Elements of Nature: Painting a Watercolor Begonia Leaf

1. Introduction: Have you ever thought about the commonalities between nature and art? I'm sure there are many. However, patterns are a common theme to both of them. Hello, everyone. My name is Cheryl and I am a self taught watercolor artist based in India. My class today is your invitation to the perfect marriage between delicate patterns in nature on one hand and the elegance of watercolor on the other hand. In this class, we will learn to create a watercolor painting of a begonia leaf. As a highlight of this class, you will learn a novel way to create the surface patterns of this leaf using masking fluid. By the end of this class, you will have your very own painting of a realistic yet painter leaf, begonia leaf that I hope will make you proud. I believe that regardless of whether you are a seasoned artist or a beginner, this class has something to offer to you. If you're ready, let's get started. 2. Class Project : For your class project, you will create your own watercolor painting of a Begonia Rex Lee. The reference picture I have provided, which you may use for your painting, is of a plant leaf from my own garden. However, you don't necessarily need to use the reference, provided you can use any other reference of a becconia leaf. There are many exquisite leaf patterns found in the species that might get you excited. A painting like this one might seem intimidating, but do not worry. I will guide you lesson by lesson in how to complete your project. First, we will apply the masking fluid with a twist. I will demonstrate to you how to do this. As you progress through the lessons, I encourage you to upload your progress shot. Once you're done with your work, please upload a final shot or a scan of your work to the section below titled, My Projects. Now let us proceed to the lessons and I can't wait to see what you create. 3. Materials: I have with me watercolor paper. And this is in the form of a watercolor block, which means that the edges are glued down together so that it does not buckle underwater. But if you do not have a watercolor block, you could also use loose sheets of paper and secure it yourself. And fix it yourself with a masking tape onto a heart surface. This is 100% cotton paper by saunders. It's compressed and that means it has some tucture on the surface which is useful for us. The weight of the paper that I'm using is 300 grams/meter square. The dimensions are 12 " times 9 ". But you could also use a different dimensions if you prefer to draw and paint a larger or smaller leaf than the one that I'm doing, pencil and needable eraser, we'll need artist masking fluid and a toothbrush for spraying the masking fluid onto our paper. It's also useful to have a cement pick up to remove the masking fluid at the end of the painting, I have with me two watercolor brushes and these are size size two synthetic round brushes with a pointed tip. You don't need to. It's sufficient if you have a large brush with a good tip with four shades of water color. These are by Winsor and Newton Professionals. The colors that I have, a bismuth yellow, which is a cool yellow. You could also use lemon yellow instead of it if you don't have the shade. Next, I have rose madder, and this is a pinkish red. You could also use any other pink or red that is available with you. There are two shades of blue with me. One is paints gray which is a bluish gray. It has a very dark tonal value. It is sulfl for us to increase the paints that we'll be using on our leave to create shadow areas. The other one we have is French ultramarine, which is a pigment that is available in any watercolor palette that you might buy. I believe every palette would have some ultramarine in it. It's a granulating watercolor, which means that it gives us a very nice texture once it's dry. I have with me artist gas, the color is titanium white. This is also helpful for us to create patterns towards the end of the painting, on the surface of the lean. We'll also need two clean containers of water. One is for rinsing of our brushes between colors. The second one is for applying clean coats of water on the paper. It's also useful to have a mixing palette, especially for mixing our greens for our painting today. 4. Drawing: To get started, I freehand the drawing of the leaf. This is a fairly easy drawing. The way I do it is that I first draw the mid vein, and then both half of the leaves on either side of it. It helps to think of each half of the leaf as a water drop shape. If I get the lines incorrect at some places, I lift the graphite up with my nediable eraser and I redraw the lines. It's important to use table eraser on watercolor paper because the regular era, if you rub the surface of the paper with it, the regular eraser ruins the fabric of the paper. This is not something we want. Now, I proceed to draw more of the veins that come out from the central vein or the mid vein. I observe the pattern closely before drawing them on my sheet of paper. If you feel that this drawing is hard for you, what you could alternatively do is trace out. I have a video lesson on how to trace out drawings given in my other skillshare class, which is on painting a stag in watercolors. There are a few different ways to trace out a drawing. You could either use a tracing paper, you could even use a light board for that. Another thing you could do is that you could first draw a rough drawing on a scrap piece of paper before drawing it on the watercolor sheet. This gives you the practice you need to make a good drawing. The drawing of our leaf does not need to be very soft. It's okay if you have some very visible lines on your watercolor sheet. That's because the veins run on the leaf is where we'll paint the darkest areas anyway. So this would be hidden by the dark layers of water color. 5. Painting the Leaf Borders: Welcome back. I have my paint and paint brushes ready. Now, along with my mixing palette, the shade I'm going to use is rose matter. You could alternatively use any red or pink that's available with you. And I also have a clean container of water with me. To start, I read the entire area of the paper inside the borders of the leaf. I read the entire area inside the leaf with water. Like so, I have sped up the video a bit, but you could take your time doing this. This is a step where you have to thoroughly wet the paper, but at the same time, make sure that you have no puddles of water anywhere because that's not something we want. If you have any puddles, you could lift it off with a tissue paper and go over it with a light place of water. Again, I take some of my roster shade onto the tip of my brush. This is size. Till now, I needed a smaller brush to do the intricate patterns at the borders. I draw these curvy lines. I do not draw a straight line because as you can see at the borders of the leaf, we have this texture and pattern where the leaf goes up and down like a wave. That's what I'm trying to capture with my wavy lines. I'm not drawing a straight line, I just do this also at the base of the leaf where it attaches to the stem. I have left some pink shade. That's because I can see some pink at that part of the leaf. Now my entire border is covered with the pink shade. And I've drawn these wavy lines go over it again to darken the shades a bit because I felt like it was too subtle, far lighter than I wanted it to be. Darken it a bit. Also on the left side of the leaf, I can see that there's some light coming from behind it, which illuminates it from behind. It appears a bit glowing. I'll try to capture that as well on the left hand side, but for now I put more pigment at the base of the leaf. Then I proceed to the left of the leaf to soften some lines that might have been hard. Now I lock in that transparent part of the leaf that I can see on the left side. This is all for this part. Let this dry completely, and then we'll meet for the next lesson where we'll apply the masking to it. Goodbye. 6. Masking Fluid: Now I have with me my masking fluid under toothbrush. Now that my underlying layer is completely dry, I'm going to dip my toothbrush into my masking fluid and fl masking fluid onto the paper after dubbing any excess of from my toothbrush. This is how you flick masking fluid onto the paper. If you're not very confident that this step, you could try it first on a spare piece of paper before going on your actual painting. I have my masking fluid on my toothbrush. Now here's where I pl onto the sheet of paper. As you can see, it creates a lot of splatters much more than you'd get from a pain brush. It's a very dense splatter that you get from a toothbrush. That's how the masking fluid helps us preserve the patterns on the leave. This is going to get your hands dirty. You could easily remove the masking fluid after you've applied it and wash your hands. Don't worry about it, it's fine. No big deal. You could continue doing this and flicking more masking fluid onto your paper for as long as you need to get a sufficient number of splatters on your leave. You have to judge that for yourself by looking at your paper, whether you had sufficient spots on your leaf to capture the idea of a agonia leave. I need more, I think go in one last time, another round of splatter. It helps to see a paper from an angle to see where the masking fluid is there versus where it's not. If you have a white colored masking fluid, some masking fluids are tinted. But minus not, I see it at an angle to see where I've got the spots and where I haven't because there it shines after this dries completely. We'll see each other in the next part. Goodbye. 7. Leaf First Layer: Now, my masking fluid is dry completely. I just left it alone for around 1 hour. It takes time for masking fluid to dry and it's important to wait till then. But once it's dry, we go in with the French Altra Marine and the bismathyellow onto this painting to paint the darkest areas of the paper where the shadows are. I have my French Altra Marine and both yellow and mixing green, something you could do using yellow and blue. And that's what I'm going to do here. I'm going to mix a lighter green and a darker green. For my lighter green, I have lesser amount of ultramarine blue. For the darker green, there's more ultramarine blue. The lighter green also has more besmath yellow in it. Whereas the darker green will have lesser bsmath yellow in it. More yellow. The brighter the green, more blue, the darker the green. I take my bsmothyellow and mix it in. Now there I have a natural looking green color and now makes the darker green in the next. Well, I think this is not dark enough, the darker ones, so I'm going to put some more ultra marine in it to increase the total value. That's about right, and it's too dry, just mix some water into it. We don't want watery mix. We want a creamy mix of these two colors. They won't move too much on the paper when we wet the paper, but also won't leave hard lines because we're going to do this wet into the areas of a leaf that I'm looking at. So I study it for some time before laying down my green wet on dry. I would recommend that for this lesson and all the following lessons, you watch the entire lesson completely before attempting it on your own painting. And carefully observe what I'm doing before doing it yourself. What I'm doing here is that I'm laying down my greens at the place where I see the shadow and I'm softening the edges on the interior of the leaf. The way to do it is that I dip my brush in water, then dab it on the tissue paper and then run along the border, the hard border of the paint, once again, clean on the tissue paper to remove the excess water. And it's very important to dab it on the tissue, Then go in with your damp brush to soften the edges, dab it on tissue, soften the edges. I think I also see some dark areas on the lower right side. That's where I next start to walk in my colors. Once again, I soften the edges around this color because I don't want to hard edge smark at the center of the leaf go in with some more dark green. And that's how we do it. Now this first layer is done and we'll wait for this to dry completely before we return. See you in the next lesson. Goodbye. 8. Leaf Second Layer: Welcome back. Now this is completely dry and we are going to prepare some mixes of paints. And the green that we created in the last part, or you could mix more green using French ultramarine and bsmoth yellow. We are going to use this mix to paint the leave we go section by section. Now I start with the top left section of the leave. These sections are separated by the veins. I paint sections but not adjacent ones. That's because I don't want the color bleeding from one section to the other. Violet still wet. I painted a section, then painted another, which has no borders in common with the previous section. Now you can observe the leaf closely and see where the darks are and where the lights are and lay your colors down accordingly. Wherever you see the light, lay down, your light green. Wherever you see the lay down a mix of your dark green and paint or just paint or even just the dark green. We do this for the whole leaf section by section, making sure that we do not paint adjacent sections until those are completely dry. I continue in this process, observing my leaf each time to make sure that I'm laying down the darks and lights where they ought to be. The way to do this, as you can see, is to first wet the entire section with clear water and then go in with your paints, because otherwise you'll have hard lines within sections and that's not something we are going for. If you feel like you have laid down excess pigment somewhere, then you can clear it out like so. Make a clean drum brush by dipping it in clean water and thoroughly rinsing it first, then dabbing it onto the tissue paper. And that's your clean drum brush. And with the damp brush, you lift off the excess color. Once again, where I see the dark grains, I put in the dark shades. And where I see the lighter grains, I put in my lighter grain depending on what I see on the reference picture. Okay, so now the left hand top section is completely dry, so I start painting the adjacent sections to the ones that I already painted. And because it's dry, the colors won't bleed. And this gives us a good look of sections on the leaf separated by rains. I continue to do this to all the sections once I know that the ones adjacent to it are completely dry. If something is not dry, I wait for it to dry before going in with my paints. Also, it's important to remember that we have masking fluid underneath the layer of paint. If you want to dry, do not use the blow dryer because that would cause masking fluid to become like a gum and stick to your paper and it would not come off later on. Do not blow dry your paper when you have muscling fluid. If you don't have muscling fluid, you could blow dry your paper between layers to speeden up the drying process. My second layer is nearly done now and I'll wait for this to dry completely before returning to my painting. See you in the next lesson. Goodbye. 9. Leaf Third Layer: In this lesson, we are going to do our third layer of greens over the sleeve. All we're going to do is that we are going to dark in any areas that should be, and that's about it. We are going to soften any hard lines that we create in this process with a clean, damp brush. Dip it in clear water, then dub it on tissue paper, and then soften the edge with that damp brush. I do it bit by bit for all segments, making sure I leave some white lines where I like the veins to show distinctly. Because this gives a nice look to the painting. At this point, we can see that our painting is coming together and it's beginning to look more and more like a real leaf. Even though we still have our masking fluid, we have yet to remove that. Going in directly with paints gray where I want the darkest areas of the leaf because this is the darkest color on my palette, with the largest tunalolu. This is how you paint in watercolors. You built your colors layer by layer. And the underlying layers, once they are dry, look much lighter than when you had put them down. That's because they absorb into the cotton paper that we are using. They settled into the curvices of the paper that gives a lighter shade than when we started for the places where the leaves fold. As I can see on the reference picture, I just had a dark mix of rose marder over there. Like you can see. I'm nearly done for this part. I feel just starting some more paints for at certain places where there needs to be roccochetsI'mene I'm going to wait for this to dry completely. In the next part, we will paint the shadow of the leaf and we'll keep this subtle in our painting today. See you next time. 10. Shadow of the Leaf: In this lesson, we are going to paint the shadow of the leaf. To start, I draw the outline within which I'd like the shadow to be. This I feel is important to do because whenever I do not do this, I tend to go overboard with the shadows. Next, I go in with my cement pickup and I remove any masking fluid that might have splattered outside my leaf onto my shadow area because I do not want spots on my shadow area. Of course, dark on these lines. I'm going to erase them later. I'll demonstrate a shadow that I'll make with just rose der and a mix of pins gray with rose der. Make this and then I soften the edges. The way you soften the edges is that you take a clean arm. Clean arm brush is a brush which you have dipped in clear water, then dubbed on a tissue paper, and with that you soften the edges of the shadow. Do this for other half segment of the leaf as well, draw the shadow, put in some more pigment, then soften the edges. In my final project, I have a much darker shadow that I drew later on. I could not capture that on the camera, but the process is the same, except that instead of Rose, do you use paints gray for the shadow? And that gives a much darker shadow if you like it in that style. The shadow is also optional. Most botanical illustrations that I've seen do not draw a shadow at all, depending on your taste. You could decide to skip this part. It's up to you now, I'm done with the shadow, and once this is completely dry, we'll meet again in the next goodbye. 11. Finishing Touches: All right, this is the very last part of our class and we are going to remove the masking fluid First, you need to make sure that when you do this paper and the shadow we painted in the last lesson needs to be completely dry when you're removing your masking fluid. Because if there's even a little bit of moisture on your paper, it will get torn. As you try to remove the masking fluid, make sure it's dry. The luminescent texture underneath the leaf comes to the fourth as we remove our masking fluid like so. This is a process that takes some time. And it's important to be patient because being in a hurry and trying to remove the muscling fluid in a hurry could cause damage to your paper. Take your time. Sped up the video quite a bit. I did not actually remove it that fast. Feel with my hands to see if it's completely off and anywhere that I can feel the muscling fluid both inside and outside the paper. I remove it with my cement pick up. I add some finishing touches, for which first I get some rose mudder. And I go over the edges of the leaf wherever I've lost the color of rose muder on the borders. Next I see that some of the veins inside the leaf have a pink issue to it. And I add the rose muder colors over there. I use my paint brush wet on dry and almost like a colored pencil in this part where I'm just drawing the veins in rose der I also intensify some of the colors. If you try to do this, this will cause you to lose some of the underlying luminescent spots. But you could get that back using guash like I do. I just felt the need to do this part. The leaf didn't look dark enough at places. I darkened it after removing the masking fluid. But preferably, you would have done this before removing the masking fluid. You don't need to do this. Again, with my white wash, I make some more spots, and these are good to complement the transparent spots that are beneath it. Some spots look opaque, whereas others are transparent. And this gives us a nice look. Add some of the finishing details. I could feel some more masking fluid outside the leaves, so I go ahead and remove that as well. I then erase the line that I had drawn in pencil for the shadow. It's okay to use a regular eraser now because we are not going to paint over this anymore, even if it damages the fiber a bit. That's fine. I dust off any excess masking fluid using a bone dry brush remove, anywhere that I can find the masking fluid still there. That's it for our painting today. I hope you enjoyed this and you're proud of the final piece that you've created. I'm proud of mine. I'm going to put my signature beneath this. You could also feel free to sign your painting if you'd like to get into this habit of putting your signature. Goodbye. See you next time. 12. Conclusion: Congratulations with your artistic vision. You have captured a begonias beauty in watercolors. As a final step, please do not forget to upload a scan or a photo of your work to the project gallery below. This helps me, as well as your fellow students, take a look at your work and provide feedback if you ask for it. If you struggle with any part of the course or have questions, feel free to start a discussion below or to ask my help by mentioning it in your project upload. I will take a look at every project uploaded while you're here. Please also leave a review for my class. This really helps me. Also, do not forget to follow me here, as well as on my Youtube and Instagram pages to keep up with all the watercolor ideas that I come up with. I hope you enjoyed yourself in my class and see you next time. Take care.