looking at. What I'm gonna do is switch over to my size two and then add some enhance. So bit of Ben and buffer the stems. And I'm just going to add a short one here. And then I'm gonna do I'm gonna do two, because we've got one, Holly and to Ivy I'm gonna do one here and then two this here. So you'll see what the composition as we're going around and doing this, that I'm constantly trying to be changing up a little bit what we're doing on both sides so that they don't look symmetrical. We want them to look balanced but not symmetrical, and that's going to look unnatural. I've mixed up a really blue tone here folder. And then I'm going to do some short ones here. So we just kept that skeleton framework down. I'm going to bring the all the way back to this leaf. And then the same on this one. I'm also going to overlap them allocable so that it looks nice and full. Okay, and then we're back to our really light value. Just filling some of those gaps with an ice pail value that you can see that it's looking really beautiful West pulling out the Brown of this stem, that's the brown and the voices are really nice mixture. And then we draw that brush-off. We're going yeah, doc is value. You can talk on a paper towel to take off some of the excess water and then you should be able to lay that straight down. There's some good contrast. And we're just getting around filling in the gaps and making sure that we've got good contrast in these. Most allowing it to touch the Hollywood is still a bit wet. And we go and that's theirs to over that. And then we're just gonna do this one down here as well. So back to our midtone. And then we can pull up the framework here. Filling with our lightest tone. Sometimes you can use just a bit of water and then as you pull along, you're going to grab the color from that you've already laid down and then that will pull out and blend. And then back to our dark tone. For the last bit, I am going to add some more blue heads, keep it early Doc. And then we're going to add just a little bit just for some contrast. And to make it look really very full. And you go up, it's still a little bit. What I'm gonna do is lift in that water up and then go back in with my doc is value. To get that good contrast in. You can also add a little bit darkness wet on what in the center. 9. Wreath project - Part 2: Okay, switching back to my size five, what I'm going to do is add some IV leaves up here and some holly leaves up here. So the idea is that we've got our point set here and then we've got Holly for IV, and then we've got Holly for and so we just alternating what we're doing. So first of all, let's get angry and I'm gonna pull this into a different, well, make some space and make a green for the holly IV. Goodness me. Pull that out and then create our heart shape. And I'm going to choose a point up here to aim for. It's a bit too much blue. Like a bit of contrast, but not too much. Okay, and then back to our lightest sap green for some Holly over here. So I'm gonna do two pieces. I'm going to do one coming up here and then one going out. So you can see I'm not worrying about making this too big or too perfect. And that we really changing up the direction. I'm going to pull that line o here instead. You can always do that. You just have to lift it up as you fill it in. This is why I like to lay the outlines down first. If you just go ahead and start painting big areas of color, it's a lot harder to fix than if you just laid out online that you want to change the shape of later. And it's okay to keep making changes as you go as well. Not mistakes. You're just laying the picture. Tell you as you go along what you need to be doing next. Or if something doesn't feel right, then feel free to change it. It's absolutely o painting and you don't need to copy what I'm doing to get the right look for you. Okay, what I'm gonna do in this gap is a little bit more just appear. And then we're going to put the point set here, here. So back to our blues. Gonna do a short one. Careful to touch that where it's still quite what I'm going to make it look for by talking this underneath. Can light value. I'm also, as you can see, the lengthening the payer to fill in that gap and do that. And then back to our dark value in the darkest blue. And I'm careful with the placement of this contrast. I can go back over some of the mid-value lines, make them darker like that. Or I can add them in between. I am, but I'm careful with where I'm putting this. What I'm going to do to fill in that little gap between the holly leaves is just pull in some more brown like that and probably should run that back through the center. Okay, now we can move on to our next point, sexier. So we're back to our red. And this one, I'm going to make that a little smaller just so that it doesn't compete with the other one. Full attention. Go and left the scarlet lake. It's a really nice red rich red color. And that's in Dhaka, tens in there as well. And I guess we've got our little original six. And then we can add some nice green leaves around that. I'm going to be really careful not to touch this because it is so wet and it's just going to bleed everywhere. If I do that. If you want a little more control over your brush, if you're painting something that's fiddly, it helps to hold it closer to the end. And if you want to paint loose, then you can move your hand further up. And you should then have more control over where the bristles are going. So if you want something more expressive, you can hold the brush right at the tip of the handle. And I'm a much further upsets and me. I'm going to add a bluish one here on this edge. Just for a bit of color variation from allowing some blades, but not where it's very wet. And I can see that one's sneaking out of it. Could also doesn't matter tremendously to have some blades. That fun. Can I add one last one here and a nice rich color? While I've got it mixed up, I'm also going to add a little bit of contrast to these. To the edges in the, the bits where they hired the bits that would be shadowed. The best places to out contrast. Last big point set here. Okay, what I'm gonna do to fill this gap is more Holly coming up here to join it. And then any remaining gaps we're going to fill in at the end. So we're going to have one comes down here and one probably comes up here. So the blue is drawing in the IV. It's granulate, sing really nicely. And then we'll do the other one and just have a bit more contrast in that one. Little spike they conquer wrong. You actually gonna extend these a little bit. Give us a bit more of a shape, and then just add a bit of contrast in this one so it's not all the same color. Okay, when you've got most of the main elements of your reef and the best thing to do is to stop painting and take a bit of a step, Bach. And what you're going to want to do is look for any gaps that need filling. So for example, we've got a clear gap here that needs filling. And probably here as well. I think this could do with some balancing out the gap. There may be something here as well. And so first of all, we're going to do is add our holly berries. So these are going to help fill some of the gaps. So this one, for example, is going to add few barriers there. Maybe a couple on this other side to go, and then a few over here. Bit rounder. And then we're going to add a couple of buries up here. And maybe what I'm also going to do is add a couple up here as well just to compliment the red from the points ICO. If this happens to you and this happens to me all the time, you put your hand in some wet paint and the best thing to do is tariff piece of kit, some water, put it on that and rub the brush. And then and then blocked. It's not going to always lift up a 100%. You need to make sure your brush and your water clean. And, but it will lift up most of it. You sometimes have to rough it up a bit to get into the paper fibers and impressed to lift it up. And there we go. You can almost not tell I've done that. I'm struggling with it. You can also add a bit of white paint or guage or some believe proof right by Dr. Martin's, which I do quite like for adding white over the top. And that can sometimes cover some of those mistakes up as well. If you can't get them either in time or you don't see it until after it's dried, it works only really if it's still wet. Okay. What I'm going to do here is probably just fill in with a couple of generic leaves. So if you took my class on skill Xiang, more scholar flows, then you will have seen me do these techniques before. And they're essentially just little brush strokes. And I'm going to let that bleed as well. Just a little, just to fill in the gaps. We're gonna add some of the same leaves in just where we've got a couple of small gaps. And maybe one of here is to fill that in. Might do another one back here as well. Love these kind of fill in leaves that are really great for just filling out bit of composition where you think you've got a gap as well. I'm also going to add another little point set leaf. So I think that's a bit of a gap. And potentially a little one on the other side here. Not much, just a little bit. Just to make sure that it's balanced with the extension here. Okay. I'm I'm pretty happy with that. I like how it's looking. I'm just going to add another barrier there for some balance. And then what we're going to do is add the yellow at the center of the point sets helix. They both seem quite dry. And I'm gonna go back to my yellow mixture. Get that nice thick cadmium, and then just add a little yellow bits at the centre there. Okay, if you want to go back through and add any layering or vein details you can. But I quite like to stop at this point before we overwork it. So I'm just going to put my brush down. And then we have the Reece. 10. Final Thoughts: All right guys, that was it. Cost completed. Thank you so much for painting with me today. First of all, please don't forget to show your work in the project section on skill share so that we can all see it. And if you want to post on social media, please tag me on Instagram. I'd love to see what you create and I will share everything I see my stories. Secondly, if you want to turn this into a Christmas card design, where you want to paint some of these elements on gift tax. The best thing to do is to get yourself some watercolor paper and just fold it in half. You can trim it down to size using some scissors or a guillotine. And then you can paint your design on the front and right on the inside. If you're putting it into an envelope and you've already got the envelope, then just try and make the COD about a centimeter smaller than the envelope so that it will fit inside. Otherwise, I hope this class helps you get into the Christmas festive holiday spirit. And I will see you in the next one.