Briar Rose - a Watercolour & Gouache Painterly Study

1. Welcome!: Welcome to Briar Rose, where we're going to be exploring the painterly technique. Before we jump in, for those who don't know me, as well as a skill share teacher, I'm also a surface pattern designer, specializing in bedding. I grew up in the design world as the family business was Tom Louis Studios. Although I went down a different career route and have been a musician and a therapist all my life. Getting back to the class, I'll be taking you through how to mix neutral tints, how to add texture, with mark making, and varying brush strokes. We'll be focusing on the three main elements of the painterly technique, color, brush stroke, and texture. We'll be using a fairly limited palette from warm, buttery yellows, neutral grays, and creamy whites. And as always, you can upload your work in the projects and resources area of our class, and hit the Submit project button. A lot of you share your projects over on Instagram as well, and I would love to see it, so please tag me. And you can also find me on YouTube and Pinterest. So, are we ready to get on with the class? Let's get started. 2. Preparing Our Materials : Let me run through materials for you. I used this sketchbook by my stationery. I haven't used it before, but I'm really getting on very well with it. The pages open nicely, and I can tape off quite easily across both pages. So I use empty washy tape, and I find it's really reliable and rarely tears the paper. Little bit of scrap paper, all will become clear, and let's move over to our paints. I'm using a mixture of gauche and watercolor here. You could interchange or use all watercolor all gouache. So I have dann blue, handsy yellow deep, Titanium white, and pyrol red. You don't really need the red. I used it to mix the gray from three primaries and white. So if we move over to water colors, I have buff titanium, racena, handsome yellow light, and green appetite genuine. So again, you don't need the red. We could mix all the colors that we need without it just by using a gray or a black. If we move to brushes now, I've chosen a fill bit for this class because it makes lovely petal shapes. I would add here that we need a brush that's slightly firmer because we're going to be creating a lot of texture, and it's all in the brush stroke. And we want a brush that will resist that a little bit rather than one that has very soft bristles. And this is one of my favorites, which is also a size ten ruby satin. We'll be using a dagger brush. If you have one. If you don't, you can also use a round brush for the marks that we'll be making. And a fine liner. If you don't have a liner, you could always use the tip of a small round brush will be mark making, and I love these clay modeling tools for that. You can scratch, and you can also dot with them. Really, really handy. If you don't have one, you could always scratch with a dip pen or a skewer or indeed use the bottom of a brush for scratchy marks. But anything really that makes marks through the paint, I also used these big pens for the first time, and I loved the way that it carved through the paint, but it also on dryer surfaces, turned back to a pen, so it kind of has a dual function here for us. I'm also going to be using a spray bottle. This creates texture in our background. So if you don't have one of these, you might have a fine diffuser. But I do prefer this one because you can adjust the spray with the nozzle. So let's move on to our first lesson, which is all about creating our beautiful textured background. 3. Practise: Creating Our Background : So I'm going to start by mixing some danhrone blue with the green appetite genuine. This makes a cooler green. I'm going to use a bit of scrap paper just to get going, really. It takes away the anxiety or any nerves about creating a piece from a blank page. I'm bringing in a little bit of a warmer green thereby adding yellow to the green appetite. So we're varying the direction of our brush strokes, and we're also going between wetter marks and dry brushing. Just a few more strokes in this color, and then let's mix a warmer green. You can use any yellow, and you can either mix satin with a blue or with a green. I've mixed it with the dahron blue, and I'm just now adding some lovely warm green. And some of the brush strokes will blend because the layer beneath is still wet in places. I think that really adds to the texture, which is what we're going for with this painterly technique. Now let's create another layer. I'm putting down some white gouache here. This is Titanium white. You could also use white watercolor or doctor PH Martin's bleed proof white. To create the creamy look that we're going for, I'm going to add some handsy yellow deep. Now, this color actually takes over quite a lot. So just a tiny bit of this we'll turn that white into a buttery color. I've got some handsy yellow light here, so I'm going to put some of that down as well. Just to take a little bit of warmth of the handsy yellow deep. But any yellow here mixed with white or even a brown. I'm going for a single cream mix here. I really love this color, so I'm going to put it down. Again, we'll get some blending and some dry brushing. We want to keep that main component of the painily effect texture. Just to reiterate here, you can use any brush for this layer. Before this dries, let's get in and do some mark making. This is the clay modeling tool that I mentioned. And we're just going to make some random marks. It's quite hard to get away from wanting to form a shape that looks like a leaf or a flower. Of course, if some of the shapes are leaf like, that's absolutely fine, too. Just go with the flow. Now, I haven't used big pens before for this, so I'm going to see what happens. I'm going in with the darker green first. Just squiggles, and you can see that I'm holding it, right at the top. This makes for more organic shapes, a little less controlled. In with the lighter green. I'm making a few marks here that are a little bit more leaf like. It's so enjoyable. 4. Practise: Differing Brush Strokes: So moving on to our brush practice, he could prepare any color for this. You don't need to use a gray. I just mixed a very quick gray with the three primaries and some white. You could use a very simple gray with just black and white mixed together or paints gray and white. Phil bits are lovely for petals and leaves, pushing down and then just lifting, pushing and twisting at the bottom there. So let's do another straight one. And then down and twisting towards the end. Now the side. Press down, lift up, press and up. So we're going to practice speed and pressure. We're going to be pushing into the page a lot more. Push and lift really quickly, and we're pressing down a lot more into the page. This creates a rougher feel and again, adds to the overall texture. Let's try that on the side of the brush. So we're going to continue experimenting with pressure. This is what I call a print brush technique. So what I'm doing there is almost taking the top of the brush over onto itself. What this does is create these really expression brush marks. Really get the brush to work for you here. Let's try the side. And then in from an angle. So this very gestural movement has three elements. We're using more pigment and less water. We're using speed, and we're using pressure. So let's add another layer. And I'm using almost neat white here. Lots of pigment, less water on your brush. Adding over a layer. We don't want to obscure what's underneath, so you can go a little bit to the right or left of the petal underneath or over it, but not completely obscuring it. This starts to build up the layers on top of that layered textural background that we're going to be using. This is so attractive to look at. Just going to mix up some handsy yellow deep there with some white, just to vary the color a little bit for you. And we're going to use the tip of the brush to half way. So we're going to create a small tear drop. So we're going to place our brush on the page, go out to the left and curve round. Using the side of my brush, I'm going out to the left and curving round. We're going to use this small tear drop brush mark to create our half open flowers and buds. Let's try it again. Brush down, out to the left and then round to the right. So a tear drop curve. And we're just aiming for that thinner line at the bottom to meet in the middle if you're doing the half opened flowers. We could do this quickly, too, press down all the way, curve round, and lift up really quickly. So continue to practice these moves, out to the left, out to the right, slower movements. And let's continue practicing, moving from the side of the brush to the full brush. And finally, let me show you this neat little way of creating buds. So you do your tear drop, and then just above that one, you do another one. It's so cute, and I use it quite often, so one little tear drop and another one over the top. 5. Practise: Flowers, Centres & Mark making: Let's flip back to our background page, and I'm just going to show you another technique that we're going to do together. And that is to use value as we've done in other classes. So we're just going to build up layers slowly, starting off with more translucent petals and building up to a greater value with thicker paint on our brush. So for this exercise, I'm just mixing up a very quick tint with white, yellow, and a touch of green. And we want to add enough water to this to be a 50 50 mix. So for this first brush stroke, we're going to go back to that move where you did together. Full brush, and we're going to push down quite forcefully and pull the top of the brush over itself almost. I can see that's quite pigmented, and we're not seeing a lot of the background come through. So let's just try that a bit more watered down. And that's very translucent, and I love the way that the paint galas in the middle. But let's try something between these two. And that, I feel is a really good one for the base layer of these petals. We've got the texture, and we've got some of the background showing. You can do this upward movement too. It takes a little bit more practice, but you can get some lovely brush strokes using this upward movement. And now let's mix a little bit more pigment. This is mostly white, and we've got quite a lot of paint on our brush. And we're doing a very similar mark. But you can see because we've added more paint, we're building up those layers. You can still see the petal behind and the background showing. So let's continue to practice this brush stroke, using the whole width of the brush, fanning it out, and then bringing it up. And you can start to see how we can build up texture also with the use of value. You also get these lovely edges from where the brush has left the page at the end of the movement. Let's move on to centers, and I'm just mixing up some red, blue, and yellow. It doesn't matter at this stage that we get the perfect color because I'll be taking you through that. So I'm using the dotty end of the clay modeling tool. And what I'm doing here is a mixture of dots and also just rolling the end of the modeling tool onto the page. A little bit of yellow. A little bit of that more browny ready mix. Getting a few colors in there, I feel really does bring things to life. So going in between all the colors that we might have going on on our palette by now is a really nice move. It brings variety. It also highlights if we have some darker green or brown and then use a yellow on top of it. So you can either continue then to make marks with the modeling tool or you can switch over to a pen, if you like. You can also use your dip pen or a skewer at this point. And I'm just very loosely making shapes around the petals. And I love the way that it carves into the still wet paint. A lovely effect using pens is this where you can drag the paint around to create a mark. What this does also is, it creates thicker and thinner lines, and that really does add to the painterly effect. It's a really beautiful technique and one that you might want to take forward in your future work. 6. Practise: Larger and Smaller Leaves & Mark making : Moving on to leaves. I'm just going to mix some of that green appetite with the dan thrown blue. The full brush there, pressing down gently, fanning the brush out a little bit and lifting up. It's a very similar movement to the one that we've done with the petals. You can do swifter movements or slower movements. Let's go down diagonally a little bit and create some smaller leaves. We're using the side of the brush here. And if you press down into the page with less pigment on your brush, less water, you get more texture. So let's now try that pressing, almost printing with our brush. It's quite a forcible movement, and we're pressing right into the page, fanning that brush as much as possible and almost going over with the top of the brush. And it leaves this gorgeous, gorgeous texture where the brush leaves the page. If you wanted to get a really textured effect, you can always separate the bristles on your brush. So, let me just show you that. I think what's really great is not to do all textured leaves or all one style of fluid, more watery leaves, and just mix it up a little bit and alternate between those very textured leaves, and leaves a little bit more flowy, more water, a little bit of pigment on the brush. And whilst it's still wet, let's go in and do some more marks. So I'm using the darker green bi pen here. You could also use your choice of scruchy thing. And what I love to do here is just trace the edges around very, very roughly or add a bit of veining. This is one of those things I could do all day. I love this bit. If your paint starts to dry and you want to add more marks, you can always just add a little bit more paint and then go back in with your big pen. 7. Practise: Dagger Brush Leaves: So I'm moving over to the dagger brush, which is a kite from Jackson's. And because we've got quite a lot of the same leaves, same shape leaves, I wanted to add some ribony leaves. And this is a beautiful brush for those. So just for the purposes of this practice, and I'm mixing there some green, yellow, and red with that white that's already in the left well there. And I'm just quickly mixing up like a mustard green French mustard. We can use this in two ways. We can use the tip of the brush for lines, let me just show you, so we can pull through some detailing on the leaves this way. Either veins or you could actually do some little wiggly lines around the edges of the leaves. If you don't have a dagger brush, you could also use a liner brush for this effect. Anything that creates a nice fine line. And let me just show you on a fresh page here. So we can start off with some lines. Just pull them through really quickly, and they create these lovely thin, slender leaves. So I'm using my brush upside down there. That's important with these dagger brushes because it makes it a lovely, fine line. And then I just love these little traces around the leaves, little details on the edges. So we're using the brush the right way round now. I'm going to pull through a very ribbon nee movement because just using a kk brush in a straight movement like this, I don't feel creates a really nice shape. I'm going to just do that again. It's okay, but I think you're better with a round brush for that. So starting with the tip, drag it through a little bit. Press down, we're going to go to the left. So we're using the broad part of the brush. Pull up to a tip at the bottom. Let's try again. Tip out to the left and then back up again. So now let's try a double one of those. So we're going to start again with the tip and then squiggle your brush. Now, this looks more complicated than it is. So don't worry about am I going left, right, or whatever? Just wiggle your brush and the brush will do it for you. Slowly there you can see how beautiful that is. It's great for ribbons as well, of course. Nice undulating shapes. You could practice this as much as you like just to get into the flow, and of course, you can go out to the right rather than the left. Restful to do these. You can practice doing them really slowly and also in a very swift movement. All I'm doing there is wiggling my brush left and right. And of course, you could then add some little stems to the leaves. You can either do it as a complete movement or you could add the stems later. So let's now go back to our flowers and practice some finishing touches. 8. Practise: Flowers; Finishing Touches: So we're going to use that brush print method on these petals just to bring some layers through. So again, we're using more pigment, so I'm just placing some more white down there. So I'm just going to load up my smaller fil bit there with quite neat white. We don't want too much paint on our brush. So I've just taken the excess off. And I'm going in with that very pushing into the page, very swift movement. Really let go with this because the more that you do, the more expression fall and the more painterly it will become. So not much water on your brush. Lots of pigment. And if you want some dry brushing, take some of the pigment off your brush. So let's try that again. Really push into the page, printing with your brush. Very quick movement to pull it up again off the page. And again, you could try that upward movement with your brush. So we're not wanting to obscure all of the petals from underneath. So go around them or you could place new petals in between two of the larger ones. And who says all the petals need to be on one full flower? This is all about texture and expression. So I'm just placing them wherever I feel, I want them. Lots of pigment again. And this time, we're going to pull some tiny little bud like shapes. I'm using the side of the filbert here. And it's almost going back to the tear drop brush stroke that we did earlier together. So keeping awareness that we're working with those translucent layers underneath and slowly building up the value, adding more and more pigment to our brush. So now, let's go in for some real dry brushing. And we covered this in Millis Meadow. So load your brush with a lot of that white. And then actually, we want to take quite a lot of that off. So I'm just going to find something sketchy that I can practice on before I commit to the page. I'm moving the side of the brush, skimming almost over those petals. So it's a very light pressure and the absolute opposite of what we were doing with the brush print method. So now that I've got that all lined up, I'm going to try it on our petals here. But don't feel you have to pull that over exactly onto a petal. It's nice to do in between as well, maybe outside of the edges of the petal. And just the side of the brush, catching it a little bit on the top, and then a very, very light skimming movement. And to keep preparing your brush to make sure that you've got the right consistency. That was a little too much paint. I didn't like that, so I've just taken some more paint off. I do love this technique, and as you'll see from my recent work, I've been using it quite a lot. To me, it creates this lovely little layer of magic over the top. And I think that's now called co aesthetic. So yes, definitely going for that. I do live in Scotland after all. So, wow, we've got through the practice runs. So let's now move on to the project itself. 9. Class Project: Briar Rose Background: So let's start by taping off our page. This is 15 millimeter tape. And I do love taping off the edges, especially when I'm doing more abstract work. It really frames it. So, let's get started with our colors, some mixing green appetite with the danthrone blue there. I got my scrap bit of paper. Now let's just make some really random marks. So, the lovely thing about this technique is we can use all sorts of mixes of green from the cooler end towards the daherne blue to the warmer end of the handsy yellow deep. So I'm mixing some of the handsy yellow deep with the green appetite. That creates a lovely warm green. So I'm just working between those three colors, keeping it nice and fluid. Lovely warm browns to spring greens to cool greens. And we're laying down a base here for the whole paintly effect. It's all about the brush strokes. Some warmer brush strokes in there. And you can see there's also a mix between more watery color and a little bit of dry brushing as well. Just finishing up now with the last of those brush strokes, and then we're going to mix our second layer. So let's mix some of the beautiful buttery color using white, hansy yellow deep and a tiny bit of the handsy yellow light. Ddying a little bit more white. And this is probably a 50 50 mix. So, I want to see that first layer coming through. So not too wet and not too dry for this layer. We're going to just let that settle for a short while. And now we're going to mix a layer of more pigmented white and do the same thing just vary our brush strokes. Less is more for this bit. We're going to pick up our water spray and spray on each side of the page. 10. Class Project: Mark Making & Colour Mixing: I'm going to just mark the page a little bit with this modeling tool. You could use a dip pen or a skewer. Although we may go over these marks, I think it's an essential part of creating this project. I've got my pen there. I love these big pens. This is the darker green. Let your hand wander over the page. Don't feel you have to create leaves. These are just marks. And I'm just going to use the lighter green here as well. If you don't have these big pens, you could always use a pencil or put some ink in your dip pen and make a few scratchy marks with that. So first of all, I'm just going to mix up the handsy yellow with some thrown blue, and a little pyrol red. And what we're doing there is what we've done in previous classes to create a brown or a gray out of the three primary colors. You can see that I've brought that over to the white, and I'm just mixing that up. It's a nice or warm gray. Adding a little bit of the buttery mix from our background. Buff titanium and hands yellow light. There's no correct way with this. We're mixing neutrals, and these are all beautiful tints, and you can mix your own, you don't have to follow exactly what I'm doing. They all start to merge together as we go through the project. What I'm doing is creating a few different tints. We've got a buttery yellow on the left, and we've got that nice warm gray on the right. I forget how overbearing the handsy yellow deep is. So it kind of took over that white a little bit. So I've taken that over to our gray on the right there. What we're aiming for really is a range of different grays and buttery whites. 11. Class Project: Flowers & Buds: So I'm picking up that very warm kind of dove gray mix from earlier. Warming it up a little bit. Maybe a little too much, and taking some of the green appetite over. And let's lay down some initial flower shapes. I'm interchanging between the tints that we've mixed. What we're aiming for there is slightly different tints on each petal. The more you mix, the satisfying it is really once you've got your palette, and just mixing with those three pies, can produce such a wide range of tints. So very quick brush strokes. No thinking about it too much, don't think of it as a flower, placing down shapes. Going in with a warmer color there over that dove gray. So we're doing what we practiced here and pressing down quite hard on the brush. Just on some of the petals, we can vary our brush strokes, vary the pressure on our brush. So let's just keep going round and adding tints and cooler tints. The reason why I love preparing a background for pieces like this is that when we push down on our brush, you can start to see from the brush stroke itself, the color coming through underneath. So I am continuing there to use the brush and the side of my brush. What we're doing is building up subtle layers, which really brings these roses to life. We're also thinking about movement and composition. So we've got their three main flower heads appearing, and they're traveling across the page in a really pleasing manner from top right to bottom left. I love that fawn bage color. Paler layers now on top of those slightly darker muted tints. A few little buds. The beauty with this is that you can change the shape of your flowers at any point, really. Aim to try and relax and move fairly quickly and intuitively. 12. Class Project: Dark Leaves: Let's mix up some greens for our leaves now. Mixing a tiny bit of everything in their really. The mixes we've already done, adding a little bit of rosena, the full brush and the side. Mixing some of that hands yellow deep in with the drone blue. We can slow down a little bit here and start to think very gently about where we want to place our leaves. And I twisted my brush around a little bit for that leaf. And adding some little leaves around the half opened flowers. And the buds, using the side of the brush. 13. Class Project: Mark Making On Leaves & Flowers: I really love this bit. We're going to get out whatever you're using for scratching and just make marks in the leaves. And again, we may go over these marks, but it all adds to the whole journey, I think, of painterly pieces like this. So I'm just tracing out around some of the petals, pulling out some lines. It starts to get a little bit more relaxing now. We've laid down a lot of brushstrokes, faster and slower movements, and now we can just ponder on our piece and see what we would like to add. 14. Class Project: Flower Centres : I'm mixing some blue and the asana there. This is to add just some very simple details to the center of the flowers. I want to mix a brown. So I'm just adding a little bit more of that hands yellow deep. And that's perfect. I'm using the clay modeling tool. If you don't have one of those, you could use the bottom of a small brush, and let's those in very lightly. I think because the piece has got so much abandoned, we don't want to get too detailed here. I'm thinking actually that that's a bit too big, so I'm just going to move down to a smaller modeling tool, adding a little bit of the hands yellow deep. A bit more brown. Dotting in various colors to the center of the flower looks really nice. I've got brown and orange yellowy feel, and also I might just add a little bit of white. Here goes the white knocks it back ale bit. That's one, very simple way of bringing character to your flower centers. So I'm just continuing around using the raw sienna, white and the brown that we've mixed up. 15. Class Project: Dagger Brush Leaves: I'm now going to move over to the sword brush and mixing in some of the green appetite with the hands yellow deep. Want to bring a different color in now. This color will also bring together that darker green that we have and the creamy flowers. Adding a little bit of detail there around the leaves as well as forming new leaves. Nice fluid movement. Pulling leaves, also just creating some very fine lines through the leaves that we already painted. I really love this part of the whole process because we're slowing down now. We've done the first expression full movements, and we're just adding a little details now. So the pace is a lot slower. You can see how these two greens compliment each other. 16. Class Project: Layering Flowers: And switching back to the smaller filbert now to create some petals. I wasn't too keen on the three leaves there, so I'm just going over with some white. Concentrating now again on the flowers. We're gently creating some little buds here, filling out the half opened flowers, using the side of the brush, and we're using that pressed down and twist brush movement that we practiced. As we did with Mili's Meadow, we're now going to build up the value of our paint. I'm going to go in with quite a lot of pigmented white now. At this stage, you can go over petals that you've already laid down or create new ones. Again, using that pushing down and twisting, it just creates these lovely, free flowing petals with lots of movement in them. I really want to add some of those pressing down and twisting movements here. It makes the petal edges quite rough and full of texture. Push right down, bending the brush back over. It's really nice to play some of these over the existing petals. Quite rough and quick movements. We're almost now printing with the brush, pressing it into the page, and it creates these beautiful broken edges on the petals. And what that does is reveal the layers beneath. Dry brushing over the softer lines is a really lovely way to increase the texture. So I'm continuing to value and brush stroke. A few more of those creamy yellow buds. These are particularly effective when painted over the dark leaves. Just taking a moment to see what else I would like to do. And now we've loosened up such a lot. Why don't we try some of those pushing into the page brush marks? It adds a final layer of texture on top of all the layers, and it's so fun to do. So check over your work now and have a look and see if there's anything out of balance. 17. Class Project: Dry Brushing: We can add now the final dry brushing technique. And I'm using the side of the brush. It's almost the opposite movement to the pressing into the page brush stroke, because what we're doing is skimming over the surface of the paper, very, very gently, a lot of pigment on the brush, hardly any water, very, very dry. Again, this is lovely to do over the darker areas of your painting. Very spare movements. And just checking over. Think just a few more on these petals. So the paint is on the edge of the brush only, and I'm just pulling in, following the line of the petals. And coming to the end of our project, just consider the last movements. I think we deserve a bit of a rest and a cup of tea, and then we'll move on to the final reveal. 18. Thank You! : Okay, so it's revealed time. This is my favorite part. Especially when we're doing more semi abstract work, framing it like this really does add to the overall effect. So we've explored the three main elements of the painterly technique. Color in the mixing of neutral tints, brush stroke, soft, expressive movement, and texture through layering, mark making, and dry brushing. I hope this class has kindled a love of creating easy, textured backgrounds. It can be daunting always painting on blank white surfaces. But using this approach, where the flowers almost seem to appear effortlessly through the layers can be an effective technique to take forward in your work. Thanks so much for joining me. Take good care of yourself, and I'll see you again soon. Bye for now.