Bite-sized Botanicals: Paint Watercolor Heritage Carrots in your lunch break!

1. About this class : by Hannah and illustrated by Sting Westernised join May for the first class in my body size botanical Siri's heritage Carrots come in all sorts of wonderful colors and then just cry out to be painted this big in his classes bite sized so that you could digest it much break after dinner. All while the baby sleeps, we'll be coming some fun color mixing techniques to make your painting smoker hasten and you'll be able to paint along with May as we put this wonderful bunch of veggies. This project is perfect for the kitchen wall, a housewarming gift or a thank you card. You don't need any special materials. Just a watercolor paper brush your toe and watercolor paints. Let's dive in. 2. Mixing your colours: we get started, we're going to mix up here, pal it so that we have a beautiful Grady int off carrots that look like they go together. So I am going to be using a violet Eliza in crimson and of raw sienna. Now, if you don't have these colors, just try and find a nice purple. This is a cool red E conceits. It sort of got pinky times in it, and raw sienna is a transparent color, but you could also use yellow polka. It's quite close in Hugh, you can say, but this pigment is just more opaque, and I prefer the raw sienna for this one will also be mixing a grain using sap grain and cerulean blue. So first we need to mix up how washes over here so that weight can work quite quickly once we start painting. So I will wet all of my colors in my palette, but I can lift the painting you can use to paints or pan set. You could even use liquid watercolors, but I do find that those are really very strong, and it could be hard to get natural looking colors without inter mixing those so I would lean towards a pan settle tubes, for this is my raw sienna. We're going to test the colors here once we've makes them to make sure that we're happy with them, and then we can leap straight into painting. Now, something I mentioned in all of my beginner classes is that you need to make sure that you makes a big enough wash to get you through the whole area that you're going to need to paint. If you've got quite a lot of carrots to paint, we want to make sure that we're not running out of color, especially if it's a color that we've mixed. So that is going to be a our yellow carrots, so going to mix an orange color using the Eliza in crimson and the raw sienna. So I tested. Sad to say, we're happy with it. No, it needs a bit more pigment, more yellow closer. I'm not happy with the color of this, just not quite happy with the strength of wash. Very abbots better. And then we'll do a few carrots with, uh, Streit, the misery in crimson. Now these colors are all blending together beautifully. If we were just going to pick a yellow and then an orange and then a different red. You say that it just doesn't really flow quite as nicely if we're mixing an orange from the colors that are already in ass, it so that doesn't look quite as nice as this, Grady. It that we've got here, especially once we start to mix the purple in without read, it really looks like it belongs rather than just picking around and read and around a purple, which doesn't quite look as cohesive and organic. So these are the colors that we're going to use. I'm gonna finish mixing up these washes and then we'll get onto our grains and for our lakeside around, we're going to use a striped sap grain, and we're also going to use a grain that has a little bit off the same yellow. The raw sienna mixed in with it. Once again, we're keeping our color palette cohesive. If we have sap green and way peak, lemon, yellow or one of these other yellows, it's not going to look quite as cohesive and organic as if we use the yellow that's already existing in their composition. And that way. It all fits together harmoniously, and we get this beautiful Grady int that we can use to pay our parents. 3. Composition and painting: provided some reference images for some heritage carrots on a Pinteresque board. So if you head to the about section or the project section, you'll find the link to that collection of images. So then you can have a look at the different shapes of the carrots. You can have a look at the colors and even get some layout ideas. I'm going to paint mine all in a long line, but you might like to do yours in a bunch you might like to do a circle with them all radiating out or even a semi circle. I think there's lots of different ways that you could lay this out. Have a think about what your end product is going to pay. If you want to do a greeting card for someone, then you know, maybe think about how it's going to feet in the constraints of a card, whether you want to do a carats all the way along. Or maybe you might want to do it. Carrots just in one corner looks up to you now. This is the kind of thing that you could paint freehand if you want to. Last time I painted these carrots that's what I did. However, for this activity, I have actually sketched out my character using some water color pencils. So I've picked some colors that are quite complimentary to the colors I'm already using, so that when I start to paint over them, these lines are going to dissolve into the painting, and you're going to see them so either lightly sketch at your carrots or just know where they're going to sit on the page if you want to do it freehand. The great thing about this is that you can't really get the carats wrong. They're all meant to be different and a little bit quirky. So if some of them are fat and some of them are thin, it's gonna look great. What really makes this painting is the repetition of form and the beautiful graduation of color, and then the little quirky characteristics that might h carrots slightly different rut. So let's start painting my raw sienna. He had just straight raw sienna, and you could play around with the transparency of these carrots by making some of them slightly darker, with a more concentrated wash and some of them lighter. I've got relatively with brash and I'm just pulling the color. Damn, We call this the bait, so I'm not letting it dry out. I am just pulling the color. Damn some se. Talk to the tip. So if you want to get some thicker paint out of your set, you can actually drop that. Went in, went into the first wash while it's still wet, just like that next carrot. Some of the carrots have kicked quite strike along the top, and some of them I've observed this would have ever a roundness to them where the greenery grows out. So I have mixed them up by doing those two variations. Some of them have got little fine roots hanging off the end. Go, I think a point again. Just along. Yes. We're gonna work in a few sections with these carrots. I wants this first washes dry, will come back in on, had some little details just to give them a bit more definition, making sure to go over my pencil lines so that they disappear into the work. This character is a bit of a nobly end because some of them are a bit odd. Next carrot. Okay, I'm going to start using some off my orange. Now what's again dragging the color down? There's a so simple and sorry fun, and I love that I convey lumpy and bumpy and that that just adds more character to the illustration. I'm miss. Did I regard It's my wonky one. And if I get my brush while it's wet through a little bit of wet in wet mixing drop in. Some of my raw sienna had a little bit of interest next onto a think character, just adding a little bit of orange back in to my Eliza in crimson. Just to help unify the colors that we've got. I want this next one to bay right up purposely, one I'm loving. How these withdrawing that right? It could be a little short one and a purple carrot coming up next has to go over those watercolor pencil lines just to activate them and dissolve them. I want to drop some of this. We'll see and into these once. If you let this sit and dry a little bit, it's much easier to drop whipped paint into the debt painting rather than trying to drop whipped paint into really, really wet painting that just that they're water doesn't flow around quite as much. It's gonna make this worshipping thicker. Yes, that's good. So we have our harmonious palette that we've mixed with three colors to make all of these different hues. And then we're also dropping those colors across while the paint is wet to get some really nice into mixing happening. I'm using quite a lot of water here so you can see it really worthwhile having a 300 GSM paper rather than having your thinner paper buckle. As as all of this starts to dry now, I don't want this to be too wildly purple. I think that might be a good color. The last couple of carrots back to mixing a little bit more of our purple in with our violet color here that makes drawing beautifully with they flicks of other colors in them. Is that beed? When you keep that baby wit as you move across the page, it means that you don't end up with those weird to the collie flower blooms, so you take that there and then the water on your page doesn't ever dry out as you paint. Having said that, though, that kind of takes. You would probably be quite nice in an illustration like this. And lastly, finish off with a lot of purple one. I'm gonna swept to a slightly smaller brash just to drop some more coloring base ones anyhow, and last thing I'm going to do is just dragged down with a fine brush, a few little little routes using the colors that we've got here. But I'm already part of that character. Personal preference, whether you wanna have these or not. Okay, we leave our parts to dry completely, and then we're going to come back in and do some greenery up here. When they totally dry, we're going to add some texture on top of the root of the carrot. In the meantime, I'm going to show you how we're mixing the grains to use for up here, okay? 4. Carrot Tops: right. So while the character drawing, I'm going to mix up some grains. This is just my straight sap green, ready to go check that I'm happy with the concentration of that color that it's dark enough and thick enough. Yes, good. On. In the first video, we mixed here some sap grain and some off our raw sienna together. And last late, we're going to mix a little bit of this in with a grain just to give us some Dhaka bluey grain heart lots that we can, adding, Those are the grains that we use for the character ups. And while we are mixing, we are, oh, set out here to be able to make some nice Brown's to use for the kind of little root follicles and little lines that you have on the carats. I don't know what the technical name is because when you look at a color wheel, we've got this violet color and yellow, and so they are complementary colors, which means that when we start to mix them together, what we actually get is a really muddy color. So if I couldn't find it so violet and when you add yellow, you start to get Brown's for us to get some interesting details on our carrots, we can add some of this in here. Get a nice brown color. And if we make this washed thicker than the color that we used in our first layer, it's going to show up quite well because with water colors, we work like two dark. If we try to put this color on top of all about purple carrots, it's not going to show up. So we need to have a thicker wash and generally a darker wash. In order for that to to work properly. Once our character drive, we're all prepared. Now we have got our our greens premixed and ready to go, and we have got a nice brown color that we can use for a highlights. Never the carrots. I'm going to use similar color to what's on top, so I'm gonna use a thick a version of this on top of the yellow carrots, and I'm going to use this browning one on top off my purple and my red carrots. The tips of these air dry enough now that I can get away with painting the carrot tops without the grains running into the carrots and charging that color through. We've got a three colors and I'm going to just to the carrot tops like they've been trimmed . You could do some a little fluffy tops on them if you want to, but I quite like this. Look off them, Captain. Washed and trimmed. The bunch is quite thick at the dice, and then it sort of folks out into a number of different stems. I'm just gonna go like that and the next one bit different color on H one just to add interest, because we've mixed them all using the same grain. It looks really cohesive at an uniform rather than instead of one crazy apple green one on one that's a forest grain. So if you just pick the colors straight out of your palate, it can be really hard to have things looking, um, looking organic and looking natural. So I'm putting my my carrot tops in this deep that I've painted, trying to make the stems of these h one just slightly different. That I look like a production line. But yeah, is a carrot tops done. And what's this is all completely dry. Will come in and do our finishing touches and are carrots will be finished. Okay, 5. Finishing Touches: all right, we're back. And I am so happy with how this layer has dried. I love the beautiful color, Grady it that we've achieved because we've used just the three colors to mix our our oranges and pinks and our and our purples. And I really love how dropping other colors in an extra water while the first layer was what has given these beautiful collie flowers, I think that that's worked out really nicely. I like these lot of colors on the purple and just this really subtle raw sienna on top of the orange works. Really? Well, I've got a nice small brush. This is a zero to come in and do the finishing touches. So to get nice fine lines, you want to use really like pressure. If you're pushing down even with a tiny brush, it can get quite thick lines. But if you keep your pressure really lot, then you can have really, really fine lines. I'm also kicking my brush vertical so I'm not trying to get fine lines by dragging the brush on its side. I'm gonna keep it upright, keep my hand up. All right, so these characters cylindrical So my little detail lines that I include are going to have a slight curve to them to help give a hint to the shape of the vegetable. Now you don't need a steady hand for the spirit because most of these lines were bit wavy and weird. What's a little blemishes and dots and spots on them? So I'm not using a reference image at this point. I'm just making it up. I'm going to zoom in so you can see this bit better, and then we'll finish off to say what it looks like at the end. I really like into mixing the colors that I'm using across my palate, cause each just hopes to unify everything. So bringing a little bit of this Maroni brown across into the raw sienna just just makes everything I always try to say how I can. Mixed colors are named using what I've already got my palate. Another grain. Rather than reaching for a grain in my pants set, I will always try and say, if I could mix that using the colors I've got, or maybe even just one or two of the colors, So I'm adding in one new color. But I'm mixing it in with existing makes to be thick enough that we can say it over the top . See how these lines just kind of blend in. Really beautifully fired. Gone? Oh, I need a brown and I picked something out of here. It's just not going to work quite as nicely as mixing the colors like we've done here. And if you enjoyed this class and you're new to water colors, then maybe check out my other class. Level up your water color, mastering layers, do a whole different pile of exercises that help you to plan your layers and understand how layering works, how the order off colors works and how you get really nice distinctive lines and really good contrast. And in the end of that project, we paint a sea turtle. So if you felt like that, you had a few questions doing this class, and you just don't maybe feel like I didn't explain things enough. Maybe jump into that other class because I go into lots of detail at that fundamental watercolor technics, and it's yet, so it's just really nice to have that money. I get it Now. I know why women to do it that way. And I love for people to get watercolor on, understand why and how you do it, because it's such a great medium last carrot and just like, what are carats of finished Now? I think that the color scheme we've mixed is really what makes this illustration sing. I hope that you've enjoyed mixing all of these harmonious colors just with three different pickets, and we've also covered off on painting natural looking greens. Now, this activity assured enough that you can do it in your lunch break. Do it in a neighboring after dinner. So I would love to say your carrot compositions take a photo or a scan and uploaded into the project area. I would definitely have a look and leave a comment so that watercolor techniques that we've used today I'll just name them way put down. I wash and we've dropped which pigment in while it was drying. Then we've let that dry, and then we've done our carrot tops. And then we've used some fine details, which we've layered over the top of out dry car, so that technique is called wet on dry, and that allows us to get these really nice sharp lines. So if you're interested in more techniques like that, check out my master layers class. And if you are interested in something a little bit more advanced, I've got a class on ways that you can combine water, color and wash. If you're interested in seeing my future classes hit, follow up the top so that you get notified. I think these carrots would look fabulous in a kitchen as a print. That would also be really nice as a housewarming present for a friend. Or, if you make a smaller version, would be really nice greeting card with a terrible pound like Thanks a bunch or I'm rooting for you. And when Instagram so feel free to tag me in your project and we can celebrate your work. Thanks for taking my butt size botanicals, glass and happy painting.