Acrylic Flower Painting - Learn To Paint Loose Florals (fall edition)

1. Introduction: Hey everyone, my name is Alicia and I'm an artist here in San Jose, California. Moving along our fault addition painting series. In this class, I'm going to show you how to paint this loose acrylic flowers following a lovely reference photo, will walk you through this painting step-by-step, will show you all the materials that he will need. Color mixing techniques, brush techniques, and an exercise on dimension and form. I love how these Moody had cozy colors are so fall appropriate and I'm so excited to paint with you all. So let's dive right in and begin. 2. Exercise 1 - Color Mixing: In this color mixing lesson, I will walk you through some colors and show you how to mix colors to get a variation of darks and lights. This technique can be applied with any color of your choice. So we will begin with these four colors here, and black and white. I'm going to make four columns here, one with the plain color right off the tube, which will be in the first column. And then I'll show you the different variations you can get by just mixing white and then black. And then the last column will be a combination of these colors amongst each other. It's, Let's begin with this darker green, which I believe is called it goes green and acrylics Liquitex basics. So here's what you get when you mix in some white. As you can see, there's a huge jump between the original color of this green and then this one. And of course, you can control the lightness of your green depending on how much white you mixing. Mixing in some black can really give you some really nice dark tones. And again, you can totally control how much dark you want your colors to be two. So depending on how much black you add, you will, you can change up the different tones. And if you want to mute this color a bit more, adding some white and black to the screen can give you just that, which I have on my absolute favorite colors to mix. So remember if you want to tone down any color, mixing some white and black to any original color can just can give you that really nice muted tone down version of the existing color. Here I'm adding some more white, just a tiny bit of black, but more white to show you the different variations you can get in this version as well. Alright, so I will be repeating the same steps and all these colors. So I'm going to just speed this up a little bit, but I just wanted to point out how you can get so many different colors by not using that many colors at all. To begin with, the variations that you can get from each color are endless. These are just a few basic examples and I'm able to show you, but feel free to practice with some color mixing techniques if you are an absolute beginner, these can be super useful and handy. And before you know it, this will be second nature to you. And when you really need to reproduce a certain color, you will know exactly off the bat what makes an order to get that exact. Alright, so, so far we have only introduced white and black to an original color. But now I'm going to show you even more deviations and options that you can get by mixing our original colors that we have together. E.g. what happens when you mix both these greens together or mixing the slide queen and raw sienna, or maybe even raw sienna and blue. You get the idea. So let's try some of that to see what we can get. So here I'm mixing in both these greens with some white and black, which creates this grayish tone. And then if you mix more of the darker green, hookers green, you'll get an in-between green from the top. Here you can see mixing the light olive green with why sienna gives you this really nice warm tone. Whereas mixing some black to that will give you a cooler tone. Raw sienna and tailor blue will give you a somewhat sap green color with some warm tones in it. And then mixing white that gives you a muted olive green. But I'm hoping this exercise can help you understand the depth of colors you can get by mixing them together and just playing around with them. These next two colors are some of my absolute favorite colors to paint in. And I often use these colors quite a bit in all my paintings. If you're interested, I got this color by mixing in hookers, green, tail blue, some white and black. And then this next one. If you take that exact same color, I'm mixing a little bit of raw sienna in it. You will get this muted version of the one on top, which is just so beautiful. Here's an example of these colors applied to a painting, and you can tell how some of these colors have been used in this landscape. So in order to build dimension and depth, you need to have these variations of colors in order to make your painting not look flat. So play around with color mixing beforehand to give you a sense of colors you can get from a limited color palette. And this will really help you visualize how you can use these colors in your painting. 3. Exercise 2 - Brushwork: Alright, so now let's dive right into some brushwork. I'm going to show you the different marks you can make with my most commonly used brushes. And I'll show you how I apply and use them. Let's first begin with the flat brush. This one's super basic and clean. I use this one for the sky and you can get simple flat washes with this one, but extremely thin lines if you use the tip of it as well. Hello Lee, the smaller flat brush works just the same. And I use this for simple flat washes for my landscape, especially when I block off colors in the first step. Like mentioned, these next two brushes are my most used and amongst my favorite to paint landscapes. They are very versatile and are great for that loose style landscape paintings which we love. You can get really great, clean like flat strokes with this. I love painting this. When I am painting like huge mountains are just going to block in shapes. I love using this brush to block in the initial stages. This brush is also great for layering paint on top of one another as well. If you change the direction of the brush and hold it vertically, you can get arch like shapes that can be used for bushes, trees and loose objects. Because of the brushes arch like shape. It is great for bushes and hence really great for landscapes. Using the side of the brush or its tip can also be very useful to paint faraway trees or houses, etc. And overall, it's just really great for detailing. The smaller size. Full brush is great for smaller bushes and objects far away. I use this long, thin brush and every single painting, which I mostly bring up at the end for detailing, whether I'm painting florals or landscapes. I always bring this out at the end. This brush can really add some visual interests with just little tiny marks. Today's painting, I use this brush for the grass. I gave it some highlights and just little tiny marks far away. This can also signify and give impressions of little objects far away. So maybe even houses or animals. I even actually assigned my art with this brush. If you are wondering how I assign them, it's always with this brush at the very end. 4. Exercise 3 - Dimension & Form: In this lesson, I'm going to go over dimension and form. A form is a three-dimensional figure as opposed to a shape being flat. And how would you add a fall onto an object? Well, in painting, you can do that by adding color. In this example here we have dark tones, mid tones, light tones, and highlights. This is exactly what you need to turn a flat object and give it some dimension and form. I'm going to show you how I'll be using red, black, and white to demonstrate this. So first, I'm going to block in the shape with just plain red so that we can have a base to start from. This right here is an example of a flat 2D object, which we will now turn into a three-dimensional shape. Now, I'm going to start adding in my mid tones. So I'm going to add some black and whites to the red to create that. To get my dark tones, I'm going to add some more black and fill in that edge. So now we're going to take these two colors and blend them in-between. You can already see how this is forming a shape. Okay, now let's add in some light tones by mixing in some white. Notice how I'm painting in the direction of the ball. Not just painting this up and down, since this is a round shape, you want to kind of paint in that curve. I'm just going to go back and forth in between my dark tones, mid tones and light tones until I'm satisfied and I feel that this looks good. I'm just giving it a rough background so that it doesn't feel like this is just floating around. Alright, and then for the highlight, I'm going to take a lot more white and a tiny dab of red. So a quick recap. Dark tones are achieved by mixing your original color with some black. And then the more white you mix in, you will get a gradient. So you can see how you can move from a dark tone to a mid tone to lighter ones. And then your highlights. 5. Materials & Prep Paper: These are all the materials that I've used a role for water. I've used Gesso Primer like always, and the same tape that I always use as well to tape the edges. Acrylic Strathmore paper, I cut mine into a five by seven. And then these are all the brushes you just need any flat brush to paint the background, doesn't. It's not really that important. This brush though I use for pretty much my entire painting. It's a number three Princeton round brush. Then these are just some other brushes I use here and they're flat brush. And then, and then a number to round brush for fine details along with a filbert brush. Again, I have listed and named all of them in the description below. Alright, and then you obviously need some sort of palette. And I use a glass palette, the scraper. And then these are all the paints that I've used. The top three are the ones that I use for the flowers. So a brilliant red, orange, red and yellow along with burnt sienna, Taylor, blue, and green, and of course white and black. So to begin, I am prepping the paper down which ISO, which is basically a primer. And it just perhaps your Canvas before painting. You can choose to thin this down slightly if you would like, or just use it directly off the tub, which I prefer. Then maybe dab your brush once or twice in the water to make it spread better. One or two, even coats should be enough. And once you're done with this step, we will move on to the taping section. Like always, let's begin taping down the paper and its edges to leave us a clean border. 6. Painting - First Base Layer: So let's begin painting the background first. And I'm using mainly black, but also a bit of Taylor Green with white in places just so that it isn't too stark black and we have some slight variation in color. Use any flat brush that you have. And I'm just adding in some dabs of black randomly. And then I'll be filling in the remaining gaps with the green mixed in white. And of course blend all these colors together. It does not have to be extremely clean or neat. This is just a background that will mostly be covered anyway. Taking a filbert brush now and I'm using yellow, I'm diluting the colors just with water a bit and using this for solely for placement purposes of all the flowers. Try and follow the shape of the flower as best as you can, but it does not have to be perfect. We will be adding in tons of layers on top of this. So it's okay for now. I'm just going to look at the reference photo and then follow the yellow flowers and place the base layers of that wherever I see it. Some fingers, same exact technique, but this time with orange. And I'm just going around my painting and adding that color flower to wherever I wanted. Lastly, I'm adding in some red and adding just basically goes to these flowers where I see the red and the reference photo. You certainly don't need to add all the flowers you see in the pig. But just do it as much as you like based on your composition you've come up with. Try and follow the position of the flower and the size of it as closely as you can. Here, I'm just filling in the buds of these flowers with one sienna and black so that we have a better visualization of the way these flowers are supposed to be facing. This will really help us with our next layer. So just get that center portion of each club we're here. 7. Painting - Second Flower Layers: I switched my brush two and number three, Princeton round brush. And we're just going to be building layers on these flowers, petal by petal. So I'm mixing in the orange and yellow. And I'm just adding that color to the orange flower in the center here. So try and follow the shape of each petal as closely as you can. Looking at the reference photo, It's okay if you can see some of your existing initial layers underneath this. I actually liked the look and it gives it more dimension and also builds to the loose abstract field that I'm going for. Alright, so I'm doing the same exact thing to the bottom flower here. I'm just building on that second layer. I decided I wanted these two flowers to be more on the orangey side. The top one on the bottom here that I'm painting is gonna be on the orange side. So take your time and just paint these flowers petal bipedal. You'll see me adding these colors randomly to the background as well to pull it altogether and just to give the impression that these flowers in the background. Now, not every flower you paint needs to be in-focus. So the ones in the back are gonna be painted lighter and with lesser details. So adding inspects of that color here and there will do the trick. Okay, so for the last color combo of these flowers, I'm going to take the red and orange, and I'm going to build on that as my second layer. So the red ones I see. You'll notice that this process gets a lot easier if you take it layer by layer, painting each flower petals step-by-step, and just building on each new layer with a new variation of added color. 8. Painting - Third Layer To Build Structure: Alright, so I'm going back in with a third layer now, and I'm building on each flower bit more with more color. So I'm taking in some yellow and orange, and I'm adding that to each petal, to this yellow flower right here and also to the bottom one. And then this will help in pulling out the colors a bit more if the layer underneath is still translucent. So just go around and add an additional layer if needed, to. All your flowers. Don't forget to add these colors to the background. Just look tiny little specks of it here and there. This will really help pull everything together at the end. Alright, so in the next few layers you will really see this painting come more to life with each added layer. So at this point, I would say we have a really strong base and foundation, but we are still missing some structures. So I'm adding in some more definition in color and details will bring that all together. Here I took in and I'm mixing some red whites to get this beautiful pinkish red tone to bring out some of those brighter reds me see in the reference. So this is where you can also add in more definition to the drawing aspect of your flowers to make it look a little bit more realistic and to add some dimension. But I'm still keeping the overall feel of this painting loose. I'm going in and adding in a few petals of these red flowers carefully by looking at the reference for the position of it. I'm going in with a light yellow, so I'm mixing in yellow and white. And then building on this with another layer. With every layer that you add, it is not necessary to completely cover the old layers. In fact, that kind of defeats the purpose. So always leave a slight peak through your old layers to give you fibers more dimension and form. For the orange color flowers, the side here, I thought it would be nice to add a bit of a peachy tone to this. So adding in orange with the white and yellow will give you that color. Sprinkling a bit of that, THE tone to the background as well, to merge everything together. 9. Painting - Background Leaves: Before we add our final details to our flowers, Let's finish off the background with some leaves. First, I'm using a bit of pale green, white, and a tablet of yellow. And I'm just using the same brown brush that we've been using for all the flowers. And I'm adding a few stems and just random leaves to fill up the space in the background. Have fun with this process and add simple leaf-like shapes like you see me doing. So wherever you feel like it and keeps them off the stroke small while others bigger. So just change them up so that they look more organic. Just, just As mentioned. By a phase remains in the trees. 10. Final Details & Class Project!: Alrighty, So we're almost near the end. But like always, fine details are immersed in all my paintings, which I believe is the most important aspect, which is the last added touch that pulls a piece together. So I'm taking a fine detail brush, number two, round brush and mixing in some red, orange and white to add little fine details to each petal. So I'm starting at the base of the petal and just pulling it upwards. So go ahead and add that detail to the main flowers in the front. This is great to add separation between each pedal. If some of them look all clumped up together. Wow. Hello. Taking in some brown and black to the center. But again, just to define some of the edges a bit more, I'm also pulling those darks in some of the petals upwards as well too. Again, this will add in the separation a bit more with some lights and darks. Last but not least, I'm going to finish up with adding final highlights to the flowers and background. So I'm taking in some light yellow and adding it to a few petals for that extra pop. I'm adding that pop of color to the background as well, just a few specks. Similarly, taking in white and orange and adding that pop of color to the orange flowers. And I will be following up with few specs and daps to the background too, to mix it all in. Getting those little spikes we see in the middle of each flower bed with yellow. And we will be done. Time to peel off this tape to reveal our final painting. If you followed me so far. Well done. I can't wait to see what you came up with. There we go. This completes our fall edition, acrylics hours for today. Hope you enjoyed, and I cannot wait to see what you'll come up with, share your projects. I would love to see them and do not forget to leave this class interview. Ask me any questions in the discussions tab below. I invite you to explore the different classes I had created for you. Classes and watercolors as well as acrylics are available if you want to learn more. So do consider following me so that you do not miss out on future painting classes from me. Thank you so much for your support over at my website and also my Etsy shop, you can find original art prints and much more. The links are below. As always, follow me on Instagram to keep up with latest updates, give obeys and all that fun stuff. Thank you once again. And happy painting.