Begin Creative Flower Watercoloring

1. Begin Creative Flower Watercoloring : Welcome to Begin Creative Flower Watercoloring. I'm Ron Mulvey and I'll be showing you some valuable watercoloring techniques that will improve your skills painting, boost your artistic confidence, and release your creative energy. I will show you some simple design secrets you will need to know that will make drawing flowers very simple, design secrets you can apply when drawing any of your favorite flowers. Learn my draw and paint method, that works every time and eliminates frustration and failure. Watercoloring is so simple and direct, if you can color with felts, you can begin creative water coloring, your flower projects with me today. Learn how to gather information and inspiration outside. Then polish up your work at home with some very effective studio techniques. Our mystic rose project and will demonstrate how to use masking fluid with your watercoloring. Learn a simple wet on wet technique, and then learn the magic of a flower doodle, something that will keep your skills sharp. This class has projects for the beginning and intermediate art student. Basic watercoloring materials will be used. I will give you lots of step-by-step instruction and some inspiring demos. Watch, learn, and do. 2. Flower Power Design Secrets: Let's just take a basic pattern, which is three. We'll have 1,2,3. It could also be, one down, two up, on this pattern. It could be two over here, probably with one here. That's the three or the Y-pattern. Another one if you want to go to four, of course four is easy, you're just going to do equal sections. Now I want to do four, I always go from the inside out, the way the plant grows. So three and four, now four doesn't have to be like that. Four could also be two down and two up. Recognizing patterns is very important with flowers. We could have three and one down. You could even have four all the way around, just four straight across. So that's four. Now here would be a five-pattern. Just think of a star or a person. A head, two arms, and two feet. Many flowers use the five-pattern. Repos, I'll take this three-pattern, and let's make it into five. So there's three, now I'll need two more. I'm just going to, well, I know it's going to be a little different, but not much. See these ones are straight. These ones are more balanced like this section here, coming in like a triangle with one on top, oh, well, six would probably. I got 1,2,3, 4,5,6. A good way to understand the petals are to take your little pattern and see if you can add a balanced petal arrangement. Now you'll notice that at some point, my petals are going to have to hop over the other petal, see. You'll find with flowers, that not all of them have enough room, to stand out exactly the same, some hide behind others. This little exercise is great. You can actually make your own flowers. Let's put a little bit of that, something in the middle here, and we'll add little dots. So you're using geometric shapes, which nature uses all the time. Let's add some zig-zags on this one. It also works for leaves. Now how do I get these even? I go zig-zag, zig-zag, zig, zig-zag, zig zag, zig. So I've got the same on each side. Usually, almost probably always leaves are symmetrical. Now you can use a pencil for these little exercises. I'm using a pen because you can see it, and the pencil sometimes doesn't show up as well. Let's understand a big thing in flowers and that's called foreshortening. You can look at a flower from above and it will look something like this. Let's take the humble dandy lion. Now you'll see that all of these flicking out from the center create a very simple round pattern. If I want that flower to turn on the side, I have to start not with a circle as we did with this one, thinking with a circle. I want to think oval. So I'm going to put the oval in. The petals that are closest to you, are going to be shorter. Then as we get to the side, they get longer. This is to create what's called a foreshortened image of your flower. You can get this by simply picking up a dandy lion or a daisy and actually just looking at it. Now, I'm going to adjust to the bed, and the shortest ones at right in the middle there. Say we had no, a flower arrangement, we'll put a couple of round ones, and a couple oval. Four rounds, oval, oval, and let's say we just have a small zigzag around each one. You'll notice these all look the same, but these ones will be foreshortened, hope I got to hop over there. Foreshortened, and these ones would be round. So there's lots of hopping over. You are hopping over other flowers. If you don't do that, all your flowers will look isolated. So we'll try this one. This is merely an exercise for you to get used to the petals and where they're going to be, especially if you're doing a design like this. So maybe the sunflowers. Then down we go, maybe this one is turning and there is lots of hopping over did you see? 3. Flower Power Drawing Skills: I'm going to take the pencil because shading is very important with one of the projects we're going to be doing. Then you push down with your finger here and apply a little pressure and gradually get it darker until you're using your shoulder and your biceps to push that pencil down and get it skinny at the end. I could even lighten this up a little more. I'm going to start with a fairly large, straight and use my finger for this to hit against, and now I'm going to get lighter, and lighter and lighter. Notice, I'm using finger drawing and wrist drawing, my wrist is moving, but my arm is fairly stationary and coming down very skinny here. These are just little exercise here, we'll do light against dark. When I start to get near the light, I'll bear down on my pencil and make it dark. Dark against light. So dark against light. Now here's what you can do for a leaf pattern. If you had a leaf, you could start at dark here where it would be touching a plant. Right there, nice and dark. Now just think of what the shape of a leaf and lighten up, lighten up, lighten up, there we go. We have a leaf shape or a grass. Well, lots of plants have grassy looking leaves, so the next one might come up beside it right from here. I can get one in front and one behind. You can do a little exercise like this too. You can go all the way around, dark. Then as you're turning the corner, you can move your paper or you can just move your wrist and go. Make sure you're holding your paper. Is a great little exercises to get flower power. Next one could be light. Some people prefer to make their paper move. Here, I think I'll do a light one in here now. So you're alternating light and dark. Then in the middle, I'll go dark. A little bit like a Black Eyed Susan. Then you might want to take your finger and give it a little shading like this. You see how that gives a nice effect? But I won't do the middle, I'll leave the paper white in the middle. That's a pretty good effect there, see doesn't it appear like this is brighter than the actual white-paper? But if you can do these things in black and white, when you do your colored picture, it will look that much better. So you see how I'm adding little decorations, be decorative with your flowers. Just with a pencil, doing your shading. Now, this is a whole arm shade. See my whole arm is moving here and I'm going light, dark to light. I'm turning the corner, I'm going dark. Where I come against light, I go dark. So practicing with your pencil, dark and light. China marker, even easier because it's waxy. Dark to light, dark to light. So remember that leaf pattern we did that twisted. Great little patterns with my dark to light. 4. Simple Flower Drawing: It's very good to have a work page. I did this on the Internet just looking at wild flowers. But let's say you've taken this little flower here and you've found it, and you like it. You go over with your dark pen. This old school copying, this is how it illustrators back in the 50s, 40s, 30s, 20s, once they got a good drawing they had to transfer for final copy. This is how it was done, and if they messed up on their final copy, they still have that draft. This is called the final draft. There it is. I'll put my paper this way, and my flower now, I just put it like this, take my pencil and take a little tape. You have to have some tape because you don't want your papers moving. Yes. That's duct tape. It goes with the gray, and now all I do is do my copying here. I don't have to press too hard. Just hard enough to get my drawing transferred. This is a good one and I'll show you why. Now, I'm going to take my tape off and just check and see if it worked, and it did. Forgot my little. Now the nice thing is, I can take that same copy and I can put it here so that it's overlapping this one. I'm thinking it's about here. What I do is I can go lightly over these ones. I know this one's going to show up, and notice I'm not being too fussy with this. Check and see. Oh yeah, I got room for a little more of this one, and if I overlap into it, it's okay because I'm not pressing too hard and I can erase it. This way I'm layering. I've drawn one flower, but I'm getting a little more mileage out of it because I'm tracing the same flower two or three times. Let me just check it. Perfect. I'm going to put one more probably coming in right there. Once you've done this rough copy, during your research, do you rough copy, do your transferring. You've really gotten to know the flower and you can ink it. Now all I have to do is take my eraser and erase the pencil lines gently. There we go. Dark against light. 5. Step By Step Watercoloring: What I've done here is added a few little doodles, and I used a pretty bold Sharpie. What I'm doing is just adding, I could even add dots to fill it in. You could use colored Sharpie. Just creating a little design. All my extra spots there with some dots. I'm a firm believer in decoration, decorating your picture. Kids do it all the time. We know that great artists have always admired the way children freely adorn and decorate their picture. Different colored map boards will influence the way you paint. Always having white underneath can be a little boring. Oh look. Oh, we've got a happy accident going here. There's some color bleeding here from one of the sharpies. I spray both sides, put it down. This is interesting, I've never had this happened with a Sharpie before. But I'm going with it. I didn't do this on purpose. This is great. Now we have the big squirrel hair brush, our paper is fairly wet. It's a great way to paint, just a little atomizer. Now, the paper is not saturated, so that's okay. It's just lightly wet. I'm going to take some of this blue because the blue is happening here anyways, and watch how it's right on top of the paper. It's not even soaking in yet. Now remember the board can be tilted, that's why I like it. There we go. We've outlined the outside. Now what I'm going to do is just let it drip like this. Now I clean off my brush, and I take a little bit of the red. I'm going to put the red in one corner to take the blue into the violet tone. If I don't like these lines, I can certainly get rid of those by cutting them off later. Okay, there we have a nice little background. Now, if I want to get rid of this page here, all I have to do is take my trusty brush. This is an Asian brush. Just give it a little bit of a wipe. Or I could take a napkin like that. There we go. Let's give the centers of all the flowers a little cadmium yellow. That's the first step. Three flowers, three centers, takeoff the paint. Then we take some cadmium red and we go around this flower. You'll have a beautiful orange. Now we're going to transition from the red orange. We're just going to add some water. Let that move out a bit into the petals and take a little bit of the sap green, full strength. The brush is wet, the paper is went, and some of these leaves that I've added underneath, not to petals. Leaves are not petals. sap green, very nice green. I'm going to do the tips to start with here. I have two reds. I have the cadmium red, and I have the alizarin or carmine red. You can use any color you want. See the purple is coming in here, very good. Water colors are funny. You'll be doing them and thinking, oh, it's not working. Give it a little time, be patient. Working like wet. Like this is your best bet in the beginning. If I want to go a little darker on the edges, I can, but I'm going back. Notice I clean my brush every time. Lots of cleaning of the brush. Always use clean colors. Now I'm going to add a different green. This is more of a faylo green, and I'll put it right where these are coming in close. They're more like in the shadow. The beginning of each one to create a bit of a shadow. I'm going to do half of this one and half of this one. This was the Green I used for the lilacs. That's going to mix on its own. We might go with another little bit of the cadmium around the yellow center. Some flowers have strong colors, and our little star flowers here, all these little star flowers, let's give them a little yellow in the middle. I think I'm going to go with a little darker blue in the bottom part here. Don't be afraid to use full strength colors. Contrast makes a great picture. Dark against light. We're moving right along here and there we go. Dark against light. You have to use a little bravery when you paint. Don't be too timid. I'm going to let that dry now. What would that look like in a little frame? I could get rid of all these nasty little lines on the outside. What a difference, a little frame, and of course the final touches sometimes in the frame. Like adding a little more here and there. I like these very light here. There we go. You can just keep developing something like that. It fits great in a little frame, look at that. 6. Tulips And Teacup Draw And Tranfer: [MUSIC] So the old school, make your drawing, put some pencil on the back, and then take your drawing, and a piece of good water color paper or whatever you want. Put your drawing on it, and then go over the drawing very carefully with a sharp pencil or a stylus. You have to remember where you are and it will transfer onto here. Remember, when you outline, make your lines sure and make them true. Aim for where you're going, and when you get there, stop. You're better to do that because you'll get a finer looking line. Couple stems, these are tulips, and I'm going to bring this leaves just a bit more into the cup, and that's because I think it makes it a better design. There's my little tulips and here comes my cup. I'm going to turn my paper to get the cup because I just want to suggest the top rim. Saucer like couple lines, and I'm going to put a few reflection lines down like that. Once I've done this, all I have to do is wet the paper do both sides with this [inaudible] a couple times, the water has soaked in. What you want to do is get rid of the surface water. Otherwise, when you put the color on it will just go like that. Here we go. I'm using a finer brush, a little bit of water, some pure alizarin. Now I take that, and all I'm going to do is pop it into the tulip. See, it doesn't diffuse all over the place. Now I might want to lighten that a bit for the next one or the next two. You can use any color you want. Now look, because the paper is slightly damp, I can lift a little bit off there. It was a little too dark but I'm not worried because you can lift paint off if the paper's been wet, then we clean the brush. Let's see the paper is wet, let's put it on here. Notice it does not spread all over the place. Small picture, small tools. Here's a little trick if you want to get the form add a little bit of water to it, drop it in. See because it's wet you'll get it darker at the bottom layer at the top. Call that a graded wash but where it's not really a washed drop in the color again. Now we take a little more of the sap green this time and let's drop it into the bottom of the flower. Now you might observe on your flowers that the bottom of the leaves are lighter or they might be darker. You might want to add a little shadow underneath the tool by adding a little dark dots here. This is dropping the coloring. That way you get more of a shape to the leaf, drop it in. Over to the cup before it dries. Now I'm thinking this is probably getting a little dry, and I'll check it, yeah it's still dump, that's good. I'm going to go with a cadmium yellow medium, and let's leave the middle of the cup white so that we can get a China effect. Just a little bit here. You can't go wrong trying a few little colors now, watch this clean the brush off. You can use this for flower petals too. Soften the edge of the little cup. You want pull little bit down in here for the reflection. Same a little bit of the green from here. You see. Oh, look, there's a happy [inaudible]. See it's lightened up there. I like that. From the edge there we go, bring down the yellow, but leave white in the middle, even in the reflection, leave white. Let's let that dry. Here's what I want to do is I want to wet the paper, but not wet the objects that I've done here. I want to come at it from the side here, you see. Use your other hand if you have to, left-hand, it 's okay. Use both hands. Then over here, notice that I'm leaving an area just coming up to where the leaves are. I've got a little bleed here. Nothing wrong with that, that's going to be good. I'm getting a nice effect there. I'm going to have to though, pick up my tape. This is why I like the tape. Wow, I haven't done anything. Look at that. It's moving. Take some dark blue here. Thello and ultramarine mix them together. Let me just see what happens when I bring this in. You know, watching a watercolor do things. See the papers dry there, so it's not going anywhere. You get some happy little things happening. Look at this. Now if I could had this bone dry, I would had a different effect. You have to embrace things sometimes with the watercolor, and just watch. See that's not moving as much now. I can direct the flow, coming on over here. I will just clean my brush off, touch it to the rag and then soften this edge here. Bring this down. What I'll do is mix up. While the paper's wet, we're in a good position here because the paper is wet. I can use darker paint to set things off. Now, I know that if I put it near here, it's going to go all over the place. I'm just going to put a little bit in here, and I'm going to adjust the color on the paper. I take a little red and put it in there, see how that adjustment. You're almost better to mix your paints on the paper to adjust the value or what we call key the value. You can say," Oh, I want it darker", lift it off, or "I want it lighter" you'd come over here a little bit. I don't think it's going to go too far here. I'm going with some vertical thrusts in the top, and that's a good place for me to stop for a second. Put it down straight, let it dry.[MUSIC] 7. Tulips and Teacup Watercoloring: There's a dark green, and this is what we call a Thalo green. Winsor and Newton puts it out. Then I will take a lighter green, which is a sap green and sap green is a little warmer. You can see cool green first. I will start at the bottom of the leaf with the small brush. Notice I'm not mixing a lot of colors together. A couple colors, two colors mixed together is fine. Once you start mixing three, In the beginning, you can get a little out of hand. Now we put the warm part in and we'd like to meet up with the cooler green. Always putting warm against cool makes a great looking picture. There we go, maybe some down in here, and pop it in here, that's great, that's a dark. I think I might like that. That's going to be quick, I'm going to come right across with this out of the way that I've left. Got a little happy incident there. I'm going to put it right over the bottom of the flowers there and then quickly take my brush, clean it off, and pick it up right there so I don't have a line, and right here, pull it down, a reflection and soften the edge here. Here I'm wiggling, soften that edge, and then take the brush, wiggle, pull, wipe, wiggle, pull, wipe and pull. It's giving a reflective quality here. Could be a glass table. I want to set these off or take a little of the blue, mix it in with the bit of the green, and let's see what we can do with this blue, green. That's quite thick, so I add a little water to it. It's still very thick, add little more water, tap, tap, tap. Say I want to get it as dark as I can, but I don't want the paint to be pasty. Pasty paint in watercolor is not considered good technique. Leave a little white mark there, just a little white mark. Okay, it's working. Then I want to let it drip a bit, and I want to come in between here and I will make careful because it's not quite dry, but it's pretty dry. There we go, got a little drip there, no problem, It will drip, a little brush. I can tap in here later and get closer to it. Notice I'm pointing the brush at the edge that I'm painting. I'm almost out of the forest as they say. I can take that original mixture that I put down here when I was thinning it. I'm working across the paper with what's called a wash. There's almost a steam effect here, I'm going to use just clear water now. Remember we talked about this little spot here. I'll make sure the brushes not too much paint on it. What I like about little pictures is that there's a good [inaudible] See I can drop it in, might even take a little bit of the darker and just drop it in there you see. I get a more of a accidental effect. Now look at that nice yellow here, I don't think I want to get rid of that. Will come up to it. There it just gently go over it. There we go. Now you turn the picture this way. I want you to look at these two sections here. One is definitely wet. Yes, it is. It's a little bit on the green side here, so I'm going to take a little green. See that green and I'm going to drop a little bit of the green in here. I know this is still wet so I can drop a little bit in there. Now this leaf is quite right. I clean off my midsize brush and I take a little bit of the brighter cadmium yellow, and let that tilt in to get a reflection down here. Because this is yellow, that would reflect yellow. These are pretty high I don't think they'll reflect down there but, I'll bring this across here too. What are the flowers in while they're not in anything? I'm not trying to be real here, I'm just trying to show you some effects. So a little dark in the corner here and little more dark blue. I'm balancing my colors. It's a little bit dark here. Remember I said I might even cut this later. My teacup. How about if I had a pattern on the teacup? I've got a good tip on this brush, but I'm going to use the little brush because I want to just make some little marks here. I'm going to hold it up to you so you can see it really well. Put my hand underneath it. I'm just going to reach over and I'm going to put in some little design. If you had a magnifying glass, you probably could put in even something more intricate. While I'm here, I might as well just take a little bit of that and darken this up. Especially in between here. Wet clean my brush off. Let it move over there. Take a bit of the ultramarine, which is a little pastier than the Thalo, but add a little Thalo to it. I'm creating a dark diagonal right across my paper. I'm not being fussy, just creating a little more dark, creating an effect pushing into here. You can see these little pictures, you'd have a lot of fun with them. Playing around with them. Don't be afraid of it might not turn out, it doesn't matter if it turns out or not. The trick is you showed up and you're doing something like a floating teacup. Might put a couple of lines this way. There, I like that.[MUSIC] 8. Easy Draw Roses: way, Theo. All right, - way . Oh, way Way, Theo, - Let's do a little rose now. I think we have enough confidence that we could do it. Would you like to do it in pencil? And then way might go over it. And Sharpie? Yeah. Let's do it in pencil and go over and Sharpie. Thank 9. Tear Drop Rose : There we go. All I have to do is darken the back of the one I want, which is this one. Pencil. Hope you're doing this with me, quickly get to drawing. Rub, rub, rub, softer the pencil, the more darker the transfer will be. It's such a small one, but I'm still going to borrow a little tape from here. I'm going to put it right there in the middle. There we go. I start in the middle here. I can use my little lines. This is where little feathery lines work. As I push on them, it's going to make the mark on the other side of the paper. This way you don't have to keep erasing on your paper and damaging the surface of your watercolor paper. Oh, I got it, that's okay. I kind of like that shape. Okay, I'm going to now put in the leaves. To put in the leaves because I've studied them. I'm going to turn my little rose, there's one poking out here. So I'm going put a little leaf in here. Wow they really are pointies. Here's one sticking out. That little line goes right through. I don't know if you can see this with your pencil, but that's okay. I get the general shape of the leaf and then the fine point sharpie and now I add my serrated edge. It's little zigzags, quite a few, except the end, it's straight. I'll go on this side zigzag. We're doing a fairly realistic rendering. Watch this, I'm going to use the pen right into there. Same with this one. If you can go both directions and then curve the line, because it will look better. Bring this one into one. We're going to go around my rows. Probably should start in the middle. Notice I'm holding the pen fairly straight, not on an angle. The reason being is that the nib will always wear a straight instead of slanting and getting damaged. That was a long one. Where else? I'm just filling in some areas with leaves. Look at this little guy here, [inaudible]. The serrated leaves compared to the smoothness of the rows is a good contrast. What else? It's kind of going this way. I like it one, two , three, four, five, not bad. I think I need one right here. I'm going to put this in first. See, that's the center line and then I'm going to start from here. Keep the serrated going. I may have made this a little bit skinny, but that's okay. Look what I got, lots of zigzags or no, that worked out nicely. Let's see, that's good. One more underneath, no, seriously there's that's fine. That's going to be right. I'll just put one up here. I can see up here there's one. Put the center line in first, that helps. This is a smaller one. I could put one little. That's good. I'll put my name on it, Ron and erase the pencil lines. 10. Watercoloring Your Rose: I have green and I have red. Now, I want to make the green darker near the petals so I take a little bit of phthalo and a drop a water, puddle it up here, touch it to my rag and put a little bit here. Now you'll see that the phthalo is fast and it will sink into the paper right away, so you'll need another brush with a pinch of water on it, just a bit to soften the edge. Once you've got the water flowing, you're not going to get any of those hard lines. But go little bits at a time, you see? It almost looks like the leaf is curling there. I missed this one, I'm going do it completely in blue. Wow, you know what? I think my brush is getting too big. I pull in my little rigger brush; always touch it to a rag and before that blue sets; wow, got it just in time, the phthalo blue sets and makes a line very, very quickly. See, you can almost see a little line there and that's just puddling so tapping it out as good. This one, dark near the rose because the rose is creating a bit of a shadow. You can see, on the rose, the darker area of the leaves are shadow areas. I'm getting used to this little rose sitting beside me, and there we go with our blue. I think only one side of this and then dip my brush, clean off the paint, and just water. Half of that one up and I think half of this one; the end of this one. I'm just varying it, the end of that one; it looks like the lights hitting it there. This one totally blue looks like it's underneath all the other ones. We're making decisions as we're going; we're thinking a little bit, where is that leaf? Is it on top? Is it on bottom? This one no blue. I'm going to do this one with a little bit of the cadmium yellow light. I put a little bit of the cadmium yellow light here and touch it to my rag, it might be a little thick and I give that just a little cadmium yellow and a little bit on the edge here. Can't do that one, It's not dry. If I had a hairdryer, I would dry it and keep going, but I'm going to show you that patience is important; I've only done like five or 10 minutes all together so far and look how far we've come. Next, let's warm the rose up with a tiny bit of yellow on one side. Now remember, a little bit of yellow with a little bit of alizarin will give you a warm red. On the other side, I'm going to take a little bit of cadmium red and lots of times one red doesn't make it, sometimes you need two reds. On this side a cadmium red and you'll see it's more of an orange red, a peach red, if you had a peach colored rose, you'd be using a little cadmium. While that's drawing, I can see that I'm going to drop in my crimson right into this. There's the crimson and notice because the paper is dry, it's not going anywhere and I can get quite dark. I'm going to go a little darker here and I'm going very full strength alizarin in the middle, and full strength on the sides here. Not the whole thing, just on the little tips and then a little bit less over here. While that's a little bit wet, I'll drop a little bit in here and just let it dry. Let's put a little background in. Notice I'm just coming up to the leaf and the petal with my brush but not touching them, not going into them and I'm doing just the top part all the way around with water. Wooh, there's a little happy accident, look at that. Always anticipate a happy accident. Clean up my edges. This is interesting that happened, watch this. I've never done this before but learn as you go. If I put the strong blue here next to the wet paper, it should bleed in, see? Then drop it in like tie-dying. Now it's time to move a few things and tilt. I have blue, but I don't have anything warm in the background and that's okay. I'll take a little bit of the alizarin for the background, definitely alizarin spreads. I'm going to go with three alizarin spots, one over the blue here and each spot is going to be a little bit different size. That one really spread, so we probably need a little more water on this one, there we go. A little bit of yellow. Notice I haven't mixed anything, it's come in close. Just touch it there, stop a little bit. I haven't used any yellow and this is cadmium yellow medium, and then I'm going to put that around the outside of the rose. Staying away from the blue for now. Just around the outside of the rose. Get a little bit of a halo effect. There's a lot up here. Check it out, there it is, there's the big one. We're going to let it collect but some of the papers probably a little bit dry. Keep my eye on it here, remember that one went down first bringing it into the flower and you're directing the flow of the thicker paint, here it comes. Let's see if we can get that over there. Now, one way to get it over is wet your brush and add a little bit of water to make it flow, there we go. As you get the flow going again, there we go and now great little effects here. A bit of water, just a bit. There's a crucial time when you can't add any more water. Bigger brush here, it's a little damp. I'm going to pull it right up, clean it off, and then picking up my drips. If you don't pick up the drips, you'll get some funny little shapes on your paper. These squirrel hair brushes are great for picking up drips because they're very soft and super absorbent. 11. Deep Colors And Mood: Rarely will you get the right red with just one red. I've mixed two reds. I've mixed the cadmium and the Alizarin, and that gives me a very strong red here. I can go a little darker in the middle again and just add a little water to it. Go to the next level and maybe this petal. So you're gradually darkening the rose. Rather than just one big blob of red. You're adding different layers of red. Some dark, some lighter. Sometimes you're going from dark on one side. Add some water and light at the other side at the bottom. That will work too. So dark. You'll come up with your own little formula for a successful rose. A lot of it is just observing the rose and looking at it. You might use a combination of felt pens. This goes a little dark too soon. So I'm going to add a little bit of dark on the inside of this, but keep the top of it light. See, maybe it's a little too dark in the middle here so I can lift it off. See, what I lift off I can put down here. Gradation or dark to light, smooth to rough, hot to cold, tall to small, wide to narrow. Gradation gradually get from hot to cold. Gradually get from large to small, and you're creating interest in your painting. So working on gradation, very important. Excellent. Now. A little on the leaves. So here I need to go a little darker green on this both sides. I'm using my little brush, my little rigor brush. As it gets near the end, of course, the paint is been already deposited, so it's less. I think I'll do this one too dark. Now this is light here. So putting dark next to it, sets it off. Good. Maybe a little more there. This one here will definitely needs this yellow. So I've added some yellow over it. Beautiful. It's coming along. I Like it. Little more yellow up here, stronger. There we go. What do you think? Maybe be a little more on that edge. This is the last thing, I'm not doing anymore. I think this is good. We just pick up a bit of the red there. There, perfect. Nope. I'm going to leave it. I like that just the way it is. Okay. Let's take the tape off and see what it looks like because taking off the tape is the most fun part because then you'd get to see what it really looks like. I'm pulling the tape away from the picture. There. So much fun with these little water coloring tricks. Sometimes you can spend a while doing it. Just like anything else. Things take time. Even small pictures. Very nice. Got my name. It's all done. Let's put it in a little matte and see what it looks like. 12. Easy Draw Mystic Rose : I'm going to be tracing my own drawing and it will go on to the watercolor paper. I'll take a moment and if you have one of your flowers that turned out, you can do the same thing and we'll meet back here in a couple minutes. Now I'm just completing the stem. Look at that. I think you can even see it even though it's pencil. I don't need this anymore. I'm going to redraw my leaf and the way I'm going to do this, I'm going to be looking a little bit at my real leaf and I see that it comes out from the stem. I'm going to put it on the right angle so I can see it. Then I'm going to have one and there's another little spot here. There it is. There's the second one. That's this one, then this one, and then I got to leave room for this because this one here is underneath, so I'll put that one in lightly. Now I'll just gently do the shape. I won't put the little jagged edges in because I'll draw those in when I do my pen over. There's little bud coming up front, see? But I don't want to complicate this. I want to keep it simple. But I might be drawing roses all week. Then the next one's a little bigger. I'm putting the bite in. I'm going put a few holes in my roses. No, just one little bite. There we go. Then that comes down here. But you know what? I'll bet you, some roses have big stems so that doesn't matter. I notice that the leaf pattern is alternating, so I'm going to put another one over here and I'll finish that one up quickly. 1, 2, 3. See the 1, 2, 3, and then just put the pattern in and then this one in behind. There. These are at front, so it looks a little different. Perfect. It comes down there and I have my pattern but I think I need maybe one more here. It's going to be a little smaller. It's good to have three. I'll bring this one right up behind this one, see? I've complicated it a little bit but not too much. I think you'll be able to follow it. There. That looks better with three. There we go. Now we can do something special with this. Fine tip Sharpie, I find the fountain pen works great on a hot press paper but it tends to bog up in this softer paper. Now I would just take the pen and remember, I'll do one leaf to show you. We're stylizing a little bit. Take a really good look at the serrated edges. I'm going to look at them too. They're a little bit feathery. Here we go. Let's put that there so you can see it, study it as we do it. I'm going to start with smooth, and then zig-zag, and then from this edge, smooth zigzag. Here's the big one here. Continue that around and I'll meet you here in a second. They come down here and they hook down and then in. Just to make it a little tricky, want you to put one in the middle here; couple in the middle, just little zigzags. They're coming down. There we go. I like that. I have three of these, even though there's about three or four. Look, I love it. This is great. We can throw a little color on it now. I would suggest pouring a little into a container. It pours fairly thickly and then wiping the top so it doesn't get all stuck. There's my brush. I've put soap on it. Dots decide where we're going to [inaudible] and I think what I'm going to do holding my brush up high, is I'm going to do the stem. Just like painting, just tap it down like that. I'm going to do the outside of the rose too. With any kind of new material, you're experimenting. You're not quite sure what's going to happen. The more you use a material or a technique, the more confident you become. Notice how I'm pointing the brush at the edge, I could move this too. There we go. I don't think I'll do the leaves. But because we have all these spots here, I am going to tap some [inaudible] in like that. Not on the rose, but even over a few of the leaves. I'm thinking this will give it a decorative effect and since I've already done it here, this going to be great. There we go. The first thing you want to do is to take the mask-it and add a little bit of water to your soap and start cleaning it immediately. The soap was emulsifier so it won't stick. There, we've done it. Then I'll go clean my brush with soap and water. You can use the end of a brush. I'm going to put in a few little strokes here that will simulate a grassy texture. We just want to see what happens. You can get a stylus, which is like a nib, and you could make long lines. I could put on some of these black lines. I could put little lines for the veins but I'm not going to do that. There we go. I've put quite a bit a [inaudible] at the bottom and rather than pour it back in, I will probably just leave the [inaudible] and dump it into the water and clean that off. We're ready to go. 13. Laying In Your Colors: This is it. I'm using a spritz or this time a little bit on the back. If you do spritz on the back and the front, this size of paper will not buckle, maybe even a little bit on there and sticks, you see. I gave this a good 20 minutes to dry. I can go right over this rows, you see, I make want vertical strokes. Notice the spritz just dampens the paper perfectly. This could be like a misty morning and now I'm going to add in behind a little bit of blue, stronger three of them at different intervals. Clean the brush again, add a little bit of Alizarin on one side and some yellow on the other side, and then just let it mingle. This could be faraway trees. I don't think I want to white there. I don't want anything competing with the rows. The reason I go back and forth here, just so I don't have any lines behind. I don't even mind if it comes over the leaves a bit now. I'm going to let that dry bean be patient. It won't dry on there, be patient and let things dry. Bottom right up over the leaves. We're just going to let that set and see what happens. I think I'll take some blue and find a little spot here. Here we are, because I want the rows to be as pretty bold. What do we do after that? Well, I come right under here because the musket is going to protect the rows. Now it takes him clean, mist like this, sprayed on there. Pick it up. Get a random effect, almost a forced effect there. If I don't like that, I can take my brush, cleans it off of course. I can soften the edge C because the paper is still slight, lead damp. We'll pull that down a little more in there. Remember, it's like a force behind there. All these little white speckles are going to show up too. It's going to be pretty exciting to see what happens. I think I'll go with a little bit of red up here and put a little bit on my brush here. Then just wiggle a brush quickly. A little bit of mist, just a bit. The mist is great because it allows you to get soft edges. Nice. Notice I don't have any darks, just mid tones. We're going to let that sit for a while. To recap, this is still to be removed. The leaves have been done, we have some interesting shapes here, we have some dots that are going to show up. This is the watermark. I don't know if you can see it, these arches, archival paper. You'll get that on sheets. This was a big sheet of paper cut down. Just before we stop, I am going to add a dark, and it's going to be a dark blue right there and here. Then you're going to cross it over here. We have a strong diagonal or what we would call an oblique, mist it, and then lift it and see if I can make it drift a bit. Just a bit. Drifting that's very strong color. It's starting to drift now. I think I will lift off. A little bit of the leaf with a piece of paper towel, so that I get dark against light. Then I'm going to leave it and let it dry it. I think I've had enough of the mask and I'm going to take it off and see what we can do. Gently, one direction. I don't see any paper ripping there. You can use an eraser, if you like, a pink pearl. You can use a little piece of rubber. I like my fingers. It's great to use your fingers as long as it's bone dry, and your fingers have been washed, so they're not covered with oil. Now, the thicker part, just keep at it. One direction. Don't go back and forth. One direction, and it doesn't look like it's harmed the paper at all. It'll stubborn here, so we just bear down a little more. I suppose you could wear a latex glove, might work really well. The trick is to keep pushing in the same direction. Don't pull it. Let it beat up or ball up. There we go. I'm going to leave the grass one in. Change fingers. Well, there's a few more up here. You can feel them, they're little bumps. I think that's pretty successful. There we go. Here's the rose. It's opened up since yesterday. You can see it's opening right up. I'll just leave the leaf there as a reference. Everybody draws a pink rose, red rose. They have a certain significance. We have some beautiful yellow roses in the garden. But I've geared the greens and blues to set off the vibrant pink, red hue of this rose. The simplest thing to do is to give a light wash to the rose. The reason we do that is because this will establish our light areas. Now, you see the rigger brush takes a minute to start working. But it's a great brush because you can see the tip of it as you're painting. Now, that's the advantage of the rigger brush. Now, a bigger brush. Notice I'm pointing the brush right at the edge that I'm painting, and the paper is very dry. You may want to turn your paper if you like. There it is. That's the first wash. Now, the leaves are going to need a wash too, because they're darker, we're going to go darker. Here we go. Let's get the leaf mixture, some sap green, in with the yellow, and don't go too dark too soon. Now I'm going to put a little test here. You can see that probably I need a little bit of the darker green with the lighter green. Now let's check it. It's a little darker, so I'm going to do the bottom one here first and I hold my paper on the side. Here we go. We give it a flat wash. Holding the brush up, you can do like little circular motions. I see we have a little bit of the masking fluid here for a little hole. There's one. This one is on top of this one. I like this one. I'll just darken this one and this one. I'm going to do something a little different to these. Now they're a little lighter because I didn't load my brush. I'm going to pick up a little here and drop it in like this. There we go. I'm going to make them different. They're going to be darker in one place and lighter in the next. We'll mix up some more dark green. Here's the darker green, I added a little bit of blue to it. That'll be for this section here. Just pop it into the bottom and let it spread. There we go. We just boss it over a little bit. Because it's wet, it's going to spread. That's it all. I'm going to give it a little green. Now, you see how thick that's going on? You can't really see the green underneath. So what do you do is then keep putting the paint on onto all three leaves, gently, so that you don't rub the paint underneath. Then gently go over it again, touch it to the rag. Lift the surface paint off. You're not doing anything to the paint underneath, you're just lifting the surface paint off. Now I'm going to take a little of the darker green, which I already have in here, with just a pinch of the ultramarine blue. Just a little bit. I'm going to touch this one. Now, it's dark here, so I don't want to go too dark here. I'm going to keep it a little bit lighter there. That's getting pretty close to the green we have here, and I'm thinking that's just about right. There we go. I'm going to accept that as the green. Put a little green in here, just tap it in. You'll notice how the green neutralizes the pink. Then see there's the real true color. I think I'm going to bring it down here, a little bit of green. Once again, I'm going to make a little bit darker green and drop it in here for the shadow. Well, that's a little dark. So what do I do? Green it up a bit with some cadmium yellow medium, drop it in, and then pick it up. Whenever you get a big blob, just pick it up with your brush, see? Then tap it. These little leaves, put them. These are not leaves, these are the sepal. That's the sepal. We're going to add a little bit of yellow to that, because it's just a little bit too dark. Tap it down. Like I said, there was a little pinch of red in the leaves and the stems. Just drop a little red in. There we go. We're getting a drop of the pure alizarin crimson there, and my second water container is over here. Now, remember, you don't want drips, so we'll start with the middle. There's my drawing, that'll help me out a little bit. Start at the middle and we go around with our second coat. If that's not dark enough, then add little more alizarin crimson and do a little check. I think that's better. Drop it in, see? Just by dropping it in, we get the second coat going. We're going to go over this part last and make it the darkest. I might do this one next, and maybe this one. There's no rule book. There's just your decisions and just stick with your decision. Leaving a little bit of the lighter pink at the tip here, you see? to simulate that one. Now I can darken this one, simply because it's wet, just tap it in, look, see? Just tap a little bit of color in here and there. This is light, so I think I'll tap a little bit in there. Same with this, I'm going to tap it in. Now my rose is starting to come out. 14. Creating Depth And Contrast: Now, I think what I'll do is I'm going to do this, you don't have to, but I'm going to bring a little bit of that pink in there. There's my [inaudible]. I'm just going to take to the quarter of my mat board up here and tilt, see? Then add water and bring a little bit of that pink into there. I think a little more blue in that one. That's perfect there. There we are. Every time you do a picture, you do get better at the procedure. So even if you didn't use the masking fluid, you can see that we're still succeeding here. The masking fluid is still on here. So I'm bringing in a gray area and notice I take that and just tap it out. See? Tap it out. Tap it out. Don't leave extreme darks next to lights if you want a nice flowing picture. Now you'll see I probably need a little more blue in there. Now, I think I need a little dark coming through here. So this is where I'm going to take [inaudible] because I'm going to be bold. It's a little wet, see? Whoa oh whoa. But I really need to show off that little dew drop there. That looks [inaudible]. One of them. A little bonuses here. Now, because the paper is wet, it's easier to adjust the darkness and the lightness of things. So many layers and thin it out. Let it fade out. Now, this is getting a little bit puffy. I'm going to take it right up here. Put my rose over here. Fit that over here. I'm going to tilt it right up. Take some water. However, it only goes where it's wet. Okay. So I covered that one. There's one little dropping in a little bit, where does this go? Right over my leaf. But that's no problem. Sometimes we have to sacrifice something for a little boldness. I'm cleaning my brush off, and I'll just pull that right off the leaf there, see? That's not a leaf rather that's the sepal. I like that better. Great. Make sure it's fairly clean. I'm going to take some green, and mix it on here. I like these mat boards because you can get a good idea of what the color is. Great. A little bit of yellow with it. Now, I'm going to come down right on an angle. Kind of a shadow area here, right over the leaf. Then a dark in the bottom here. There, it looks like it's growing on the side of a hill. So some diagonals right through the bottom there. Now, it's on the leaf there. Take your brush and we'll soften a few edges here. So you lift that off, soften up this edge. You can always soften an edge or lift it off, see? To lighten it. Just push a little bit, rub on your rag, push a little bit, rub on your rag. I think the musket is still there. Of course, the last thing you want to do, is let it dry completely. So we're getting some little grassy textures in here, working the stem. It's like a rose on a hill. I really like this very strong yellow we got in here. Okay. Getting in the zone now, because the paper is wet. When the paper is wet, you can do things to it that you can't do to it when it's dry. So that's, there. Look at these. These look like far away hills now. Starting to really work a little bit lighter here, see? I can go back and lighten the areas to adjust my dark and light areas. Like this went too dark here. Now, I've gotten this little light section here. Always cleaning my brush. If your brush is too wet, it will bleed into the background. So you see how I'm lifting? Lifting is very important if you're doing this kind of a water color. Later on, you can go over it and darken it with your pen again. But it takes more of that really pure alizarin. This is almost straight out of the tube with just a very small amount of water. Because I want to get the inside of the rose. So if you look at the inside of the rose now, we're going through the final details. It's quite dark, because of the shadow areas. I'm going to come into the inside of the rose with this dark alizarin and just pad it so it's not pasty. I think I'll do a little bit on the tip here, just because it might be sorted in the shade. Then empty the brush. Then stipple or pad it out. So I get really dark to really light. Now, let's do the same on this part here. Dark, tap, tap, tap, tap, see? Very little paint. Tap it out here. Take it off. Even the damp rag will take it off like that. Tap it out. See? Cadmium here. I'm allowed to use a little bit of opaque watercolor, especially the cadmiums in small areas, you see? So that's not see-through. You can start to see some of the areas that I've lightened, you see? It's like a shadow coming through here. So you can take some of that cadmium and rub it like this into the center. You'll get a light effect. I think I'm going to let that sit for a minute, and I'll show you how to do the last and final touches when this is dry. 15. Adding Mixed Media: What I'm going to do is, go up the side, and make the stem look a little more three-dimensional, and come under here with a little bit of the green half the leaf here, creates a little shadow area. These are fine markers. We're doing what's called a mixed media where we use other mediums to help our picture along. I like that. Put a little bit in the middle and see what it does. If you'd like to have a little more control at the end, this might be something you might choose, and the lighter you do it. Smaller tip here. This gives a very lovely pink even though it's a violet. Can leave a little white showing there, a little bit of pink showing there. Tapping it in little dots, and I don't know, I think I'm just about there, but I want to get really dark in the middle. I'm going to go with this one in the middle, dotting it see dotting it. That'll give me the dark look in the middle. Couple of dots there, couple there. A little dark areas created shadows on my rose. You can see the purple or the violet. The color is actually like this. It's a violet, you can see how it really just using dots, how you can have lots of fun with mixed media. This leaves looking a little bit too dark. I can wet it, tap it. Wherever I see where I want to lighten it, wet it, tap it. See how I'm lifting it? This is like the English watercolors style that we had a course called the watercolor essentials, and we learned how to lift. The English watercolors in the 18th century were great at lifting colors, and keeping the leaves. If I wanted to re-do this picture, I just have to redraw it again, and try another one. I'm thinking it's a little too dark in here. Watch wet it, let it sit for a minute, pull and tap. Look at that, much more vibrant, way too dark here. It's almost pasty there. You don't be afraid to keep working at your picture. The more you work at it, you'll learn more. Look at the paint I'm taking off there. I'm not giving up on this little rose until I'm totally, or at least moderately satisfied with the result. Some people say, don't work on your picture, you have to get a right away, don't work it, that's not true. Picasso worked his pictures, some of them for years. Monet worked his pictures for years. Lot's of artists throw out more pictures than they actually show. Look at that, look what I'm getting there. That's a very vibrant blue. That's the good thing about a staining color. I see a mountain here now, see? The staining colors are very intense. If I did this picture again, I would get a different effect, and maybe after four or five tries, I'd really have it down. I'd have my roses would be pretty cool. I've got one little spot up here that's a little bit pasty. See, just rub it a little bit, I'm using my Robert Simon's brush, nothing fancy, and then, pull it out. Now, you can see I'm getting bands of light or a cloud. See the line that's forming here, that's because the wet paper is meeting up against dry paper. You want to just fan that out a little bit so you don't get that line see? Tap there good. Mr. Movie still trying things, but you know what? If nothing ventured, nothing gained. Let's just see what happens here. Well, that's pretty dark. Wouldn't you say that's pretty dark? What can I do with that. Well, maybe I can go right over all this. It's a little stormy rose. I don't think my water drop's going to work. You can see this is quite an experiment. We had to fix the leaves, the first little coloring with the pens, there was no problem there. Then it got a little stubborn, but you know what? I think it's going to work out. I do. After all, the rose is the star of the show, not the sky and not the little fluffy things. You know those little miskits all over the bottom, what they've really done is given me some field texture. I think we have our rose back now, green. Water and because the rose is so pink, this is going to work. Remember my paint, it's not thick, not in the sense that it's pasty thick. There's quite a bit of water with it. I like that blue section in there. That's good. Can leave a few little white specks. Remember, once you cover the white, you're not going to get it back. Green is worked out really well here. The blue, we can just lift a little bit to aim it over to the rose you see? I've flipped my picture over, it's actually upside down for me. See those little white things showing through there now? Upside down sometimes gives you a better perspective on your picture. There's the top of that hill, the sun is hitting it. You know what? I'm liking that except this one little spot in here. I can see I need to put a little dark in here too behind the rose, coming up behind it. Oh yes, I see now. This is the hill behind here, there we go. Think that's going to work. Mystical rose. Could be the mother of all roses. I like that and we leave it, and put my little mat on it. Quite satisfied with that. That's going to work out just fine. 16. Flower 'Power Board': This is the big flower pitcher I did at murals, one of them, we did two. You'll see it's all buckled up. It's a 140 pound paper. It's great paper, but it does need to be tamed a bit here, while I show you a few things with it, this is my worksheet. I just got so much information that day, it was wonderful just sitting in the garden, and taking notes. Pansies turned out great. My first pansies, I didn't realize that there was a real pattern in the pansies. Here is what I discovered. A pansy starts with the middle, which is 1, 2, 3, 4 like a four leaf clover. Sometimes you get a face on them, depending on the species, or the variety I should say. Then it comes up with three, one here, one here, and then this one, a little different shape here. So you end up with four against three, and then there's two more behind. So five petals. I examined quite a number of pansies and found that to be true, that there's 1, 2, 3 followed by two behind it. Now, I can draw my pansies without even being there, make them grumpy, make them happy. Let's see what we can do to this purple here. Let's see if we can intensify it, with a very light wash of the very strong Thalo blue. So I'm going to start in the middle here, by adding very small touches of the blue. Look at what that little amount did to the picture, just that little bit of blue. Let me add it on this one. So if I have a violet or purple, I can always intensify it with a thin wash with a very small brush. I just don't think you can really bang around with flowers. I think you have to be either be very direct and bold. We've done that or simulate the intense beauty, and simplicity with very small, thin washes. One there, one there. These are on the first three and here. I'm going to put them out like that and then clean my brush off, so there's less red on it. Paint it out, so that it disperses all over the petal from dark to light. Remember the pansies. They're not straight, flat, perfect washes, they're more variegated. The one behind, I'm going to go with a light blue behind. The one behind was lighter. Looking now if the light coming here, I'd seen it myself clinging to make it little darker on this side, than this side. Let's see if we can simulate some light coming on this flower. We've got little idea going now, always good to have a little idea. So this side is going to be darker, than the other side. Looking at your flowers at different times of the day always, will give you a different outlook on your flower. Little more purple in here, with a little blue on this side and we go. The last thing, I'm going with a little more yellow, the pinch more of the cadmium yellow. See, just sit here and play with this for a while. Every time I do something, I'm learning something about my flowers. So this is the worksheet. Take a little bit of the very strong fallow type blue, with a small brush or big brush. Let's do a small brush because then you'll feel like you've got more control. Let's just start it up here, up next to this little flower. These little worksheets are a great way to get to a facility with your washes. Notice that my wash is flat right now. I have not even tilting my paper. Now watch what I do. I just keep it going back and forth slowly, till I notice that it gets a little rough and I take a little water on my brush, and finish it off. Now you may get a little bit of a line there, see. If you go over it, you see you keep getting aligned. Now if that's the effect you want, that's great. So a good wash, generally needs a little bit of a tilt. The reason being, is that water runs downhill. So you'll see my second one is quite smooth, and it goes from dark to light. Let's try another one. Let's set this off here. Take a little bit of the blue. This one I'm going to use a little stroke, go around the outside of my flower. I'm contrasting a dark color, the blue against the light. Now, I'll listen to the brush, it'll sound scratchy. The reason it's sounding scratchy, is it's lost its water. So adding a little water at the end, to make the wash disappear, especially on the edges, though that's a hard edge, the white and the blue. I like that, I'm going to leave that there because it's wet. I can draw up a little bit of the darker wash into here, and let it run down. There we go. So, because the papers wet, just this little tapping or stippling method, creates a very good transition, from dark to light, dark, water to light. I can even make this darker. So learning these principal dark to light, will really help you drawing and painting your flowers. Because this petunia here, how do I make it a little more intense? Well, I have to take a little bit more of the red. What I'll do is I'll test on the dry paper, put another very light coat. Because the paper's dry and my paintbrush's wet, I can dry my page off, paintbrush a bit on the paper, and then pull the paint out gradually to the edge, so that the middle of this keeps getting darker and darker. Now, you have to admit, that my second coat has made this red more vibrant. I'm probably not going to get the right vibrancy, by putting on thick paint. It's not going to work as well. Because of the angle of this flower, I'm going to keep this light, because the petals turn inward. Just sit here and play with this for a while. Every time I do something, I'm learning something about my flowers. So this is the worksheet.