Bengal Peonies | Enhance Your Gouache Floral Skills

1. Welcome!: What if I told you, you could paint peonies with a very limited palette and just two or three brushes. The peony flowering season is so short, which makes them all the more special. There's a reason why we're drawn to capturing their beauty, but they can also feel quite complicated to paint, and it's taken me maybe a couple of years to develop a style that I'm really happy with. Keywords for this confident beginner to intermediate class are translucency and layering. We're going to have a really good warm up together, going through brushstrokes, mixing peaches and pinks, working on value, texture, and then final detailing. Hi, I'm Holly, and I teach from my studio in a very old house in the Lowlands of Scotland. As well as teaching on Skillshare, my designs have been selected for greetings cards, wallpaper, and bedding. My inspiration comes primarily from my surroundings. I love trees. Wildflowers are my passion, and living on the coast is a real gift. So let's take a look at our class project. We're going to take all that we've practiced into creating a joyful bundle of peonies, bursting with soft pinks through to a really hot pink. If you don't have gouache, you can do this class with watercolor. And as I've mentioned before, an easy way in really is to just buy one tube of white gouache and mix that to your watercolors. At the end of this class, I'm hoping you'll feel more confident in balancing intuition and thought, developing trust in your brushstrokes. And moving towards your own unique, authentic style. Before we start, I just want to mention you can access subtitles underneath each lesson. And there's also a full transcript. I enjoy every aspect of creating classes for you, but by far, my favorite is seeing your projects. So if you fancy sharing your work, you can find where to do this under our class in projects and resources. And then over on the right, you'll see submit project. Super excited to get started, so let's go. 2. Practise | Initial Translucent Layers: So let's put some white down. And a choice of pink, and I'm using the Windsor and Newton Bengal Rose, a warm green, and I'm using the Shin Han moss green. And then let's bring some water over into a well here. So I've kind of done three drops there. Added some water. So this is very watery. And let's just practice the shape that we're going to be using. And I'm using my flat brush, but you could use a Filbert. So very translucent. And I'm putting the brush down, fan it out there, and then turning round, twisting to a tip. And here on the side of the brush. Let's do a few of those with a bit of movement. Curving the brush round. Just getting used to your brush. Pick up a little bit of your pink and let's mix a very pale pink still with lots of water, and we can just drop in or create new petals with this pink, using the side of the brush there, and then back to the full belly of the brush and twisting towards the end there to a point. This is your practice page, so there's no right or wrong. Not that there's any right or wrong for your project, either. It's all learning. So you can see that we have the gray page showing through, and that's what we want for this first layer. And I'm just continuing with the brush that I've chosen, warming up, familiarizing myself with the shape of the brush. And we're going to come back to this once this layer has dried. So let's go a little larger, and we're using two strokes of the brush. Nice fluid movements, and we'll let those dry and come back to them. In our class project, we'll be varying the size. So let's just practice doing some smaller ones again here, a mix of the full brush and a side of the brush. And you can always go round and drop in little bits of white or pale pink. Let's add a little bit more pink. Touch of white, a touch of the pink. Still quite watery. And let's do another pink flower. Such a pretty color. So these could be half open flowers, smaller peony heads. The main technique in this class is to build up layers. So we've got a basic translucent layer. We've got a slightly thicker layer with the pink, and we're now going to go in with a lot more pigment. And what I like to do is pull down a petal. So it's slightly lower than the background petals. And I'm going in between here. So I'm just keeping going until I am below the point of the previous layer. Just gives us a sense of depth. And here we've got a little bit of the paint bleeding into the watery layer underneath, which is a really pleasing effect. Or you can go over fully dried layers. Let's try here with this one. So again, going in between those petals, pulling it down, so it's underneath the previous layer at the bottom. And then just adding lovely soft petals. A little bit of pink again. Slightly thicker, a bit more pigment. Then let's do the same with our half opened flowers. So these are very pigmented layers now. So getting some neat white with the Bengal Rose. These are fully dry now. And then we can create these foreground petals. I love this technique where you can actually mix two colors on your brush. Using more pigmented petals as well over these semi translucent ones brings them forward. It kind of creates a depth for the whole flower. 3. Practise | Dry Brushing & Easy Flower Centres: So I'm switching to a Filbert size 12 and picking up quite a lot of pink. Fairly neat and just flaring out the brush a little bit, because what we're going to create is some texture now. So it's a swift movement. I don't have a lot of paint on my brush or water. Let's flare it out again. And then just drag it along the paper. Now, this also depends on what type of paper you're using. So for this, it's got some tooth to it. This is the Fabriano Tiziano. So it's showing quite a bit of texture. If you're using hot press, you'll get a slightly different result. But still that beautiful texture that we're looking for. And you can also, of course, use the side of the brush. Once you've got the consistency that you're looking for, we can try this over one of our flowers. So flaring out the brush again and let's choose the top of this petal and just create that very swift textural dry brush effect. Neat pink again, just working it through the brush a little, flaring out. And let's try again with this flower. It's such a pretty detail, and all of these details are kind of what brings this whole painting together. Oops. I got a lob on my brush there. Just go to try and get rid of that. Flare out again. Let's try over this very translucent flower here. That's slightly dry. Let's just see again. Yeah, so that's wing on the very dry side. It is a little bit of a thing that you have to practice until you get the brush into the right consistency and dryness that you want. So back to my half inch flat brush, and I'm just going to finish off these flowers by creating much more pigmented petals. Quite confident strokes. This is your practice page. Nothing can go wrong. And let's just go over these tiny little petals up here. So we've got the very translucent, the mid range, and then very thick at the front. And this is how we're going to create that beautiful depth. A little bit more white. Back to my Filbert, a size 12. Very pigmented white now. I'm just going to allow the excess water to soak up. And then let's do some dry brushing with the white. So you can see I'm also just starting the movement before I hit the page. And I find that helps a little bit with these free flowing, expressive brush strokes. So flaring out the brush again, it's a very swift and up movement. And just keep going until you get a real feel for the brush that you're using and the consistency that you want. I think just the way that my brush flared there, it looks like there's a line down the middle. I think that's just accidental. That's quite sweet. So it's got very dry there, so I'm dipping my brush back into the water, taking the excess off, and then just going back in. I didn't even need to put more paint on my brush. Just the water has carried me through. So let's try on one of these large petals now, starting from the top, very swift movement down. We're not looking for perfection here. We're looking for getting used to the brush, allowing your intuition to take over. And we've got lovely hard line there on that petal, so we can kind of accentuate that by adding this texture. It is a bit of a skill just trying to get the right amount of water and paint all your brush for dry brushing. But once you've got it and you're really familiar with the brush, it becomes second nature. So why not try some little centers now? And I'm using Raw Sienna. You could use quin gold or any kind of orangy brown, and I've mixed that with the white and adding a little bit of the pink. This makes it into a slightly peachy tone leaning towards the orangy gold. And I've gone down to a very small brush, slide zero. Any small brush or a brush with a really good point on it doesn't need to be tiny. All I do for the centers are these very tiny little dots, really. Or you could put your brush down and then just pull down slightly. Extremely simple and almost throw away. I struggled with centers for so long, and I was overcomplicating it. I realized that when I looked at other artists' work, their centers were very simple, especially with this kind of style. So don't put yourself under pressure to create, you know, really elaborate centers. We're just going along with the theme of the painting, which is very loose. So if we started to do really complicated centers, it would look a little bit so this is a very gentle approach to the centers. And here I'm just picking out the centers. Might add another layer to those. Another thing you can do is put the centers down over the translucent layer and then start to build up so you start to lay down petals around So let me show you here. So we got our center, and then you can just start to curve your petals around those. That could be a slightly easier approach. And now I'm just using up the white paint, really, just adding another layer. To stroke petals there, and then on the side, and doing that kind of movement, which is allowing the sway of the direction that you want to go in. I've put some burnt tumber down because I think it'd be quite nice just to have a darker color next to those centers. Like a little bit of shadowing. 4. Practise | Mixing Peach, Painting Stems & Leaves: Let's get another sheet to practice on. So we've got the Bengal Rose, a little bit of the Raw Sienna mix. I'm going to add a little more. That's watercolor. And the Bengal Rose is the gouache, of course, and so is the white. And then let's mix just a slightly different color to the neat Bengal rose that we're going to be using. So the Raw Sienna, the pink of choice. A little bit of white. And we start to get kind of a dusky pink. Another quick way of mixing a dusky pink, as you'll probably know, is just to add a little bit of green. Just want to push it a little bit more to the peach. So adding more Raw Sienna and more white. Gorgeous color. Look at that. Beautiful. So we can start to bring in slightly different petal colours as well. Adding a little bit more white to that. Let's see what that looks like. Very, very pretty color. Love it. So really, basically any gold or orange mixed with a pink and a little bit of white. And we get these gorgeous, dusky pinky peaches. So we could always add some of these petals in amongst our flowers. I really love creating colors with very limited palette. So what we're doing is borrowing from each color to mix some luscious supporting colors. I love that pink. So some more Bengal Rose now fairly neat. And I just want to try that two tone again so we get that lovely pink next to a paler pink. This is another effect, which is going to add to that multi kind of texture, shape, size, hue, falo that we're going to be bringing. Quickly running out of paint. So more Bengal rose, a little bit of white. And let's kind of go in with some deeper colors with this technique. I really love mixing on the brush. And some dry brushing there. A little bit of everything. It's slightly unpredictable as well, which I love. You never quite know how it's gonna come out. But it's one of my favorite techniques to bring into a painting. Then let's go over to our moss green. So this is gouache. If you want to use watercolor, you could use a green gold or any warm green and add a little bit of your white gouache. Because, as you know, I use both watercolor and gouache side by side, and I feel like it gets really expensive if we have to buy in new paints. So let's just use what we have. So here is how to mix a kind of a deeper, pinky, brownie peach, and that is to take some green over to the pink. And the reverse works as well, bringing a small amount of pink over to your green. Bring a little bit of depth and turn it slightly towards a more sage or olive green. So let's practice some stems. And maybe a few little sepals around the flowers. So the sepals is just the usual tip belly tip movement. Slightly slower movement than the stems. Mixing some white with the green because what we can do there is just add some really cute little highlights because we've got quite a lot of detail in our flowers, so it's quite nice to have some on the leaves, too. So, washing, drying my Filbert brush again, picking up a little bit of white, mixing that with my moss green. Let's try some larger leaves very similar to the petal shapes. I didn't want to overcomplicate the leaves as they're there really just to showcase the flowers. So full brush there. And I would say that this is mostly how I would paint the consistency, which is slightly in between what you'd call a watery layer and a dry brush. It's just the way that I work, but you find what's good for you. Let's just practice the shapes of the leaves that we want. And we can just add smaller leaves around our flowers. So we'll definitely be doing this in our class project. I love green and pink together. I think it's my favorite Combi, and adding this luscious, bright but deep green is just a beautiful embellishment and supporting act, if you like, to our flowers. And we can add some highlights over these larger leaves as well by adding more white. And like a dual tone there again, mixing on the brush. Down to the last vestiges of my Winsor Green. So, again, if you don't have Winsor Green, fallow blue or any cool blue green would be great. And just adding a little bit of white to that. Adding them white just transforms this color. It's one of my favorites at the moment. And yes, I am breaking rules here because normally you would put the cooler color in the background, and then you would use warmer colors to bring the painting towards you. But I like breaking rules, so here we are. So pretty. Let's just keep practicing full brush, side of the brush, a little bit of dry brushing. 5. Practise | Finishing Touches: So moving to our finishing touches now, and I'm using a small brush again. And let's outline some of the petals with pure white. Very thick paint. The trick here I found and you've probably found your own way in with this is to have the brush not too sticky with paint. So I want it fairly wet with the excess taken off and quite thick pigment, just so it does move, but it's also very defining. And I'm just choosing certain petals to highlight. It's quite nice to do them around the initial very translucent layer. And with our thicker value petals, as well. A and why not around the pink? You can see that I'm holding my brush fairly low down, and that's because to me, it feels more like I'm using a pencil or a pen, and it just gives me a little bit more control. Just pulling down some little lines on this one. And then let's move back to our other page and mix a very pale bluey green. This is the winter green. And I've mixed it quite light just so that we can start to see the details. And just adding little embellishments around the leaves, sometimes just outlining the leaf, others just adding some little veining details. Trying to bring a little bit of variety with each leaf, so I'm not doing the same thing. This stage of the painting is really restful because we have all the elements down and I just kind of doodling now, which is one of my favorite pastimes. So let's do the same with the moss green leaves now, adding white to our moss green or warm green of your choice. And again, I'm doing it fairly light so that you'll be able to see it and doing the same thing here, outlining some of the leaves, adding veining, little curvy lines around the outside. Super restful. This will really get our muscles warmed up for our class project. It's quite a thorough practice, and the reason why I made it so is because I found I needed quite a lot of warm up to paint like this in this style. I just could not go into this without taking some time just to warm up my muscles and get back to the brushstrokes that I want to use. So I hope you feel that it's been good having this really thorough warm up. So they just slowed down a little bit and did some more detailed veining. I can't get enough of this. It's so restful. This is definitely one of my favorite doodles to do with a small brush. It's just picking up some light green and then two curved lines, basically. It's such a cute addition. And one I go back to time and time again. Let me show you over here on the right. So it's just two very swift curved lines. Oh, it's so sweet. I love these. I'm going to be doing some mini painting soon. I can see that I'm going to be using this one for sure. Oh, so cute. Don't they look really effective, especially on this dark gray background. I love those. On the home stretch now, and I'm just going to mix a little bit more of that Winsor Green. Let's add a little bit of shadowing now around our blue green leaves. This is handy when we might want to separate the leaves. So there I'm making sure that the blue green leaf is dominant over that one in the background. And the same here. Very subtle throwaway lines. And maybe some more defined lines just pushing down on the brush a little bit more. So pretty. Adding a little bit more white and back to the filbert, let's just put in some final little brush strokes. So we're defining the warmer green leaves with the lighter green. It brings together that moss green and the windsor green. So these final leaves I tend to when I'm painting, make them very free, very expressive, and slightly textural. You can see how it all comes towards you and brings all of the elements together. And then a little bit of dry brushing. Very satisfying. And I think that's it. So let's move on to our class project. 6. Class Project | First Translucent Layers: I'm going to start with a very translucent white, so I've added three drops of water there off my brush, and then let's take over some other white guash. Using the full brush, we're just going to pull through a petal. With that one, we're going to twist the brush round, so starting off with the broadside and twisting to a point. So let's continue to lay down these lovely translucent petals using that twist movement. So we get full bodied petals, but we all come in to a point. Let's try another one over here. So again, a good wiggle on the brush. Using the side of the brush there. Flat brushes make the best petal shapes, I think. You can get quite a variety of shapes. We're also starting to think about composition, so I feel another flower here would be really lovely. And let's drop in some water. That will add another texture to our painting. A very watery one there. Gonna drop in some paint to that one. And I love this little trick where you put down a very watery petal next to a more pigmented one, and it flows into it. All of these little tactics are going to work in our favor to create a really detailed painting. So a mix of the side and full brush. You can see there's a flow here. It's almost like a figure eight. We want to go out into these spaces above and below. And now let's add a little splash of color. So I've picked up my Bengal Rose, adding some worth of water and white to it. And then I'm just starting off nice and slowly. Let's just drop in a little bit of white and rose. So it can start very gently to introduce color. And then we can go around and just drop in little bits of water or paint. So varying the size for these flowers that are going to be coming out. We're going to make them slightly smaller, maybe. And dropping in a little bit of that pale pink. A little bit more Bengal Rose. Let's just take up a tiny touch. Maybe even a little bit more now and create some smaller flowers, maybe half open flowers. So this is a very delicate start, and we can err on the side of very watery flowers because we're going to be building up so many layers. And these may not look anything now, but believe me, once we've got some texture and layers on top of this, they're going to really do their job, which is to add depth. This painting is a mix of intuition, but also a little bit of forethought, because it's such a large undertaking. We need to balance thinking and feeling. So the thinking bit starts now where we're just coming up with a composition that we're happy with, and then we can start to free up a little bit once we've mapped out these initial flowers. So now you can see that we can start add extra petals. And I'm using that initial layer as the base for creating a flower around this and curling around petals using the side of the brush. Let's do the same here. So you can start to see the shape of the flower. And the same here. So creating petals in the foreground and our lovely translucent petals fall behind. It's a lovely way to start a peony head. So we're just mindful here that we're using slightly more pigment for these layers and varying the shape and size of our petals and also the direction. You can see what I mean about a flat brush and how beautiful it is for petals like this. Touch of pink in there. And you can see that our first layer is already falling back. Some translucent pale pink on that one. So we're really using gouache in a watercolor manner, really for these first two layers. Running out of white. So we can loosen up a little bit now, add a little bit more color. The Spengleose is such a rich bright color. It's absolutely gorgeous for this project. Now let's do a little bit of a dryer approach. So we haven't got as much water on the brush, dabbing off the excess. And then just drawing that down over the petals we've already laid down a slight dry brush effect. Let's go back to our Filbert now. And really start to bring in this bright pink. So dabbing off the excess. Flaring out the brush a little bit. And then a very quick movement. So we're not dragging the brush along the page. We put it down, and then we just very swiftly move it and lift up, so we don't really want it covering the whole petal. It's an accent on top. This is another glorious way of bringing in texture. Almost a flicky movement. So again, making sure the brush is very dry. And then we can start to follow the shapes that we've already laid down. I've got a big plot of water there in the page, so I'm just going to dab that. I'm not worried about it because it will dry, but also, I'm pretty sure that will get painted over. Back into some white. Flaring out the brush. Very dry brush, and then the same movement here, and this is all part of building the whole picture. And the same using the side of the brush and then just a flick through. You get unpredictable results, which I think is a really lovely addition because we don't want this to be too thought out. Nice dry brush. Lovely texture. And because of the paper that we're using, in my case, it's the Tiziano pastel paper. It does pick up the tooth of the paper, so we get a little bit more texture. I'm used to using a very silky hot press surface, but it's quite nice to be able to work with a paper like this. So I think I'm going to do a little bit of dry brushing on here. So if you have any petals that look a little bit lonely, we can start to go back in. 7. Class Project | Easy Centres & Building Up Layers: So before we move any further, it might be nice if we add some centers, so I have some Raw Sienna here. And let's pick up a small round brush. If we add a little bit of that pink to our Raw Sienna, it kind of keeps the cohesion going in the whole painting. I often do this, just borrow color from the palette that we have and mix them to each other. And then we're just going to tap in little dots where the centers will be. So on these, we're laying them down before we add the foreground. We don't need to overdo this. I think I always overthought centers. Just a few dabs of color sometimes is enough. We don't want them to distract from the petals and the flow. Fairly abstract and quick. I love how those really work nicely with the pink. Let's add a little bit of burnt tumba. I love burnt tumba. Adding a little bit of water and a little bit of the previous mix, again, allowing all the colors to blend together, and we're just leaning towards the color that we want, which is predominantly a brown and then dotting that around the Raw Sienna. Keeping it very light. Sometimes the simplest centers are the best. That's brought them to life a little bit. Bringing over a fresh palette and adding a little bit more white. So now we're going to go in with some swifter movements and with thicker paint. And we can add a little bit of the pink and also the rosy ande Mix. And that will just lean it towards a peachy color. And let's mix up a few different hues. We could have, like, a peachy on the left there and more pink in the center, and then a very pale pink on the right. Just dip into those three different mixes. And again, just building up those layers. And it doesn't matter if we start to paint over petals that we've already done. It's all part of the process. So a variety of the full brush, the side of the brush, and then almost just the tip for smaller details. In some places, going over entirely the petals that we've already done, and in others, just to the side so we can start to get lots of different hue value. And we're starting to loosen up here with our brush strokes and engaging more intuition. No. Adding little extra petals. It's starting to take form now. So here I'm working round the dots that we've just done in the center. W to keep those. Remembering that kind of overall bowl shape. So we are curling the petals at the side. Here going in with some nice pale pink. The good thing about gouache is if you're not entirely happy with something, you can go over it, especially as we're getting to a much thicker paint now. Curling round to that one center point. Leaning towards the pink again. And adding some petals to our smaller, half open flowers. And why not introduce some of that to our white flowers? Yeah, I love that. So a bit more of the Bengal Rose, and that first stroke, I was using a very dry brush, and it had flared naturally. So I really liked that. And I think that would be lovely to bring into this painting a little bit more. Varying my brush strokes. We can do slower movements or very quick expressive movements. Trying all the different techniques that we have going for us. So that was quite a watery petal, then I dropped in paint, keeps all of that texture going. So I just need to figure out here we've got three main flowers here, one coming down, one to the left. So I'm just going to move that around so I can see what I'm doing a little bit better. And then I'm going to really start to shape these three flowers now. Pushing down on the brush, a little bit more water, which gives us more control, and the brush can travel further on the page. And already that looks a lot better. I'm really happy with that. So I just want to do a similar thing to this second flower here. And then the third one. A little twisty movement on the brush there. So I feel now that they are a little bit more defined. So why not go back a little deeper here with the Bengal Rose. Do adore this color. And getting both white and pink on the brush yet another technique that brings in lots of detail. So almost neat pink now. And it might be nice just to work on the petals that we have going on. Didn't want to completely go over that lovely brush stroke underneath. And I am mixing the white and the pink on the brush. Brings about a lovely, lovely effect. Again, slightly unpredictable. I think moments like that are really important. So we're loosening up now a lot. Again, mixing my brush, white and pink. A gorgeous effect. 8. Class Project | Leaves: Let's start to add some leaves. And I'm using the Shin Han moss green. But any warm green of your choice replenishing the pink and a little more white. I'm also putting down some Windsor green. That's a very cool green, and I'm using a fresh pot of water just so I keep my pinks and greens separate. So back to our size zero and adding a bit of pink to the moss green. I'm a big believer in that just borrowing colors and mixing them together. And then we're going to lay down some stems and some sepals on the buds. Just to get us going. Just mapping out those areas where we want leaves. Adding a little stroke of white over the green. We're going to add larger leaves, so no pressure here. Just a way of knowing where we want to work with the green. In places, the paint is still wet, and I don't mind that really. Can all mix together a little bit. I often do my stems quite quickly in an expressive way because I have quite shaky hands. So the more I try, the more shaky they are. So I tend to just use quite an expressive stroke. Just a paler bit of green now. Adding a few leaves. I'm amazed, actually, given that this is a size zero, how beautiful and how big the leaves are with the size zero. So a little bit of attention now to our buds and half open flowers. Working a lot more quickly and more intuitively now. We can start to relax a little bit because our painting is quite formed in its composition. And I always find leaves relaxing because we're really just working on complementing the flowers. So mixing between the green and white, just to get a little bit of variety in our petals. I like little details on my leaves. And now I'm doing really swift movements because it's easy to get a little bit tight as we're going through. And so I like to just do some throwaway swift movements just to keep that looseness going. Not too much water on my brush, so we're getting a slightly dry brush effect. So I'm looking at the cluster of flowers on the right, and they're getting quite tight, which is fine. But I just want to balance out the painting on a whole. So I'm going to mix white with Bengal rose, a little bit of water, and I'm going to add a flower. Yeah, I think I'm going to add a flower here. So we've got petals going in all sorts of directions and half opened flowers. There's an eye bit of movement going. I just felt I wanted to add another flower here just so the two groupings look similar. So I'm going back to this grouping here, and this flower has gone a little bit wayward, I would say. So I'm going to just bring in a few leaves there to give it a little bit more shape. So some of the moss green and a little bit of white. And I'm choosing where the center is, and I see it as there, so So drawing in those leaves with that center point in mind. And that looks better. And so let's carry on and dot some leaves around. I really want to bring the painting out to the edges of the page now. It seems to almost have its own life, and it's telling me where it wants to go. So mixing white and green on the brush again and being quite bold, using the side of the filbert for those leaves. And then slightly more expressive with those two, pressing the brush into the page a lot more. Same with that. A slight twisting on the page. I am thinking of placement, but I'm not deliberating over it for too long because this is where we need to trust our gut a little bit and be more led by our heart than our head. So the leaves, adding those leaves is actually really giving it shape and form and also dimension. And I now want to add a different green altogether. So I'm mixing the Windsor green with that pale pink, a little bit of everything, really. Mixing those other colors in just makes it more of a neutral. We don't want it to completely take over, but I did want this painting to be really bright and joyful. So our warm green leaves have mapped the areas that we want leaves. And now all we need to do is place these cooler leaves around those. We don't want to obscure them, but adding them around or slightly over would be fabulous. I do love Winsor Green and Bengal Rose together. Really, really bright. So again, another dimension to our painting where we're using warm and cool colours. And I've got slightly against convention here because normally you would put down your cool leaves first and then your warmer leaves because obviously, cool colours recede and warm moves forward. But I kind of just went with intuition on this. I didn't plan out my colors too much and who wants to be conventional. It is quite a challenge at this stage of the painting just keeping the whole in mind. U 9. Class Project | Petal Highlights: Before we start, I have chosen to use a very small detail brush, but you could also use a dip pen if that felt easier or more familiar to you. Let's pick up our detail brush, and I'm using a size one. Mixing up a little bit of white. We need enough water in this to give us a lot of control because we're going to now highlight some of the petals. I'm actually going to go down to a size zero, I think. And also, because this is like a mini brush, it's really easy to hold. So I think this is the one. And that feels a lot better. It's a very light touch and just following the edges of the petals. It helps to define them as well. It's such pretty detail. On some, you can do a slightly thicker movement, as I did there, and on others, very delicate. And we can also define the very first layers of translucent petals. And also on our subsequent layers of the pale pink. Oh very restful activity going round these petals already formed for us, so it's a little bit like doodling. I'm trying not to put them on every petal, although that's very hard not to do. I'm just going to pick up this little very delicate flower here. So because it's such a translucent petal, I don't want to go too heavy. It makes such a difference, and these are very delicate details, but it helps define the petals a little bit. I also really brings them to life. And it looks so pretty against that dark gray. A I just want to pick up this little petal here. Just felt a little bit too far back in the page. Lovely. Super restful. So just pausing, having a look at the whole painting. That looks good. I'm happy to stop there. 10. Class Project | Leaf Details: So let's continue to use a find tail brush. And this is that little size zero that I got with a set of paints. Very gestural lines and curves. I want each leaf to be slightly different. So on some just a line through like a vein, others outlining the shape of the leaf. I find turning my painting really helpful in just keeping an overall view of what's happening. Et's keep it really sweet and simple and move fairly swiftly, adding little leaves over the top in places. Isn't this color gorgeous? Adding extra little leaves and working around the moss green. And thinking about the overall blow, so adding little stems here and there. I think minimal is best, and then you can always go back in and add further lines if you want to. I love how this pale turquoise works with that dark gray background. So now let's mix up a little bit of paint, and we're mixing an ice bright and neutral green. Just adding white to our moss green. It makes the most delightful color. And then we can go in and start creating details. Adding white to both that turquoise and moss green kind of keeps that cohesion going as well. Again, working fairly swiftly, and it's such an enjoyable process because everything is laid down for us, and now we're just adding our little details. What you can notice at this stage as well in the painting is the more details there are, the more depth we create, bringing forward some of the leaves and some of the flowers are falling back. So I've noticed that some of the pale green isn't showing up quite as well as I'd like. It's just sinking into the page a little bit. So I've added a little bit more white. Curves lines and extra little leaves here and there. You can see I'm holding this brush quite close down. And in that way, I can use it like a pen and have a similar amount of control. Just breaking up this cluster of leaves here so they have a little bit more shape. Adding finer details, little extra leaves. And enjoying defining these little areas of leaves where they're clumped together. You can also decide on the direction of your leaf and if you want it to be curled a little bit at the edge. Going round the sepals now, defining those a little bit. And keeping movement in our brushstrokes allows us to keep that flow that we originally started out with. We don't want to get too static. Moving more swiftly now and just working my way around again. Adding extra details to leaves I've already worked on and also just working on areas that are a little bit undefined. It's very swift, very gestural, very expressive. Just adding some little extra leaves here on the dark gray background. Love those. Very sweet. I think I'll do a few more. Yeah, I'm really loving that. I'll love these colors together. 11. Class Project | Finishing Touches: So let's start work on our final details. We've worked together from translucent to really pigmented layers and created a great deal of depth by doing that. So now I'm mixing up some Windsor green with some water and a little scrap of white, I think that was still in there. I want to define these bluey leaves a little bit more. We have the highlight, and now why not add a little bit more depth and add some shadowing. So I have a little spot of white there, and I just want to I don't want it too dark, but I do want it darker than the white. So let's see what that looks like. That feels better, not so dominant. So I'm going back to my little size zero brush. It would be really easy to overdo things, and I probably am doing too much, but I really love this process. I love detail. Winsor Green is such a rich color, very, very cool, bluey green. Using these darker leaves and just placing details on existing leaves or just little bits of shadow. And what we're doing there is knocking back the Winsor Green leaves in places. So that Moss Green moves forward a few broader strokes, turning round my painting again. Just so I can keep an overall view. I find it really useful. I hope you do, too, because it gives us different perspectives. And you can start to see things differently, see areas which may be clumping together or a little bit tighter that just one view would not give us. Quite thoughtful here, not wanting to unbalance the whole painting a little more white. And back to our filbert, giving it a good wash and good blot, as well, because we're going to be working on some dry brushing. So making sure there's good coverage on our brush and then fanning out the brush like we did previously and just adding some lovely white highlights now to our petals. So all the moisture is pretty much off the brush and using neat white, tiny touch of pink, maybe. And then slowly working around our petals. I would say this stage is thinking, intuitive balanced, taking my time, casting my eye around, picking up some of the very translucent petals from our first layer as well as subsequent layers, and also trying to keep a little bit of flow going. So on some petals, I am just using that very quick flick movement, and on others a kind of wiggly flowing movement. Adding these highlights as well defines the petals. We've been defining our leaves, and now we need to pull the flowers up to the fore, as well. Deciding that petals gonna go over that leaf. And speeding up just a little bit now. I do really love. Oh, I think I'm overworking that area now, but a bit unhappy with that. It's very easily done, but yeah, what I was saying was, I love the dry brushing. I think it brings about a really delicate, almost whimsy kind of feel, which I love. Very kind of fairy dell. So in with our Bengal Rose now, one of my favorite pinks at the moment. And let's just do the same thing and dry brush on some of these gorgeous pink flowers. M and just define them now. And let's not be afraid of color. Let's go in with that neat pink, quite bold moves. And you can start to see how we're pulling layers towards us as we add detail. Oh, I love that pink. Just makes my eyes dance. That's kind of quite a white area there, so I just want to bring in a little bit of pink and just to define those three peony heads there. Oh. And you can see we're getting even more depth now. We have the translucent layers in the background. Mid layers which are more muted pink, and then our top layers are this vibrant Bengal Rose. Filberts are beautiful for adding details to petals. And I love this combi of the flat brush and filbert. Some soft pink on that flower. And just making sure that we have a nice distribution of this pink across the painting. So you can see, I just want to work on that flower to bring that a little bit more forward. So don't be afraid now to be really bold, going back to some white and some more Bengal Rose. I'm loving this deep pink color. And I think it might be nice just to add some more kind of petals or half opened flowers around the edges. I'm kind of now working on a rectangle shape. So although we started out with our figure eight, you can see now that we're filling up the motifs. Gentle dry brushing. Soft and quicker movements. Balancing out the pink across the page. I want to add some more leaves, maybe just some softer leaves with less detail. So going back to the moss green, and I want to add some hands yellow light to that. You know that I love very balancing leaves towards the end of a painting, and I often use either a very bright green or a kind of a balancing blue, more like a French ultramarine. But because we've chosen a palette here, which is more turquoise, I want to use a bright green, just tie everything together. So adding some white to that. So it's a very bright moss green now with the addition of the handsome yellow light. Just making sure I have enough of this to do what I want. Take the excess paint off our brush. And then let's keep this really gestural and loose. And it didn't feel like there was enough of a difference between the moss green leaves, so I'm adding more handsy yellow light. Handsy yellow light is one of the best mixing colors. I would strongly recommend having it in your collection of paints. Yeah, this is lovely. Kind of more limey green leaves. And let's work quite quickly now. Trust that your eye is going to pick up spaces that may need just a little bit of definition or texture. Expressive movements. Very little water on the brush. And this finishing touch is very much about intuition. I would recommend not thinking too much and just working around your painting, adding tiny details to the leaves we already have, or just little gestural movements on their own. What we're doing by adding this layer of leaves is just making sure that all the flowers are separated from each other. So any clumping can be sorted out. Small details, adding texture. And developing the spread of the flowers now across the page. And I like that. I don't want to have it too tight, and I don't want to do anymore for fear of losing the flow. 12. Thank You!: Thank you so much for coming along on this journey with me. We've done a little bit of color mixing. We've used vibrant colors. We've experimented with transparency and layering. I hope it's left you feeling really confident about finding your own style going forward. If you have any questions, you can start a discussion under our class. Or you could always get me over on Instagram. I am Holly Tomas Art. Take good care of yourself. See you soon. Bye for now.