Beginner Friendly Watercolor Florals: Learn to Paint and Compose 4 Flowers + BONUS Leaves

1. Hello! I'm Clarice: Okay. Hi, guys. My name is Clarice, and I am a designer and artist. I teach watercolor florals, the loose kind over here on Skillshare and also on YouTube. Watercolor is a fabulous fabulous way to unwind, relax, and express. This is why I like to teach it just to share that joy with everybody else. The techniques in watercolor is just as important as using the right supplies, and I'm very proud to say that I am an ambassador for the esteemed Princeton brushes. You'll find me using a ton of Princeton brushes and all my videos here on Skillshare and also on YouTube. In this class, I'm going to show you guys how to relax, unwind and get into loose florals. This class is definitely for you if you're looking to paint for fun and B paint flowers. So a little bit about what inspired this class. This class was inspired by my self care watercolor challenge that happened over on Instagram, where we learned to paint four flowers and then got together on the fifth day to put those four flowers together in a composition. That is essentially what we're going to be doing in this class here. And the idea behind the self care watercolor challenge is pretty much getting people into a habit into a routine of taking at least 15 minutes for themselves to sit down and paint. How many times have you heard yourself say or a friend say? Well, I wanted to paint today, but I just didn't get a chance to because I was so busy. That's the point of this. It is to make you realize that 15 minutes is not too much. You can do so much in 15 minutes. Minimum of 15 minutes and make this a habit for you so you can fill your bucket so you can be there for others. Class is for you if you love flowers are looking to take time for yourselves to just do something that you enjoy AKA paint, and express, or if you're looking to learn and grow in watercolor. For all the videos and paintings that I've done on YouTube, Instagram, even on Skillshare, I constantly get one comment that is quite popular and it's these words. You make it look so easy. I'm here to tell you you can also make it look easy and achieve the same results that I am achieving. All you need to do is pick up the brush. More than once. If you're an absolute beginner in watercolor and you have no experience whatsoever, this class is also for you. Because in this class, we're going to be touching on the basics of watercolor just to give you an understanding of what the medium is all about. We're going to be starting with things like how to mix the color, wet on wet, which is one of my favorite techniques in watercolor, wet on dry a little bit of lifting color and glazing as well. 2. About this Class & Class Project: If you're an absolute beginner in watercolor and you have no experience whatsoever, this class is also for you. Because in this class, we're going to be touching on the basics of watercolor just to give you an understanding of what the medium is all about. We're going to be starting with things like how to mix the color, wet on wet, which is one of my favorite techniques in watercolor, wet on dry, a little bit of lifting color and glazing as well. Once we brush through all the basics, we're going to get right into our fun flowers. I've got four exciting flowers for you. We've got the cherry blossom, we've got the lilac. We've got the anemone, and last but not least everybody's favorite, the peony. The bonus I've thrown in a little section or a little mini class in here on how to paint leaves. We've got leaves covered as well. Once we're done all of this, we gather together what we have learned and we're going to paint a wonderful composition all from our own creative intuition. My hope for you by doing this class is that you will not only get comfortable learning how watercolor works on a basic level, but also seeing how you can take those basic skills and basic knowledge and apply them to create something beautiful and pretty and make it your own. Once you have successfully completed all four flowers, including the leaves and painting your own little composition, please post it under the gallery section. This way, I can see your gorgeous flowers and provide you with words of encouragement and maybe even feedback. By the end of this class, you will have a pretty good understanding of how watercolor works and how you can achieve all those fantastic effects to create your own florals. On that note, let's get started. 3. Art Supplies: In this lesson, we are going to go over each flower that's represented in here. There's a total of four flowers. I'm going to show you my loose techniques of how to get these flowers, and then at the end of all of the four, we're going to get together and paint them all together in a composition that is reflective of our own style. I will also be doing this as a video so you can check out mine and paint along with me, or you can feel free to just learn how to paint each flower and then do your own thing. So for my supplies, I'm going to be using my Princeton brushes in the Neptune number six and the Princeton velvet touch number four. And for watercolors, I'll be using this set of mailing watercolors, that's right here. It's a quaint little set. I've got a palette handy on the side. And then last but not least, we will be using Bow hong Academy watercolor paper to learn our flowers. I think I went through everything. Now we can 4. Watercolor Basics Before You Start: Paint think something like this is simple if you understand the basic techniques behind watercolor, what can be achieved, what you need to achieve certain results. This video, I am going to show you exactly those things. We're going to be touching on brush strokes, mixing paint, wet on wet and wet on dry. Get your supplies ready and let's go. I'm going to very quickly walk you through a couple of key concepts and techniques that are involved in watercolor. Especially if you're a beginner, I think this is going to be extremely helpful for you. First thing we're going to start off with is brush strokes. A lot of us have grown up with pencil crayons and pencil markers or pen markers, and we tend to hold it like so, using the tip of the brush to draw and paint in. For instance, if I were to do this with this brush, I'm holding it like this, and I say I've got a circle, and I want to paint in. We are painting like this if we were to use a pencil marker or a crayon. However, with water color, the less strokes you have, the better. This looks fine, mind you, but covering large surfaces and we're looking for seamless blends happening within our paintings. What do you do? Instead of holding the brush like this, we're going to hold the brush slightly to the midpoint, the belly area and use the full width length of our brush to drop in strokes. This comes in handy when we're doing petals, leaves, all those things. Really quickly, let me show you what that looks like. I'm going to take the slightly darker color just so we have a very clear indication of which is which. Now I've got color on here. I'm going to hold it sideways, and this is what this looks like. We've actually completed this circle with about two strokes. Don't worry about where the color is sitting right now, but this took me several strokes. This took me literally maybe one and then I lifted off my brush to and that's it. Let's apply this concept into flowers and petals because this is what we're doing here. If I were to do this technique here using a pen, let's just entertain that idea. You can do it. There is like I've mentioned many times, there's really no right or wrong way, but if you're looking for clean results, this is what I would be suggesting. If I were to just paint a five petal flower using holding my brush like this, this is what I'm doing, two, three, four, five. Nothing wrong with this. You can absolutely do this. Now I'm going to get my darker color and I'm going to hold my brush higher up and paint these flowers. One, two. We're going to get some water. Three. We get some color. Four, and five. You're getting a more robust flower over here with less strokes. Over here, you're literally just getting what this brush can give you when you lightly press down. Keep this in mind when you are practicing, holding your brush this way to get those first initial strokes. Then if you're trying to hone in on tiny little details, absolutely, you can tighten up your hold on the brush and go in and add your little details. Now, let's talk about mixing paint. Here's some paint that I got directly from a paint tube and my brush is already damp or wet with water. I'm just getting some of this paint from here. This would be considered more of a in the 90s percentage of color. This is what color looks like when you don't have too much water, but you're using more paint. Now, I'm going to dip my brush in water and then do the exact same thing and let's see the difference. My brush has been dipped in water. And so you can see the potency of how the color transitions onto paper is vastly different. We're getting more yellows here. We're getting a lot of dark greens happening in there with a little background of yellow. It really depends on what you're trying to achieve within your painting. If you're looking for something more washed out, with a lot more water, you're going for something like this. However, that being said, you can wash this out a lot more because I had a lot of paint on this brush. I just dipped my brush and water some more, still have a lot of paint. I'm going to wash off most of the color from this brush. Let's just go with that. Now with just water on my brush and a little bit of paint on here, I'm just going to add more water and bring that down. In water color, a little goes a long way. I mixed a ton of paint on here and we got that nice thick consistency. Then I dipped my brush in water without really washing anything away and then we got this medium consistency. Then last but not least I ended up washing off most and then adding more water to it. You can see it's still almost very similar to what we got in the middle. Keep this in mind when you're mixing colors and consistencies. My G two is about a 30 70, and I think that's more like this consistency right here that we got with these flowers, and this way, it's 30% color, 70% water, and this way, when you're adding details to your flowers, you're not adding it to something that's dark. You start off with a nice light base like this, and then you can always drop in darker color. Here's me dropping darker color. When you drop that darker color, I need to mix this a bit better. Okay. You're getting more of a nice bloom within Typically, this is how you add layers to your flowers and your leaves and such. So wet on wet involves dampening your sheet or placing color within an area on your sheet that is damp. It can be with color and it can be without color as well. And what do I mean by without color? Here's the absolute basic understanding of how water color works. So dampening our sheet of paper very roughly just to demonstrate how this works. And then with a second brush, just for the sake of this exercise, I'm getting a little bit of color on my brush, and then I'm dropping it right in there. That bloom that you see, that is what wet on wet is all about. Now, clearly, the more you dab the darker it gets, and my consistency or color mix on here is about more of a 50 50. Because I have a 50 50 mix on here and I've got a damp area already, obviously it dilutes the color even more, making it a lot lighter. If I were to go and just do this here, that's how much color I have. This is the basic understanding of wet on wet and also water color in general, I guess, because it's the water that really allows it to flow and go. Now, let's do another technique with wet on wet. Let's get a little bit of a base color on here. I'm going to use this lemon that I have, and I am going to dampen my sheet over here. I'm getting some water and extending this all the way down. You can only get this effect if your area is wet or damp. If it is dried up, you're not getting that, and that's going to be our next demonstration. Here we go. I'm going to drop some of this beautiful orange in here and you can see what that looks like. I didn't have a lot of water, so that's why the bloom is not as wide spread. Here we go. And this is what I did up there while I was demonstrating mixing paint. You can actually drop in color that has a background color already, and then you can get depending on what the colors mix giving you. I got this beautiful peach happening here. So I've used a very reddish orange or an orangish whatever you want to call that, and the base is a yellow, and so that's what gives me that beautiful result. Now let's do some wet on dry. Now, for wet on dry, you guessed it, we're adding paint after our base is dried up. So just to keep things similar, so you can see the difference, we're going to start off with a base that is so we don't need to do a water base because I can just take this and dab it right now and that's what it would look like. Here we go. Dropping that yellow in We're going to allow this to dry. I'm just going to chat a little bit about wet on wet on dry and where you would end up using. Wet on dry is typically where you're you're looking for details to overlap on your flower, for instance, since we're doing flowers, that's why I'm giving you the flower example. For instance, over here, I know these guys are dried up. I've got paint on here already. If I wanted to intensify the center for this, I'm going to not use the red. I'm going to use a different color just so it stands out a lot more. I'm going to get some of this Prussian blue that I have here, and I'm just going to lightly graze and drop in these little lines to give me a center. That my friends, is what wet on dry is all about. You're literally just adding in strokes when the whole area is dried up, that's all there is to it. Okay. Now, I've added details to a center for this. You can also be coloring surfaces as well. Let's check to see if this is dried up. No, needs a little bit more time. You can also be covering surfaces. It really depends on what it is, what effect you're trying to achieve and what you are painting. I'm going to add one more yellow box over here. While I'm discussing this with you, we're going to allow this to semi dry and then I'm going to add some color to it and I will show you the results. Again, none of this is really wrong or right. What I'm trying to say is you can achieve all these various effects for anything you're wishing to paint, achieve the various results and it's just good to know what happens when you do this, what happens when you don't do this. This way, if you ever come across something and you know in your mind the effect you're looking for, and you know it's possible based on any of these techniques, then you go for it. Okay. So on that note, let's go right into this area here. It still feels a little bit damp, but I'm just going to go for it. I'm taking color from here, and what I'm going to do is I'm just going to cover half of it. Okay. I already showed you what it looks like over here if you wanted to add fine details. Now I'm going to show you what it looks like if you just want to add color coverage, and I'm going to do this corner here and I'm going to make it like an arc. Let's just say we're adding polka dots to this, for example. And you can see that we're overlaying color. This would also be considered layers wet on dry. When I add some to the bottom, but you get the idea, you're able to get more edges and the pattern is its shape or the shape is retaining it's edges. How are you want to put it. You all know what I mean. Here we go. This is one way to add more detail as well, whether it's in flowers or if you're adding a background pattern. Now this is semi dry or maybe almost dried up as well, actually. But you're going to get a bloom is what I was hoping to show you and I don't know if it's pretty much dried up. Let's talk about how you can just add a little bit of a glaze to this. Here you go. You can do exactly what we did when we swatch our colors by adding that first lay of color thick color and then taking water and blending it into your yellow or your background. And this is more of a Yeah, this is definitely wet on dry. However, just showing you a way of how you can do a little bit of glazing. This technique would be called glazing because you're adding more of a lighter shade over another shade of color just to mildly tweak what that looks like. You can see these colors side by side. One is very lemon, this is more of a peachy color. Again, these are things that will be helpful and useful along the way. 5. #1 Cherry Blossoms in Watercolor: For this first video, we are doing cherry blossoms and I will be dominantly using the Princeton velvet touch number four. Now the reason we're using the Princeton velvet touch number four, A because cherry blossoms are smaller, B because you need to get those nice little fine lines for the center, and the velvet touch number four is an amazing brush for doing both. And the Princeton number six is also a great brush. However, the reason it's not my first brush of choice for this is mainly because the fine pointed tip isn't as fine as the number four, especially if you are a beginner and you don't really have your brush control under control. Yeah. Use that control word twice, then you'll find it hard to get those nice fine lines in the center off our cherry blossoms. Now that that's out of the way, let's just get into mixing some color. For the cherry blossoms, I would like to use a quin rose and I have that right here. I'm going to mix some of that color on here. It's this beautiful gorgeous pink. Just look at that color. We want to water it down to make it really watery. Notice how much color I got and notice how much I am mixing to get it really diluted and light. Okay. Once we have this, we're going to use we've mixed it up with a number four, so we're ready to go. We're going to create our five petals and it's a very basic simple repetitive action or brush stroke. Making sure that our brush is nice and full of color. We're going to go ahead and create five do This simply helps you to keep that center open. Then taking water, we're going to go the mixed color that is. We're going to go ahead, start with one dog, press down, trail out, close it up like that. You want to push all the color to the center. You can also dip your brush in water right now because I like different variations of color within my flower and the petals. I'm just going to go ahead and create another one. We're going to go ahead and do another one here. Okay. And then another one here. Notice how uneven my my sizing is, also the the spacing and whatnot, but we want to keep this loose and fun. There we go. We've got our simple flower for cherry blossoms pushing all the color down to the center. Now I'm going to get a bit more water on my brush, water this down some more. Maybe even get a little bit of a different color, like a different pinkish color just to get a variation. I love variations. I know I said one color, but here you go. Here's another one. Making sure we've got enough water. Same idea. Let's create another cherry blossom. This time, I'm doing it without my five dots in the center. But if you are more comfortable making sure you've got your five dots to keep that center open, do the five dots. It's definitely a helpful trick. I've got two here. What I'm going to do now at this point is get some of the color directly from the color cake on the tip of my brush, and making sure that our flower is not dried up completely, I'm going to dab right in the center this way, and this is what gives us this beautiful soft bloom in our flower. You'll notice the bloom is probably a little easier on my second flower and that's simply because it's the last one that I painted. This one dried up just a tad bit. It's really really Timing matters. Timing matters in terms of when you add the color. At this point, if you feel like you need to mix a little bit of color and get some more flow happening, you can just take your brush, push down color towards the center. That's something I wanted to do for this flower. You might even want to extend color outward. In which case, you can just start from the center and pull outwards. It's really a preference thing. Remember, guys, this is a loose style of painting. Just go with the flow, learn these techniques that I'm showing you to paint these specific flowers, but you can also use these same techniques and enhance and create other flowers. Let's just do one more flower. Before we move on. I'm going to do one, a third one over here. This one is going to have one of the petals slightly curved upward and you'll see exactly what I mean. We do our two basic ones. Again, you know what? I'm just going to make my little dots here just so it's easier on you guys. Then one more. Then I should have probably made the curved petal over here, but that's okay. Then we're just going to do something like this. All I did was do a little stroke like that. Simple enough. I'm going to show this stroke to you on another sheet of paper just so it's more clear. The stroke we're looking for for our side stroke is something like this. I made it dark just so you can see exactly what I'm aiming for. I have some color on here already, so I'm just going to use that to do our center. Now, because this one is like a flip, I'm just doing a little bit of a dotted line right in the front of it, so it doesn't get directly onto it. Now, again, with the bleeding, if you feel like you need to swipe off some color, swipe it off, make sure you have some paper towel handy on the side and just dab it onto your paper towel. That's all you're doing. Same thing over here, if you need to swipe off how this color is moving around, now's the perfect time while it is damp. You want to enhance the darkness of your center, go back in and add more of the pink. We're keeping this simple, we're keeping this fun and loose. You can also dab after it's dried, but that's essentially wet on dry as opposed to wet on wet. If you like that look better, absolutely wait for it to dry and then go in. I love the wet on wet. I think it's so seamless and pretty, and that's why I do what I do. Or that's why I do this move when I do it. Okay. Let's do the last thing which is doing a couple of buds. The buds are super fun and easy. All we're doing is, let's do a couple of buds over on this side. We're just doing that. That's all we're doing. That's an easy enough bud. Let's do another one over here. You can do a couple of them together. I'll leave that up to you guys. I'm just placing mine where I feel. They should go. And probably shouldn't have done it right below the flower, but we're going with the flow. Let's just see where this takes. Last but not least, if you would like to, you can do a splatter. All I'm doing is getting a lot of water on my brush, and then I am doing this. This gives it that beautiful whimsical look. Another great move to your florals. Last but not least we are going to be painting the branches, and for that, I'm going to use some of my weight for it. Burnt brown, which is right here, I think. Sometimes it's hard to tell. It looks more like a green. But then again, I mix a lot of my bright greens with the brown to get some nice color. It's probably just a matter of washing it away. There we go. That's the brown we're looking for. I'm going to get some of that and using the fine tip of my brush, we're going to start doing these branches. And the branches are very not flowy, but they're very kind of thick and awkwaris, feel free to kind of extend and create Okay. Without giving it any flow flow the right word. Without giving it any sort of, I guess, whimsical look. Here we go. Let's do this flower extending onto another branch. I'm going to do that. Okay. Something like that. We're just kind of connecting the dots at this point. This one kind of is a lone wolf here as well. So let's just do another one here. So clearly, I really went with the flow and I didn't really plan to see where things were going to be. But sometimes this is how you paint. This is how you learn. This is how you train your brain to kind of really go with the flow and figure out how to position things in your paintings. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. In fact, you might find it very, very helpful. Okay. Now we've got some at the top. So we're just going to finish this. And you want to give the buds a little bit of that triangle look at the bottom to kind of indicate that it's being held. Then let's just do a couple more bud like elements here. Okay. All right. So now let's do the center of our flowers. Once again, this requires a lot of brush control, and the number four is perfect for this. However, if you are brand new and a beginner, I would suggest going for something a lot thinner. I'm trying to look for my number one brush or even a zero. Princeton Heritage zero works great. What I'm doing is dampening my brush and I'm just going to use or add this brush to this video for people who have never not never done watercolor, but haven't quite mastered the skill of brush control just yet. So we've got some pink, feel free to mix it in with a tinge of brown. That's all I took to get that darker reddish tone. And then using this brush, we're going to go ahead and lightly paint in little lines into the center. And then we're doing dots. Okay. Okay. And you don't need to be specific about how many lines, how tall, all that stuff. We just need a very loose rendition of that. I'm even going to get a little bit extra brown and add that to the dots just so that they stand out a bit more really gives it such a beautiful pop and your eye immediately or the viewer's eye immediately alerts them, those are cherry blossoms. Pretty, right? All right. So we're going to continue creating more of that over here. Okay. And if you don't want to use the dark tone for your little dots, that's okay. I'm going to have just a little bit. Use your creative judgment. I'm giving you options and ideas on how to build up and so you run with that. Have you even enhanced some of these dark lines in there because it looked like they were drying up to look almost pretty similar to the center. And then last but not least one more over here. I'm going to get some of that brown and drop that in. And vola, we are done our cherry blossoms. Simple, cute, easy enough with filled with lots of techniques that you can use with other elements. 6. #2 Lilac in Watercolor: We're back. In this video, we are going to be painting the lilac. For the lilac, what we're going to be using is the Princeton number six neptune I'll be using three variations of colors or variations of purple rather with actually the third one will be pink or the second one will be pink. This way, we get those nice soft blooms in our lilac. And this technique is also something that is very indicative of the loose watercolor style, and it all boils down to white space. Please pay attention to the white space that we're going to be using in this one here. For the first color that I'm going to start off with, it's going to be a lilac. Yes. That sounded like a question, but it was more of a thought for me. I've got some lilac in here on the Paul Rubins set of colors. I'm mixing that in here. And I want it to be a very watered down version, not as much as as the cherry blossoms, but a tad bit less. Okay. Something like that, and then we're going to make sure that our brush is nice and full of color. Then we're going to start off in doing little dabs. We're going to form a cone shaped shape. Yeah. We'll start off with the darkest at the top and as we progress downward, we're going to dip our brush in water to get a more muted mix of the color. Something like that, and then we're just going down. Notice the white space. I'm roughly trying to create that shape, the cone shape, that is. As I'm going lower, I'm getting more water. And if you see little puddles of water in your lilac, that's totally okay. Keep going. Just make sure you're not filling up all the white space in between. It's a very simple technique. It might require a little bit of trial and error, especially if you've never really encountered watercolor in these techniques before. It will definitely give you more of a sense of how watercolor works. This is the first step. We're getting something like this. Then we're going to get our pink, and the pink I'm using is called a rose red. And it looks like this, and I think it'll be a very pretty mix in. All I'm doing is taking this rose red and I'm dropping it into these areas here because if you've not gathered already from your encounter with watercolor, watercolor when you add another color while the base color is still damp, you're getting a bloom, and that's what we want in this flower. So you'll notice maybe because you have pooling of water with the purple, it's just sitting. Remember what I said, move your brush to move the color around. Don't overdo it because there is such a thing as overdoing it, and then you end up covering all your white spaces. B I'm trying to find the right word B. Use this technique sparingly or use the amount of strokes you make, make it less than more. Something like this. Now we have that nice little pink peeping out which is beautiful. We can then move on to our dark purple. I'm going to be using a deep purple, and this is what that looks like. We're dropping that in mostly at the base of our shapes. Just to give it that more it's shadows happening beneath and sometimes there's little blooms of purple happening in there. Again, just like I said, with the first two steps, if you feel like you need to blend in the color a bit, go ahead and do so. I'm even going to add a couple of dabs of that at the bottom. I'll even at this point, if you want to take a little bit more of the first purple you used and drop that into certain areas, that'll really help things mix as well. You want to get that nice soft almost impressionistic look to your lilac. Look at that. Okay, so what I'm doing next is I'm going to help this flow a little bit better, so I'm just going to dab my brush in a paper towel. And then we're going to help this along because sometimes if you let it just sit, it's going to stay with those shapes. But if you kind of help the color move along within that area, it'll give you a nicer effect. Again, If this is something you want to do. If you want to just let it be and see where that takes you, I encourage that because this is how you learn from watercolor. This is how you grow as well in your understanding of how the medium works. I absolutely encourage that as well. So I'm just lightly phasing off the edges. Okay. Now, one more thing that I want to do and this one I will do with the number four is just take the darkest purple we use, which is right here. I want to give the top a bit more and I'll mix it with the pink actually. I want to give the top a little bit more of a structured look. I'm going to do little strokes like this. Making it seem like those are the tiny little buds at the top. Drop in some of that dark purple as well. Okay. And that's it. So now we can move on to doing our stems, and for the stems, I love using the olive oil olive oil. No. The olive green, guys. Here we go. I think the olive green is fabulous. I'll mix it in with a little bit of yellow green. Just to get a slightly brighter green. Otherwise, the olive green has more of that brownish look to it, which I personally love. But when you have that yellow green against the purple, it's stunning. All I'm doing is going in between and drawing in tiny little lines to indicate the stems that are holding our buds together. You see this little bloom happening, that's beautiful. Leave it as is. And then I'm going to do my main stem, give it a nice little curve because I felt like it. You can always extend to make it slightly thicker and then extend to indicate branches protruding from your main stem to the flowers. Simple, fun and loose. Then if you wanted to take it a step further and do some leaves, have something like this. Then using the tip of your brush, press down and trail on the tip towards the stem. I'd like to give it a second thicker look, so I just do something like that. Here we go. We are done. One last thing, if you wanted to do this, and I think I'm definitely doing this. No, I think I know. I'm going to do a splatter, and I'm using the darkest purple that we used, and I'm going to go for a splatter. Dipping my brush in water to get a slightly lighter version, sorry, not lighter, but muted version of the purple. I'm going to do a splatter around here. And I love when it's so kind of throwing caution to the wind, not really caring so much about placement that you lose control over you don't have any control of where these spots fall, so you go with the flow, and this is exactly what loose watercolor is all about. It is refreshing and takes a lot of unlearning everything you have learned in school, which was always about painting within the lines and keeping things tight. Here we are going loose. This is our lilac. 7. #3 Anemone in Watercolor: So in this video, we are doing anemones you're already. We are going to be using the Princeton number six dominantly for this one. Then we'll use the number four for the center. However, again, just like in the first video, which was the cherry blossoms, if you prefer to use the zero, you can totally use the zero. For this video, we're starting off with doing the center and I'm getting some of my paints gray right here. I'm mixing it onto my palette. Looks like indigo for some reason. You can also use Indigo guys if you want to use indigo, totally a thing for the anemone centers. Getting some of that nice dark color, we're going to do our very rough circle. Feel free to leave some white space in between. Let's do one here. Notice how I'm dabbing and going around to get that uneven surface happening. You can create your outer circle and then lightly fill it up to get those nice little organic looking white spots in between. For the mixing of how dark it should be, we want this to be as dark as possible because our centers for the anemones are pretty dark. There we go. We've got that. The next thing we're going to do is watering down our mixture just a tad. I'm dipping the tip of my brush in water, and then I am not lightly. I'm just going to go around the anemone and do these little droplets of watered down panes gray. Now, once this is done, this is where time is of the essence, and so we need to make sure we get our number six involved fairly quickly. I'm going to use I'm going to get a little bit of my quin rose and mix it in with some of this leftover purple that I have. But anemones come in so many different colors, feel free to go with a color that you gravitate to the most. Very watered down version again of the color pink, and before this dries up, I'm going to use this as a guide to paint our petals. The first petal is going to be around here. Something like that. Look at that beautiful bloom that you get. That's another one. If you see color collecting like this, you'll know what to do already. We've done it in the last two videos. Just take your brush and move the color downward. If you wish. And feel free to rotate your sheet. Like so I'm going to get more water in my mixture. We're not overthinking this process. We're not counting petals. We're not looking at the shape. The anemone is a very tell tale flower mainly because of the center and the center is going to do all that work for us here. If you're painting this and someone goes, that's not an anemone because it's got six petals and it actually has eight or whatever. Don't worry about it because we're painting loose guys. Okay. So go around all over until you get something like this. Now you can see I've got puddles of water happening. That's okay. Just going to lightly dab on my paper towel, and we're going to kind of really just give it a little bit more shape, pushing the color down. Okay. We wanted to dry with the color down. Once that is semi dry, we're going to take our four. We're going to get a little bit off the pink color that I used, and we're dabbing it in the center here pretty much exactly like what we did with our cherry blossom. Getting color directly from the color cake, d to the center, so we get a nice beautiful bleed. Or blend. Depending on what kind of paper you're using because supplies do matter. You might either get a beautiful blend, you might get something that doesn't blend as well. Also depends on how long you've waited to do this move. Now that we've done this, this is the part where we get a little bit of texture in our petals. The way we're doing the texture is by washing off our brush, lightly dabbing onto paper towel, then we're extending into little lines. From the anemone all the way out into the petals from the center, obviously. It's the anemone because the whole flower is one. Now if you find when you're extending, there's color sitting like that, help it along, or your next option is to start from out and go in. Although that to me doesn't quite work because I want the pink to extend outward. You're just lightly creating these lines and bringing them outward. Okay. Again, this requires your paper to be damp. And then this way, you get those nice beautiful lines creating that nice linear texture in your petals. It's a very relaxing repetitive move as well. Okay. Now, this also site full disclosure. This by no means is an easy flower. Take your time, try it a few times if you must and don't sweat the small stuff because a lot of it depends on how long have you waited, is it dried, all those things. And while this is loose, I do know that I'm adding a couple more steps that really don't need to be in there, but that's just how I like my anemones to be. I've waited for this to dry a little bit, so it's kind of damp right now. It's not completely dry. And we're going to do our final step to this, which is doing our center. Now, the telltale part for the anemone is those nice little dots on the outer edges and the lines holding it together. This is my best way of describing it because this is what we're going to be painting right now. Here we go. I'm using the number four again, and this is where we're getting more of our paints gray, mixing that in here. And then we're going to start off with doing the center actually not the center. We're going to do little dabs, little dots right on the edge here. You might get a bloom happening depending on how damp your sheet is. I personally don't mind the bloom just because we're painting loose, and this is a loose rendition of the anemone. And I think in the large scheme of things, it really does help enhance that whole whimsical loose look for our flower. Then once we've done our little dotted or dots all around, we're going to use the tip of our brush and lightly create little lines extending from that into the center. Again, feel free to use the zero if you feel like the zero is giving you more control in terms of how thin your lines are. Then lastly, what I'm going to do is paint the center in one more time. To really give it that nice dark look. I'm not going into every nook and cranny to paint the center. I'm leaving some with that light gray. Again, very rough rough, loose. Loose is the word not rough. Now, one more thing, if you're getting blooms like this and you're not entirely liking it. Again, Can you guess what I'm going to suggest you do? Take your brush, make sure it's washed, make sure you dab it on your paper towel, and you swipe the color to the center. Or stop the color from spreading outward, right? Okay. But really and truly, you don't have to do too much because this is what the anemone is all about, and this is what the loose style of painting is all about too. It's getting those beautiful blooms, knowing when to use your watercolor blooms to kind of show you certain aspects or elements to I was going to say a flower, but really and truly, it could be anything that you're painting. You can even use this center to kind of draw in more lines coming out from the center, and it gives you that darker shadowy kind of feel, which is fantastic. Again, it's a very this is optional. You don't have to do it. I figured, let me show it to you guys and you guys can decide if this is something you want to do. It just prolongs the steps, but look at how much texture and how much more enhanced our anemones. Really and truly, it's a subjective thing if you want to do this extra step or not. Do this here as well. And notice how I'm being very loose in it. I'm not really checking for extensions all the way to the end. Look how cute or how realistic this looks here, which this is more what I like in comparison to having them extended all the way to the end over there. All right. And this is our anemone in a nutshell. You can also extend further if you wanted to and get more definition between your petals. The simple way to do that is just to get some of your color that you've mixed up. And you're just enhancing it. What did I use? I used a little bit of that pink? Yes. Here we go. Now, this is a bit too bright. Let's get some of that purple in there. All I'm going to do is using the tip of my brush, making sure things are not still damp. We're going to lightly start at the top, press down, go down to the center. Or you can start from the center and go up to the top, but you're trailing off to your dot or to the point of your brush. You can push the color down. Something like that, which really helps give more definition to your petals. Again, optional enhancements. All right. And we are done our anemone. 8. #4 Peony in Watercolor: Last and final flower, and that is the peony, and this peony is going to be a combination of two different colors. We're going to be using a base color called permanent yellow deep, which is like an orange hue, which is right here. This is what it looks like on my palette, and we'll mix it in with a little bit of that pink. Again, a watered down version of this, and we're using the number six. Once we have that watered down version, we're going to start doing our strokes. The main reason for the watered down version is so that you can you can build up on the color because if you start off dark and you feel like it's too dark, it's harder to take away color. This is why we start of lighter and then proceed from there. Here we go. We're starting off, I'm holding my brush sideways, and I'm going to do stroke like this. I'm dipping the tip of my brush and water, and I'm going to enhance on this stroke and then do another one to the side. But these strokes right here in the middle are going to be our main strokes for the outer cover portion of our peony. Once this is done, dipping the tip of my brush and water, taking some pink, I'm going to extend and create another petal flopping over this way. Getting more water, we're going to continue creating another petal that's flopping this way. We've got one here, one here. I'm going to get more pink for this one here. This is what helps differentiate the shapes that we have happening. Now we're building up on the top. We're just taking a very watered down version of the orange and we're just doing this. Okay. I'm going to take some of that pink, drop that in there as well. It's nice to have that nice little glow. And then washing off most of the color from the brush, dabbing on paper towel, we're just going to sort of extend and do a couple of strokes at the top just to make it extra lighter, and then using whatever color we have on our brush, we're creating additional side strokes here. Now, we allow this to dry before we add anything to the center. This is our base basic pony. Before because this area is fairly dried up, if you want to if you want to add an enhancement to it, now is the time to get a little bit of pink and kind of drop that in at this time, or even within your whole petal itself. Okay. Then just dabbing it off. If there's any coming on the floppy petals, just brush it off. Guide the color along. This is one of the things I didn't do when I started watercolor, which was lifting or just guiding the paint along. That is such a powerful move when you're doing watercolor and say something is not spreading the way you wanted it to. One more thing I want to do before we leave this alone is add a little bit of that pink on the top here. Okay. Give it that nice little additional feel that the other petals also have a little bit of that pink. Okay. And then we allow this to dry for a bit. Let's do another rendition of a peony and this time, we're going to use two different colors. We're going to use I want to call it yellow ocher, but for this particular set, it's called natural yellow, and it's like a yellow ocher for sure. Mix it in over here. I don't mind it mixing in with a little bit of the pink. And we again want a water down version of this. And we're going to start off with the pony is going to be facing upward, all we're doing is creating a little strokes like this to kind of create that center for it. And then we're taking the same color and we're going to build up on it, but feel free to get a little bit more color because I ran out and then we're just doing little strokes all around. And it's little C strokes that you're going around. So we're using the same color still, and you'll see why because once we reach a certain stage, I want to drop in a little bit of that second color I spoke about. So here we go. We've built up the roundness of this. Okay. As I'm going outward, I'm adding more water to my brush so that it fades off into a lighter tone or color. Now we're getting some of the orange and I believe this is called orange. Very fancy. I'm taking some of the orange and I'm going to lightly add strokes in between like this. The reason I'm adding the strokes at the bottom is to really help it stand out and show us the folds in our petals. I'm doing this while it is still damp. The reason if it's not clear already after the previous three flowers, the reason being is so that we get a little bit more definition of what layers are aware. Then I'm taking that same orange and we're dropping that in to the center of the flower just to give us a nice little bloom. Now, for flesh tone colors like this or florals like this. I like to throw in a bit of brown. I know it's orange, it's not exactly flesh tone, but it is a lot lighter in comparison to some of the other flowers we've done. I would like to get I'm just looking at my colors a little bit of burnt brown. Let's mix that in with some of the orange. It's like a nice orangey brown when you mix it with your leftovers. Again, drop it in. It really gives you some beautiful shadowy effects and really helps the eye with deciphering where one petal ends and such. I'm going to drop that into the center as well, and I'm doing all of this while while all these areas are still damp. That is key to get these nice loose effects happening within your florals. Just make sure that your areas are still damp while you're doing this. This is what gives us that nice bloom. And don't overdo it. Sometimes it's easier said than done, look at me overdoing it. Or maybe do overdo it, and then you learn from it. There we go. We are done that. Now let's bounce back up to the first flower and add some center to it. Now, for our first flower, if you wanted to go in and highlight the way we've highlighted over here with that third layer of a slightly darker color, you can. But I wanted to keep the series very basic and very fun just to get you acquainted with the strokes involved in getting basic shapes for your peonies. I'm not going to enhance it and make it extra taxing on you guys. But we're going to do the center now. Taking my number four Princeton Velvet Touch, I've taken some of the brown that we used here and we're going to do little lines Just grazing, and then little dots on top. Again, very loose and rough and not rough, loose. Loose is the word. I'm trying not to use negative sounding words because, totally a different vibe from how relaxing and fun watercolor is. And also, we're painting pretty flowers. So we don't need to use words like that. Enhancing it. You can feel free to use a slightly darker version or a darker brown is what I was meaning. Because again, two tones within certain areas, especially tiny areas like this that don't have a lot of detail. Really enhance it and give the viewer an impression of light and dark and shadow and stuff like that. Light and dark is obvious, but I mean, shadowy areas. Something like that, very basic. Then you can add the same thing over here. I'm just going to add a couple of dots. That's it. These are the pies. You can choose to do either or both in our composition painting. 9. BONUS - Leaves in Watercolor: I am adding one more bonus video to this series, and this is going to be four leaves. We're going to stick with the same brushes for the leaves. I'm going to let you know in a moment exactly what kind of colors we're going to be using. Olive green is definitely on the list. Let's start off with using the number four because it gives you a little bit more control with your sizing for leaves, and let's go ahead and get some. Let's extend this over here. You can see me mixing some color. And I'm going to mix it in with some of the blue here just to get a different variation, a slightly darker color. And we want the consistency to be a little bit not super creamy, a little more watered down than that. So this is perfect. Okay. So what we're going to start off with doing is the first kind of leaf and the leaves are pretty much using the tip of your brush, then the belly of your brush and then kind of trailing off back onto the tip of your bruh. So this is how I would typically paint a leaf. I would do the stem lightly grazing to create a stem. Then I want to make sure that my brush has a ton of water on it, so I don't run it doesn't run dry. I dip my brush in water, mix it back in with the color some more. Using my tip, pressing down, trailing off onto the tip. You can get thin leaves like that. Let's just do that first. Let's create another one another stem. Using the tip, press trailing off. And what you can also do is you can start from the out and then go towards the stem for your leaf, if that is something you can do or you're fine trying. Some people don't want to do that. So same technique, you're just kind of using the guide the little branch, stem, whatever you want to call it as a guide as to where you want to stop. So these are thin leaves that you can do. Let's get a little bit more color mixed up and do thicker leaves. I'm getting a slightly darker tone here. Let's just get more of that color so we don't run out. Using the number four still, we're going to do a branch first or a stem first like that. Then I like creating my thick leaves from the outside in. Starting with the tip, press trailing to there. Getting more color now for my second side. I'm going to start a little bit below pressing down. Coming down there, and this is how we have a thicker leaf. Let's do this one more time so you can see it a bit better. Let's make this leaf over on this end. This time, again, starting from outside, using the tip, pressing down, trailing there. Notice how there's a little bit of white space happening there. That's because my brush didn't have enough water. I'm getting more water, mixing it with the color, and we're going to do the second half of our leaf. Okay. There we go. This might take a little bit of practice if you've never done this, especially if you've not quite mastered the whole using the brush because it's so soft and whatnot, but give it a shot. Now, let me use the number six to create a bigger leaf in the center. Hopefully it doesn't touch that one, but we're just going to go with the flow and see where this takes us. Taking some of my green, take any green really that you have. We're just practicing here. I'm going to get the green, get some brown in it because I don't like the bright greens. That's just my preference to mix them with brown to get something a little bit more wood z. Here we go. Now we're going to use the number six, and this will obviously give you much thicker results because it's such a thick brush, use it sparingly. Okay. Using the tip, pressing down, or trailing. Then we're going to do the second half. Trailing. Let's just join it. There you go. Now, another way to do leaves, and this is entirely up to you if you just want to go buck wild and just be very loose with stuff. I'm going to get a slightly different shade of green here for this. We'll use the number six, you can just do something like using the brush, press, trailing off. That's a leaf guys. Let's give it a stem. Let's do another one. Okay. That's also a leaf. Then if you don't like how it ends, just help it along and you should be fine. Here we go. Again, pressing down, trailing off. Okay. Can do that twice if you want it to be slightly thicker, little tiny leaf coming out from there. Again, leaves, loose leaves. Then what I also like to do at the end of my leaf painting session is to give it you've got your dark leaves, then you've got your light leaves. For that, you just water things down a whole lot. Then using the watered down version that you have on your brush, you're just going to create additional leaves around it. For instance, I don't know, this is not something I would typically do, but let's just say something is protruding from here. Okay. Okay, so it needs to be watered down a bit more. So I'm going to get more water on my brush and just do something like that. You can even extend from leaves like this where it's really, really watered down. And then they're bunched together. Again, this particular segment here is not something I would typically do. Let me show you something that I would do just so it makes a little bit more sense. Once this dries up, you'll see exactly what I mean about it looking lighter in comparison to these guys. But, I like to do a little tendril elements and they essentially. I would use the number four, by the way for this. They would typically be protruding flopping outward, and then getting water on the brush. I just do something like this, one swoop, second swoop, if I want a really thick leaf, and then another one to the side. I'm not really attaching them, and then another one here maybe because I like to do my leaves in threes and then little dots or dabs of color that are trailing off to indicate more is happening. One more style of leaves, and then we can go on or move on to using these and watching them take full effect in a composition. Here we go. Using my number four, I'm going to create a stem and then getting more color because I always like to make sure that it's nice and hydrated. I'm going to use this as a guide for where my leaf is. Create your second stroke. We're doing exactly what we did in the second leaf session, and we're just building up on how this looks. And there we go. So you can have protruding leaves like this. You can have random, big element leaves like what I showed you above here. You can have thin leaves. So here's a couple of different options that you can explore. You can also take these to be a lot smaller, and then you're just painting, I'm going to deliberately touch this and extend and make leaves. Okay. If you wanted to do something like this, kind of like almost like a fern style. No, not really a fern style. Just like a herringbone pattern leaf, I guess, you would call it. I don't know. Okay. Just ideas for you guys. The leaves are there to enhance your flowers. They are not the showstopper. Never feel like you have to do a ton of leaves in your composition. Just a couple here and there to balance all the bright colors. Works wonders. Another tip I want to mention for leaves is adding that dab of additional color to layer while it is still damp just so you get those nice light and dark areas. We've done that for our flowers. The same thing works for our leaves. Let me just do another leaf. Or stem or branch or whatever you want to call it. And let's just make this really light. No, I want to mix it with some of the colors I know, I rarely use. So it stands out. Okay, so here we go. I've got some emerald greenish color. And let's paint a leaf here, a stem rather. Again, I like to have lots of color in my brush, so I dipped it in water. And then I'm doing this. You can leave a little bit of a gap in between your leaves if you want to just to give that loose indication, that's the center. Then I'm going to get a little bit of the brown mix that in with our green on the side. Then we're dropping that in before it dries off. You always want to do this particular move right where the leaf starts with the stem or even at the tip. Then what I typically do is extend it all the way down. Then one side looks darker than the other. Just a little quick tip for getting some nice beautiful gradient effects within your leaves that you can try out. You see dark to light. It's a pretty effect. Here, I don't have enough water, and so the leaf came out half. You might like that effect in which case, go for it because that also enhances that whole loose fun watercolor look. Just keep that in mind. Okay. Let me finish this off, and then we are done with our leaves. In a nutshell, these are all the leaves you'll need to know in your loose floral journey or loose floral painting journey. I hope this made sense. Go ahead and try it out and then let's hop on and put this to the test and see how we do 10. Painting our Floral Composition - Part 1: Okay. Okay. We're now ready to go ahead and create our own little composition based off everything that we've learned over here. Here's my approach really quickly. Let me put these aside. My approach to doing your own little composition would be starting off with our main flower placement, then onto our secondary flowers, which would be the anemone and the lilacs and then finally finishing off with some cherry blossoms, which would just be peppered around and then leaves. Throughout this painting session, feel free to watch how I paint along. Or have me playing in the background and do your own little composition because we've already gone through how to paint each of these individually, including the leaves. So go with the flow, see what your creative intuition is telling you, and go along with that. I'll be explaining everything I do as I am progressing. This way, if you want to mimic what I'm doing, you can absolutely go along with it. Now, for supplies, for this specific one, I'm using the Etch watercolor pad, hot press, and then for my brushes, I'm using the number six, number four and zero. I've got my colors ready. I may or may not use the exact same colors. I'm just going to go with this flow for this whole process and see what we come up with. Using some of the permanent yellow orange hue that we use with the ponies, we're going to start off using the number six and doing that little cup portion of the pony first. Holding my brush sideways because that full length of the brush is helpful when getting these thick strokes, you're just doing these little C strokes, dipping your brush in water to get a more muted version of your color as you go along and create the next portion of this cup. Once we've done that, we're taking whatever leftover color we have on here, and we're just doing little arcs. I didn't have too much. Little bit of an archy movement or stroke at the top. Those are our background petals. Getting more water on the brush, I'm lightly creating lighter strokes just at the top. We've got that gradual dark to light in our circular area here. I'm going to get a little bit more of this orange, add some strokes this way, and now we're doing our floppy flopping over petals. Same idea. Try and leave as much white space as you can so that it doesn't blend in to one another. Then once I have a good enough amount of coverage on here, I'm going to get some of that pink and add it onto the flopping petals. This is me just adding more shape to our peony. Now we're getting some of that pink mixing it in, and we're going to drop that in here. And I'm alternating where I'm putting it, and this is just so it can bleed out nicely and blend, going to get some happening within here as well. And then a little bit at the bottom of these areas here. So it looks like it's coming from the inside out. Now, what you're going to notice is it's blooming all over. In which case, just take your brush, roughly wash it. Make sure you dab it onto your paper towel and you can help the color move along. Like for instance, over here, I want to move it along to this area here. Same thing here. Okay. Same thing around here. Don't overwork these areas because it can end up looking very overworked and then you might end up ruining it. However, having said that, the best way to learn how much is too much is by just going for it and then taking a step back to view what's happened. We're going to get a little bit more of this pink and I want to drop some right here because I want this area to be the prominent in terms of shadow and dark. And the rest can be more of that lighter feel. We'll allow this to dry just a bit before we come back to it. I'm going to use similar colors to get our second peony and let's go with that. Let's start with that, I mean, I'm starting off with the yellow cherish color that we had, and I'm going to start off with doing our little petals in a basic flower format. The darkest color for this one is right here. Now, dipping the tip of my brush and water, I'm going to continue creating strokes like this at the bottom of this flower. These represent the folds of petals that are at the bottom. We're going to do a couple at the top. Again, a white space is a big deal over here. Okay. And our flower is almost done. If I didn't have any white space, it would all just look like one big blob. So this is where white space is important. I encourage you to keep practicing. It's not something that will happen overnight. It's just something that the more you practice, the more it'll become a part of your painting ritual. This is all I'm doing for this one. I'm going to get a little bit more of the pink to revert back to this. By now, it's dried up a little bit. So what I want to do is add a little bit more pink. Okay. So I'm going to some of that in right here. Again, I'm just adding this in so that I can get a little bit more of that nice dark to light within my petals before it completely is dried up. Okay. And then I'm adding a little bit more of that at the top here. That's great. I don't want to do anything else to this little pony up here. We're going to add our browns to this one over here. Using the number four, we're going to go ahead and get some of the browns. I believe I had used raw umber and I'm mixing that with some of the yellow. So what we're doing is doing swoops or C strokes. Okay. Now, I know I'm using the number four, but the number six would give me larger coverage. Some of the color on number six, and we're going to only do this at the bottom half here. And then in the center. Can even add a couple of strokes within your main petals or your inside petals just to give it a little bit more loose definition. Then I'm getting a little bit of a darker brown dropping that in here. And the reason I'm doing it right now is because it's damp and I want that soft bloom. Look at that immediately. Everything just opens up. So you're allowing the color to speak the story almost. And that's pretty much it for this one. We can allow these to dry a little bit before we get back to doing anymore. So now let's do some of the secondary flowers. Let's start with the pony. Sorry, we've started with the peonies. Let's start with the anemone. Using my number four, I'm going to place some the one anemone right here at the top. We're going to start off with doing the center first. So really rough. And I'm controlling how big this flower is because our peonies are massive. So rough little center filled in with a little bit of white space. And then I'm doing a dotted line or circular circle all around. And then we're taking our number six in whichever color pleases you or if you want to use the same colors we've used. I'm going to get a little bit of I believe this is rose pink, and I want to water it down a bit so that I get some good bleeds. Let me just put this on the screen here. You can see this. Okay. So again, using holding the brush sideways, we're going to create these petals going all around. Dipping the tip of my brush in water, Now, notice how this pains gray is bleeding into the petals. Remember what I said. When this happens, just take a brush, make sure it doesn't have too much water on it, and you just take swipe off the color or lift off the color. I do like how the color just seeps into the pink and it gives it that really pretty soft look. I won't do too much of swiping, but just a little bit. And then before we allow this to dry too much, we're going to get some darker pink. In this case, I'll take some leftover pink that we have from the pony it's a watered down version. I'm just going to drop in some color like this. Excuse me. So it's a slightly different look from what we had done in the video itself. Now we're taking the back of this brush, and we're going to draw in these lines within our petals. And I'm kind of giving it the shape of the petal. This way, it doesn't look flat. We're kind of getting a little bit more movement within your petals and curves almost. And you'll only get these lines if you do this while it is damp. If you wait for it to completely dry up, that's okay. What I would suggest doing is taking the zero and then getting a little bit of your center and extending to paint in lines. Now I'm going to get a. We're going to allow this to dry before we enhance the center, but that's much how we do our anemonies for this composition. I'm going to do one more All right. This is what the second one looks like. I went for some purples and pretty much the exact same thing that I did over there with the exception of one step, which we're going to do right now, which is adding a couple of dots to enhance this you do only after everything is completely dried because we do not want things blending into the rest of the petals. We're just adding those little additional dots and we're enhancing our center a little bit more with the panes gray. Okay. Okay, so something just like this. So we've got our two flowers. Let's just get into our lilac. 11. Painting our Floral Composition - Part 2: So we're starting our lilacs off with a little bit of a cornflower blue. So I'm switching the colors around just a bit because we've got all these pinks and purples happening. So here we go. Let's do a lilac over here. I'm going to start off with the tip, and then we're kind of creating this cone shape by just going downward in a in tiny dabs, trying to figure out how to describe this best. Then the closer we get to this flower, the lighter it's going to be. I'm just all I did was get water on my brush and go downward. Now, this top portion, I like to have a little bit of a twirl instead making it look like a cone. What I'm going to do is in my next step, which is going to be adding a second color, we're going to get a slightly darker purple. I know that's a blue, actually, you know what? We're just going to go with the lavender carmine rose, I believe this is called, and we're going to drop this in here. Again, while this is damp so that it gives us some nice blooming blends and effects. These are my two colors and we're going to do a third shortly. Getting some water on the tip of my brush. We're going to fluff some of these areas here. I'm reshaping this We go. And now we're going in for our third and final color, which is going to be for me, I'm going to be using the bright purple. So if you've got blobs happening on your lilac currently, make sure it's not It's a little bit dried up so that you get a wet on damp effect because if I drop in color right now, I'm going to show you exactly what that looks like. You're going to have the color just sit on there. Reminders to wait for it to dry a bit, and if it's just sitting there, you know, you've got too much water. In which case, just help your color move along and you should be fine. I'm going to start off with the bottom here add our two little tiny dots to indicate the darkest tip, and then I'm going downward dropping it in C. This is what I mean by just sits there. That is what I meant. So it's just sitting there. It's not really blending in that well. But we're going to help it blend, don't worry. I'm adding some color, leaving tons of white space in between guys. If I've not mentioned that already, white space is a must with all these flowers because we are doing a loose style of painting, and so we want to make sure the only way you can tell what things are is because of the white space. Otherwise, it's going to look like one weird blob. At this point, I know I went rogue with the colors, slightly different from what we used in our videos for each of these flowers. I'm going to get a little bit of that pink that we used for this one, and I'm dropping that in here to get a little bit of a pinky hue. Okay. Okay. Now, allowing this to dry just a tad bit, and then we're going to go in with some olive green, and we're going to add in our connecting stems. I think I'm okay to start at the top here. So I have some olive green on the tip of my brush and I'm going to lightly extend and then do a little bit of that here. And that's it. So we can use the exact same technique we've done here and create another little lilac, maybe around over here. So this time, I'm going to start off with a little bit of a lavender purple and we'll start we'll do a little bit of that over here because I want this to be almost like a background lilac. So a more muted lilac happening here. So it'll only be about this high. Okay. So that's what that looks like. I'm going to get a little bit of the pinkish hue that we used for our puny, and I'm dropping that in here. Just a little bit. And then we're sparingly going to get some of the darker purple and use it, but we're going to mute down the ratios of the color by adding more water in it. So getting some of that purple, I have that on the side here. Could even use the purple that you used for this one, this anemone. So we're going to start off with the top And then just dabbing a little bit while the areas are still damp to get that nice smooth blend and bleed. And we want the darker areas to be more at the bottom. Again, sparingly using this, this one pops out more than this background one. And we're achieving that effect by using more muted tones for the back. Now, once that is done, I'm fine with how loose and stuff that looks. We might need to edge a little bit. Let's just wait and see how it dries up. Watercolor always dries up lighter. So this might end up drying up a lot lighter than this, which will be great. But if it doesn't, we're just going to go in with a little bit more purple to sort of pepper this edge. So there's a clear distinction. So getting some of my olive green, I'm going in and dropping in my little stems. Using the tip of this brush here. I'm just going to extend that and add cute little leaves. Not really leaves, but I guess buds for this flower, give it that look. It's popping out. There we go. For the cherry blossoms, we're going to start off with doing some over here between these two flowers. I'll start off by getting some of the pink on my number four and it can be a similar pink to the ones you've used in your puny or even your anemone. I'm doing a diagonal position, so it's not all in the same area. Here we go. Starting off with doing dotted circle. And then I'm dipping my brush in water so that it's not potent and dark in color, and we're going to start off with doing our petals. You can start from the outside in like I just did, or you can start from the inside out. It is a preference, see what works best for you. I'm sure you've tried the video already and you have an idea of what works better. Again, we want very loose renditions of these petals. We're not looking to perfect. We're just looking to get some nice loose cherry blossoms in here. Getting some of the color directly on the tip of my brush, we are now taking advantage of the fact that this is damp to drop in some dark pink in the center so that it gives us a nice bleed or a blend. Okay. You can even drop in some of this color at the top of some of the petals, if you want to intensify certain folds or the look or really, it's again, a preference thing if you want to. Something like that. Moving on, let's do a couple more. Same idea. I'm going to do one more half of it peeping out from here. Then dipping my brush in water, we're extending from here to create petals. Then in the middle here, I'll just do one really weird tiny one. Then going back to the center, we're enhancing to show that that's the center. Okay. Something like that. And if you feel like all the petals are too consistent in color, just take your brush and swipe off color and then wipe it onto your paper towel. And that works great. Okay, so we've got some nice flowers happening. Let's do a couple more and feel free to add peppers at the top over here, pepper on the side here, and then we can come back and do some leaves to finish off. But we're finally ready to place some leaves. We've peppered our cherry blossoms all around, and now we're going to do a couple of leaves before we go back in to finish little tiny center details for the flowers. Because we've got beautiful oranges and pinks and purples happening, it would be great to use olive green as one of the greens. Then I wouldn't mind using hookers green dark or maybe even mixing some turquoise or deep turquoise in there just to get that nice offset. I think those colors would look so beautiful. Let's just start. I'm going to start off with using the number four sorry, number six. We're going to mix olive green. No, actually, let's mix some of the yellow green first and then drop in some of the deep turquoise in there. I know yellow green is very, very bright, but let's mute it down to get a more soft see through version of that, and mix tons of water in there, so we can get that as our base damp or wet surface. Getting more water in here, really watering this down because then we can go in with that turquoise, drop that in, maybe even the hookers dark green, and it'll look really spectacular. Okay. So here we go. I've got that. Let's add some nice big petals. I was going to say petals leaves happening over here first. I like to do a little bit of a stem to help guide me, something like that. Then really pressing down, trailing off, getting more water, going to press down trail off on this side. Get that nice little bit of white space effect. I'm going to get a little bit more extend this this way, press down and pulling towards the center of the flower, something like that. Then we're going to get some of our turquoise. I've got the deep turquoise. It's right next to our cobalt teal. This is what that looks like over here. Let's just mix it onto the palette really quickly before we do anything. I'm just going to mix that over here. And then maybe even mix it in. Actually, a little bit worried about using the turquoise not going to lie, but let's just go for it and see what happens because this is how you learn guys. If you have an idea, you want to run with it. This is me running with an idea I have, so let's see how this goes. Dropping it in while it's stamp, pressing down and kind of extending to get color in there. Same thing here. And let's see how this dries up. It's going to dry up green obviously, but we've got some nice bright colors happening. It's seeping in there. Let's get more of this color and extend and add extensions to it. So maybe one just kind of flopping underneath here, but without the green, the light green in it. Another one just extending from here, like a really small petal not petal leaf. And we want to push all the color down to the bottom of the leaf. That's the darkest. All right. We've got this happening here. Let's create another version of this diagonally. Washing off my brush, getting some of that green. We drop in a stem first and then extend paint in our leaf. I'm doing a second one and just like a line there, and then getting our turquoise, dropping that in. Kind of like allowing it to blend into our lime green base. I'm going to drop some more in here because I got that nice dark hue happening there. Dropping some more in here to match that nice. Okay. Perfect. We've got some of that happening. Let's get a couple more of these colors hovering or peeking out in between the flowers, this really helps pick up and tighten the areas a bit more. Let's get some in here. Just pick two or three spots in between your flowers to drop these hues in or blobs of paint in. Closing this area up here because there's a little bit of a fold in that petal. Another one there. Let's do one happening behind here. And then for the rest of the leaves, we're going to do more of the hookers green and the olive green. So let's start off with the olive green first. And getting some olive green directly on my my color cake, my color cake. My brush. We're going to start creating a couple of loose long looking leaves starting off over. Let's start one here. Actually, let's start one here because we've got so much happening there, there's all this white space here. Let's do a little bit here. Here's an extension, Tipping the tip of my brush and water. I'm going to start from the bottom, press down and trail towards my stem. Now, this is really dark. I'm going to water it down. Create another stem. Press down. Now this is really light. I'm going to create another one just at the side of this in hopes that it'll touch the darker one and give me a nice little bleed. Maybe we'll see how that works. Something like that. 12. Painting our Floral Composition - Part 3: Let's place some of these guys around here as well just to touch some of these areas here and then give everything a nice tied up cohesive look. Drop a little bit of that in here. Let's place one here. But I'm not going to make it as long as the ones that are happening there. You can control the size of these And I'm even going lighter so that it looks like it's fading off into the background sort of deal. So get some color and drop that in before it dries up. Okay. We're adding more watered down version of leaves happening here to sort of give it a more fuller look. I mean, even sweeping off some of the color because if you feel like there's too much color, just sweep it all the way down. This way, you get the nice dark starting from where it's touching the flower to light outward. Okay. So the last thing to do is just go in and add some tinier looking leaves like using your hookers green and then also adding in some details in between the flowers like this. Leave majority of the white space, but also add little hints of green in between your flowers just to tighten things up and make the flowers pop a little bit more. It's an optional step. You don't have to do it. I like to do it every now and then, and so that's why you'll see some of that happening here. But essentially, this is how you would go about adding your leaves on the outskirts and also filling them on the insides. I'm going to add a couple more of these tiny hookers green leaves. Happening a little bit over here like that. You can see how it just makes the flower pop because the green is so dark and the flower is so light. It's a stunning juxtaposition next to it. I'm going to add one over here too. Okay. We're just going to add a little bit of a stem here to show tinier versions of this leaf. The peeking out from the back. Maybe one just overlapping here as well and then get lighter version of the color by dipping the tip of a brush in water and just in blobs of this green. And you're just kind of fluffing now. You're kind of creating dark in the center to phasing out with a light color. At this point, you can even drop in some like a splatter and just around the leaves or around the edges, which will be a nice little loose sort of phasing out Just adding a couple, and then we'll do a little bit of the splatter, and then we finish off with the centers. So here's a splatter. Just going to drop some in here, drop some in here, feel free to cover up the area where you don't want the splatter to be. So for instance, I'm going to cover up this area here. If I just cover that up, get some of my green and drop that in here. And then slowly lift it off. And there we go. Oh, I realized that was blurry because when it's a white sheet of paper, my camera blurs. So I literally just did the bladder there. Let's do another one here. I'm going to do a little bit happening here. When you get water on your brush and do another splatter, you're getting another variation of that. You're getting a lighter looking splatter. I encourage you to try the splatter on a sheet of paper, see what that looks like, and then come back into your composition and see if this is something you want to incorporate in or not. Quick additional thing I want to do is add some of the olive green leaves at the top, because I always say when you're doing a composition, it is nice to do things in threes as opposed to just doing even numbers. It has to be done in odd numbers. It's it's a designer thing more than anything else. So just adding two of that or three of that at the top there. And washing off my brush, we're going to finish off doing our centers. Let's start doing the peony centers first and then we'll finish off with the cherry blossoms. Mind you, if this is where you want to call it quits and just stop, this is perfectly fine as well because we've got a great set of loose florals happening on here. But if you want to tighten things up just a little bit, let's carry along and carry on. Starting off with the peonies, I'm going to do my brown for the center. Okay. I'm using a medium brown. I believe this is called the burnt brown in my palette. We're going to start off with doing tiny lines using my zero. Again, we're not fixating on length or spacing or anything like that. We're just creating lines and then little dabs of brown dots on there. Okay. There we go. We have our first pony center. We're going to do the second one. I typically like to do it in pink, but because these flowers are so much brighter, we're just doing it in the brown, and that's fine. Lots of white space, loose, different variations of the brown, different sizing for your lines and also your dots should help you get some cute little results. Okay. Okay. That's that for our centers. I just want to that. Okay. And then we're doing the centers for our cherry blossoms. We're just going to take a keeping with the zero. We're going to take a nice version off our pink, mix it with a little bit of the brown. You can feel free to use the same brown we just use, and this will give us a darker version off the color. And then we just go in and add our little lines almost exactly the same way like we did with our peonies. We're just doing it for our cherry blossoms. Here we go. Feel free to use pains gray. I think that should work, although it would be extremely dark. So if you want more of that monochromatic look, then stick with making a darker version of your pink and just dropping that in. Like so. Okay. Now notice I have not done branches or any of the leaves and such for cherry blossoms, I'm going to add a little bit of that shortly. But initially, I had planned not to add any of that just because I wanted to keep things loose and fun and not as much detailed. But again, this is a preference thing. If you feel like you want to add a lot more detail you can, I'm going to turn this around so that my hand is not sitting over damp elements ruining end results. And I'm going to turn this all the way upside down now for this one. And this one just gets a couple of dots. That's it. A. 13. Conclusion: Congrats on finishing this class. You made it, you've done it. You've taken time for yourself and you've created something beautiful by practicing the pause. I hope you enjoyed this. I hope you gained a lot of understanding and learning and growth from your aha moments, your mistakes. We like to call them happy accidents. This is essentially how you grow. You grow by picking up the brush. Or several brushes, and you grow by learning from your happy accidents or mistakes. You had a lot of fun learning the basics of watercolor throughout these several videos that we've done, all the way from how to hold your brush to how to mix color, consistencies, how to mix to get that beautiful wet on wet look, how to layer, so on and so forth. Most of all, I am so curious to know which of the four flowers was your favorite. Okay. When you do post your composition in the gallery of Skillshare here. That's part of your project, by the way. Please make a note and let me know. I would love to hear from you which flower was your favorite. Specially excited to see all your compositions. Please please make sure to post it in the gallery section here on Skillshare. That note, let's wrap this up. Thank you so much for being a part of this class. I hope you found this helpful. I look forward to seeing you in my next class or on YouTube. Thanks guys. Bye.