Beginner Friendly Simple Watercolor Floral Composition

1. Introduction: Hi, guys. Welcome to another lesson with me here, Clarice on Skillshare. Really quickly about me, I am a watercolor artist, formerly a brand designer from Toronto, Canada. I started off teaching little tutorials over on YouTube, how to paint loose florals, how to paint a rose, how to paint a pony. Anything that you can think of, if you Google it on my YouTube channel, you will find it. That's how I started. From there, it slowly progressed on to wine and sip events over in the Niagara region. And from there, we progressed onto watercolor retreats. I'm also an ambassador for Princeton Brushes, you will see me using Princeton brushes in pretty much all my videos. 2. The Lesson: Okay, let's quickly talk about this lesson. In this lesson, I am going to take you step by step on how to create little elements individually and then we're going to combine those elements and create a nice floral bouquet or a floral composition. Because it's the holiday season, we're going to be using some metallics, so I hope you're excited. Bring out those metallics if you have any, if not, don't worry, I'm going to be listing everything that I'm using to create these beautiful loose floral creations in this lesson, check it out and follow. 3. The Project: So for the project, I would love it if you can take what you have learned, follow along, paint along, and then take what you have learned and try and sit down and do your own composition. This is the best way for you to hone into your creative intuition and also create something that is entirely up to you. Art is very subjective and what I am painting and where I am placing things might not necessarily be what you would do. I want to see what you would do. Once you have finished that project, please post it in the gallery section of this lesson. I would love to see how it turns out. If you posted on social media, please don't forget to tag me. Again, I would love to reshare my stories and just give my $0.02 cheer you on wherever you are in your watercolor journey. 4. Part 1 - Swatching: We're on to more flowers. This time, I'm going to be using the Princeton number eight mainly and we are going to be mixing some of the primary red magenta with, I don't have the color out here with the cobalt green blue. I have those colors on my palette already, so I'm just going to put these off to the side and get them mixed up. It gives you a beautiful purple and I'm going to swatch that for you so you can see what that looks like. The primary magenta, This is a very light muted version of it. Now I'm just going to take more color from here, drop that in so you can see what it looks like with a bright red or more color less water. Here's some of the cobalt green blue, a very pretty combination, here's what it looks like if it was just darker. Very nice blue. Now, I'm going to mix the two of them to show you what you can get. Starting off like this. If you're noticing, I'm holding my brush up here and I'm really pressing down to get full span coverage or full length coverage. Then I'm taking some of the magenta and I'm dropping some of that here. Where they intersect is where you can see some beautiful purple happening. Now, notice that the mixture that you get on here when you don't mix it in the palette is a little bit different than when you do mix it in the palette. I just wanted to show you guys what it would look like naturally when they blend together. But now we're going to be mixing these two in the palette to get a more authentic purple result. Now, I really like my purples to be with more pink, so I'll be adding more pink in mine. Adjust yours according to how you would like yours to be. I've got quite a bit of blue in there, and I always like to say, a little bit of watercolor goes a long way. This will be a lot of purple. I'm going to mix this in right here. I'm actually just going to mix it where the pink is because I don't want too much of the blue mixed in. This is the color. I'm going to swatch that for you real quick. There's just so much creamy goodness happening here with the colors that I need to make sure I don't have way too much happening. You can still see some of the pink on my brush. I might just have to move this onto another palette just for easier mixing. Let's watch this color quickly. Look at that. Now I know it's not fully mixed as great, but I'm loving this deep jewel tone that we have just beautiful. 5. Part 2 - Flower Demos: Holding my brush halfway up, I'm going to start by creating that petal. Then I'm getting water on my brush and I'm going to continue creating more petals. I'm really not caring too much about the white space in between the petals, but I am caring about it in the center. You could essentially have a blob of purple like this and just leave that center open. Usually when you paint like this, sometimes you'll find little bunches of color. You can just move the color around. Like if you wish, just a couple of strokes, you don't have to go over it in an insane amount of strokes because then what's going to happen is you'll you'll have a lot of leftover prints or marks which doesn't translate to the best results. Less strokes, the better. I've got my basic setup. This almost looks like a morning glory facing upward. We're going to allow this to dry and then we're going to go in with a slightly deeper version of this color once this is completely dried. We're using the wet on dry technique here. 6. Part 3 - Flower Demos: While that is drying up, we're going to do another one over here on the side just to get a little bit more comfortable with painting something like this. Here we go. This time, I'm going to try and leave some white space in between. Say, this is our first petal. Here's a trick, by the way, if you want to really nail down on those five petal flowers, just do your little circle in a basic circle with dots. Yes. Then just go ahead and paint your petals loosely like I just did. Feel free to get more water for some of them and just troll your brush different directions and get those nice shapes. You can even do one standalone, one that looks not sure if it's connected to that or if it's alone by itself, getting more water on my brush and I'm doing my fifth petal. Then just to keep things a little bit or try something different, I'm going to get some of that deeper purple and I'm dropping that in right in the center and then we're going to allow this to dry. I guess we'll explore two different kinds of flowers or painting styles in between the two of them here. We're going to wait for this to dry and then we'll come back and add another layer. The difference between the two, this one does not have white space in between the petals. It also doesn't have the center area. With added purple. This one has a little bit of white space so you can tell where the petals are. Individual petals are, that is. Then we've added some purple to the center. 7. Part 4 - Flower Demos: So this first one over here has dried up most of it and it may be just a tad bit damp, but I'm itching to create my next layer. Here we go. I've mixed up a little bit more color and I'm making sure that it's not too dark. I'm going to get a little bit of water on this. What we're going to do for this next layer is we're going to create petals like this, but smaller. This will be our outer area and then we're painting on top. This is definitely wet on dry, not wet on damp. This is a good indication, so we're going to do our little dotted circle, just like we did with the second flower. Then using that as your area or your guide rather, we're going to paint these loose shapes for petals. The point is to dab and get this nice wet on dry effect and experiment to see exactly how things dry up and how layering can also elevate your florals layering with wet on dry. This one's done. We're going to allow this to dry and then we're going to go back in with a slightly darker rendition or mixture of that purple and we're going to create even smaller petals on the inside. 8. Part 5 - Flower Demos: So this is dried up quite well. This might be just a little bit damp, but I'm okay with it being a little bit damp to get a little bit of a bleed. If that happens. If not, that's okay. We're going to continue with what we did here. We're reflecting the same thing over here. Smaller petals, we're going to try and get more definition between the petals by leaving a little bit of white space. Here we go. One, two, can use some of those petal techniques that we did in the beginning for brushstrokes. And you can always turn your sheet around. Then I'm going to go one more here. Now, this was a little bit damp so you can see there's a little bit of bleed happening and that's okay. I don't mind it overly. Now let's go in the center and add more of that beautiful rich purple. I'm mixing more of that purple on the side and I'm just going to drop more of that in here. Make sure you don't close up all this beautiful white space that's happening there. The goal of this is just to dab or layer more color just in the center so we can get that nice dark to light effect. Now that that's done, we're going to wait for that to dry before we do another layer of smaller petals on there. 9. Part 6 - Berries Demo: Going to just essentially roughly draw or paint a circle, something like this. Notice how I'm pressing down my brush, swirling around and then I go up the other way. And then I'm lightly grazing the edges to get more perfection in. Then I'm going to get a little bit more of the blue on the tip of my brush. Then we're just going to create little protrusions at the top, three of them like so, and then we'll just do maybe three at the bottom like this and we have a stem. Then let's do another one. Circle. Now, the circles can get out of hand. That's okay when you're first trying it out. This could almost be one that's facing us. You can just drop in more color and it'll do exactly what it did with the flowers at the top, so this is going to be a lot darker. That's a good enough indication that it's facing us. Let's do another one facing upward this way. No, let's this way. I'll try and make it smaller so it doesn't touch the flowers at the top. And they can touch one another. That's okay. Then we've got our little protrusions. Using the tip of my brush, I'm just lightly gazing to create these a little crown. This one can be another stem, I guess. The stems are a little bit off on this. Let's do this one more time, but this is the basic idea, adding the darker color to the center of this is likely best done when it is wet on damp versus wet on wet or even wet on dry maybe, but wet on damp will give you smoother results. Let's try and add this in a little berry bunch. Say if you wanted to add that to your flowers at the top. 10. Part 7 - Berries Demo: Here we go. I'm going to start off with one circle. In fact, instead of doing all the details and then doing another one, I'm going to dip the tip of my brush and create the next berry right away. I'm lightly touching this berry and notice how the color just seeps into it, which is beautiful. I love when things like that happen, especially when it's a loose style of watercolor. It's so nice to see. Let's do one more happening here. Then I'm taking more of that color on the tip of my brush, the darker, more prominent blue, and then I'm going to lightly add these little strokes at the top here. I'm going to add some here, and then let's add some here. In this one, they're all facing upward, which is fine. Then let's just add little bottom for them. Just something very rough. I'm not even making it a green than adding the stems in the same color. We're literally just painting and just going with the flow here to get the basics down of painting, I guess, something that resembles a blueberry that you can add to your flowers. That's all there is to it. It's super simple, fun and great with getting practice in for your brush control and then also painting circles in and that wet on wet versus wet on damp. Now, one thing I want to just make mention of is, let's just examine the blueberry or the berry as a whole. It's supposed to be a filler element that happens more to embellish your main elements. So say you go lighter than this blue, that's totally fine. I'm just painting this in to give you more idea of where this is going. You can add depth to this very loosely by just adding more color to one side. It looks like the light is hitting on this side and then using that same darker tone. You get this darker tone by adding more color, less water. You're creating your little crown at the top and then at the bottom, you're just doing your little bits there. And then that's it. This is very thin, a stem, it's ridiculously thin, but you get the meaning or you get what I'm trying to say here is just add more of a darker tone on one side and then it immediately elevates the whole light and shadow aspect to your berry. Now, actually, because this is semi dried up, you can also notice if we go and add that in right now, I'll give us a nice soft effect. Because it's wet on damp. I'm going to show you what that will look like on this one on the side here because that will be more on these shadows should be on the same side. I'm just going with where it was darker, but they really should be on the same side. I should have always been on the side here. But you can see how it elevates everything right away. Let's just do that over here on this side. I'm going to show you what that will look like because I feel my preference is always wet on wet or wet on damp. I need to add a little bit more water. There we go. If I'm adding this rich color here and it's just sitting there. It's not really doing much and this is the difference between wet on damp versus wet on wet. Wet on damp will give you those nice darker results, but it just gives you that hard edge. You're not getting that beautiful bleed that you get here. The bleed is best over here because this is wet on wet. It's bordering a fluid, not a smooth gradient over here, but it still works. This here it just stops midway. I did mention if that is the case and you want to experiment, just take a damp brush. And just rub that along and see if you can get a blend in or not, something like that. Same thing over here. This one's a little bit wet on wet. Wet on damp there. That was my fix for it. To be very honest, I figure these are a great way to practice knowing the difference between wet on wet, wet on damp, and then wet on dry and also showing you the results. 11. Part 8 - Berries Demo: So this one has dried up. We're going to go in with a darker version of the purple. Roughly mix that in here. I'm using my number eight. You can also use the number four just to get a little bit more control over the shapes if you still working on your brush control. That's just a suggestion. Now, holding my brush loosely, I'm going to go ahead and create little petals. Again, if you want to create that little dotted circle that I spoke about, if that's more helpful, try that and then also turn your sheet around if you can paint better that way. And then I'm doing the little jaggedy edges. Perfect. Now you allow that to dry and then you're going to see what that looks like. Right now, it looks a lot darker. We're going to find out exactly in a few moments once it dries up. But I maybe could have gone just a tad bit lighter to get a more gradual effect because right now this looks very stark. But let's move on to the next flower here. It's got a little bit of damp happening, so I'm going to get a little bit more water into my mixture here. Let's start. I'm going to start off in between on purpose so that it kind of alternates. We essentially did the exact same thing that we did with the second set of petals just on a smaller scale with a slightly darker hue of purple. What I want to add to this is a little bit of metallic. I think what I'm going to use is the champagne gold. You can also use the fire opal so I'm going to get some champagne gold happening here, mixing it in with my number four. I'm going to drop it in first over here. What I'm going to do is just lightly dab around the edges and random dabbing happening in the center of the flower, but leaving that white space open. I'm going to do the same thing here. I'm dabbing at the edges. For the center because the center is very tiny, I'm just going to leave it white. But I'm lightly dabbing into the petals here. To introduce one more thing that we have done in at least one of these flowers and that's going to be adding some texture onto the flowers using the back of the brush. Now, if you remember correctly, I've said that the best way to get proper texture is when the area is damp, I'm going to do it mainly in the last set of petals that we have painted. Look at that. Look at that stark. Indent or discoloration, I guess you can say, where the lines are so prominent and that's mainly because we're essentially scraping off the paint as we scrape in these lines. But look how much depth and added texture it adds to your flowers. Look at that. I like to start from the center and then go outward. I'm going along the shape of the petals so this way it looks more whimsical and fun. This is what that looks like. Super pretty and you can see exactly how damp it is. Now, this one's also damp, very tempted to do it here as well. But I think just for the sake of this lesson, so you get a good understanding of how things dry up, I'm just going to leave this as is, and we're going to compare the two once they're completely dried up properly. Let's just take a quick moment to look at the shine happening right there. Very pretty as well. But let's see how that dries up again. We've got the shine here too and it is integrating in with the lines quite nicely too. It's almost like a subtle effect on that last layer of flowers or petals. 12. Part 9 Dried Up Flowers Purple Flowers: So it's all dried up and we can finish off with a couple of strokes on the outskirts of this and it's what I like to call fluffing. Now, I don't have a lot of space over here, so I'll just do it on this one flower and it may or may not touch a little bit of this. We want to get a very diluted version of the base color or just the colors we've been using. Actually, let me revise what I just said. We've been using the same color. We're just using different ratios of water to color mixes. We started with the least for the base, and then we slowly built mind you, for the third layer, I feel like I could have gone slight bit lighter because this is very dark, but that's fine. I don't mind it. It's a very nice contrast to it as well. Here we go going lighter. I'm using my number eight and I'm just going to lightly just add little strokes around. My flour making these very organic looking shapes to enhance the fluffiness of it. And you want to give it just subtle little strokes like this. I guess I could say that I'm making little waves, but look at the variation in edge pattern, I guess you could call it. It's very loose, it's organic and I'm keeping it light. So we're going to allow that to dry. You can also overlap a little bit if you want just to give it that extra interest. Otherwise, it's going to look a little bit too concentrated and intentional. This way now, we've got a flower that's bigger, fluffier and you could do the same thing over here as well. That's what I would term as fluffing pretty much using a watered down version of the base color to just add that loose light effect around the flowers to imply background petals or layers of petals to your flower. 13. Part 10 - Leaves: So now we can do a couple of loose leaves just in the same style that we did our flowers in. I'm going to introduce some of the green. Let's try and mix a little bit of this sap green because I feel like it's very muted and this is what the sap green looks like. Let's just watch that real quick. This is what it looks like here. What if I mix a little bit of that purple in with it? I'm going to mix some of that in my leftover section here and we're going to get a more muted green tone, which I think is great because then it'll give a nice enough balance to our elements like the berries and the flowers. Now, for these leaves, what I would suggest is going lighter because these are so much darker. For instance, we're using the same techniques that we've done in our brushstroke um session. Starting with a stem and then starting from out going in, that's my preference. But what I would love you to do is love for you to do so you can get used to this is doing that little pressing and getting that nice edge to your leaf as well. This is something that we did with the flower. Remember when we did the petals and this just gives us more organic looser looking shapes on the side. Then if you just add the same detail. I did one stroke and then I just went sideways and press my brush down to get this shape, do the same thing that way. Then just to finish it off, if you just want to add that darker tone at the base of the leaf, this way you're creating some very loose looking depth and it adds something super pretty to the end result and I overworked that there, but you get the idea. The whole theme of this is to just be really loose in your strokes obviously, minus the berries. I feel like we were a little bit more concentrated with the berries. But with the leaves, I want this to be a little bit more of a practicing by starting with your stem, pressing down to really zigzag your way and then get a loose enough shape like this that can be a leaf. So it's that whole experience of just taking water using a water down version of the color and just creating these lucid shapes that are supposed to be your leaves in your nice thick flowers or big flowers. Again, lighter tone, so more water, less color, and we're just adding this to offset the flowers to give it that extra interest in that beautiful loose feel. Now, one more element that you can do in the same color, in fact, I'm just going to add a little bit more of that purple in here to get more of a purply tone. Let's just see what that looks like. If you can add elements like the tendrils that we did, but just adding extra long little lines like this and then just starting with the tip pressing down and dragging for longer leaves, that can also create some really nice beautiful effects. For these, all I'm doing is starting with the tip and then dragging and trailing off. It's like a flick of the wrist situation. A couple of two different leaves for you to try and this just adds texture. It adds interesting shape. You've got some really nice thicks and thins going on, and we're keeping things very, very loose. That's still the main aspect to this. So we're going to take what we've learned in this lesson over here and we're going to put it together to form a mini composition. I just want to show you guys how you can take each element that you've learned and put it together and create your own little mini compositions. If you've been struggling with compositions, this video is for you. 14. Part 11 Composition Purple Flowers: So I'm going to start off with using my Princeton number eight brush and we're mixing the same color that I had previously mixed to demonstrate those flowers. We're starting off with that very muted base, we've got a lot of space to work here and I'm not going to be doing this a lot of instruction. I'll be able to move a little bit more loosely and fluidly over here. Here we go. Starting off with our very loose base section and we're pretty much creating five petal flowers using some very, very water down purple. I'm going to start with the dotted circle and I'm getting water on my brush and we're going to loosely press down and create these very watered down looking petals like so. This flower that I'm painting, I'm going very fast with my strokes to create these petals. I would suggest doing that to get that more authentic loose look to your flower. I'm aiming for five petals. Let's see if we can fit five on here. I'm going to do one more here. And then just one like so. We allow this to dry for a bit and then we come back to create that next level of flowers going on. While this is still damp, I would love to take this opportunity to go ahead and get some green happening for our leaves. For the leaves, all I did was mix in some of that cobalt sap green, sorry, with that same purple mixture. I have that mixed here already, and I'm taking a very muted version of that, just like I did with the base for the petals. We're going to start off with doing some leaves. I like to have things diagonally. I'm going to start a little bit of leafy action happening here. Then a little bit around here. And then taking more water on my brush, starting with that first stroke and then pressing down to really get a nice little loose effect for my leaf there. I'm going to get a little bit more green here just so I can drop that in and then create another loose looking leaf there. These ones I'm trying to keep smaller so that they don't overpower this area here. It looks more like it's just trailing off. I love that little seepage of pink going on in there as well. I'm going to drop some of that darker color in here just to give us a nice feel for darks and lights. Then just because I like to keep things in three, we're going to add one more leaf happening We've got diagonal. Let's do another one happening around here. Let's do one here. That's good. Then just like we created those nice long tendril like effects, I want to add some of that for added movement. I'm going to drop some of that in here. All I'm doing is lightly grazing and trailing off. Then I did say we would do those longer looking leaves which would look like this. Again, you're giving nice movement to your painting. Now, feel free to pick a different corner if you have done something slightly different with yours, or if you've placed things differently in yours. I love these little long leafy tendril elements because they again, add a lot of movement and it gives you some really nice contrast when it comes to shapes and sizes, sorry, thicks and thins. That's what I'm looking at. Because when you paint loosely, you need to have elements like this so then your eye flows nicer or more smoothly. 15. Part 12 Composition Purple Flowers: So I'm going to get a little bit more. Again, just dropping the color into these areas that are still damp. Right now, we've waited for that to dry a tad bit. These areas are damp, not completely wet when we first place the color down. This gives us a more a nicer feel when we drop the color in because it's going to not stick longer. It's going to be a little darker because there's not as much water for it to blend into. This is great for little shadowy elements. Look at that beautiful bleed happening over there. That's just so pretty. Getting a couple more strokes in here and maybe just doing a little bit of fluffing, which is just adding a couple of loose elements strokes like this. This will come with time. I don't expect you to get this right away. If you're struggling with fluffing, I promise you just make an effort to add this in and then over time, you're going to automatically get how to tweet or press down your brush because I know sometimes folks end up trying to mimic and I'm just going to get a scrap piece of paper here to show you. Sometimes it might look really weird like this. That's okay. We all have to start somewhere. The more you practice and try these out, the easier it will get for you. So now let's do some of those blueberry style, they're not filler flowers, but they're blueberries or berry elements. Same color mixture. We're just tweaking the ratio a bit. I'm getting a little bit of that pink in there and then adding more blue to it, it looks more blue than purple or like a a lighter indigo, I guess, could be a good description. Again, we want to start off very light. At a 30, 70 percentage, maybe just a slight bit deeper than the base that we mixed for the petals. I'd like to start my blueberries somewhere up I think it'll be nice to have some falling down this way and then a couple of them peaking up this way. Then again, we've got that diagonal placement happening over here as well. Here we go. I'm a little bit antsy about starting with the number eight brush, but we're going to go for it and try. Feel free to use, the number four brush. Let's do one in the number eight first for me. Here we go. Very rough little circle. Then just to make sure that I get some nice little peaks for our blueberry crowns, I'm going to use my number four and lightly just pushing upward. Now you can do this right away or you can wait for this area to dry up just a tad bit and then go in. You're using more of a wet on damp technique. This way, that area will be a lot darker because when there's less water on the base and it's just a bit damp, you're going to get more of a darker effect, which is what you essentially would like to have for that element at the top there. I'm just going to add the bottom bits here. For this one, I'm going to wait for it to dry just a tad bit, then we can see what that looks like. Getting more of a water down mixture. I'm going to add one more here. For some reason, my elements are always a lot closer to the flowers and tighter. But if you like to air things out and have them spaced out a bit more and just leave a little bit of white space, that is totally fine too. I encourage that. I'm going to now add the stems. Then I want to add one more very light one happening here. I'm using this element here or this light one to reflect that whole fluffing ideology of mine. This is to give more precedents to these elements versus the ones in the background. Feel free to. Now I have four, so I'm going to add one more and make that super light and keep that in the background here. I love how there's a little bit of separation happening in my purple color here, it's actually very cute and adds a lot of character to the elements. Okay. Now let's get a little bit of that darker indigo mix. Using this brush again, I'm going to add that in. Notice how immediately it's so much darker and more prominent at the top, because this is wet on damp. I'm going to drop some of that at the bottom of this too. Just on the sides here where these two berries touch I want to add a little bit of that happening here. Then just at the base. Then you can maybe add a little bit for the background berries too. There we go. We've got a lot of that going on, beautiful tonal range in there. Now we can move on to doing some over here. 16. Part 13 Composition Purple Flowers: All right, we're back. We move some of that out of the way and we're going to go ahead and do more of these over here. So using the number four, getting some of that nice muted purple or indigo rather, make sure it is indigo. I'm adding a little bit more blue. Here we go. Love how it's almost like a granulating effect. We've got that blue and that pink seeping through. The more it dries, the more prominent this is, and I think this is going to look very nice. Here we go. Getting more water in my mixture. This one can be pointing up this way. I'm doing another one here, lightly touching that area. I'm going to add the little crown right away. Why not? Very pretty. Then let's do one more. Let's do one more. Peeping this way, not peeping fully this way. Now, for the so called fluffing, if you want to just add a couple just very loose looking shapes in the background there, indicate that there's more adding more water to it. I'm just adding something here at the bottom, so I don't have to draw in more stems. This is just hiding the stems. Maybe there'll be a stem here. Something like that. Have fun with it. Place things where you feel like you want to. Now I'm going in with that darker tone because we've allowed things to dry just a little bit. This is more of a wet on damp. So I'm going to drop in a little bit more of, I'm just going to make sure I have more blue than purple. I don't want it clashing with this flower. Here we go. Dropping in some of that darker tone here, some over here, some at the bottom. I want it in the areas where the berries are touching or close to each other, rather. Then obviously in that area. Now, this is a very muted blend. If you remember what I mentioned, if things dry up quickly, I'm sure you do, but we're going to rejog that memory real quick here. What I need you to do is wash off your brush, dab it on your paper towel and then with a clean brush, you're going to just blend that in. There we go. We've got our loose berries. Don't overdo the blending because then it might look overworked and weird. Try and restrain yourself. Now, getting some of that green. I'm getting more of that green mixed in here now because we are done with our berries. Then, sure, why not? Let's just add some there too. Perfect. Then getting those tiny little green elements just like we did at the top there. I'm going to turn this a little bit sideways. Let's get some happening this way. All I'm doing is pressing down just the first half of my brush to give me these very wiry style elements. The longest one can be just protruding this way. Again, you're essentially using this more to give movement and add a little bit of visual interest than anything else. Having these elements really do enhance everything in your artwork because now all of a sudden these elements help elevate your main character, which is the flower, essentially. Then last but not least, getting some of our opal and we're dropping some in into the berries, giving that nice shine, which we all love, or maybe not all of us. I love adding shine and glitter. It's not the greatest for I guess, if you're doing digital art, you're painting to scan this and create elements or products, but you can just eliminate them if this is not your vibe or goal. So pretty to watch. Then obviously the dots. 17. Part 14 Composition Purple Flowers: So our flour is dried up and it's now time to do that second layer. I've just mixed up another batch of that purple and I have watered it down and we're going to continue using the Princeton number eight. We're pretty much doing the same technique to create these petals, but we're going to make them smaller. And what I would suggest is you can still do your little dotted center and you can just roughly go over the first layer that you had done. Here we go. I'm doing mine. You can turn your sheet around if that's easier for you to create this and it doesn't have to sit perfectly on top of these petals. You can go in between. For instance, I'll do one here and I'm going to overlap between these two. One, two, three, four. This one will intersect between these two as well here or touch these two adjoining ones. Perfect. Now, at this point, because I want the center to be a little bit more prominent, I'm going to get more using the number four, I'm going to get a darker mixture, more color, less water, and I'm just going to drop that in to the center. This is just me adding more depth to the middle of the flower as I'm building up on the layers of this flower. That's the reason why I'm adding this in. So this is the wet on wet layering. You can touch a little bit of the petals just to get that nice little flow of color going on. Then if you want to add a little bit more definition between your petals, you can just drop in some strokes, not all the areas needed. For instance, I'm just del I deliberately did one there so that you can see the difference between the two petals, did one there. It is still wet on damp, so it won't dry up entirely like this. Be ready to see that it's completely submerged into the petal, so keep that in mind. Great. We're going to allow this to dry and next we're going to add some leaves overlapping on these ones over here. Just a little bit of action just so that it's got some hierarchy in terms of the background leaves and the foreground leaves. Again, I've taken sap green. I've mixed it with some of that purple I'm using the same area to mix new and remix more color as we go along with the layers. Now on another note, I do want to say that if you really like the light look and you don't want to overlayer or you can't be bothered with layering and adding more depth, then you can totally leave it as is actually before we added this one here. But I'm going to leave that up to your discretion because everyone has different preferences when it comes to things like this. Here we go. This time I'm doing the leaves with the number four, slightly darker tone of that green, and we're going to do it the same way not rocket science. We're doing the same thing. The only difference is I'm going to add this on a smaller scale. That's why I'm using the number four. And it's a little bit darker. It stands out from the rest. I always start my leaves off majority of the time, I should say, with a stem. This way, I have an idea of where I'm placing things and then I find a spot on the stem to create the leaf and go from there. Some people like to place the leaves first and then do the stem, leave allow your own creative intuition to kick in and go with that. I'm offering you suggestions because this is how I do things, but that doesn't necessarily mean that this is the only way to do things. Gain inspiration from it and then find your joy as you paint along. Okay. You will definitely find yourself getting a lot looser as you paint, embrace that and pay attention to the loose strokes or results that you get for your loose strokes. It's so awesome to see things evolve and just grow. The more you practice, the more you paint, the easier and the more startling the results. 18. Part 15 Composition Purple Flowers: Last, I'm just going to add more of that darker color to the base of the leaves and along the stems. This way, we've got a tad bit of depth added to it. Then another thing I want to do is add a splatter. Getting a little bit of water on my brush because I want the splatter to be a tad lighter. I'm just going to drop that in here. And then these are the fluffing strokes that I'm doing. You can also find the areas where some of the splatter is and you can mix that in. That is also completely a valid thing to do to help with the fluffing. Something like that, I did that there. Because a lot of the time I do find, at least for me personally, when I first started out, I found I didn't want to touch areas that I had stuff painted on already and why not? Because you totally can paint over other elements. It's called glazing, it's called layering and that should totally be a thing that people do because it gives you some really great results. Everything is dried up and we can now go ahead and do our final third layer of petals in the center. I'm going to get a little bit more of that color mixed up here and I'm going to try and control how dark it is because I do want it to still be light enough that you can see through. I'm adding water to my mixture as I go along mixing it up. This time, I'm going to use my number four. I can't remember if I use my number four or number eight for the second last layer or the last layer we did. But if I use number eight, then I'm using number four now so I can control the sizing of these petals. Here we go. This time, I'm going to start off deliberately in between these two right here and we're going smaller. Something like that, going to dip the tip of my brush in water just to make sure that I'm getting move everything around so I have room to turn things. Let's just go in this one direction. The same technique just smaller. This one, I'm just going to really just dab around here so that the shapes can be a little bit more organic looking. Then last but not least, we are adding our little dotted center and then if you want to have it touching more of the edge. Just get a more opaque mixture of the color and just drop that in right now. Now is the perfect time because it is wet, it'll give us a beautiful bloom and we're just building up on the layers here. Then again, if you wanted to add some definition in your petals, just drop in those little strokes. Adding some of the opal. We're going to add some of the opal right to the center here. Then we're using the back of our brush. I'm going to create two little roughly dotted circles here because the first one is going to seep with the purple when we start painting or drawing in our lines. Then using the back of the brush, we're going to start from the center and pull it in the direction or into the shape of the petals. It is important that this is done while this area is damp or wet. Make sure you're not waiting for too long and that you've got enough of that nice opal in there or whichever metallics you're using, you don't have to be using fire opal. Then as you go around, you're just drawing it in following that shape that we have. Make sure you're holding down your sheet. There we go. 19. Part 16 Composition Purple Flowers: Last, I'm just going to add more of that darker color to the base of the leaves and along the stems. This way, we've got a tad bit of depth added to it. Then another thing I want to do is add a splatter. Getting a little bit of water on my brush because I want the splatter to be a tad lighter. I'm just going to drop that in here. And then these are the fluffing strokes that I'm doing. You can also find the areas where some of the splatter is and you can mix that in. That is also completely a valid thing to do to help the fluffing. Something like that, I did that there. Because a lot of the time I do find, at least for me personally, when I first started out, I found I didn't want to touch areas that I had stuff painted on already and why not? Because you totally can paint over other elements. It's called glazing, it's called layering and that should totally be a thing that people do because it gives you some really great results. Everything is dried up and we can now go ahead and do our final third layer of petals in the center. Going to get a little bit more of that color mixed up here and I'm going to try and control how dark it is because I do want it to still be light enough that you can see through. I'm adding water to my mixture as I go along mixing it up. This time, I'm going to use my number four. I can't remember if I use my number four, number eight for the second last layer or the last layer we did. But if I use number eight then, I'm using number four now so I can control the sizing of these petals. Here we go. This time, I'm going to start off deliberately in between these two right here and we're going smaller. Something like that, going to dip the tip of my brush in water just to make sure that I'm getting move everything around so I have room to turn things. Let's just go in this one direction. The same technique just smaller. This one I'm just going to really just This is what I call going with the flow. I was going to leave it like this because this is what we had done in our little section here. I use a combination of the two. But as I'm looking at this, I'm really feeling like my creative intuition is telling me to go really dark in there almost like a black. I'm going to mix some of the dragon's blood that I have in my palette and I'm going to mix that in with the leftover purple to get a darker color. And once I have that darker color, I'm going to add that to the center and almost give it a dark tone like you would see in anemones, for example, I think it's going to give us a very interesting result because that's going to create so much contrast in the overall painting. I think it's going to tighten things up a lot more. Here we go. Run with me on this and let's see how this turns out. I'm getting some of the magenta and the cobalt green blue, mixing that in here with some of the dragon's blood. Look how dark that is. I think we could use I think this is dark enough and I'm going to go very, very potent in color ratio for more color, less water. Then I'm just going to dab that in here. Now I need to have more color lay on here because the center seems to be damp, which obviously we've not given it enough time to dry up completely. If you can do this during your more of a wet on dry, that's fine. I'm just layering on some more and I'm leaving a little bit of white space here just to indicate that nice glten then just adding more color just to increase the depth that we have within the flower. Then last but not least I'm taking that nice rich color and we're just going to lightly add dots around. Then now we allow this to dry and we're going to see if we need any more highlights happening in there. But as I'm looking at this, I love how the leaves are looking. I would just do one more tiny thing and that is adding a little bit of a darker detail to the leaves by darker detail, I mean more of a mixing some of that color here. Leftover purple from the center with a little bit of the sap green. I'm just going to add little details to show the veins in the leaves, for example, We just want to give it that nice contrast and just make it pop just a little bit loosely it just elevates things so much more. I'm also just adding little tiny fluffing bits with this just to enhance the whole feel and have a little bit more of this color tie in in the rest of the areas. Otherwise it just sticks out like a sore thumb. You do need to have when you, it's nice to have these colors all around so that they tie in with everything happening on a tiny scale so that it doesn't look like a lot of contrasts happening in one area. Okay. 20. Part 17 Composition Purple Flowers: So we are finished and this is still drying up. But a couple of things that I really wanted to bring to your attention right away is make sure that when you're creating a flower like this, you either leave the center open, so white space or with a little bit of dabbing in the center with tons of white space showing just because you've got so much happening in the flower itself. Or if you decide to go the route that I have gone where the darkest areas in the center and then everything slowly gets lighter, make sure you have a little bit of white space, so you get that depth, that feeling sorry, not depth. This would be more of light hitting the flower center. Same thing with the little white spaces that you see around in the flower. Every spot is not closed up. All these beautiful little bleeds that you see in the colors that we've added, and same thing applies for the way we did the berries, the way we added the glisten in the berries, the subtle glisten in the center of the flower, and then just the added building up of layers in our leaves. We've essentially taken the three things that we learned over here, from the flowers to the berries, to the leaves, and we have put it together to form a mini composition like this. I hope this was fun. I hope this is inspiring you to sit down and create a whole bunch of these and maybe even try some ideas that might come your way as you paint this as you watch this video. Sorry. That's it. That's it. Thanks guys for watching. I hope you enjoyed this. I certainly did. H 21. You Made It! Congrats!: Okay, so if you are watching this part of the video, that means you have completed your lesson. I'm so proud of you. I cannot wait to see what you do. A quick reminder, make sure you post your composition or even the composition you painted along with me in the gallery section so I can see what you have done. I hope you had fun painting along. I hope this gave you an insight more into how this therapeutic medium of watercolor works. I hope you give this lesson a try again. Use what you have learned. Try it with your favorite colors, try it with your favorite brushes or maybe entirely different paper. I guarantee you will get different results because now that you know exactly what you're doing, you're going to be flowing much better. That guys is how you go with the flow in watercolor. I hope you had fun.