Compose, Paint, Create Part 1: Let's Put Composition Into Practice Painting Watercolor Botanicals | Natalie Martin | Skillshare
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Compose, Paint, Create Part 1: Let's Put Composition Into Practice Painting Watercolor Botanicals

teacher avatar Natalie Martin, Australian Watercolour Artist

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

      0:45

    • 2.

      Let's Talk Materials

      10:30

    • 3.

      What is Composition?

      6:05

    • 4.

      The Rule of Thirds (and other compositional structures)

      15:25

    • 5.

      Principle of Art: Balance

      33:04

    • 6.

      Principle of Art: Proportion

      28:36

    • 7.

      Principle of Art: Emphasis

      27:06

    • 8.

      Principle of Art: Unity

      28:28

    • 9.

      Principle of Art: Variety

      36:00

    • 10.

      The Final Project

      0:59

    • 11.

      The Wrap Up

      2:38

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About This Class

Hands up if you’ve got a pile of incomplete, unresolved or not-quite-right paintings taking up precious space. We’ve all been there, but what is it that’s missing? Composition is the underlying glue that brings it all together. The good news is that anyone can learn it, it is not a secret inherent talent it is a learned skill. Join me, professional watercolor artist Natalie Martin on a fun and playful deep dive into this extraordinary and undervalued topic. Welcome to Compose, Paint, Create!

In this course we are going to explore ways of creating compelling compositions using the Principles of Art as our tools. This is a hands-on course where we will be applying these principles to artworks we create, learning as we go. The outcome will be a greater understanding of composition, the role it plays in our artworks and a clearer path to creating successful artworks.

Composition is a huge subject so I’ve broken Compose Paint Create into two separate courses. In Part 1 one we explore the first 5 of the 10 Principles of Art. These are largely focused on the placement and arrangement of your elements. In Part 2 we explore the final five Principles of Art, and look more closely at creating mood, emotion and atmosphere as well as when and how to break the rules.

I use watercolor botanicals as the guiding theme throughout as that’s the thing I love painting most, but you are in no way limited to just painting florals or following exactly what I do. In fact I encourage you to explore further. These learnings apply to not just watercolor (or florals!) but every medium and subject - so if florals aren’t your thing feel welcome to switch it up, leaves, teacups, boats, whatever tickles your fancy. If you love gouache or acrylic , you could also try some of the exercises in alternative mediums. It’s entirely up to you!

In previous online courses and workshops I’ve only really had the chance to show you the tip of the iceberg when it comes to composition. In this course we explore the whole kit and kaboodle. It’s big and wonderful and you will be so surprised by what you get out of it, it's going to open your creative world right up. Are you ready? Come on, grab your paint brushes, let’s get started.

When will Part 2 be available? I'm working on that! I'm hoping to have it live and ready for you before the end of 2023.

Please note: I mention an E-Book in the videos, this is not included in your Skillshare subscription. Head to my website to learn more. I have included my little cheat sheets for each Principles of Art though, find them in the downloads section.

Meet Your Teacher

Teacher Profile Image

Natalie Martin

Australian Watercolour Artist

Teacher

 

 

Hi! My name is Natalie and I'm an artist based on the Surf Coast in Victoria, Australia. I've painted with watercolor for over 10 years and have been teaching it through workshops and online courses for the last few years now. I really enjoy teaching and sharing the magic of watercolor. 'Welcome to Watercolor' is my first online course, a beginner's guide to contemporary botanical watercolor. My second course is on my all time favorite subject COLOR called 'The Magic of Color Mixing' and I've just released my third, 'Lessons in Layering with Watercolor' - you guessed it! It's all about layering and exploring what this can bring to your work.

My practice explores the natural world with this joyous and free-flow... See full profile

Level: Intermediate

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Transcripts

1. Introduction: Composition. It's a word we've all heard before, but potentially not since high school art class. We have a tendency to skip over and misunderstand the importance of composition within our artwork. Join me Natalie Martin, a professional watercolour artist on this fun and playful deep dive into an extraordinary and undervalued topic. Let's diffuse the ambiguity around composition. I'll present it to you in an easy to digest way with all the necessary theory wrapped in creative and challenging projects. At the completion of the course, I want you to feel confident and inspired to create more of your own work. Welcome to Compose, Paint. Create. 2. Let's Talk Materials: Let's talk materials. Now we all know I love art materials and can talk about them all day long. So I'm going to try and keep this short and sharp. But there's a couple of significant differences I really want to talk about today that I'm going to be working with compared to my previous courses. So, I'm going to be painting with my professional quality watercolour tube paints, as opposed to the Micador discs that I've painted with in previous classes. Also, I'll be painting with cotton paper as opposed to cellulose paper. I'm going to talk you through the two significant differences through with that in a minute. But first I'll run through everything that we're going to need for today. So, I've got my cotton paper here. I've got a few different sizes. I use these little scraps to do little test colours on. And then I've got at least five sheets for the five projects for the course of this cotton paper. I've torn that down from a large sheet of watercolour paper, but you can also buy a pad of cotton watercolour paper for that purpose. I also have some just plain printer paper to do some sketching on. If you have a sketchbook or just whatever average cartridge paper, that's totally fine. I've provided you these two printouts. There's two there. I should show you, Tada. They are going to be very handy and used in our first project that we'll be working with today. So you will need to trim those out. All ready to go. I have got here my selection of paint brushes. You'll notice I've got some different ones to what I had last time. These four here by Polina Bright. They are ones that I had just arrived. I'd ordered them just before I filmed 'Lessons in Layering' and I was so excited to try them. They are really beautiful. They hold an incredible line because the bristles are much, much longer than your typical synthetic round brush, and they hold a phenomenal amount of water. So I've really been enjoying painting with those and that's basically what I largely paint with all the time now. I've got two additional little ones here. I've got a liner or a rigger. That's a very fine little brush, great for holding a really thin line. You don't have to have to have to have this brush, but if you have a nice little synthetic round that will also come in handy. This one's a six, but it's the Princeton velvet touch so it has an incredibly fine point. And if you ever bought brushes from a number of different brands, you'll notice that the profile of each of the brushes, even between the different styles of brushes within the one brand, they all have a different profile on the tip. So this one is incredibly pointy. I like it for that purpose, but it also has a downside that sometimes it's just too sharp the marks that it's making. So I love it for that fine, fine point. I've got a four B pencil. This is so that you can see very clearly what I'm sketching with an HB or a two B is going to be plenty enough for you guys. Along with that, you'll need an eraser and a sharpener. Oops, putting scraps everywhere. I just have a little bowl here that I keep my sharpener in, so that the crumbles don't go everywhere. What else have I got here? We have some salt. Just table salt is fine. You're going to use that in one of the exercises today. Flaked salt, rock salt, any kind of salt is fine. They all have a slightly different effect, but just even just your basic table salt is ideal. We're going to use our painter's tape again. So this is from the hardware store, not the art store. It is a low tack painter's tape. It means that it doesn't bond with the paper as much and it does a beautiful, crisp line when we mask with it. So that one's definitely going to be needed. At some point today, I use a metal ruler. It tears the paper much more beautifully than a plastic ruler when I'm tearing down my paper. But we're also going to need that for one of our exercises today. And then what else? Some scissors. They might come in handy at some point, our jar of water. And I've got these paints here to show you a few examples. So I won't be painting with these, but I'm just going to demonstrate a couple of things for you. So, let me just grab some paper here. I'll get this paper out of the way and not ruin that and just grab a fresh sheet. What I want to show you is a lot of people ask me what the difference is between say, student level paints or professional quality paints. It's the amount of pigment that's used within the binder and all the other things that are inside that tube of paint. What I've done here is this is my working set of paints that I have all the time. I've hand selected each of these colours. They're all tubes of paint that I squeeze out and allow to dry inside my palette. So I'm not stuck with like the fussy little set that you can get from the art store. They're often quite limited with their colours. They focus more on your traditional landscape painter, so they're very earthy and flat colours. I've specifically spent years and years working out exactly what colours I like working with on a regular basis. So I'm not actually going to tell you specific colours to work with. I'd rather you choose that on your own. But I do want to demonstrate the difference between your student and professional quality. And sometimes even between two brands of your professional level paints. There's an enormous difference there as well For student quality I'm going to show you these black ones which I advised against in 'Welcome to Water colour'. What colour should I paint with? I might do a green. And then I'm going to use these. They're stuck. Start hurling stuff everywhere. All right. There's some greens there. Now, I'm just going to wet my brush. I'm going to pick up a green here. And this is the student quality paint, so this one is very, very low saturation. You can see how difficult that is for me to get a lot of colour onto the brush, and it still looks so washy because there's just a very distinct lack of pigment in that colour. Then I'm going to go over to my, the brilliant set. So this is the slightly more expensive can be tempting to get these because they're like 12 bucks. These are now like 40 bucks. But the colour and the value is so much greater. So, in comparison, there's your different colours. You got much, much more pigment to work with. And you're going to get that vibrancy and excitement with your work. You'll find that you just get frustrated if you end up with your student quality paints. This is true for tube paints as well. And it can be tempting because there's such an enormous cost difference. But your professional quality is going to last you a whole lot longer. So I highly recommend, just if you're wanting to up your game from these guys up to your tube paints. I would skip student quality altogether and just go straight to your professional quality watercolour paints. The bang for buck is much greater. In saying that not all tube paints are created equal either. Here, these are two examples that I've found distinct for me. My palette is largely Daniel Smith paints. I really enjoy their colours, but there's two colours that I just was completely dissatisfied with. I'm just going to squeeze a little bit of the Daniel Smith Ultramarine Blue in that one there. And I'm going to paint out a little bit of that. Like so, but a little bit more. Now that's the Daniel Smith and then this is Holbein. This one Holbein, tend to do their vibrant colours really, really well. I've ended up switching to a Holbein and there's just so much more pigment in there for me, I really, really enjoy that a little bit more. And then my other example is the Opera pink. Opera pink is incredibly saturated, vibrant pink. Not many people gravitate towards it, actually, but I quite like it for creating my floral works. I'll do the same. Here is our Opera pink from Daniel Smith. So I'll do that on the Daniel Smith level. Like so, and then I'll go to my Holbein in which I actually don't have any more tube of, but it is in my palette here. It's just going to swoosh that around and get that going. Again, for me, the saturation, although as subtle when you're in the flow and painting, makes an enormous difference. So you're not having to spend so much time collecting paint, that the intensity and the richness of the pigment is just better for me personally. I encourage you to explore it yourself and work out what brands, what paints. I'm definitely not going to just go and brag Daniel Smith. It's not be all and end all. I've got Schmincke I'vet Daniel Smith, I've got Holbein. They're the ones I tend to gravitate towards and are easily available to me. Every brand is different though, so I'm not going to specify each colour. And I definitely don't need to specify brand either because it's so much of a feel thing. It's so important for you to experiment yourself and work out what colours you like working with on a regular basis, as well as what brands really gel with your style, because that's important as well. Now, paper is the other thing I was going to touch on. Watercolour paper, in past courses, we've worked with cellulose paper. It's made from trees. The optimal paper to work with when we're talking watercolour is cotton. It is far superior to your cellulose based paper because of the way that it absorbs and distributes the pigment. It does it far more evenly and gracefully. It's so beautiful to paint on, so I highly, highly recommend stepping up your game from your cellulose pad of paper, which is easy to also grab because it's like half the price of your cotton. But to get the results, and we're working on finished results in our projects today, to get a beautiful result, it's worth going the extra mile and getting some great paper. Highly, highly recommend. But from here, I think that's everything we need to go through. So let's get into it. We are going to first learn about what actually is composition better. Get into that first, before we get into our projects. 3. What is Composition?: So, what even is composition? I know we've got to this point and we're like, okay, I understand it's important, but why? Composition is, the way that our elements come together on the page? Simply put, it is the arranging of our elements of art on the page. But what's often misunderstood is the way in which we do that, and the methods in which we do that determines how we experience the work, how our eye is led around it, how it generates emotion or mood. All of these things all come down to composition. Composition is in no way limited to just watercolour. It can be applied across all the visual arts, floristry, architecture, photography, everything. It all comes down to the same similar, these principles of art. They can be applied across them all. What is interesting is today is we're going to build upon our understanding of each one. And as we learn each principle, they'll feedback on the previous ones and you'll come out at the other end having this great understanding of how to move things forward with your work. Because that's another really significant part of composition is having an understanding of it is going to help you assess your work and work out where's gone wrong. We can go back to that pile of artwork that we have that's not quite right and finally work out. Okay, so maybe my balance is just out, or maybe it doesn't feel quite unified. These are all things that we're going to be out to resolve by the end of this course. Our elements of art. If you're unfamiliar, line, shape, colour, form, value, texture and space, all of these things are really important. What I might do is I'll quickly demonstrate them for you. So we've got Line, super easy. Line line is a really powerful tool within our elements. And then we've got Shape. That is a square or a flat things that we work with can be quite organic, can be quite structural, just depending on how you do it. Then we have Form. Form is when we're talking, creating a 3D impression on a 2D space. I'm just going to shade in a little sphere there for us. Then we have Value. Value is the lightness or darkness of a colour. So we can have really dark and we can have really light. Think of value if you were to photocopy it on an old fashioned photocopier. Some colours are very high value, like a red or a blue is always going to come up quite dark when you photocopy it. But when you say photocopy yellow, that's a light value colour. And this happens within your tonal range as well. You can have a very dark blue, or you could dilute it with water and end up with a very light blue. Then we have Colour. Well, I can't possibly demonstrate that with a pencil. So let's just get some colour from here. Let's put my fabulous Opera Pink there. But that refers to all colour within your work. Texture, texture is famous for, can't even spell. Texture is famous for being a little bit difficult to generate with watercolour, but it is just creating a visual surface, something that generates and gives a sense of texture. Let's just do a little bit of some jagged lines there. Space, space is one of my favourite things to play with. You might have heard me talk about negative space a lot in the 'Lessons in Layering'. It is my fave. So, we can either have like let's draw or flower because that's my thing. This is a positive shaped flower, it's going to fill it in. Then we can have a negative space flower. That's when the white is doing the talking or that area around it determines the space. Let's just get that one in there. It's so nice drawing with a pencil. All right, so there's my negative space. Both super powerful and good things to use within our watercolour. All right, so they are our elements of art. We are familiar with those. We've been painting before. These are all things, our building blocks, our ingredients. When it comes to our artworks, what we're mainly going to focus on today is the principles of art. They're our methods. They are the means of organising our elements on the page. And they're the things that are going to help place things well. They're going to help generate those compelling compositions we've been talking about so much. Today, we're going to look at balance, proportion, emphasis, unity, and variety as our first five. And in the second course, we're going to look at contrast, movement, rhythm, pattern, and repetition. What the most interesting thing is with composition is that it's actually difficult to sum up and easily present in one way. What can be misconstrued is that none of these things and none of our principles are mutually exclusive and they can be all interrelated. That's just something you should get a grasp of early on, just roll with it, rather than trying to put everything neatly in a box, because it's just not going to work that way. This is art not science. So that is what we'll be working with today. This is what we're talking about with composition. And composition is one of my favourite things to teach people because you just see the lights go on. And when they have even the most basic grasp of it, their artwork improves out of sight. So I cannot wait to share this fascinating subject with you. From here, we're going to get into the rule of Thirds, another word we may have heard before, but we're going to go into depth and find out what it's all about. 4. The Rule of Thirds (and other compositional structures): Now, the rule of thirds. It's a term we've all heard before and it might be our full experience of what we understand of composition right now. And it's so important, it's so important to understand. What I've done is I've actually created to demonstrate a little rule of thirds grid. And all it is, is the space that I'm working with, divided equally into three parts both ways, horizontally and vertically. It can work landscape. It can also work square. No matter what your canvas or paper size is, you can divide that area into thirds and you're going to get a successful composition. And I'll show you how. I've got some examples to show us. This is from my 'Year in Bloom' series, and I really, really use the rule of thirds as the predominant linking thing between each work. So if I was to put this little guy over the top there, you can see that I've got my most crucial part of this and most in focus subject is right here, sitting exactly on that intersection. And these intersections are the powerhouses on the rule of thirds. Put your key elements here rather than the centre. And you're going to have a work that's got a bit more of a story to tell and it's more interesting to look at. You can see here as well that my supporting elements glance the other thirds. This bottom one down here hits the bottom third intersection, and then everything else is weighted on that top third line. There's a number of ways to use this. You can align things to the line or you can sit them on top. But working with those thirds as opposed to just free flowing, dumping things all over the page is going to make your work look more sophisticated and like it's been well thought out and planned because that's what we're going for with composition. All right, so there's example one. Now here's another one from the same series, although it looks quite different. I'm still working with the rule of thirds because it's one of those things that you can use in so many different ways, but it really, really helps generate a good piece of work on this instance. My key flower is sitting on the bottom right hand third and its support guy is sitting alongside the left hand third. You can see that I've got a third one because our eye loves, things in odds, not evens, really important to remember. Two is awkward. We don't know where to look, put a third in, and it will generate a hierarchy almost instantly. Our third one is sitting up here, off to the side a little bit, but it's still hitting on that third. So I'll pop that one there. I've got a couple more to show you from this little series. Now, you can see here, I've done the same thing again, put two main figures in and a little mini one making it three. This time I'm working off the sides of the third. It also still works, plus the brunt of the weight of the work. All of this business of where the painting lies hits that central third. Another way of generating some really interesting works. Now final one from this little series is this one up here. Now I've got two up here, but because they're either side of the third, they kind of counterbalance one another and they become one unit sitting on the third. And then everything else tumbles down here, and a few key ones are all still hitting on those thirds. So it's just something to bear in mind. I don't pencil in thirds every single one, and you certainly don't have to make one of these for every single one. I'm just doing this for demonstration purposes, but whilst you're learning, this thing is really handy. You can make one at home if you're in the US and you need to make a letter shaped one. I've included a four and letter printouts in the downloads, but you can also just make one on baking paper or if you happen to have transparency film or anything like that, anything that's slightly transparent is going to help you line those up. Now, got one final example of the third. I've got a couple more here. This one here is a large work that I don't have with me because it's just recently sold. But I wanted to show you in a landscape sense, how this could work as well without the rule of thirds. As a guide, I'm going to see how the visual line carries up on that right hand third. Then the weight of the work sits in the top, sits in the top third. So it's just another way of thinking about it working with the lines, but also put weight within the thirds rather than hovering awkwardly between thirds. Now get rid of that one. This is another little landscape example where the apex of the mountain is sitting exactly on the third. Plus I've used extra marks and interest here to drive that energy up sitting on that third, plus the horizon line sits on the third. No matter what the thirds work for portraiture, they work for landscape, they work for florals and still lives. It's something that you can apply to everything that you're learning. Let's slide that one there. These are a couple more here. Here's another tree, one that I based here. And this one has one driving force centrally, right up that third. And that's what makes that a strong work. If it was central, our eye gets a little awkward, It goes, oh, that's. It's there, but it's not telling me much and it's not got much thought or planning going into it. And then this negative space shape here is what's sitting on the bottom most third. And that's what makes that combination of working with multiple thirds, not just one central one is going to counteract that strength going up there. All right, so get rid of that one. Here's another couple of little landscape. So this is a little series that I did recently on holiday when I was up in the Northern Rivers. I did all of these waterfalls on third up here. The waterfall sits directly on a third here, although the weight I've got a line through the centre. This one up here helps counteract that. And it evens out around there. Plus there's lots of information and details sitting on this third here. And then on this example, I've done it the other way around. The waterfall sits mainly on the third there, and the interest in detail sits across the top. It's really just putting those really important things, the things you want the eye to go to first, on one of those intersections or working the full length of the third. And that's really going to enhance that work and take it to a place where it's feeling a lot more cohesive. All right, so that's the third, the rule of thirds you might be like. Okay, I've heard of that, but what about the golden mean? The golden mean is kind of a beast. I can flesh out the arithmetic that it takes to generate a golden mean. And that's automatically, for some people, just going to go too hard basket, although it is a really significant structure, not just in art, but in building, all throughout nature, it's really important in science too. It's actually represented all the way through our world. It's quite difficult to use in the purpose of art, especially in the 2D form. So I suggest going to the rule of thirds as a simplified version of it. I think that's really important. You can get really hung up on the mean and it actually looks quite similar. It is the divine proportion. It is the most perfect version of that. But ultimately, the thirds does a brilliant job as well. So it's a much simpler way of applying a similar concept. I honestly don't use the mean very much. I do understand the importance of it in history, but that's like another whole course in itself. It is big and deep, and there's a lot to learn about that one. The Rule of Thirds is probably the structure that I most predominantly use in all of my work. And this may look a little familiar to you, because if you pull up your iPhone or your phone, a grid comes up. And you will find that it's actually the rule of thirds sitting there right on your phone. So you can compose your reference images or whatever through your phone and have that as a bit of a step towards creating a better composition as well. So that's a really handy tool to have up your sleeve. Besides the thirds, there's actually some other structures that people work with. They've actually been fancied in different areas in time, like a triangle shape was really popular in the Renaissance period. So I'm just going to run quickly through some other structures besides the thirds that really work for creating some artworks. All right, first up, we have a triangle. I feel like the blackboard upside down, upside down. This one here, it's a triangle. Obviously can be great for portraiture because of the structure of us with shoulders and heads and things, but also great for mountains. In this example, you can see the apex of the mountain is quite centralised and the general shape is a triangle. I've also used an example here where I've arranged the three flowers in a triangular shape centrally, which also can be determined as a triangular composition. Where am I going to slide you? You can go up there. Now, next shape. Circle. Circles are really nice ways of leading the eye around. And they feel feminine, and soft and round. Whereas a triangle has a grounding effect, a circle has quite a different way you travel the work. In this particular piece, I've got you traveling around in a nice circular way, and it keeps you entranced in the image, as opposed to leading you out. A circle is a really nice way to use an image. An S is one of my other favourite ones that I like to work with. It can be the reversed S. It doesn't necessarily have to be correctly the right way around. In this example here, you can see I start down here, wander up this way, and that way, it's a nice way to keep that eye moving through the work, and it doesn't stagnate anywhere. I really love an S, and it has a really lovely, feminine feel to it, which I really enjoy, including in my work. Here's another couple of examples. In this one here we start here, travel around and up and out. You get to take in the whole work, but keep moving at the same time. Next we have a cross. So in this example, I've actually included it because interestingly, I've used negative space as the horizontal cross and the vertical is the main predominant trunk. In theory, what we were just talking about before, putting something centrally is not ideal. But in the instance where you're working with a cross shape, it can actually work because you've got arms coming off to the side helping balance it. Same with this one here. In this image here, I've got the central shape with the arms coming off to the side creating that cross effect. Next up is a V. You may have seen they look a little bit like hieroglyphs in the end of all these different compositional shapes. But I promise you, they're actually really fun to explore. Here we've got a V in the valley here, we've got a V and they keep generating the V. Repeating those shapes is a really interesting thing to explore as well, is that one next up we've got an X which is working from the outer corners in this instance, which was too big for me to show you because it is quite a large work, probably nearly the size of the wall behind me. I've worked everything into the central point, making it an X shape through the composition. Then we have an L shape, which you can work into the thirds as well. In this instance, I've pretty much put the tree here on the third and then the horizontal here. It's really great for a landscape tool. You put one vertical in which makes it dynamic and then all these horizontals gives it a good L shape. I've also included this one here which is the Gilberts Banksia. This is an example of the L working backwards. On the right hand side is the vertical and on the bottom is the left. It's just another way to think of it. You don't have to literally be spelling correctly L, It can be the reverse as well. A C shape is one that I don't work with that often, to be honest, because I find it difficult to work with. But I found a couple of examples in here. I've just got a great big C taking you through there. It's a little bit like the S shape, but it's just one curve instead of the double curve. And in this one here, which again, is another one of these really big ones. I've actually got the C working the bottom half of the work. It's down around the bottom and it takes you in from the left and actually in from the right and down up and around. So it's just another way of generating that work. Again, probably best for a landscape situation where you've got like an overarching branch coming from the top or something like that. All right, so there are other compositional structures apart from the thirds. I might just put the thirds in there as well because that's the one that I love the most. I find that that's gets me the most successful outcomes all the time. What I thought I'd show you now though is times that have absolutely bombed and failed my compositions. And it can still happen whilst you're working. So you might be all in the stores of painting and then realise that you've just like misplaced something or it's just not quite working. So I just wanted to show you that we all do this. It's not something that is just for the beginners. So you would have seen my finished piece of one of these. This was a trial example of me trying to get this concept down. And I was agonising over getting these negative shapes. And I was focusing more on that than the composition. And you can see that I accidentally placed my two flowers pretty much centrally, which put a really awkward spin on this work. It made everything feel very centralised and too perfectly balanced where I wanted it to feel. If it was over on this third here, it would have a much more cohesive feel and easier for the eye to read. So that was one of my fails. And then this one here, I just stuffed up my S shape. So it kind of went into like a fat C or like a fat S, I don't know, but it didn't work. I needed to complete the S or this brunt of this weight sits centrally, which really awkward for the eye. So that's something to just bear in mind, is like once you're in the throes of work, you've got to pay attention to what you're doing at the same time as well. I just got carried away with getting into the details and stuffed up. I've got one further example of, well, where I've miss weighted the work. This is a bigger one that I've stuffed up. So in this one, I put all these huge, heavy flowers over to the right hand side, but didn't leave any room to counterbalance them anywhere throughout the work. So these ones, huge and heavy. But then if I was to fill out the rest of that, it's just going to always feel like it's dropping off this side over here. It's not working as a piece. So that one's in my pile of incomplete that I have a hanging out in my studio. So I hope that gives you a great understanding of how, the basic premise of how to place your things on the page, there's so many ways to do it, but I'm going to pretty much roll with the thirds through the rest of my explanations today. But enough talk. Let's get into some painting. The next project is all about balance and I can't wait to share it with you. 5. Principle of Art: Balance: Okay, we've just taken a look at our compositional structures. Now to get into our principles of art. The first one we're going to explore is balance. Balance is probably one of the most fundamental and one you're aiming for within most of your artworks, your artwork with a sense of balance has an equilibrium. It is going to make it feel grounded and it makes it easy for us to read. An unbalanced work can be feeling discordant or makes us literally feel unbalanced, and it makes us engage with the work less. Trying to achieve balance is a really important thing. Within balance, there's a number of ways to generate that. I want to explore each of those with you. We're going to need our cutouts. I've got all my cutouts here. Make sure we got those trimmed out and ready to go. The first of our balances that I want us to explore is symmetry. Symmetry is, if we have an A4 piece of paper and we have an axis down the middle, this acts like a seesaw. And we want to have equal weight either side, and that generates a sense of symmetry. Say for this example, I've got the three flowers, there's a centralised 1, and 1 either side of that vertical axis axis. Therefore, that has a nice sense of symmetry. Another example is this Waratah, where the stem goes straight up vertically through the centre and weighted either side of that vertical axis is equal. Then we have asymmetry. Oops, can't spell. It's going to be a constant problem today. Alright asymmetry. I really wanted to show you this example because asymmetry is working with not the exact weights either side of the axis, but starting to understand that each of the elements or subjects on the page holds a visual weight and it's getting a great balance. Is distributing that weight evenly and in a way that is pleasing for the eye. In this example, I've actually used the negative space as a weight within the work. And it's so important to understand that negative space holds weight as well as the positive. So you can see here, I've got the tree trunks working through, and then negative space down here and negative space down here, making the work feel asymmetrical but also balanced at the same time. Here's another example, which when I'm working with flowers, this is one of the most important things, is not always putting them in the centre, because we have a tendency to want to do that. It feels comfortable. We know where the centre of the page is and we're not playing any risks there. But as soon as we start entertaining those thirds and this Banksia happens to be sitting on that left hand third, that's when we start to have a bit more impact on what we're saying on the page. So although it is not in the centre, which makes it a symmetrical painting, this makes it asymmetrical by having more busyness and energy here, counteracted by things that are further away from the subject here. And all the while, the negative space always has a weight as well. Let's slide that one away. All right, then we have radial balance. This one might sound pretty straightforward, and I have a pretty basic example for this one because it's not one that I work with in a regular basis. But basically it's a balance working from a centralised point working outwards. Think of sun rays, think of mandalas. These are all radial balanced works. It can be a really beautiful way to draw attention to things as well. Then the final one is a crystallographic balance, which is a long word, and it actually just means there is no one thing drawing attention. It is an all over balance. Think of Jackson Pollock and his, paint splattered absolutely everywhere. And his abstract expressionism, there's no central place to focus the eye. So here's an example from my 'Magic of Colour Mixing'. I've been digging them around. So there's nowhere that the eye singularly lands. It's evenly spread and it feels balanced either side. Here's another one where I've just put gum leaves over the entire picture plane. But again, no singular point is drawing attention, but it still feels balanced. Here's another little one, it's a fun one to play with. Almost feels like a pattern when we're working with a crystallographic balance. And here's some Wattle as well. There are the different kinds of balance that we're working with. And what we're going to do our project around balance is we're going to work with these little cutouts we have here. And we're going to work with our thirds. And we're going to work on a few different compositions and come up with a successful formula that we then paint. Get rid of that one too. We don't need that anymore. I'm going to grab my piece of paper here. Actually, you know what, I want. I want to do it on a piece of sketch paper so that I can push that to the side and work from that, from the picture. So, I've given you all these elements. They are whole things ready to go, little subjects that we're going to arrange into compositions, but they all hold different visual weight. So this is something to really important to bear in mind. I've also given you a bit of a bum steer. I'm going to actually just pencil these rules in because I've given you two Protea heads. I love working with Proteas. You can see I've got a couple here. These flowers here are from my front garden. And they are the flowers that got me into painting flowers in the first place. Because I was really stuck in my practice, I was really not enjoying painting at all. And one day I just went, you know what, Just pick these flowers, paint them, start over. And that was the beginning of it all for me. So sometimes it's just the littlest little switch and thinking. So I've always held a bit of a little love heart eyes for my Protea, that's what inspired this work today. And everyone seems to love them. So I've got two with us. You can either do one or two totally up to you. I want you to keep playing with these elements and try to come up with something that feels balanced that you would then generate into a painting. We've got two little Leucadendrons there too, some sprigs of Blue Gum, some little bits of Geraldton wax, and some Gum Leaves. And each of these holds different weight. The lighter coloured leaves are lighter in weight than these bigger, heavier leaves. The little fussy details hold a different weight to these heavy little Sea Hollies. These are going to be our little support at to our Protea. I've roughly penciled in the thirds here and I'm going to start placing things around. Typically, if we wanted to do a symmetrical composition, we could go something like this. Very roughly, that is a symmetrical composition, but it's not really doing much for me, it's not really fluid or feeling like a great use of all these elements. I'd think I'm going to go for an asymmetrical composition for this example. So I'm going to start placing things around. Maybe I might put it down there even. And then I'm going to try and get that nice and even feeling and you'll have a sense for it as well. You'll come to it and go that feels nice. And what I want you to do when you come to one that you really love, take a little snap, take a photo with your phone. And what you'll do is I want you to accumulate a few rather than just go with the first one you like. Because often the first one you like is the most obvious choice. But pushing yourself and generating that little bit more creative energy around that is actually going to help you come up with a more interesting composition. So I would love for you to aim for four to five that you really liked putting together. And then we're going to pick your most successful, which does not necessarily have to replicate my one. Your eye is going to see different things to me, which is different things to the next person. I really want you to find one that you really love. The look of that feels balanced. The balance is the absolute essence of what we're working with here. So I'm just going to keep fussing along here and trying to come up with a composition I like to look of. And I'll keep playing around until I land on something that feels right, maybe not that one, it's feeling a bit too busy up there. Do you want a sense of busyness? Do you want a sense of calm? All of these things come down to balance. Busyness is going to make it feel too much. Maybe a few more Sea Hollies. I'm going to put one over there to counterbalance that one. And then with this visual weight sitting on, this third is going to make it feel a bit different. Now I want to make sure I don't use just one of everything or all of everything because that's the other thing I might have given you all of these elements, but you most certainly don't have to use them all because I've given you too many so that you've got stretch there to play with different things. It's working, but I'm not excited to paint this one yet, so I might give it one more. Go start from the start. All right. Maybe I'll start over on this third now. Then put in some gum leaves. Bring that over to this third here. I don't want that shooting out of the top of the Protea because that always looks a little bit strange. Make sure it's offset a little bit, then maybe I'll go for a C shape or an S shape whilst working with the thirds a little bit too. I don't know if I'm going to use any of the blue gum this time, I might skip that one. And I'll do a little bit of this. I'm trying for that balance. All about finding that balance. I need to get that further down on that third, I think. And then this one. All right, getting there. It's a lot of pushing, pulling. I really love this exercise because it takes the pressure off and it gives you a chance to actually have a play around and work with these elements whilst not having to paint them. So you get to really have a play with what balance feels like. For me that's feeling a little bottom heavy. Maybe that one's got to go, or maybe I should have it run off the edge of the page. It could go up here potentially. No, I don't know if I like that. And your taste is going to be entirely different to my taste, so definitely roll with whatever's feeling good for you, good without being great. Got to keep working here, I think, push it a little bit harder. That's going to shoot me out of the frame, which is less than ideal, because you don't want to look at the focal point and go straight out. That's a bit of a no, no when it comes to composition. And those lines were just leading me out. So I want to have the lines leading me up this way. All the visual lines. Okay, I'm back here again. Alright, I think I'm getting closer and what I'm going to do is just adapt a little bit while I'm painting to try and make sure that it all syncs up together. I need just that little bit of something in there, I think. And maybe that one sitting on a third, sitting on a third sitting on a third. That one should probably be going there. And maybe that one in there. Yeah, I think I'm going to go with that. All right. So enough fussing around. But I do want you to take the time with this. This is something you can always come back to as well. And I encourage you to, once you've gotten through this first exercise, it's definitely worthwhile painting some of your own flowers, cutting them out, and trying this exercise again. Because it's going to help you practice those compositions. Work out what feels really nicely balanced. And sometimes it can be the simplest thing that like a little trap you keep falling in, that I keep leading people out, or these lines aren't following one another or something that I often see is like a visual hole. So there'll just be like an awkward gap somewhere and it's just like a stopping point. We just like that didn't flow very nicely. I'm always trying to seek flow and balance within my work, so I'll just stick that one back in again. You also don't have to represent these little cutouts exactly as I've painted them. You're more than welcome to just if there's a leaf in the way or whatever, you don't have to re paint them all identically. Maybe go and go down there. All right? So that's feeling pretty balanced. Pretty balanced to me. Get rid of these ones, not using them anymore. I'm going to slide this off to the side and I'm going to dive into giving it a go painting. What I'm going to suggest here, and you're not going to be comfortable with it, but you know we're here to learn is to pause the video now and have a go painting it yourself before you watch me paint it. Because then you're going to put your creative license in there rather than mimic what I do. You're going to see how I paint it. Anyway. So you know that that's there as your comfort. But I would love for you to give it a crack first before you watch me do it. And it will mean that you're creating your own composition as opposed to working with the one that I've provided you. All right, so pause. All right, I'm back. Come on, let's get painting. Where do I start? I usually start at the top of the Protea flower, the crown with the petals. I'm just going to mix up some colours here. All right. And I'm not going to pencil in my thirds. I've got my thirds and my composition lying here ready to go. I've got my reference point, so I don't even need to sketch here because sketching is going to make us tight and it's going to make us a bit pedantic about getting everything right. So I'm going to mostly focus on getting these in here. Now that I've got this as a reference, one thing that I am going to do is trying to twist that flower head pointing upwards a little bit more. That give it a bit of flow down here. So I've got that S shape going. So I'm just going to change the angle of it slightly because at the moment, think of a flower head like a face, and your eye automatically looks at where that other person is looking. So that flower is looking directly out of frame. So basically, I want to try and encourage it to flow back up that way again, just something to consider. So I'm going to paint in these, I'm going to keep those colours mixing all the time. You know, I love unexpected and vibrant colours, so let's keep that going. I'm working with Polina's size one brush, and you'll see me alternate between a few of them here. She's got a different sizing to what normal synthetic rounds are. This one's more like maybe an eight or ten. When I'm talking about my Princeton brushes or something like that, it's quite a good chunky brush. Make sure I spin that around, make sure it's sitting on that third as well. Always important. So I'm really thinking about where I'm putting my things because that's what tends to happen is we get comfortable. And we stop paying attention to this. And what happens is that we'll place things in there and they're not quite in the right spot. And then we're like, oh, how do I fix this? So troubleshooting on the fly is actually really important as well. I'm going to put a leaf in. You'll be like, why is she going to leaves when she hasn't finished the flower yet? Actually I'm going to switch brushes up a size because I want to work into the wettest areas at all times and I want that leaf to bleed. So I'm just going to paint that one in there, let that beautifully bleed into that one. It's nice and warm in this room, so it's going to dry quite quickly. If I had done that in a cold studio, it would have just gone and bled out. So timing is pretty crucial when we're painting these things. All right, now, more leaves. I'm going to use that colour theory to get some nice greens. Still have not decided on my greens in my palette because I usually just mix them all. I find I like working with those a bit better. Get some purple in there as well. Tuck that one in there behind. Now, the thing that I get asked a lot is when and where to overlap things. This is entirely up to you. I'm going to start painting in the Leucadendron next, so that the leaves, or maybe I might do one more leaf, but see how I've got this one sort of alongside this driving this upward energy. I could sit it behind the leaves or I could sit in front of the leaves. It's entirely up to you, so it's just something to have a little play with. I think I want to have it sort of sitting out to the side there a little bit. So I need one more leaf in there. This is all troubleshooting. I'm sort of just giving my inner monologue as I'm painting, so you can kind of go, oh, she's just really chatty in her own head. Okay, little bits of planning all the way along. Switch back down, finish off this guy. I'm doing this in one foul swoop. I'm not going to do it in layers, therefore you're going to see a lot of bleeding and a lot of negative space so that I can have plenty of room to so that I'm not going to allow everything to bleed into one big puddle. I love working in this really swift way that's basically trying to create an essence of the thing rather than paint it so literally, 'cause you can see from the flower itself, it's actually quite complex in its structure. The leaves all overlap, you're more than welcome, if that leaves in the way to rip it off, just get it out of the way you want to see the flower more than anything. So if the leaves are in the way, just take them off. Okay. You can see I mix almost all of my colours. If colours are something that you're unfamiliar with, I would highly recommend trying out my 'Magic of Colour Mixing' course. Because it really, this composition course and the colour course are probably sort of the ones that people have not avoid doing, but the ones that they don't think are important. And these ones are the ones that are going to make all the difference. So the colour course, I can't even tell you how much that's going to affect and change the way you look at colour and mixed colour. It's just awesome how it can shift your thinking. So highly recommend that one if you're just going. But how is she making all these greens? Add a little bit of a stem in al, right now. I'm going to stick that Leucadendron down the side there. You may also notice as well that my palette is hugely messy. All of this, once dry can be reconstituted, so I never wash it down. Really important way of just keeping all your colours looking harmonious between your works because if you're always picking up the same few colours and mixing them, then you're going to have a cohesiveness in it altogether. All right bit more browny in there. I don't want everything so saturated that it's hard to look at. That can be a bit much and it can be really upsetting to your balance. You can see I've kind of curved that one in a little bit more, and I might just do one additional leaf in there a bit. A bit lighter. I'm constantly analysing what's going down on the page, making sure that everything's talking the way I want it to. Making sure it's sort of holding true to this. But if it's not, it's not the end of the world. I can keep troubleshooting as I'm painting as well because sometimes when you translate this to this, it just doesn't really go to plan. And then you've got to go and rather than holding onto this like the Holy Grail, look at this and try and make this work, rethink the balance or rejig this even and try and troubleshoot it here before you take it to here. Another really good way of just working through those things that come up while we're painting. Get this little sprig in here. Ad libbing a little bit there if you're also welcome to do that. Okay. I'm going to wait to paint the crown of the Protea until it's all dry because otherwise it'll run into one another and I'm not sure I'll want that to happen. So I'm going to move keep moving and go to go up and paint in this second Leucadendron up here. All right. I want to have it a little bit more yellow because there's so many different ways to use balance. You can balance with colour, you can balance with value, you can balance with texture. Think of all of your elements, and there's a way to balance those. It's something to bear in mind If you're going too heavy with the colour and it's all the one tone overall, that's going to feel potentially unbalanced as well. Because there's a lack of balance. There's not enough range there to play with to visually digest. Counteracting those colours. All right, now for those gum leaves, I'm going to pop them in. Go back to some of the light colours that I'd mix for the Protea leaves, but then introduce maybe a little bit more Ultramarine I think for those, the beautiful gum leaves up there. I get a bit more grey in there because it can look too saturated. Sometimes I just go for too much colour. A little bit of purple. Now, a little bit more here to do, now that I've got the brunt of it in, I'm starting to think, okay, balance, balance, balance, balance. How am I going to generate this C curve into a really nice formed piece? So I'm going to need to put something in this visual hole here because this hole is bugging me bad. Here, I've got this little bit of Geraldton wax or like, you know, loose spriggy thing that I've put in. So I'm just going to paint that in to fill in the gap. And I'm going to go for a bit more texture and that will be a nice stop gap in there. Take that little drop off there, always standing back to check what I'm doing, make sure I'm not going too heavy or if you're fussing things, definitely just put the paint brush down and step away. And it can be just having that bit of clear eyes go off. Make yourself a cup of tea, and that's going to help you see things with a fresh perspective. Alright, Sea Hollies. I've got to put you in now, grab some of this Ultra. If you're someone that really loves detail, you could always do this in a whole lot more detail. I'm not telling you how to paint these so much as I'd love you to see how you approach it. Do another one here, because these are heavy. They're little, but they're heavy. They hold more visual weight than you might realise. I'm going to have to be really careful with the placement of these little Sea Hollies. Not native to Australia, but we tend to throw them in a lot of our native bouquets. If you find yourself at the florist wanting to get a native bouquet. And now I think I want to put one here, maybe a little bit overlapped on that leaf, and maybe another one here. They're floating in thin air right now, I know that. But I'll throw in a little idea of a stem I think too much and that might counteract that balance that we were just talking about. Sync those in a little bit though, so they don't feel so floaty like so, Now, getting closer, you can see the finish line. Don't get too excited that you muck it up. This is what happens as we get to this point. And we can see the finish line. And we go, I'm just going to do this. And then you'll be so disappointed, I've done that so many times or you get so hung up about finishing it that you never actually do. That's the other thing, I really want you to get to a point through this course that you don't feel like you have to do that anymore. You learn how to finish the work 'cause that's a big step in your creative process, learning how to successfully do that. All right. Painting in this crown of the Protea. I've still got quite a large brush in my hand. It's got to be a six or eight really. But it has the most beautiful fine tip. So I'm just going to keep working with that and drag these little lines down. That's going to balance some of this other fine detail that we have around here. All right now it's get a little bit more paint here, a little bit of details here, a little bit of a second layer. All right, what are we missing? I need to add in a few more leaves and then I think I'm really close to finishing. At this point you might have noticed I'm not really looking at this anymore because this one's down it's job. I've got the brunt of it in, I've blocked it all in. And I just want to try and make this work as a successful painting now. For me, I need to add in a bit more foliage, fill it out a little bit, and I think that's feeling really good. I jump up to a bigger brush again. I think, I love these little soft peaches and how they play off the blues. And there's enough dark values, there's enough light values, there's enough colour range. All these things come into consideration for sure. All right. Sometimes I don't even putting shapes in, I just know that I need to counterbalance that with like a tiniest little dob is going to make that feel better or more successful. So just bear that in mind as well, like it doesn't have to be a literal shape every single time. Just a little blob can be enough of a shift. All right. Starting to feel nearly there before I overdo it and might have to stop soon. I'm just going to put a little bit more of this little limey stuff up here, because I've got a lot of the rich pink colour here and it's got the complimentary greens all around it I'm just going to counterbalance a lot of that and place A little blob of pink up there, don't even know what it is, but it is just going to help follow that around. I might need another one down here. It's going to help that eye lead through that C curve a little bit more successfully. A little bit of blue. Just gonna keep fussing here for a moment. A bit dark there. Because we've got four Sea Hollies, which again are odd numbers, much better than even numbers. I'm just going to do like a little fake pretend one that's kind of in here to help balance that out because now we've got five. My eye is a lot happier. It was kind of wigging out for a bit there. And it's because we don't know where to look and our brain picks up patterns in an incredible way. And it just, it's like disarming having even numbers. We like the odd numbers to make it feel happier. So there's my little composition of balance focusing entirely on balance at this point. So I'm really just trying to make sure that that's not feeling too left weighted, right, weighted top and bottom. I can't wait to see what you come up with because I really hope what ends up being shared is this huge array of the thing with these things is it's totally limitless. Although you've got a handful of things to play with, every single person is going to approach them differently. So I cannot wait to see what everyone comes up with. From here, we're going to jump into our next principle of art, which is proportion, another really big, crucial one. And I can't wait to share that with you. 6. Principle of Art: Proportion: I hope you enjoyed that first exploration into our first principle of art balance, and it's given you a greater understanding of what that can contribute to an artwork. Our second principle is called proportion. This one is really crucial to understand because as when we're learning, we tend to have things that are out of proportion, but not intentionally. So understanding what proportion contributes to your painting is super important. Essentially, it creates a hierarchy within your work. And it talks about the size differentiation between the different elements within your work. So you can either make things feel quite regular and standard, or by creating an exaggerated idea of it, it's going to really tell a different story. So that's what we're going to explore today. Another thing to bear in mind with proportion is it's not just what's happening within our picture plane, it is also about the painting in context. So if you were to have a really small painting on a huge white wall, it's going to feel strange in proportion. But say if you had a large painting that fills the wall perfectly, then that's going to tell a different story as well and it's how it's going to experience that work. Just something to bear in mind. I've got some reference photos. I've got them printed out here. You don't have to have them printed. I've got them all supplied for you in the downloads files. I just wanted to have these in front of me so I can talk to them whilst we're painting, the first thing we're going to do is go through the different ways of generating hierarchy within your work. The very first one is standard as you would expect. The proportion feels familiar, it feels like nothing's too out of the blue. And it's something that you can see. I've got this one here as an example, which is my work 'Waratah's Standing Tall'. The vase is in proportion to the flowers. The leaves are in proportion to the flowers as well. So everything is as expected, which is what we're talking about when we're talking about standard proportion. If I was to sketch this out in standard, I'm going to do a thumbnail. Actually, there's a few things to cover here actually, let's go here. Here's all my photos. I'm going to do a little thumbnail. Thumbnails are such an amazing tool to explore your compositions. It's pretty much how I start most works. Sometimes I want to launch it and just get on with it. But because I have all that composition knowledge ingrained, I can trust that. But when you're learning, it's such an excellent way to explore your various opportunities and things to play with. Oops, that was not a good third. That one's there. So we've got a standard proportion. If I was looking at these photos here, I love working with reference photos, but what tends to happen is they're not often composed well. So if I was to just go and paint that exact thing, it may not turn out to be the greatest composition. So I want you to treat your reference photos a little bit differently in this course, I want you to look at them but not replicate them. So if I'm looking here and the way that this one overlaps here, that's not ideal. And then just the little bits here and there. So that's not, I wouldn't want to replicate this painting exactly is what I'm trying to say. What I want you to do is think about how we're using our photos to generate that shape, but we might use elements from here and elements from there. And maybe I like those colors there, but I want it in that kind of arrangement. So I'm picking and choosing different parts of it to assemble into an idea of my own painting. All those decisions that I make along the way are going to help me get to my endpoint. For a standard thumbnail you might expect to see Hydrangea, I'm going to work with the thirds here. Might just do a few little ones here. And then I'll do some leaves. It's as expected you're doing it to a scale in proportion that is familiar. I'm getting a few in there. I'm just going to make them a bit more jaggedy so you can tell that they're the flowers. Now I'm putting quite a few in. That's our standard proportion, familiar, expected everything relative scale to one another. The ratios are all correct. If we were to do a dominant proportion. I'm just going to draw up my grid again. Of course, you don't even have to do this. I'm doing my thumbnails portrait, if you would prefer to do them. Landscape the reference photos, a landscape, you're more than welcome to do that too. If I was to do dominant, I'm going to draw those thirds in again. This is probably a good example of dominant in there. I've got one flower quite large, and then I might do a few in the distance over here. A dominant proportion is going to draw attention to our main key player here, with these guys as a little support act in the background. It's a really good way of generating an emphasis on a certain thing. I've got that in an example here. So in this sunflower piece, my focal point, my largest area, the emphasis is drawn to the largest flower because we've got these repeated flowers all over your eye. Singles out the one that holds the most dominant position and the dominant size. Really something to bear in mind, because what I find is we can accidentally make a flower too big or in a funny relationship to the other sizes in the painting, and that makes it awkward for the eye. You want to do these things with intention. So I'm just going to put a few more leaves in there. And these are the little flowers. They're all Hydranges, but they're all just little. All right, and the final one that I want to show you is exaggerated or altered proportion. So go like this. This is my favorite one to work with because I really like playing up proportion. And I chose the Hydrangea for this example because they're such big, lush, full shapes. And it's a fun thing to exaggerate In this example here that I've got for you, I've really exaggerated. These Silver Princess blossoms, they are, in reality, tiny, not as small, way smaller than my fist. Really small size of the salt shaker. Really small. But I've blown them up here to really enhance all their beautiful detail and make them feel big and bold. That's what I want you to think about when we're talking about our proportion in exaggerated. When we're doing exaggerated, I'm going to draw these thirds in again. I'm going to go really big and bold with my shape. I might go one huge one here and a secondary one here. But I'll try and make sure that this guy, even though I've only got two, I love putting a little challenge to myself. Two objects always more difficult to work with, but two I'm going to work with here because that's all I'm going to have room for on my piece of paper. And then I might do a leaf and maybe another one in there. Potentially one over here too. And then I'll do some more flowers over here. So I've gotten really big and exaggerated with my shapes and the proportions of these flowers to make them feel really big and bold, and beautiful. So we've got standard, very familiar, probably as you would expect to paint it directly from a photo. Dominant is when you've got one that carrying a lot more weight than your other supporting actors in there and then you're exaggerated is like playing into those shapes within the flower. My challenge to you is to pick either standard dominant or exaggerated. And working with these photos that I've provided, generate a composition and then a painting from that. So from here I'm going to grab an extra piece of paper. Because I don't just want to land on this first example of a thumbnail that I've done. I'm just going to push these up here. Need a bit more room, always need a lot of space. Thumbnails are such a brilliant way to explore everything within composition because we're just going to quickly sketch things out. Definitely don't get bogged down in the details. I've got some examples of previous thumbnails that I've done in the past. Sometimes I put the thirds in, sometimes I don't. But I do generally like to throw in a bit of color for something that I'm working on that's a bit more significant. These are often for commissions, so people need to understand what I'm thinking with color, space, size, all of these things. Sometimes I even list the flowers that are in there. This was a few different examples. Got it around the wrong way. Yeah, A few different examples of how an olive branch might fall on a page. This one was quite a complicated one where I needed to work in quite a number of different plants all into one assortment. But they wanted to feel quite naturalistic, so I needed to explore these things with thumbnails. If I was to dive straight into a finished piece and just hope for the best, the chances of all that working out is not great, but with a little bit of planning and consideration into where certain things are going on the page, especially when it comes to balance and proportion, it's really important. Here's another one. So this family wanted an idea of the colours that I was going to use and then how that might flow into the work. And if you look at the thirds, all of these things fall directly on the thirds. I just wanted to show you those because I do thumbnails to this isn't just for beginners. It is definitely part of the process that's worth holding on to. For this particular exercise, I'm really leaning towards exaggerated because I want to paint these Hydrangea's in a big, bold way. I'm going to now have just a little bit more of a play. I'm just going to write this up exaggerated. I'm just going to play with a couple more thumbnails because if I land on the first thumbnail, and that'll do, then I really haven't put that much thought into it. I really want to try and make sure I explore a few different avenues. Maybe horizontal, landscape shaped artwork. Maybe I want to go square. Maybe I want to try three in the picture. So I'm just going to have a little play. Let's go horizontal and maybe I'll put the main guy over here. I can put it over on the edge. What you don't want to do is just have it just just glance and edge of the page. That's going to be really awkward for the eye and it can be difficult for us to read. I want to have it chopped over at the edge a bit more significantly and then we'll put these flowers in, do you like my petals. The other thing that I often see is when people get into their painting without their planning, they'll put in their first flower and they go, oh, I should put a second flower in. And they just go on plunk it somewhere. You really want to think about what that's going to do. Leave an awkward space in the middle there. If I was just to put a flower in there, although it might feel a little bit balanced, I guess you're going to have this great, big trench through the middle of your work, which is going to make it less engaging for people to follow. I want to make sure that it's nice and easy for everyone to read. For the landscape option, I might put three in. I might put a little bit of a version of dominant and exaggerated big guy there, a little bit smaller. And then maybe another one over there. Again, if you're going to have two shapes just touching together like that. A blunder when it comes to that, because it's going to create an awkward point in the artwork. I want you to try and think about overlapping them more significantly than maybe what you realise then. That way this one sits behind getting very scribbly over here. That one might have to be a bit darker to set it behind there. Then if I'm looking here, I can sort of see how the flower heads are falling on the bush. They are usually upright. The leaves fall behind underneath them. So I might put some leaves in there. I don't really see too many leaves popping out up the top might put one in, that's why I've got my reference photos there. I love this one for colour, so I think I'm going to use this one mainly for my colour reference. The detail in this one is awesome. This one I'm using more for like how the bush sits in nature because I think if we don't understand that sometimes we put the leaves and the flowers in all the wrong places. This one's really nice for colour as well, actually. And then this one's good just to see the variety of different things you can use. So I'm going to paint into this, light mauves and blues. But say you might let the pink one more go for the pink I'd rather you do rather than exactly follow what I do. There's three Hydrangea altogether, exaggerated plus dominant kind of way. I might go back to my portrait one, then I've got that one there. How else could I do this? Let's maybe put one more centrally and then chopped off to the side, and maybe a hint of one there. So I've got three in there again, and do that again. Maybe a leaf up there and a leaf down there. Hydrangea is so fun to paint as well. I can't wait to show you how fun they are to paint. Most people freak out and they're like, no, we're not painting those because they're way too much detail. I just cannot fathom how I'm ever going to get to that point where I can paint one. He's got to think light and bright with your brush. All right. And there's three there, so hang on, I better do something about this little space here. Let's go for one more. Make sure I've explored every avenue. I always say at least three thumbnails is going to get you the best possible outcome for your direction in your painting. Let's go for a bit more dominant again. So I'm going to go big one up here with some littler ones maybe like there. We need a fifth one in. Yeah, let's go like that. So I've got a diagonal line going through there, which I like to look of. Some people do value studies when they do their compositions, which is adding in your darks and lights. I think that can be a really valuable tool as well. I tend to get the scribble down just to get the idea out. And then I want to get into the painting part and I'll trust that I'll put enough value in. But if you find that you're working a little bit 2D, this is an opportunity to kind of sketch in. It's got to be dark underneath the bottom of those, so it feels like they're 3D. So go a little bit dark underneath. Think about your forms as well as your composition. Okay, and then we'll do some nice big leaves. And these guys would have litter leaves because they're little. Alright, so which one am I going to go for, I'm going to flick through, I'm maybe this one I'm leaning towards this one, so that's what I'm going to go for. I'm going to grab my piece of paper. I'm going to keep these close by so I'm not forgetting about what I was doing. I want to try and hold onto this as much as I can, but if it goes awol on the page, that's totally fine as well. We can troubleshoot on the fly, which is always an important thing to remember. Now, here we go again. I want you to pause so we've got our thumbnails. We know the direction we're going. But I would love for you to give it a go first before you watch me paint the flowers. I want to see how you paint a Hydrangea as opposed to just mimicking what I do. I think that's challenging yourself to just give it a go is such an interesting way to explore your creativity. Even if you think that's just so phenomenally hard, it is going to get you a more deserved result and it's going to feel really good. So pause and I'll join you in a moment. Okay, welcome back. I hope you had a good go. And now I'm going to show you how I would approach it. I love painting Hydrangea because you can get so light and bright with your brush and have a really good time. I think when things get overwhelming on the detail front, which clearly there's a lot of information in a Hydranger, I tend to like to simplify it all down and keep it a little bit more, not as intense in the painting detail. So I'm just mixing up some colours to get started. Now I'm going to get into, I think I'm going to do my key flower first, which is actually this front one in the centre here on this third. So I'm going to, it's literally just a series of marks for me, make sure I've got that colour shifting all the time. Then sometimes I like to work with the pigment on the page as opposed to always picking up more paint. It'll mean that you're actually work into a little bit more of those lighter values before you muddy everything up with too much pigment, because that can happen pretty quickly. Lots of dark values and you can see I'm doing little marks. Big marks. I've not got my fingers on the page too much. I'm working everything in wet on wet. Looking at my photo every now and again to try and get some colour reference, we might end up doing two layers here. Sometimes I do that with this one just because if you keep working in on top of all of it, it's just going to all turn into a puddle, which we definitely don't want. Basically simplifying these shapes down for our Hydrangea rather than trying to get too bogged down in all the minute detail. I'm just trying to have some fun with it and create this beautiful ball shape that they have. Make sure it's got some loose fun edges because that is going to give it that sort of raggedy look that I love so much. They're definitely not a tidy, neat edge, that's for sure. A bit more dark in there. You'll be surprised at how much, a little bit more darker than you're more comfortable with can really change the way the work is looking and feeling a little bit more contrast, contrast we go into in part two. All right, that's roughly my first one in as it dries. I might add a little bit more, but now I'm going to move over to the next one that sits behind it. But to generate that look, I'm going to have to create a darker edge to make sure that I've enhanced that. Make that first one stand out, so I'm going to go fraction darker for this back one. Brown's a bit of an unsung hero for me. I always forget to put it in there because I get far too excited to include all the colours. But then as soon as you add that little bit of brown, to drag the saturation out of it, you just get this really nice effect. Now I can lighten it off a little bit because now of course you can see I've got an imperfect line here, but it's going to really make that edge pop. All right. Now keep referencing my little photo there. My photo photo reference my thumbnail. Now I just want to add, well, you know what, I need to make this go down a little bit lower. I'm going to add a little bit more to the lower part here. Just looking at my reference that really sat on the bottom third, and I've kind of misjudged that a little bit and I've placed it too high. I'm just going to add in a little bit more dark in there to help bring that down a little bit. Then I have to rethink about where I'm going to put that third shape because it's only the littlest portion of it. But I need to make sure that it doesn't sit too high because otherwise it's going to upset my thirds. I have to think about that a little bit more carefully. I think it might actually need to go a little bit higher than what I first thought, or potentially it could go down lower. This is one of the things you've just got to troubleshoot on the fly. Because as much as we want to mimic exactly this, it's just possibly not going to. Happen. Make that one a little bit bigger. Okay. So I'm going to get, I've got a very big swamp happening of dark blue down there. I'm going to, I think I'm going to pop it in sort of kind of where I originally wanted to do a slightly different spot. I'm going to go dark again to try and pop that right out with a fair bit of blue I'd say. Okay, and just a little guy, I think, now that's kind of the brunt of the first layer I'd like to do with these Hydrangea. My next step is I'm going to put these leaves in, grab some of this green. I actually really don't like this green at all, but I really find it useful for mixing. I never use it straight because it looks like lolly green. But add lots of different things, purple, blue, brown, anything to it, and you get nice colour mixes. Even a little bit of red can be really nice. I want to make sure go good green in there right now. Leaf placement, looking back here again, I'm pretty happy with those where those are gonna lie. So I think I'll stick with the plan. I'm gonna flip my page around, actually, because that's gonna help me place this leaf a bit better. And then leaf number one, might just need a little bit more depth in there. And then we need to do another leaf. But because it's sitting up a bit higher, I'm going to make it a bit brighter, so it would be where the sun's kind of catching it. I'm always thinking about how these things sit in nature and where the sun would be hitting it. What would be giving it life? Just take that big drop off. Now that one actually came over to that third. Now it's going to sit in a bit more shadow down there. Maybe down there, let it bleed a bit. You can see how beautifully the cotton absorbs and distributes the pigment. It just does it so differently to cellulose. I really recommend cellulose for playing and getting over that roadblock of being worried about ruining the good paper. But when you get moving with the cotton, it feels good, it's just so different. Add a little bit more there again. Now I think I need to add a little bit more leaf foliage in here, dark in there, then needs to just be like the littlest hint in my mind. You might see it differently to me because we all see things uniquely when it comes to composition. But I'm just now thinking about balance. How can I balance this work using these exaggerated proportions? I want to make sure it feels nice and harmonious with everything. All right. Pretty close. Let's bring that out a little bit more. Maybe I need another hole leaf in there. Just a little hint of one that's starting to feel pretty good. All right. I'm just going to pause for a minute. I'm going to dry this off so I can get a second layer in there. 'cause I'm keen to just add a little tiny bit more detail and then I'm going to come back and finish it off. Okay. I've just given that a quick once over with the hair dryer to speed up the drying process. But let's get back into it. So this area through the flowers, you can see that the leaves are a little bit wet, but I'm not going to touch them again. I'm just going to add a little bit more detail into these just to really just amp up that effect of creating lots of dimension. So I'm going to make up a nice dark rich colour. And then it's just these dark shapes to break up this massive, big dark area that I was working with in here. Just lots of thin as well as thick. Because you're kind of painting the shadows in at this point. Which is hard to wrap your brain around a little bit. But if you don't think about it too much, then a few touches of blobs will actually do the job. So we might just make that a bit more blue again. And then I'm going to add some of that same idea into this main flower just to make that all feel like it's sinking up. Painting shadows can be really tricky. I just try not to think about it too much. Just as long as it's feeling like a bowl shape still. I'm good. Finally, just over into this area here where he's sitting kind in the background, I just need a little bit more. Yummy, purple. Break up that edge. All right, there we go. Oh, maybe just a little bit more there. Darken that off in that corner. All right. I'm pretty happy with that. That is our exploration of proportion. I hope you've got a better idea of how the size of the shapes within your composition has a huge impact. Say if you had that entirely wrong, you might get an accidental like ants point of view. Or you've got to be careful about where you're placing those shapes in the size relationships to one another. As an extension project, you could go back to our original set of three thumbnails and maybe explore another one further. So that one I did entirely about exaggerated proportion. You could go back and learn about dominant proportions through that same thumbnail exercise and producing an artwork from here, we're going to go into one of my most favourite ones, emphasis. Emphasis is a big key one for me, so I can't wait to run that through with you. 7. Principle of Art: Emphasis: So we've just covered proportion. Our next principle of art we're going to explore is emphasis. This is a big one for me because it is kind of the driving force that attracts a person into a painting in the first place. It is where you're going to look first. It's where all the energy and the rest of the painting leads to. So it's something to really consider when you're placing it, especially when we've got our thirds in mind. Now you know where to put them. It's like how do you make sure that that's the greatest emphasis within the painting? So there's a few ways to create this. The first one is called contrast. I'm going to do my little thumbnails. Again, contrast, I mean, there's so many different ways to generate contrasts within a painting. I've got a few examples here, so this one is more like a value contrast. I've got the really, really striking dark background against some lighter brighter colors that's making that figure. I mean, it's the only thing on the page as well, but it really draws the emphasis in on that one particular bird of paradise. Then I've got this example here, which is actually, it's got a value contrast as well as a texture contrast. The background is very flat and plain, and then the blossoms themselves are full of energy and lots and lots of texture in activity, which makes them the central point to look at as well. Then in a different, more subtle way. This is a painting I'm not quite finished yet, but I wanted to show you. Anyway, the emphasis here. I start here, the way that my eye enters the painting and I land there first, which is the, it's creating contrast because it's against here. But it's in contrast to the rest of the flowers as well. The rest of the flowers are yellow. And this one's purple. Therefore, that's the opposite to yellow, which makes it stand out more. There's so many different ways you can use contrast, and it's probably my favourite way to generate emphasis within a painting. You can also use isolation. Isolation. In this particular example, I've got that singular branch slow down, and that is what's isolated, and it's where your eyes drawn to first before you absorb the rest of the painting. We have convergence. Convergence was a tricky one for me to find an example for, but it's basically, it's more of a key one in landscapes where all the lines in the painting lead to an invisible vanishing point. So this is an example of one that I did a little while ago of tree trunks and they all go up into the sky. And the central point in the middle there, which isn't really a thing, but it's where all the lines are pointing to converging. That's the emphasis point. So that's a really interesting one to explore, but you need a very strong line work within that. One anomaly is you can have subtle anomalies or you can have really strong anomalies, but basically it's something that doesn't fit in sync with everything else or it isn't within the same theme as everything else. In this example, I've got the New Holland Honey Eater. And that is the anomaly in that painting because everything else is flora and foliage so your eye first goes there. When we're looking at paintings, faces and eyes are things that we naturally are drawn to much faster than anything else. We particularly look at where they're looking to. Not only is it the first place that we look, but we look to where they're looking as well. So it's a very important directional tool. So this one, looking around helps you follow around in that painting and lead your eye around. We talked about proportion in the previous one, but it also falls into emphasis as well, because using proportion can create emphasis. So here's another example here, where the emphasis is where the larger, more dominant Banksia's are within this painting, and then these other little ones are more receding. So therefore they don't grab as much attention. The last one is positional, which I had to paint up a little example because I couldn't find one in my bag of tricks. But I did this little daffodil painting and basically by putting something in a position that makes it stand out. It's another way of generating emphasis. You can do this in a lot of different ways, but just by literally moving its position within the assortment of subjects on the page can really help draw emphasis. I mean, all the flowers are the same size, they're all the same colour. But your eye goes here first. So it's just something to bear in mind when you're working like this. So that's our examples that we've worked through. I'm just going to quickly sketch out some thumbnails for us, so we can get into our next project. All right. So for this project I've chosen Poppies, Icelandic Poppies actually, again, I've given you all these reference photos, but I'm just going to have these out in front of me so I've got something to work with. I love the way that poppies have these like really irregular shapes in their stems. I think that's just a fascinating part of them and they're just so beautiful and crinkly and they've got so much character. So I'm going to have all these out in front of me. If you've got an iPad or something like that, you can just pop them up there. It's just the easiest way to do it. Now, if I'm talking about contrast using our Poppies, there's lots of ways I could do this. I could just simply do. Say maybe I'll do a nice big Poppy up here. I'm going to do really simplified ones for the part of my thumbnails that might be red or something like that. And then I'm just going to do some other ones around it that are different colours. That is going to create a very strong contrast. Do some blooms in there. Just to drive the point home, I'm just going to paint in some red on that one. Just really roughly. The next one was isolation. Even just having a solo flower is going to be a composition worth exploring. And that's going to be isolated. So it is going to generate a really nice sense of composition there too. It's more about all the other elements at that point, the details and that kind of thing. All right, I've just isolated that flower and that makes the emphasis point because that's the central point of the flower. That's where our eye is going to go first. If you work your stem in here, it will then, because it attaches into the back of that. And then think of this like a face. And that eye I was mentioning about how our eye likes to look where they're looking. Our eye looks up like that way. So we've actually got a bit of a C shaped curve in our composition shape there. That's a nice one to explore. The next one is convergence, really difficult to demonstrate with Poppies. But we're going to try anyway. I'm going to imagine that we're doing an ant's eye view. So I'm a little ant on the ground, and I'm looking up at all these Poppies. I've got these long, long stems and flowers attached to the end. It's the stems themselves. The lines that they're creating. These are called leading lines. They're going to lead our eye, and this area in here is, in fact, what ends up becoming the emphasis. I'm going to talk a little bit more about leading lines in part two as well. Because it really falls into rhythm and movement as well. Really important part of it is being conscious of where you're putting your lines though it does go hand in hand with emphasis. We're going to talk a little bit about it today too. The next one is anomaly. You can go subtle with your anomaly or you can go really strong. I might do one that is the only one facing the right way, then the rest are facing outwards or they're still in half bud form, or buds. That being the only open flower, is going to be the anomaly there and automatically become the point of emphasis. Then we have proportional because poppies are so large and vivacious as well, I think that'd be a fun one to explore. You could literally just go really massive with your poppies. Like what we did with the Hydrangeas, just in proportion, that can be a really nice one to explore. Go massive, and then we have positional. And of course I feel like this, naturally. Position leads to a tall Poppy because we all know about tall Poppy syndrome. Okay. If we put that up there and do some more flowers here. I'm just really rough sketching these flowers because I'm going to do similar to what we did with the Daffodil. And they're all going to be down here and the emphasis is going to be up here with this guy. Now, that's just me really quickly, roughly, sketching in all these different ideas and different ways of generating emphasis. From here, I want to take my reference photos and I want to take my preferred one of these. And I'm going to explore them just a little bit further so I can come up with an idea for a painting. So I'm going to grab one more piece of sketch paper and do some more thumbnails. I think I want to go down, I think I kind of want to do a bit of a combination of contrast and anomaly. So I want to have one strongly coloured flower, but then also have a mixture of partially open and bud form flowers as well as fully open. And that's going to have that little bit of a dance and drama around that as well. It's going to create a bit more tension than just doing one singularly. Just do a couple more just because I want to put those two ideas together. I might do. Put those thirds in. What flower am I going to follow. It's kind of like this one. Oh, there we go. That one. I'll try and do that one in there. He's going to be my hero. The big Gun, the one that you want to look at first. Then I'm going to do maybe some of these cup ones and half shaped ones here. And then he can be like that, and then there might be a little bud. Bud there, and maybe like half a pedal there and maybe another bud there, because three is always nice. 123, 123. And then the thing that I want to sort of draw attention to as well is when I put those stems in, that's pretty critical work. Getting them in, in a fluid way. I love how like jaunty they are and they're quite organic and kind of lopsided and quirky. So I want to try and make sure that I embrace that in the painting, but also wherever I put these is going to help lead your eye to those emphasised points. So it's really important to think about where you're going to do that. I'm going to make sure that everything falls together. I'm going to work with those thirds and try and get them. So planning your stems is actually a really important part because I think that's where I mostly see painting going wrong. Because we focus all our energy getting the flower and I'm like, oh, we'll just quickly throw in the stem and then it ends up being like a disaster and ruining the painting because we go too heavy or they are in the wrong spot. That one is mimicking that shape a little too much. I want to just try and change that a little bit. There we go. That's feeling pretty good. I've got this nice open space here, so it has almost circular feeling to it. I can circle around. And for me, my eye goes up here, lands on here. And then I check out all of this, and then exit again, and then I go up again. So that's good. I'll just do one more. I think. I'll just explore, maybe working on the bottom third a little bit more and trying to draw the attention down there. I'm trying to think of all these flowers here and I've got these as my references. So I want to make sure that I'm using these so I've got somewhere to look when I need to get these shapes right on the page. Maybe that way, that way all coming up there. That's the main one, the big dog. And then I think I need something else to balance that out. Now we're thinking about proportion, and balance and emphasis, all in one work starting to build upon itself. Okay. I think I'm feeling more towards this one. That's the one I'm going to try and achieve in a painting. I'll just park that one over there for a mo, and grab my paper. Now, again, I'm not going to do any pencil work in here because I have this as my reference point. Actually, I'm not going to confuse myself, I'm just going to fold it in half so I've got that clearly identified which one I'm working on. Now, Poppies, these are fun ones to paint, but they can be overly complicated, so I don't want to get too hung up on that. Of course, I encourage you to stop right here and have it go yourself, see what comes of it, and then you can take a look at how I approach it. Because how I paint it is not necessarily how you paint it. And it really does really reinforce everything is when you're troubleshooting on the fly yourself. So give it a pause and I'll meet you back in a moment. All right, welcome back. Had to go, I'm dying to see. Please share it with me. I'm now going to start painting my Poppies. Let's see how we go. It'll be really interesting to see where everyone started because I'd like to start at the centre of the flower, and getting that positioning right is so crucial, mine is basically sitting exactly right on that third. So I'm going to start on that third and painting these the centre of the flower. Make sure my angles all right. If you're probably like, what is she even doing? I would not have started it like this at all, but that's just the way this goes. I've had a few cracks of painting poppies in my time, and I love painting them so much. You might have noticed this one over here. I've got a few of them. Okay. Be amazed at how quickly they come together as well. I like to go into my light greens. I'm really trying to focus on my objective of contrast and anomaly. I've mixed the two together because I think I like that combination. My contrast is going to be colour, I'm going to go really strong with my red, beautiful, big red poppy and then I'm going to follow that one as my bit of guiding reference. Even painting a red Poppy. I'm not just going to use solely red paint the entire time because I think that just flattens the life out of your painting. So I'm going to try and make sure I do lots of different colours to help hyper generate that impression of the Poppy. Tonal range, tonal range, tonal, range, tonal range. So the power of light pigment is so wild. I just love all those, the crinkly parts of the Poppies. I'm trying to harness that in there. A little bit of purple just enhance that even further. And then I'm going to do a nice shadow in there. This hand never knows what to do when I'm trying to mix my colours. It's like I want to jump into, but you can't. Okay. Fine lines to help generate those crinkles. And then I need to shadow again. Oh, that was a lot of paint. It's kind of as a quick impression of a Poppy. It's certainly not a perfect impression. A perfect depiction. But I love just emphasising its qualities as opposed to mimicking it exactly. Dark in the. Did I go off the edge, not really. I think I will now, I've gone bigger than I anticipated. All right, while that's drying, actually I might just add a little bit more contrast into the centre here. Just by adding a little bit of dark can really enhance that centre. Pop it right out and then I'm going to add some more detail once it's all wet. Because at the minute, if I was to do it or run into another and turn into a mess. All right, So now I'm going to go over here, but I can't do a red Poppy again, because that would draw emphasis away. I'm going to draw maybe a drawing painting, a pale pink Poppy. And that's going to talk to the previous one but not be it be the big guy wanting all the attention. I'm just going to hunt through my reference photos, try and work out. I think I was going for something like a little cupped one. Let's have a little look here. I think it's this guy here. I think I'll go with something. I'll just put that in the wrong colour with something like that. He's got a little bit, I got a little bit of the stamen showing. So I'm painting them in first. And that was more down the bottom third here. So let's paint them in. All right. Now into painting these pink, I want to go quite pale pink so that it doesn't detract from my other one. Now for the shadows, I'm going to know it needs to go a bit stronger. Really want to really, really, really like this bit. Okay. I can see that I'm disappearing into the zone as I'm painting and I keep forgetting to talk, but that's just the most natural way to be while painting quiet. All right. Let that one drift off I think to the side. This one might need to go like that a bit. That's starting to feel pretty good now. I've got my two key Poppies in, but I want to do one more. I've just got a side of one happening over here. So I'm just going to imply that there, like, it's not a big deal, it's just kind of there in the wings, even that's enough. Then the last thing I want to do is painting some of these beautiful buds, because I just love their like crazy little alien forms. So I'm going to grab some of these bright green which is going to contrast, which is going to make that red pop again. Because red is the opposite to green going to contrast where we've been so far. And I'm not going to draw stem painting stems just yet. Always shifting my colours. My favourite thing, I'm very rarely selecting colour directly off the palette, always mixing. I shouldn't say never, that's incorrect, but all right, I didn't leave room for my other little bud just up there. So I might actually try and complement these two with one lower. So I've had to troubleshoot this one again as well. But I might even go this way. And now the crucial part are those leading lines, those stems. So I'm going to paint them all in. I often don't even encourage anyone to paint in stems because they're so problematic and your eye can often make up the difference. But I think in this instance it's going to be pretty crucial and you just got to go way, way lighter and thinner than you might think. Might go a bit stronger for that one up there. Because otherwise they just that's all your eye is going to see because they're so dominant strong lines that your eyes are going to go, whoa. I don't even see anything else there. I just want to follow those beautiful lines. I just need to put in one more for the main flower, which I haven't touched on yet, which I might do. Just do a bit more dark in there. I've got a bit of a hole there. I've got two buds and two stems, but a flower as well. So I need a third one here too. I might try and just do a real light one. There we go. And I just want to add a little bit more detail into that flower, and I think we're pretty close to finished. I've got a bit more yellow too. Make that nice and full and central. I just wiped out all that colour of accident there we go. And maybe just a tiny couple of details. Adding in some extra layers or just because it's still damp, it's going to just spread that little bit, but it might just give it that little bit of softness around these outer edges and need to fill that little hole there that was bugging me. I think we're pretty much there. All right. There you go. That's how I approach my Poppy example for your extension project. I mean, you could do similar to what we did in the proportion exercise and revisit your thumbnails and explore another one further. I think this is the best way to cement in that and not get stuck in too many traps. As you develop as an artist, you'll find that you lean on certain ones and forget about others. But if you keep revisiting the ones that you're less inclined to use, I think that's one of the strongest ways to keep improving. So my challenge to you for this one is to go back to this example, to this array of thumbnails, and work with the one that you least connected with. Because that's going to probably contribute the most to your experience. All right, from here we're going to park everything that we've just learned about emphasis and move into our next one, which is Unity. 8. Principle of Art: Unity: All right, we just explored emphasis, one of my most favourites with one of my most favourite flowers, the Poppy, but we've now got flowering Gum and we're going to explore unity. Unity is the overall cohesiveness of the artwork as well as the relating parts within the artwork. There's so much to explore within Unity and it's something we're definitely gunning for because a unified artwork is going to be easier to engage with, easier to read, and it's going to feel whole and finished. That is one of the key things I think we struggle with is getting to that unified point of our artwork. And that's when we put it in that pile and we don't want to deal with it anymore. So let's talk about unity as a whole. There's a number of ways to generate unity. What I've done with my pencil, oh, there it is. It's hiding from me. Okay. So we can do, I've got to draw up my thumbnails. Let's do four, because we've got four to explore. I even recommend doing these thumbnails yourself as well. Like these ones that are rough out here. This is making your hand do the work, connects to your brain, and it all seems to seep in a whole lot better. All right, here's my four. The first one is Proximal. That literally means things in close proximity are going to feel unified. I've got some examples for us to help reiterate that. Here's one here. The theme of this one is our Australian native flora. And they're unified because of the way that they've been brought together. Their proximity is going to make them feel really unified and feel like a whole complete work. This is another example here which actually employs a few. This one is proximity. These peonies are really close together. But they're also similar because they're not all identical, but they're related to a theme, they're repeated because they are the same kind of flower. So there's three things in one, in this one which these other ones are about to talk about. In similar, it's all of the things within the paintings that relate to one another. So there's two birds, they become similar, the flowers become similar. And these marks and colours that are used, it can go right down to the nitty gritty of your elements. The colours and these lines are what makes things this feel unified. Repetition is a really good one to unify things. When we're talking in the natural world with flowers, when we're working with clustered things, it's definitely best to focus on that cluster because that's going to unify that, as well as in this case, draw a focal point. So that's a really crucial one to play with. Here's another example of repetition that I've recently just painted. And these repeated negative spaced lines is what gives this one a unified feel, totally different to the other one. But you get it makes the painting have a wholeness. Simplification is probably one that people may not land on straightaway, but when you simplify your shapes, your colours, your marks in a painting, that's going to make it feel unified as well. I think that's really handy in the abstract world and as well as our botanicals, because in this instance, I've simplified it down to just two colours. And painting that way makes the whole thing feel cohesive, which is so important when we're talking about a good composition. The final example is one of my favourites because it's the flower distilled to its most basic shape. It's simplification again, but it's simplification of shape, which is something I think people can skip over, especially when we're talking about in our floral world where there's just a lot of detail and we want to try and capture all of it. But simplifying can actually help the whole feel more cohesive. So I hope that gives you a good gist of what I'm talking about, about Unity. When we're coming to our references, I've got a whole bunch of photos for you to work with. This one I've chosen Flowering Gum, but there's actually quite a few different species of Flowering Gum in these photos. So you're more than welcome to choose whatever you like. I put a bunch in there because I just like I literally scope the streets and stop and take photos of all these all the time. So these ones are Silver Princess, there's these big, big bells. And this is a Bell Fruited Mallee. So that's like a Mallee, that one. And these are all Flowering Gum, all flowery little tutus, which I just love painting. If we're talking about proximity, even just putting them all together like a cluster, like what we have in these photos is going to give that sense of unity. Like what I had with my example here, that is actually one of these flowers here, the Bell Fruited Mallee. But just bringing them together in proximity and repeating them can unify these altogether. I'm going to make a little cluster, so I'm going to maybe do a big ball of them. Hard to draw fast, the old Flowering Gum, but you're going to get the gist. And then I want to make sure I have some leaves or something to make that feel like it's a part of the natural world. Might have something over here. But basically putting them all in proximity is going to make them feel unified. Then we have similar. Similar is a little bit different to proximity because your eye will pick up similarities from different groupings within the one artwork. I might have a little bit of the Flowering Gum over here. Then I might have a little bit more over here, a little bit over here, and then maybe some more over here. And then it's linked together with some leaves, but your eye is going to go bang, bang, bang. Because it's going to pick up and unify that work by the similar elements throughout. Because we're working with one flower, they're all using the idea of repetition as well. The next one is repetition, which we explored here, but we'll give another example anyway, because then we can just get straight into the painting. I'm going to do a bit more stylised one, let's do, say, three little ones together in the centre, just something completely different. The two on the right there actually hanging out on the third. And then I'm going to put a leaf onto that third there. And then maybe a little one over there just to keep it all in balance. Then that will actually look good with a mask around it, potentially. Then the final one is simplification. We can easily get bogged down in an enormous amount of detail because look how much fussy detail there can be on these. Maybe it's we just go a bit bigger and bolder with it and do less detail. Let's see So it's a little, we're playing with proportion to simplify it. So then we could get less detail in there. All right, well, I think I'm leaning towards repetition to explore with this one, but within that we're kind of getting similar end proximity all in one. So it's like a three, it's like a hat-trick, basically, three in one. We're going to do that. So, to get myself set up. You can follow along for this part because it's actually a little bit complicated, the order of things that I'm going to do here. And I really want to show you this technique because I stumbled upon it myself and I thought this one is so much fun. And if you've done 'Lessons in Layering' and it's an extension upon that, I'm just going to sharpen my pencil here too. It's a little bit similar to the negative space exercise where we're going to mask out an area, but we do it in a different order. So first of all, I'm going to mark up my paper. So I've got a nice pencil, a blue mark somewhere there. I'm on A4. So I'll give you dimensions in the downloads if you're working on a letter as well, so you can get a nice outcome too. I'm going to mark 4.5 centimetres either side. Here, I'm, making a mess. What about doing. Then I'm going to 8.5 centimetres down, rule across there. But with the lightest, lightest touch with your pencil, we don't want any indentations on the page. Light, light, light. Then I'm going to rule it another further, 12 centimetres down. Rule that across there. Then I'm going to go the 4.5 and 4.5. I will give you a diagram of this in the ebook too, so you don't have to try and follow along word for word and try and keep up with me. I'm just going to rule that square out. Finish that one off. Down here too. That square that I've centred off in the middle there is going to be my masked area and I'm going to paint into that. But what I'm going to do is have parts of the flowers and the leaves bursting out of that frame. You're going to not have that perfect boundary, but have it literally exploding out of that frame. Which I can't wait to show you how to do. First thing I'm going to do is just dull off that pencil even further. So even just like dabbing an eraser over the top is going to take the brunt of that off. Because as soon as you paint over it, it's going to be extraordinarily hard to get rid of once it's under paint, you can't really erase it. Get rid of a little bit, more. So basically only I can see it, or if it goes under paint, it's going to go invisible like so now I like to paint these flowers with a few layers. So we're going to go with the first layer, but not have taped it yet because we're going to get these into position. All right, I'm going to grab some yellow for the centres of the flowers. How am I going to do this? One here, here, and one here. Then I'm going to grab some pink. Pink. Way too pink. I want to go nice and soft for this initial layer. When we work with watercolour, we work from light to dark, opposite to what you do with oil and acrylic. I know that's really confusing. And then I'm going to do some basic shapes to block in these flowers for us a little bit more. There's really, really rough at this stage. Then I'm going to do some leaves. Need to get the leaves in at this stage too. The other little thing I want to do is put some salt on the leaves. I don't know if you've worked with watercolour and salt before, but you get some magical results that gives it these beautiful, crinkly, organic little marks. Going to paint in some of these. But I have to bear in mind that I want those beautiful tutu fronds to not get into too much trouble there. A little pink in there. And I'm going to lighten that right off. I'm going to do a bit more down here. And then whilst that's all very wet, actually I want to just drop in a little bit more colour, a bit more goldy. Whilst that's all wet, don't just shake the salt all over it. Shake a little bit into your hand. First, less is always more. Just the tiniest little bit. Just drop it in there. If it's too wet, it'll just dissolve into the water, but the right balance and it's not much and that will just dry really beautifully. And what happens with salt is it absorbs up all the water around it and then leaves the pigment behind so you get this beautiful crystalised look. Now I'm now going to grab a little bit more colour. We'll do another leaf here. So I'm bearing in mind these boundaries. I've got this square here and I'm going almost for a symmetrical balance. I'm ignoring my rule of thirds, which I know I've said is like the main thing that I like to use. But in this instance, I really wanted to use the masked effect. And I think this is going to work really nice with a symmetrical kind of look being down the middle of the page. I'm going to throw one more leaf in, over here. And you're probably like, what on earth are we doing here? She's got us on a magical mystery tour again. Now a bit more salt. I worked very wet just over there, so that may not be ideal to put salt on just yet. I might need to block some of that out actually. Just gone a bit too heavy with the water. Now, salt again, if you were to use rock salt or flaked salt or anything like that, you do get a different result. So it's worth exploring now, that looks like an absolute shemozzle, but I'm going to dry it off and then get my masking tape on to complete the rest of the work. Bear with me whilst I give that a little blow dry, and then I'll come back to you in a moment. This one's all dry now. I'm ready to apply the masking tape First though, I'm just going to brush off that salt. Don't do that unless it's totally dry. You'll smear it everywhere. But literally, once it's dry, you can just brush it off lightly with your finger. Get rid of that. And now I'm going to grab this masking tape and like in 'Lessons in Layering'. Just quickly show you how to pop this on. I'm going to go, I'm just going to cover that pencil line just by the fractions of a millimetre. Gently place that down and then you want to burnish that edge on so you don't accidentally bleed underneath that tape. I'm just using the back of my thumb now and I'm just going to burnish that on. And then I'm going to take that around to the next side, just gently over that pencil. There we go. There we go, one more bit here. Oh, that's just shy. What am I doing? The corners especially need an extra little burnish 'cause that's the place they're most likely going to leak. And the last one there, you probably like, what on earth is she doing? But I promise you this one is a very cool result that you will want to do again. So I'm ready to paint now. This is my little canvas right here. I'm going to complete a few more layers on these flowers. I'm probably going to get into using this little liner for all those really, really fine stamens. So if you don't have one of those, jump down to a much smaller brush. Between a 2-4 is going to be ideal to get those really fine lines. You can manage it with a bigger brush. It's just that the control it takes is a lot more. I'm going to actually start with this one though, and then that's my littlest one there, it just rolled away. That's the little one. I'm going to start adding a little bit more detail. I'm going to add in these little little guys there and then you'll see them come together. And I don't want them all pointing in crazy directions, but that's probably pretty close. All right. Now from here I'm going to start adding in that information to, to build up that density of all the stamens and everything. I don't want it to be. If you have too much detail, it's going to look a little bit strange. We're actually employing a little bit of simplification here too. I'm going with strong colour at this stage. It's basically a building up process from here. I don't try and do it all in one perfect round each time because it'll look too perfect. They sit out in all these jaunty little angles and all look, you want them to all look quite unique, even though they're the same flower. At some stage here, I'll adding all the yellow as well. With a light pink here. You can see that I'm really quickly moving my paper all the time as well. Really, just carefully with the edge of my fingers. This means that I'm not buckling over myself trying to get an angle. I can just work into the best angle for my hand as opposed to making life more difficult for myself. So starting to build up that it's gonna take a little bit to get all singing together. I think that painting, the order of things is one of the biggest stumbling blocks from my students. But it's so much a feel thing because you could paint the yellow in first. I sometimes do that even with these and then other times I'll, sometimes I just want to get into painting the blossoms themselves. It truly isn't the right or wrong. It'll come more naturally when you get more familiar with your elements and principles and know what generates, look what effects you can create a little bit more busyness in there. Whilst that's all drying, I'm going to start painting in the background too. So I'm going to use a really, really rich blend of paints, grey and like a turquoise to create a really deep dark background and that contrasts. And the ground itself is actually going to help create unity as well. So we have unity working in a whole bunch of different ways for this particular exercise. So make sure that tape is on, nice and firm. And then I'm going to work around some of these little shapes and make sure I'll leave a little bit of negative space around there. And I want to work really dark with my paint. You don't want any resistance when you're mixing your paint, but I want to try and get the richest mix I can possibly get to get nice, strong, dark colour. And if it's not quite dark enough enough, you can always add a second layer as opposed to work into a thicker mix of paint. You don't want it too thick And a bit more richness in there. And you can see how the negative space really helps those little edges pop as well. I just love this effect that it gets. Go up here now. I'm definitely not going too sharp a line on these outer edges. I just want to nice and loose up here too. While that's been doing that and the rest of it's been drying, I'm going to go back and add in a little bit more detail. I might actually even grab my slightly smaller brush. This is that Opera Pink that I mentioned in the materials video. I just love this pink so much, it's so vibrant. All add in some more layers again, right where they're too touched, they can get a bit more congested. And in the centre here is going to help make them pop a bit more, up there. Sometimes you can get so macro and focus on so many details that you forget to step back and look at the whole. I got to make sure I pull myself out of it and have a look at what I've actually been working on. Because sometimes I think that's one of my biggest issues is that I get too one eyed and get really focused on one little thing, and then when I pull back and have a look at the picture as a whole, I'm like, oh, I've been putting all my energy into the wrong area and creating emphasis or unity in the wrong place, or it becomes unbalanced. A little bit more here and there. Now that's getting closer. Now I'm going to do something that I really don't recommend is I'm going to pull the tape off now while it's wet. I would suggest for you, when you've got a bit more time and you can pause and come back to it, I would do this when it's dry, but just for the sake of keeping us moving, I'm going to pull this off. Well, hang on. I haven't even hit the edge there. I haven't covered it properly. Let me get in there properly. There we go. Doing this, when it's dry, there's a lot less risk. If that wet paint gets anywhere, that's going to ruin your painting. Now get that beautiful, satisfying edge though. I just love this technique carefully peeling away because the wet paint could go anywhere. The final steps that we're going to do is just add a few more little details outside of this box. It really feels like it's bursting out. All right. You can see where the edges are clipped off. I just want to add in a bit more information there. And that's just going to really bring that one home. A little few more details in there, a little few more details in there and in here. Grab a bit more yellow to create some more of those little yellow guys. There you go. I just love that effect so much and I think it's a brilliant way to explore this idea of unity. And of course, you can always go back to the thumbnails and explore some of the other ideas of ways of generating simplicity and, or proximity, similarity, repetition, any of those things that generate unity. But something else to consider is that if you start working across a body of work, you want some harmonising and unifying aspects to that as well. So my challenge to you, my extension project to you for this section of the course, is to start thinking in multiples and how you could possibly generate the idea of Unity across multiple works. To make sure that everyone's unique, you want to do a little thumbnail to plant out each one. And that way you could have a beautiful trio. Or have a whole series that you could do a different flower for each one. It's really up to you, but I think thinking across a series is a really nice way to bring things to a wholeness as well. So that's my challenge to you. From here, we've got our final principle of art for this part one of the course. It's variety. How fun. I cannot wait to share this one with you. And I'll see you in the next video. 9. Principle of Art: Variety: Having just explored unity, we now go to the opposite end of a sliding scale and explore variety. Think of them as the contradictory things. And you don't want to work that's entirely unified. And you also don't want to work that's fully verified because you too much variety is going to create an uncomfortable, unplanned looking work, but too much unity is going to feel monotonous and safe. So we're going to try and find a happy point between the two. There's a number of ways to generate variety. It's basically all the elements that are dissimilar to one another. In Unity, we're looking at all the similarities and things that bring things together in variety. We're looking at all the things that make them different. Got a few examples as I do. The very first one is positional variety. And I'm going to use this example on the easel because although they are all the same flower and it makes it feel unified because I haven't just stamped them out all the same way and all the top view down or the same angle. Having them, each one a little bit different is giving it a sense of variety. It's just a low level sense of variety at all the little parts and pieces, different angles that's going to make it feel like it's got plenty of variety. Then I'm going to go back to this one again, which I showed you in unity. This one I'm going to talk about in variety as well. Because although it feels unified, there is an enormous amount of variety within this work. There's plenty of contrast. There's different shapes, bigger shapes, littler shapes, fine shapes, lines, bold shapes, thick shapes, and a whole range of colours. So there's an enormous amount of variety in this piece, as well as giving it a sense of unity because of the way that they're placed together. So they kind of work hand in hand. And you want to find that tension point to make sure you've got a little bit of both in your work. Then we have dissimilarities in variety. And this example here, basically, it's similar to the other previous one where none of the flowers are the same in here, they're all a little bit different in all different angles and there's a number of different species in the vase that's going to make that far more various looking than if it was all the one species in the vase. Creating a lot of variety with your subject can be a really interesting way to do it. And this can also dissimilarity can come down to using irregular mark making. So you could have big big blobs as well as fine little marks. That is another way of creating variety. It doesn't have to be all the same shape all the time. Now, La Nina is a work that I did that's really quite large. You may be able to see it in the corner of the picture up there, but it's behind me on a big wall, so I can't show it to you in person. This is a piece that I love to explore with variety through contrast. So contrast is, you think of all your elements. Line, shape, form, colour value, texture, space. All of these have a way of generating contrast, and we go into contrast in more depth in part two. It's actually the first principle we explore. But when we're talking about variety, if you have extremes of contrast, that's going to feel like there's a lot of variety. And if we have not much of a range in our contrast, then it's going to create much less sense of variety. Probably more like on the unified, potentially monotonous stage. So in La Nina, we have really dark big blobs as well as big broad light shapes. And there's a huge variety of mark making creating a really interesting sense of contrast between shape as well as colour and value. So that was always one that I wanted to show you for that. And then anomaly, we kind of went into a little bit in emphasis. And I'm going to bring up this same work again, but like when you're using, in this instance, just one singular anomaly that's going to create the emphasis there, but it also creates a variety within the work. It means that, well, we weren't just thinking, oh, I could just put another flower there. We're starting to think a little bit more about the message we're telling. So by putting an anomaly in there, you can actually really shift the story and have a different idea imbued into the work. Now the final one is conceptual, and I'm almost embarrassed to show you this one because I had to create it to demonstrate this example. But conceptual is just not something that I really, particularly work with. It's when you pull a huge variety of different things together all have different meanings and they come together and they create their own story. So if I was to present you this here and there's a Tiger Lily and a smiley face and a drink and a butterfly and all of these things. It's left to the viewer to work out the story. The variety becomes part of the message. It's not something I lean towards. I sort of imagine more like your Salvador Dali with the melting clocks and all the unusual things happening in your surrealism. That's what I think of as a strong varietal. Conceptual idea. It's not something that I really work in towards at all myself. But anyway, I've done it. We're there. It's all good. Now for this project so far, I've provided you three lots of reference photos. For this one, I want you to start thinking about sourcing your own reference photos. My suggestion to you is, and I'm going to use this for myself in the exercise, is we're going to Google varieties of Daisies or Daisies species. If you Google either of those and look up images, find a selection of images that appeal to you. And we want an enormous variety of different kinds of Daisies to work with. And that's what I really want you to do. I'm not providing you the images in that way. You can come up with your own painting based on the images that you source. I've specifically chosen Daisies because they have an enormous range of variety. But they also are all from the one species. So we've got that tension of unified and variety. So we want to bring both of those ideas together and then, we're going to piece together, it's a little bit different. This piece, we're going to go quite loose and it's going to be all over coverage and it's going to paint as many different Daisies as possible. Our first thing we're going to do, just to save ourselves, I'm actually going to go down to a square shape for the final piece here. Because I think that would be a nice different challenge. Because if we're always working on the A4, either way we can get boxed in and not think outside the square, but this time we're actually thinking in the square because I'm giving you a square. You just have to stretch that muscle a little bit again. So you can fall in the trap of always working on the same size paper. And you get really familiar with your formulas when it comes to your compositional recipes. In your mind, you always have ones that you prefer. So this is just a challenge to you is change the shape of your paper. And you're going to have to change your formats a little bit. Now I'm going to paint a series of daisies out, and they're going to be my building blocks to generate something about this. But then also, once I've got my building blocks, I need to think about composition. So I'll have to do thumbnails based off my building blocks and then work into a final piece. So I'm doing things a little bit backwards. We're doing the practice work first and then doing our thumbnails. So I'm just going to get started. I'm going to do my favourite first, the Paper Daisy. I can do Paper Daisy two different ways actually, so I might do that as well. I kind of always got a donut in the middle, which I like to. Do nice hot pink Paper Daisy, these nice easy little dab marks to get those petals going. And then to generate that little bit of form, I'm just going to go and add some extra ones underneath. Got a serious swamp happening here from my Hydrangea. My Hydrangeas got very excited about mixing all those blues. There's one Paper Daisy and then I'm going to go and do like a more closed version. Of course, they come in all kinds of colours as well, so he could just do one with all different colours of different Paper Daisies. But I'm going to go for the whole kit and caboodle here, and that's a nice closed one. And then I'm going to do a little Cut Leaf Daisy, which is another little Australian native, which is a really, really fine leafed little Daisy. I might actually go down to my mini brush for this one running out of room because of my swamp in the corner there. I don't normally let it get that swampy, but I think it's because I've been painting back to back. So they've got really, really fine little leaves and then I might, do you like your classic sort of big old classic Daisy. Which white is always very hard to paint if you've got a white paper background. So I'm going to generate that sort of form with a little bit of light green to give it that feel might need a little bit more grunt to that. What else can I think of? I don't have Google in front of me, so I'm having to make this up in my mind, Sometimes even just drawing out the pigment from the centre can be nice. All right, And then say like a big African style Daisy, which is like big, beautiful purple, colourful ones. They come in all kinds of colours, make up a good colour there. And then I think I'll go a bit more orange in the centre. And I want to make sure I've got lots of balancing things like in the think back to the balancing exercise. And we have large shapes, little shapes, fine shapes, thick shapes, and we want to make sure we have lots of variety in our shapes. I'm getting raggedy ends there. There's a nice little African Daisy. Now, what else can we do? Or we can do some little tiny miniature Paper Daisies. I'm really trying to come up with some smaller forms as well, so we don't get too stuck. Just with all big shapes, I need a bit more. Way too much. Way too much. I might do them up, right, So they feel a little bit different. Like a little tiny Alpine Paper Daisy. I love those ones. And they could even have a little stems if we wanted. Then we can do like a Calendula thing. I might do an orangey centre for that one, All these different shapes, and they might be yellow. Let's just go with yellow. Got a lot of yellow going on my palette. So you can see just even exploring one species, how much variety you can generate. Definitely worthwhile thinking about, especially if you're doing like themed works or coming out with a series, it's worthwhile exploring. I do a little one of that too. What else am I missing? I might just do some little Everlastings. They might be nice too. Now, at any moment, you're also welcome to pause and go and search your own photos and come up with you might be like, I'm missing a lot of green here or I really favour blue. Go and find those images and factor that in at this point because these are going to be our little ingredients to the larger piece. This is what we'll be working with. You want to make sure you're working with things that you enjoy painting as well. I'm just going to throw in a few, I love these little Everlastings, really, really fine forms this time. And then I'm going to grab like a nice green, and they might be on stems as well. All these are going to come together as little bite sized pieces. And we're going to then do a finished work with them all congested and creating a huge sense of variety. I'm going to do this here and then I'm just going to grab my piece of just printer paper so I can do some thumbnails. And I've got this shape here. When I do my thumbnails, I want to make sure that I have a more squarish shape with my thumbnails, and I'll pencil in those thirds. Then with my biggest shapes, I want to make sure that they become the focal points and I put them on the key thirds. So I might put like the African Daisy up here, and then I might do a couple of big Everlasting Paper Daisies here. But then, because we're going for that sense of variety, I don't want to repeat them all too much. So I want to make sure that I fill all the gaps in between with these other little parts and pieces. And then when you get to when you pull it all together and you're like, oh, that's feeling good. Or you might go, oh, it actually feels out of balance. Like I don't have enough large shapes in there. I don't have enough small shapes in there. This is what the brilliance of thumbnails is for. Because if you get halfway through your work on your beautiful cotton paper, then you've wasted your time and energy because you're not going to finish it and you're not going to be happy with the result. This is, it might be called delayed satisfaction where we do the work first, work out our planning, bring it all together, and then go with our cotton paper with confidence so we never waste it. Let's do some Everlastings up there. Maybe a few more there and then some Calendula. Then what should I put down here? Maybe the big Daisy, maybe a closed Paper Daisy there, and another one there, Cut Leafs and some more Everlasting, something like this. This is making sense to me. What are my little scribbles? I'm sort of looking at these and going, okay, don't forget to put include all these little marks will come together into a hole. What else are we going to do there? I think I might just fill that space with those. Therefore, I've got a couple of key players here and another one here. Maybe one of those is the wrong answer, but I'll try and make it work. See how we go. I mean, I could keep producing these as well. Because similar to our cutouts, and think of these like our cutouts, in the first exercise, you can, these are your little ingredients to make these things. So there's limitless combinations and this is half the hiccup with composition is like, I just, I don't know where to put things and where to start. Start with your big objects, put them on the key thirds and fill out around the rest of them. And that's going to feel a lot more comfortable and you won't feel as lost as you're putting it together. Okay, So I'm going to get into painting, I think. Yeah. I'm going to leave these two up here for me. As my reference, I got a lot of pink and red. So I want to make sure I have a little bit of green in there to balance. I want to make sure I've got lots of nice dark tones, as well as some nice beautiful light tones in there too. And that's going to give it a sense of variety as well. Okay, so putting, I'm going to place my Paper Daisies in first. I'm going to grab some yellow. Now that was on the third, I want to make sure I place them correctly on the third whilst I'm painting. And then grab that lovely green. I've really swamped out my pink there now. This one went right to the edge, and I want to leave a little white border because that's actually going to help harmonise it as well. If I went right over to the edge, it's going to feel more like a pattern than a finished work. The pattern is something we explore in the next one, in part two. Very loose and simplified little Paper Daisy there. Then I might do another one here. We get that gold yellow in here too. What's better. Green. And go some more of the same pinkies. Maybe a tiny touch of red in there. Get some darker tones in the back there. Then again. Let's get that lightened right off, get some really light tones. Okay. And then what was I saying that I put down the bottom in this corner? I think it was Everlasting. So I'm going to do this little golden ball and they're part of the Daisy family. They're Australian natives. Okay. If you're always painting into the wettest part of the painting. I like the way that when the bleeding happens with watercolour and has a unique quality of watercolour. But when you allow the paint to bleed together, it does have a unifying effect as well. Okay. Need a bit more blue in there. There's our little Paper Daisies. And then we're going to grab the Calendula. I think I'll put in here just one little random one fit. It's like making a little puzzle. I need to fit one more in there. There we go. Now moving along, critical mistake I often see people make is they'll get started here and they'll go right. I've got to start on my next big thing over here. But then connecting the two is really difficult. So you want to be able to build from your initial starting point and then work everything in. Like I was just saying about allowing the paint to mingle while it's wet, Always work into the wettest areas of the painting. So that's going to help build you up to this point. So I'm not as much as I want to, I'm not going to dash up and paint my next biggest object. I'm going to build my way to it knowing that it's going to sit fairly harmoniously on that top right third, I've got to make sure that I get to there and it will integrate a whole lot better if I was just to blob it there and hope for the best filling the gaps. It's when we tend to trip ourselves up and we'll get a big old visual hole somewhere where we just tumble down and it's going to absorb a lot of energy in the work. So just something to bear in mind, What are we doing here? We're going to do a few of these little Alpine Everlastings, the mini Paper Daisies over here. Maybe you like, even when you work in this kind of scale, your eye still picks up patterns of odds and evens. If I've got four there, I really should make it five maybe. Where am I going to put you? Over here. Your eye just naturally does this and it's really hard to avoid. Some people love working in evens, But it really is quite difficult for our eye to digest sometimes because we get lost in trying to work out where the pattern starts, where a pattern stops, and we just innately are counting the whole time. I need to have my little bit of grey here that's not too blue. And let's do a little samples still not quite right. A little bit of blue in there, but not too much. I know some people will be having a heart attack about this palette right now. I'm having a bit of a heart attack about this pond, but I love utilising all these in between colours that just happen to naturally occur when things mingle. Or if you need to make space, you often have a happy accident finding what you are after all along. Adding in these little details a little bit more. They're looking cute. Now, next in my plan was another little couple of Calendula's, I believe. So I'll paint these in here. And then we use up some of this yellow, this massive amount of yellow that I've got going on here. You can start to see how variety and unity really do work hand in hand. What do we want there? Now we're going to do some Cut Leaves, more yellow. Yellow is going to be one of the unifying parts of all of this. And then all the different kinds of flowers are going to be the variety. They're going to be all Cut, Leaf flowers, Cut Leaf Daisies. Make up my purple. Or probably don't want it to be all exactly the same purple, but I'm going to start here and these ones are like really fine little petals. Just keep shaking up that purple purples are opposite to yellow. So that's going to naturally give it a sense of variety because it gives it a whole lot of energy. Variety drives energy, humidity drives calmness. Wash that off and get a bit of a lighter version. Might do some filler. Do you need a darker one in there now? Pull up some of these little gaps, perfect. There's my Cut Leaf Daisies. Going back to my plan, I think I can almost connect in my big African Daisy in there now, which is exciting because that means we're on the cusp of getting it all, bringing it all together. Now I'm going for this guy, so I'm going to go into this colour. I'm going to go a bit stronger I think, than what I originally had planned. And he's going to go right on that third. And then let's use up some of this soup. He's going to be quite a dominant force in this little painting. Make sure I get a nice little bit of bright in there too, beautiful. Might just do a little bit of the dark detail in one of those just for fun. Now back to incorporating a little bit more of this Everlasting to sync that up there and keep it balanced, which I think is that complete corner. So let's just fill that right up with all those guys. Get back to, what colour did I have there, about that colour. That one swallowed it nearly whole. Perfect. All these painting techniques come with sound effects, just so you know. Now I'm going to incorporate, I think I hadn't nominated a colour in my mind for the two at the top there. So I'm actually going to go for quite a neutrally green, almost like it's going to be representing white. I need to just get the right colour on my brush here. Is that going to be about right? Nearly right. Not dark enough. It's amazing what colours you need to use to generate a sense of a white flower. It's more difficult than you would imagine. That was too much. Mop that up. I need to add more of those white ones. Might put down here though, I wasn't intentionally going to do that, but I think it's going to work out better that way. And then what did I have in mind for here? I think I had some more of these orange guys, so I get them in. Paint them up. I'm stretch here. Oh, yellow. Yeah, that's what I want. Okay. Might just do a little bit more of these little fillers because I thought they looked good. I got to make sure that I continue that somewhere. Because if you only have one area of it, I feel like that sometimes can be a little bit visually distracting. I'm going to fill out that little area over here with a few more of those Cut Leaf little Daisies. And put one in there. And these are a nice way of generating a little bit of interest. Something completely different, Get that in more of those. It's like implying that there's more behind there. I guess now I'm going to put two more of those up there and the rest is going to be the Everlasting. And they we're done. I'm constantly troubleshooting along the way. I'm like, is this balancing what's happening here? Is there enough strong colour? Is there enough light colour? Have I represented all my forms? Is there enough? And that's going to create that sense of variety in the work. What did I say? I was going, oh, you know what? I might flip it, I might put it over here and put those two there. And then I'm going to do lots of the little guys here and do a little bit more of the Everlasting. I need to balance that little hole there as well. Final touches before I put in these. A little bit darker than up there. We are on the home stretch, I'm just going to put a couple of leaves there. Just like I always like to just pull myself out of it for a moment and go, okay, fresh eyes. What's missing? What needs doing? Does it feel balanced? I need a little bit of extra leaf down here, maybe over there. Just a quick analysis of how it's all. How's it come together? How do we feel? I think that's looking pretty good now. A few little touches, and that's brought it all together. Now for an extension project, I would love you to try this exercise with a flower of your choice. You're better off choosing a species with a bit of range in it. I would definitely recommend something with a few different sizes in forms as well. But by selecting your own flower and having a play with it, you're going to have your own ownership over the whole outcome. And I think that's where you start to take off all on your own. That is our first five of the ten principles of art, and now for the final project. 10. The Final Project: Okay, there you have it. That's our five principles of art that we're going to visit in part one of Compose, Paint, Create. My challenge to you for the final project is to go back and have a look through the work that you've created so far, the projects themselves and the extension work. And have a think about what you would tweak or rework. And my challenge to you is to rework the pieces. Two, there's two I want you to do. The one you loved the most and the one you struggled with the most. This is just going to reinforce everything that we've covered today because you may have noticed how we've built upon. We were started off with balance and then went into proportion. That built on balance. And they all start to interrelate and there's commonalities between them all. So now knowing what you know, I want you to take all of that knowledge and improve what you've worked on so far. Can't wait to see what you come up with. 11. The Wrap Up: Thank you for joining me for Composed Paint, Create part one, and I really hope to see you in part two where we cover a whole other array of things that is just going to button everything up and you're going to be experts in composition. I hope you treat this course like a treasure trove that you keep dipping back into because there's just so much to learn and absorb when it comes to composition. You can pause, rewatch, revisit anytime that you like. And each time you will pick up something new and it's only going to contribute to the greater whole. If you've purchased the course through teachable or my website, your enrolment includes my comprehensive eBook. This is your companion guide side kick amazing little resource where it has all your course notes. Everything is housed in one place and you can refer back to it as you move through the course. It has the extension projects in detail, as well as a whole array of tips and tricks links that you might need. Everything. From here, keep an eye out for part two. Part two, we're going to cover contrast, movement, rhythm, pattern, and repetition. The further five principles we didn't cover today. As well as how to analyse your work and all important breaking of the rules because that's the most favourite thing to teach. Really crucial part about composition. I can't wait to see you in part two. You may have heard me mention throughout this course some of my other available courses. 'Welcome to Watercolour' is all about the fundamentals of watercolour. And we visit all the skills. In 'Magic of Colour Mixing' we learn how to add spice to our watercolour works. It's my most favourite of subjects and we go all through the colour theory and then learn how to apply it in context. And then 'Lessons in Layering', we look how to create depth interest in detail in our watercolour works. Each of these now includes an eBook as well. If you haven't already go and download those. They are fantastic resources too. Your feedback means the world, so please honestly, your reviews help me shape all future content. And I really do take it onboard. And I want to create the best possible things for you and we want to share in this experience together. And I've also got a beautiful Facebook community, a private group where you're most welcome to join. Now you're one of my students. It's a very encouraging place and I give you monthly creative challenges to keep you working. You're also welcome to find me on socials. I'm on Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook where you'll see all my latest updates. Thank you for joining me for Composed Paint, Create Part One. I hope to see you in part two.