Chicory Flowers: Learn to Combine Watercolor and Gouache! | Jana Raninis | Skillshare
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Chicory Flowers: Learn to Combine Watercolor and Gouache!

teacher avatar Jana Raninis, watercolorist

Watch this class and thousands more

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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Introduction

      1:14

    • 2.

      Materials

      3:07

    • 3.

      Drawing Chicory Flowers

      6:39

    • 4.

      Color Palette

      5:04

    • 5.

      Class Project part 1 - Watercolor Background

      7:41

    • 6.

      Class Project part 2 - Gouache Flowers

      23:05

    • 7.

      Class Project part 3 - Details and Highlights

      5:42

    • 8.

      Final Thoughts

      0:48

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About This Class

I don't know about you guys, but I just love chicories! They are so humble and beautiful, they look like a tiny pieces of sky fallen into the grass. They bloom in late summer throughout the autumn and you can see them in the meadows or by the roads.

This class is all about these lovely wild flowers.

We will explore the possibilities of combining traditional transparent watercolor to create warm, subtle, seamless background, and gouache paints for the chicory.

First we will spend some time to learn how to draw the chicory flowers, the stems, buds and leaves.

We will also have a brief talk about the color palette I chose for the Class Project, about the watercolor paints and the gouache paints we will work with.

The opacity of the gouache paints is something that is really special about them, they provide perfect coverage and highlights that are needed to bring the painting to life.

If you are interested in gouache, check out my class Snowdrops - Gouache Painting for Beginners.

So if you love painting flowers and are open to mixed media, join me in this class and paint some chicory flowers with warm autumnal background with me!

Meet Your Teacher

Teacher Profile Image

Jana Raninis

watercolorist

Teacher

Hello, I'm Jana.

I live in Slovakia - a small lovely country in the very heart of Europe. I have studied Arts years ago, and since I was a little child, a set of paints or crayons was the best present anyone could give me. But then life happened and I found myself doing a corporate job instead of illustrating children's books. However, it does not mean I gave up on painting and drawing - not at all.

In fact, it is pretty much how I spend my evenings, my free days or even lunch breaks sometimes.

I just love it! Especially watercolor. One of my art teachers once told me I would eventually end up with acrylics, because watercolor is just too unpredictable and the mistakes are too hard to correct. Well, she couldn't be more wrong :).

I am here today to share my p... See full profile

Level: All Levels

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Transcripts

1. Introduction: Hello, am I creative France and welcome. My name is Yana and I would like to invite you to my class to paint some lovely blue to grow flowers, which are so beautiful that they look like tiny bits of heaven fallen down into the grass. This class is special because we are going to combine two media, typical transparent, watercolor and gouache, which is more opaque, can provide outstanding colors and nice highlights to your painting. I absolutely love working with both of these media and together they seem to create the perfect team. If you are interested in gouache, I have one more class on this medium. It's called snow drops, gouache painting for beginners. Where we talk more about gouache and its specifics. I'd be happy if you still die. But now let's see what art supplies we need for these lovely to carry flowers. 2. Materials: So today we are going to combine traditional watercolor and gouache, which is technically watercolor too. But it's much more opaque and gives you possibilities to normal watercolor wouldn't. I don't have very large set of gouache paints, only ten tubes, but it's perfectly enough. The colors can be mixed together and create whatever color you miss. Or sometimes I mix white gouache with our watercolor to get a pastel, opaque color I need. This is Royal talents brand. The pain seem to be of decent quality. I don't have different brands to compare, but the pains feel nice. The opacity is okay. They are not the best you can get, but they are pretty sufficient to my needs. The gouache paints are going to be used for the flowers, stems, and bats. Here is my watercolor sets. This is white knight set. We're going to use it for the background of our artwork. Regarding the paper, this is Arches hot press, hundred percent cotton paper. Usually I like using cold press paper more. But this kind of paper is smooth and does not have much texture. And therefore, I like it more for painting with gouache. Textured watercolor paper is better for pure watercolor paintings, especially those painted in loose style with not too much details. Now this is my mixing palette. I will use it to mix the gouache paints. It's pretty simple plastic palette, but any old ceramic plate would do. Regarding brushes, I have several of them. For the background. I have this nice mop brushes, which are perfect for applying a lot of water and paint. For the gouache painting and the details. I have simple round brush size six. And these two small brushes for the tiniest things. You will also need a jar of water, some paper towels to clean your brushes. And I have here also a masking tape to tape my paper down to some firm surface. Like here I have a piece of cardboard from some old shelf. 3. Drawing Chicory Flowers: I have uploaded several photos in the resources section in case you need some reference of particularly flowers. They are pretty simple, round blue flowers composed of long, narrow petals growing on a long stem. There are blooming flowers, flowers that are already gone, and also some small buds. Here. You can see that I painted something similar to what we are going to do today already in my watercolor sketchbook. You can see these nice blue flowers, too bad and feel withered flowers as well. Here in the bottom. If you want, you can practice drawing the flowers and stems before you actually sketch them for the painting. I have my old sketch book here, and I'm just going to draw several trickery flowers. Feel free to draw along. So what I do first is drawing the stem. It does not have to be perfectly straight. It can be a bit wavy. And then I suggest the position of the flowers that grow from the stem just very loosely. The oval shape means that the flower is viewed from an angle. The round shape means that we look directly into the center of the flower. Then I draw the petals. They are quite narrow and a little bit ragged on the outside edge. For the flower that is on an angle. The petals the dark, so to say farther from us, appear longer than those that are closer to us or that are pointing on us. Now the bus are very simple, small balls. There can also be a small pointy leaf or two. That's it. Let's do a few more of them just to get the grip of it. You can see that now, one of my flowers looks like a cone because we look at it from the outside. And I also add one, a withered flower. I want to draw one more stem for flowers. This time there is a flower right at the top of the stem. This flower is tilted towards a bit like it's looking up. And to more round flowers and few bats. And Ali. Now for the flower itself, besides the color and shape of the petals, there is one more thing that makes it so nice and elegant. And that is the stamen. And we can find in the center of it, these are the tiny details that give the flower the extra crisp. You can see them also in the painting here. There are dark blue and white details in the flowers that add more highlights and texture. I'm going to show you how I redraw that she can flowers. You can draw along, or you can just create your own composition. 4. Color Palette: Very good. Now we can talk about the colors that we are going to use in today's class. You are of course, free to choose your own color palette if you want to give your painting a different vibe. But I want mine to feel autumn and warmer. So I chose warm colors for the background. I will paint the background using traditional watercolor paints, but you can use gouache as well if you water it down enough to act like normal watercolor. So to make it running and transparent, I'm going to repeat the color scheme from the painting here because it really works for me. So let's see. First I have here a bit of very vibrant and warm orange color. This one is called golden. In this set. You can see bits of it here and there in the painting. And it gives us nice idea of warm light in the background. Next I have a grayish green. This one is called green earth. And it is a muted green. Very subtle. If you don't have this muted green, you can try to use any green you have and mix it with a little bit of orange. That should do the trick. Next color is CPR. It brings us the earthy Maddie feeling. But it's still very warm and nice, and it looks nice next to the orange. And the last one is azure blue. This is not the same kind of blue as I'm going to use for the flowers. The flowers blue will be cooler. But I chose this blue because it's warmer than ultramarine blue that is used for the flowers. And I want the background to feel very warm, like a nice sunny day in Indian summer. And I want it to contrast with the icy blue of the trickery. Regarding the gouache part, I create the flowers part. I have here a few gouache paints. I need to mix my own grain because I don't have this yellowish, warm green in my set. And I'm going to use ultramarine and yellow for that. I have only viridian green, and as you can see, it's way too cool for what I need. So I'm not going to use it. I'm going to need a little bit of burnt sienna for the details in the bus mostly. And one very important color is white, which I'm going to use not only for highlights, but also to mix it with ultramarine blue to get this nice light color for the flowers. So let's see. I have a bit of ultramarine and a bit of yellow. And I'm mixing them together to see if they can give me the yellowish green I need for the stems and leaves. So they can. Now this is the dark blue that is going to be used for the few details. And now I'm mixing the ultramarine and white. And that will provide us with this lovely pastel blue for the petals. Here we have burnt sienna, which is very warm, reddish brown. And let's not forget the white. Okay, This is very simple color chart for our painting. You can see that I don't use a lot of colors. Having small number of different colors in your artwork will make it look more harmonious. So keep that in mind. 5. Class Project part 1 - Watercolor Background: Okay, and I've talking, let's paint some trickery flowers. But first let me take my paper down to a piece of cardboard to prevent backlink and create an elegant wide frame later. My paper is 21 by 21 cm. So it's square, which is a format I really like. And now I have my pencil and I'm redrawing the stems and flowers, just like when I throw them into my sketchbook before. But I'm not going to draw the petals, only the circles and ovals indicating where the flowers are. I'm drawing the flowers and the bats SOL. And let's add also few leaves. Nice. I'm satisfied with the sketch. So now we can move to the watercolor part. I have a jar of clean water and a big mop brush, which makes it easy to cover the whole paper in water. I apply quite a lot of water. I want it to soak into the paper and make the pigments run nicely was applied. I think the paper is wet enough. So let's add some color. I'm starting with the orange color. I'm still using the mop brush to apply the color randomly and loosely. Now some green. There is no rule about how to paint the background. It's very random. And as the paper is wet, the colors around on the paper and blend into one another. Let's add a bit of Azure. And now just continue according to how it looks on your end. If you still have some whitespaces at some color there, if you think you have too little of green, add more green. You can tilt the paper to the side to make the pigment around more. Remember that the watercolor dry light. So you can add more color here and there. You can see that the green color I chose is very granulating because the pigment particles cluster and it creates this nice grainy texture. Now while the paper is still quite wet, or at least sit down, I'm going to splatter a little bit of orange over it. I load my brush with orange color and then I beat it out of the brush using another brush or a pencil. And I hope it will give my painting the feeling of flickering light in the background. And now it's time to add the paper dry completely. So if you want to take a break, you can do it. You can have a cup of tea or coffee, or maybe use your hairdryer to speed up the drying process app. If you don't want to wait that long. Once your paper is dry, you can draw several vertical lines for the grasses that will help to set our checkers into the place. I use the same green as far as the background. And I make very simple long brush strokes. I lead the green concentrate more in the very bottom of the paper. And then I let it dry again before working on the checkout. 6. Class Project part 2 - Gouache Flowers: Now we can put our watercolor aside and grabbed the gouache paints. The pencil sketch is still quite visible, so we can follow it and paint some lovely trickery flowers. I'm using regular round brush with the hair firm enough to hold thicker paint. And I mix ultramarine blue and white together. Now see that I don't mix the paints all the way through. I don't want them to create one homogeneous color, rather to be able to pick also a bit of white or darker blue as I go. I paint the petals. You can say that sometimes I pick pure blue from the other mixing well to add more contrast to the flower. Also having the pains not mixed together perfectly creates nice texture as you move the brush across the paper. Because you can technically have two different colors on the brush at the same time. Feel free to use more wide. Sometimes. There can be some light reflecting on the petals that makes them look bright. Now when I paint round flower, the one that is looking directly at me, I have one trick. I paint the 12:00 and 06:00 petals first, make sure they are the same length. And only then I start adding more petals and go all the way around. This way. I don't need to worry that along the way, I make the petals gradually smaller or bigger, and the whole flower will look funny. Instead, I have a perfect circle. This flower is a bit of an angle. So again, make the further petals look longer and the closer petals shorter. Always make sure you have enough paint in your brush as you paint to make the petals seamless. Also, if you feel the paint is still thick and it's hard to work with it. Feel free to use a bit of clean water, but not too much. We don't want the paint to lower its opacity and vividness. Very well. Now I'm going to work with the darker blue. So without any white in it. And I paint the closer petals in some of the flowers. I need the color to be a bit different from the rest of the flower, so that it's clear that those are separate petals. Here. I'm going to try that with a lighter blue. Nice. Our flowers look very good. Now I'm going to paint these flowers here. The petals shrunk into some small blue piece of mass. Now we can clean our brush from the blue color and move on to the stems and leaves. I'm using the same brush as for the flowers because it has this nice fine tip that allows me to draw thin lines. If you feel you need to switch to a smaller brush, feel free to do it. So I mixed together ultramarine blue and yellow, more or less 50, 50 to create a nice yellowish green. You can experiment and try the color on a piece of scrap paper to make sure it's what we're looking for. I'm okay with it. So I draw the stem and also the buds. For the bads, similar as for the petals. I did not mix the colors to to roughly. So when painting the bus, there is a little bit of yellow visible, which is a nice detail. Now I grabbed my tiny brush and pick up a little bit of burnt sienna and add few tiny lines, little wrinkles that are on the bugs. Well, it seems too bright. So I'm going to mix it with some leftover gray I have in my palette. You can mix in a little bit of green to mute it down, or blue if you want it to turn green. Now, for the withered flower, the part that holds the flower is already a bit too dry. So I'll use more of the burnt sienna mix for the stems and bads. I'll use the green. And again, add some texture to the bads using small brush and dark burnt sienna mix. Now I painted the leaf using the green. I'm mixed myself, but it looks quite flat. So I'm going to add a bit of blue on one side, which creates the idea of shadow. Okay, let's repeat the process again with another plant. Stems, the bads, and with her flowers, dry parts. 7. Class Project part 3 - Details and Highlights: Okay, once you are done with all the green parts, clean your tiny brush and use a bit of white color to add highlights and texture to the center of the flowers. I'm just drawing small white dots side-by-side. I make sure the white is thick and opaque, so I don't use water at all. And while I still have the white in the brush, I'm going to add more highlights also to the bats and stamps, but not too much, just tiny bits. You don't want to color the whole stems with white. Now I take my liner brush, which gives me really thin and fine lines. And I'm adding a bit of detail to the petals. It stands out nicely on the light blue color of the petals and contrast with the white dots in the center of the flowers. I am very happy how the flowers turned out, but something will make it even more beautiful. And that is a sprinkle of white-collar over the painting. So again, I'm loading my round brush with color. This time, white gouache with just enough water to make it liquid enough for sputtering. And now I use another brush and beat the color out. And you can see this lovely tiny white drops. These drops can be a morning dew or light flickering or nothing in particular, but it gives the painting very nice finished and detail. And that's it. Let us now remove the tape and see the elegant white frame. I'm really happy. I love this painting. It is lovely. Guys. Let me know how it went for you in case you have any questions, feel free to ask. I'm here for you. 8. Final Thoughts: So let's wrap it up. In this class. We combined to media traditional watercolor and gouache to create this lovely painting with warm, pleasant background and cool blue trickery flowers with white details. I would love to see your projects, so please take a photo and upload it in the project section for me and your classmates to see and get inspired by. Also in case of any questions or comments, use the discussion section and also, please leave a review and let me know what you liked about the class and what could be improved. Thank you for being here with me today and I wish you all the best. Stay safe, stay creative, and see you in my next classes.