Transcripts
1. Intro to Expressive Brush Pen Florals: Hello and welcome to my Skillshare class, Expressive Brush Pen Florals. I am Kylie Bennett, @kylieinkentucky. I'm a lettering artist and author, a designer and a lover of all things colorful and floral. Since I began exploring floral illustration, my style has really evolved and the tools that I use have changed over time. My process has also really developed through a lot of trial and error and a lot of experimentation. And I'm so glad you're here, because in this class, I'm going to spill all of my process for creating expressive florals using my favorite tool, the brush pen. Throughout the lessons you'll learn how to create a library of simplified floral drawings, how to choose a color palette, use brush pens to color your illustrations and add detail that will set them apart from the crowd. I think you'll find this is all much easier than you might think. If you don't have brush pens, no problem, you can just use watercolors. I'm confident that no matter what tools you use in this class, you will complete the class feeling inspired and confident and equipped to create beautiful, expressive floral illustrations.
2. Lesson 1: Suggested Tools: Now, I'm going to go over what tools you might want to have on hand throughout the class. But please remember that these are not a requirement and whatever you have you can easily work with. My first disclaimer, and I'll say this throughout the class, is that I'm using Tombow Dual Brush Pens as watercolors. I have the entire 96 set of Tombow Dual Brush Pens. For me, this is like having a set of 96 watercolors. But if you don't have these, you can use just a regular watercolor set. I'm not going to be using these in class, but I like to use these exactly the same way to corrugate floral illustrations. I'm just going to put this aside, but just know that anytime I say watercolors throughout the class, I'm talking about these, but these are an equal replacement. You'll want to have some dual brush pens to use as watercolors on hand. I'm going to be using probably, I don't know yet, because we're going to pick out our colors as we go. But I'll probably use, I would say 6-10 different Tombow Dual Brush Pens. We'll talk about how you can find variety in whatever collection you have as we move forward. But you'll want to have those. You'll also want to have just your basic writing utensils. A pencil for sketching, I've got an ink pen that you might find helpful, once again, optional, got a paintbrush to use for applying the color, but you could also use a water brush, and then you'll need an eraser. You'll also want to have a pallet or something to hold your colors as you're using them. This is a super cute little watercolor palette that a friend gave me that I'm going to be using. But you could easily just use a little dish or something that you have in your cabinet, in your kitchen. I found this one at Goodwill and it works great, because since we're using watercolors, you can use water to wipe off any surface that you use. You could also use a laminated sheet of some sort, a plastic placemat, a plastic baggie even works, just as long as it's a smooth, slick surface. I also have watercolor paper and regular paper. You'll need regular paper for sketching out and creating your floral illustrations, but you'll need watercolor paper for your final projects that you create. I have some pieces of scrap Watercolor papers set off to the side because these are what we're going to use when we're figuring out our color palettes and switching our watercolors. I also have my art journal here because you're going to see, but I really suggest creating a little library of illustrations that you can work from. This is what mine looks like. You might want to have something like that on hand as well, to keep all of your notes from this class. Lastly, you will need a paper towel for blotting your paint brush off and some water. That's all you need. Let's go ahead and move on to the next lesson.
3. Lesson 2: Create A Collection of Floral Drawings: For this lesson, all you need is pencil and some paper or an art journal or a notebook. We're going to be creating a collection of floral shapes and designs. You'll learn how to create simplified illustrations. You could even look at them as being doodles. Basically, all this means is that we're going to create designs that are recognizable as flowers, but they aren't hyper realistic. I think the simpler they are and the less realistic they are actually is better. I'm not going to be using any reference photos for this class, but if you're feeling stumped and lacking inspiration and you want to create your own unique floral designs. All you have to do is find some reference photos online. I've actually used supermarket bouquets of flowers before to get some inspiration, but it's not necessary, because you'll see we really are going to be making just some basic shapes. Then adding details to them to make them look a little bit more like flowers. I've got my art journal here open to a blank page. Let's just start brainstorming some ideas for simple flowers. The key is to remember that we are not trying to over-complicate things. If we want to keep it really simple, we can just start with a circle. I'm just going to start with a circle. Once again, does not have to be perfect. In fact, probably looks way better if it's not. Let's go ahead and add a stem to this just like a normal flower. Then I'm going to add some really simple leaves. They're going to be going in alternating order up and down the stem. You would not see a flower that has these perfect little alternating leaves going up the stem, but that's okay. The point is not realism. The point is a recognizable flower shape that's cute and fun and brings joy. That's where the expressive part of this class comes in. We want everything we do to bring us happiness and joy and be queued in simple and fun. I'm just going to draw like a little center to the flower. Then draw some lines that sort of extend outward and these are the details that are so much fun to create. When you're thinking of these really simple floral illustrations. I might add some lines to the center of my leaves. There you go. That's the first flower illustration. You could also change this up by creating something that looks really similar except giving this flower a little bit more of a rounded shape. Then we'll do maybe a larger center here. Then add these lines that go outward and instead of giving this one a stem, we can go ahead and draw our leaves out on either side here you can do a little set of two, or you could have added them anywhere around here. Let's think about some more floral shapes we can do. I love to add a lot of greenery into my floral illustrations. For me, I'll usually just do a couple of really simple leaf designs. You could give these little stem or they could just be the stand alone leaves. You can do some round ones. Give those some detail. These are really wonderful filler. Just like in a real flower arrangement. You have greenery that serves as filler. We're going to have greenery that serves as this filler in our illustrations as well. If you wanted to do a little bit more of a complicated greenery, do some curving line and then we'll just draw our little round leaves out here to the side. Finish it on top and then just give that a little bit of detail too. We'll also do a bunching. Once again, I don't even know if I would like all of these when it comes time to sketch our layout, but it's important to get all of your ideas down as many as possible so that you have a lot of options. Let's go with another circle shape here, let's move over to this page, I do circle like this. I'm going to add some leaves here underneath. I'm going to give that a curvy stem. Then I'm just going to add some dots. Maybe some little things that come out here. Once again, I have no idea if this is a real flower or what, but it looks cute and I like it. Start circle here and let's do some more traditional petals that you might see. Then add a really simple stem. Maybe do some little things like this. So I'm just going to go ahead and sketch there some more flower designs and I'll speed this up, but you can watch and follow along with me or try to create your own floral designs. When thinking about creating your collection, it's important that you have a lot of variety in not only type of flower, but also in height. You want to have some tall flowers that you can kind of add in like this or maybe something like this doodle that I was doing the other day that adds a little bit of height. I'll also have this really tall flowering that I like to add into. It's also good to think about flowers that you can bunch together. One of my favorites, simple flowers to draw is something like this. Just a circle with a little circle in there and you can just group these together a little bit like what you might find. It reminds me of something you might see in a field somewhere. It just adds a little bit of interests and something a little bit different to your illustration. I think we've got enough here to go on and start and because this is my art journal. I want to make sure I preserve all these illustrations. I am going to quickly go over this with my ink pin and then erase the pencil marks below. I'm just going to speed through that real fast. Now I have actually, four filled pages of floral illustrations that are really simple that I can add to any drawings that I'm doing. I like to do this because if I already have a reference of things that I've created that I can look back at when I'm illustrating. I don't have to look to Pinterest or Instagram for inspiration that another artist has done. This really has helped my style evolve and also to stay consistent in my style too. I highly recommend keeping your sketches somewhere where you can look back at them. Let's go on and move on to the next lesson.
4. Lesson 3: Sketch Your Layouts: In this lesson, we are sketching out our arrangement. All you need for this is your reference, the sketches that we just created, a pencil and then some watercolor paper because we're going to be sketching right on to the final piece of paper that we use. There are several ways that we can sketch out an arrangement. We can create a flat lay type of layout where the flowers are placed on the paper in a nice little puzzle piece arrangement. However, you can also create a bouquet style of arrangement. If you're a littering artist, you can also try making a wreath of florals around your lettering. But today we're only going to work on a flat lay and bouquet style arrangement. Let's get started with the flat lay, and go ahead and open up my art journal to my reference pages. We'll start with the ones we drew. I'm going to set those to the side. I'm going to grab a sheet of watercolor paper as well. Before we begin drawing, I want you to make note that we will not be going heavy on the pencil sketch because we're going to need to erase the pencil marks after we lay our paint down. Just be really gentle when you're sketching. Remember that you can always start over again. It's not a big deal if you mess up on your sketch and it doesn't erase properly or whatever. The goal is simply just to start trying things, and testing things out and get comfortable with the process. Since this is the more organic flat lay setup, I am just going to start working from the middle of the paper. I usually only like to do a circle on the center of the paper, but you could do this in any shape you want it. It would be gorgeous if you did all this within a heart or within a letter maybe, or you could just fill up the entire page, but I'm just going to start working from the center. I love this little guy right here. I'm just going to start sketching that out. You might not be able to see my sketches because I'm going to be really easy with my pencil, so I don't make very heavy marks. Since I did a flower, I'm going to go ahead and do a leaf next. This flower was on the longer side. Maybe my leaf is going to be a shorter leaf because I want to alternate the shape and size. Make sure that I have variety and then I have balance which is really important when creating flat lays like this. Since I have this nice little space here, I'm going to do one of my circle flowers, the really simple ones. I'm going to just gesturally sketch out my detail just so I know when I'm painting. Down here feels like a good place to do a grouping. I'm going to go ahead and add that in. I like to work fast because A, I'm impatient and, B, I just think it's fun when you don't think about it is so hard because oftentimes that's what can trip us up, is when we really start thinking way too hard about how we think things are supposed to look. I think we need some more greenery. We need some filler greenery that can take up some of this space. I'm going to draw one of my longer leaves right here. I don't know which one. Think we only have enough room really for one of these. If you feel like there's an area that needs a little bit of something, you can easily draw in a little leaf like that to add in some filler in a place where you feel it's missing something. What do we want to put here? I think I'm going to do one of these flowers that has the more traditional looking petals. Some more greenery right here, I might try to do like that and a little filler flower to take up some of the space. I've got everything not really balanced as far as the shape goes. I'm going to focus on maybe filling in some of these, and filling in some of these. What I'm filling right here is I'm definitely filling some more greenery over here. We'll try doing something like this. Maybe to finish this section off, just do a flower with some long petals that can round that out there at the bottom. Maybe another one of these filler flowers right here. I haven't done one of my big flowers that I love to create. We'll do swanky shape, and these big leaves. Lastly, I'm going to finish off with one of my tall sprigs. I don't know what the heck this flower is supposed to be, but it adds a lot of interest and fun. I'm just going to go in and add some little leaves and filler flowers here and there. We're definitely not balanced on our paper. But guess what? We can trim this off. If you need it to be balanced, just trim that edge off. You can trim the top and bottom off and it'll look great. This is going to serve as our flat lay arrangement. Now, I want to show you about creating a bouquet. Let's grab a fresh sheet of watercolor paper. Bouquets seem pretty intimidating, and they don't have to be. They are a little bit trickier than just a little organic flat lay like we just did. But a way that you can make it easier is we can start with an inverted triangle. We're not necessarily going to have our bouquet in a flower bag, like you would see a bouquet in the supermarket or at the florist. But this is a good idea of what the shape is going to look like. We can also start with our stems because we know that our stems are all going to come out at the bottom here. Now that we've got her stems drawn, we can go ahead and start filling in blooms. As a rule of thumb for me, I usually start with the large ones because those are going to take up space. Then like we have done with our organic flat lay, we can just add in filler. Just like a real arrangement of flowers, you've got your greenery that's filler, and you've got your blimps that are the star of the show. Also another thing, this isn't going to be a realistic bouquet because when you're looking at a bouquet some flowers are facing towards you, some you're looking at them from the side, some of them are turned away from you. We're not really worried about that. We just want to create something that looks similar to a bouquet. Doesn't have to necessarily be super realistic. But if you have the patience for that, if you have the energy, the inspiration, the skill set, go for it and I would love to see what you create. I'm going to do one of those flowers, and then I'm going to draw another one of my big blooms, and we can actually overlap them. It doesn't have to be totally perfect. This one, I'm going to decide that this stem is there, and then my leaf for this flower is going to be right there. Then maybe let's do one more right here. That's a big flower, and then we'll start filling in everything. You just pick which stem you want to be for that flower. That way you can go ahead and add some little leaves to it. Now that we've got our three main flowers or you could do four, you could even just do two. We want to add some filler, and we also want to add a little bit of interests because in a bouquet you might have a little something that's hanging out at the top here. We'll just do one of our little unknown flowers. None of these flowers are accurate to real life, but that's okay. Then we might have maybe just some greenery that's just poking out here at the top, so we want to add that in and you also might have some peeking out here on the sides too. I just add some of that in there. Then we can go in here and maybe add over top just some filler flowers right in here. Maybe we have a couple pedals peeking up behind this. Really, it's all about just filling in with flowers that can help create the shapes that you are going for. I think that's pretty good. We don't have to overdo it. I think that's what always threw me off about creating a bouquet of flowers before my own illustration was that I really tried to reinvent the wheel, and that's simply just not necessary. I'm going to go ahead and erase some of these pencil marks from our triangle shape that we did. But you can leave them because we are going to be painting over them. We've got our two flat lay, so I'm going to go ahead and move on to the next lesson where we're going to be picking out color palettes for both of these. I'll walk you through how to use Tombow dual brush pens as watercolors, as well as swatching your colors before we start putting them on the flowers. Whether or not you're using watercolors or Tombow dual brush pens, you want to stick through this lesson because there is much to be learned.
5. Lesson 4: Choose a Color Palette: In this lesson, we're going to go through the process of picking out a color palette and I'll walk you through how to use dual brush pens as water colors, as well as the importance of swatching your colors before you begin. Actually putting color onto our sketch that we completed. Like I said at the end of the previous lesson, even if you're just using regular water colors, you want to watch this lesson because there's a lot of important things in here. Heller is my favorite part of creating any project, and I love planning my color schemes and picking them out and lots of people asked me, how do you pick your color palette? First I just want to say that it is not rocket science. I do not have a formula. I don't have any special skills that help me pick out color palettes. I honestly just pick what I'm drawn to and I make sure that it doesn't look horrible together, which is what we can all do. We all know what colors look good together and what colors don't. I picked out several colors from my set of 96 Tombaugh dual brush pens that I am drawn to, that I will use time and time again. There's a definite scheme already going on here. They're muted, pastel, feminine colors. That's just what I'm drawn to every single time. I challenge you to look at your collection. If you're a person who does use brush pens, you've probably slowly picked out colors that you're drawn to over time. Or if you have watercolors, you have what you need to create some of these shades by doing some color mixing. To get into the rules of thumb for floral illustration, I always like to have a couple different shades of green, so I've got a green that's a little bit darker. A green that has some yellow in it and a green that looks like it might have a little blue in it, but it's also lighter and more muted. If you only have one shade of green, as long as you have a yellow, a white, a blue, a black, you can mix up different shades of green. Green and yellow, would make this sort of green. A green and white would make this, a green and blue would make a pretty teal color. A green and black would make darker green. You can always do color mixing to achieve more shades and more variety. I'm going to set this to the side. Those are going to be my greenery and my stems. Beyond that, I'm just going to pick colors that I just plain all like from my blooms. I love this dusty kind of mauvy colors. I'm going to choose that. I've got a yellow here that would be pretty in the center of my blooms. But actually I think I want to go with a mustard yellow, so I'm going to grab that. This yellow, I like this a lot better and I think this goes more with the scheme I've already got going on. You don't have a mustard, yellow. You can make a little yellow and brown to make this color being really pretty. I love to throw in a neutral color. Once again, white and brown would create this neutral color. Then I like this peach. I'm going to have a lot of warm tones going on here. I love this color purple, and I love this color blue. That's going to be our color palette for our floral illustrations. Ultimately just remember as we move forward that if you're working with a basic palette, you can mix up colors to create a palette that you want. Also since we're using these as watercolors. They're going to be a shear or opaque as we want them to be. They can be really vibrant or they can be really soft because we can add or take away water to create different shades of our color. I bet you're working with a lot more variety than you think you are. Let's get into swatching our colors. I'm going to grab some water paintbrush. Got my palette and paper towel. I also have my scrap watercolor paper. I'm going to move these to the side. Just going to use one scrap here to swatch my colors. Then this is where if you've never used Tom Wu dual brush pens as watercolors before, this is going to be a real quick crash course because it could not be easier. You're just going to take one of your pens onto your surface and you're just going to color it on. I like to use the brush tip on it. That way I can cover more surface area. I'm just going to go ahead and swatch a couple of these onto my palette. I'm going to do my greens. I want to see how these greens look as watercolors. This is important, sorry that sound is terrible. This is important because some watercolors and some brush pens are more pigmented than others. When you add water, you can really see that. We want to go into our illustration knowing that information. You're just going to add some water onto your brush, tip that into your swatch ink on the palette. Then just go ahead and start playing around. This will also get you more use to what this feels like as well. Because they're not exactly the same as regular watercolors, but they are kind of similar. You want to make notes also about what you observe when you're using these because this wasn't as pigment it as I thought it was going to be. I had to do a second layer of color on top of it to get the shade that I wanted. That's good to know. I'm going to write a number two underneath that to know that I'm going to need maybe two layers of that if I'm not getting the exact pigmentation that I want. But another thing you can do as you can go in and just add more color at anytime you want. You can experiment with maybe adding less water and seeing what that would look like to still not super dark. I'll just stick with my note of maybe having two layers. Let's move on to this next green. It's gorgeous, that does have a lot of blue in it. Really, really pretty and I'm getting exactly what I wanted out of this color. I'm not going to make a note on this necessarily. I love that shade. Let's move on to our yellow green. It's pretty too. It's kind of. That's really, really bright. I don't know if I am loving this green after all. It's kind of neon. Here's how you clean off your Tom Wu dual brush pen ink. You just simply grab a paper tile with some water and you wipe it off. It is so easy and because these pens are water-soluble, you can get them on any surface and they'll wipe off with a little water. I'm undecided on whether I'm going to use this or not. Go ahead and wipe the rest of my ink off because I want to start swatching, for my balloon colors. That's really pretty and soft. I really like that. I can already tell just by laying that down that is going to be pretty opaque or pretty shear. I'm probably going to need more than one layer of this. Let's add some more color and say if we can get it wherever you want it to be. That's looking a little better, will make our note for two layers on this one. This blue is going to be very pigment it I think, definitely a lot of color payout. If something is a little bit darker than you wanted it to be, just add more water to it. If we add more water, we're going to get a lighter wash of color. Just depends on what you want. I actually really like how bright that is. I think I'd probably stick with that. This purple is probably going be pretty shear. It is. We're going to definitely need to maybe add less water to only use it or just do multiple layers. The same goes for this tan. But I've got something in mind for this. I'm not too upset that this is pretty shear because I think that can work in my favor when creating some of those filler flowers. Then lastly, this peaches pretty shears as well. I just might want to make sure to add more pigment to that. Now that we've swatched the colors that we're using, I want to let these dry because there's one more step to swatching. Now our swatches are completely dry and you wanna make sure that they are completely dry, which is so frustrating for an impatient person like me. But it's really important because we are now going to test out what our watercolors look like when we layer them over our swatches. I'm just going to go in and I'm gonna use the bullet nib on each brush pen to just kind of go over top of we've already done just to see what our details going to show up as. It looks gorgeous. The reason why I'm not using the brush pen side is because I'm primarily a lettering artists and I don't want to ruin the tips of my pens by using them on a rough paper. They're really not supposed to be used on a rough paper, but the bullet nib side, I literally never use it. It's a little bit firmer and thicker. I'm not super worried about if these get a little bit frayed. If you are just using regular watercolors, then don't add as much water to your watercolors and try using a smaller brush to add darker details over top of your watercolors. That will work just fine. See, this is going to give us a really good idea of what our details are going to look like at the end. This isn't unnecessary step necessarily, but it's super fun to do so. We're going to be adding things like dots and lines and stripes to our finished floral illustrations. This is just giving us a better idea of what that's going to look like. You can even use this as an opportunity to test out with different colors. Look like on top of one another. I really like how that peach looks like on top of the pink. But what is the pink look like on top of peach? The opposite of what I just said. I love how dark that is with the lighter blue. What does this look like with the purple? Love the purple and the blue together. Now we have swatched are watercolors, and we know how they layer on top of one another. Once again, not totally necessary step, but if one step. Let's go ahead and move on to the next lesson, which is where the fun of really begins. We're going to start coloring in our floral illustrations.
6. Lesson 5 Part 1: Coloring Your Florals: So we're back to our sketch and what we need for coloring in our florals is our paint brush or palette, our water, your paints, however you are using those in your sketch. The first thing we're going to do is apply a base coat of some soft color in. We're really going to get fun and textured and maybe even a little bit messy and out of the lines with this because that always look so good. And I'm just going to start since I don't have a lot of room on my palette with all of my greens. So let me go ahead and lay my greens down onto my palette. And I haven't really blocked out where I'm going to add the green but we're just going to work through it as we go. Don't overthink it. I'm just going to start on this top end and work my way down. Because with watercolor, you don't want to smudge what you're working on. So I'm going to start with this floral right here, and I'm just going to use my paintbrush to kind of mush that paint around because I like it to be textured like this. It's going to dry really beautifully. Maybe add a little bit more paint and dot that in and let that dark color kind of bleed out and make really pretty texture. Do the same thing. Remember that perfection is not the goal and watercolors in my experience, they have their own agenda and we're just along for the ride. And I think that's sort of what can trip somebody up who is maybe a perfectionist when they're using watercolors. I'm going to switch over to this blue color because I think this sort of clover looking thing looks like it needs this blue-green. And because I've got the same color green right beside each other, I'm going to do a lighter wash of color for these leaves so that there is still some variety and it's not too dark. Vibrant greens right beside one another. I think I want this branch to be brown, so we won't worry about that right now. I go back to green, and once again, to get that really neat texture, all you do is you just take some color and you sort of just dot it on and let it bleed out and do it something. For this line I'm only going to color the leaves on this and I'm going to color in the branch to be tan. So that's also an option too for some of your greenery to be brown and green. While this bit of greenery is drying, I'm going to set this aside and then we'll move over to our bouquet arrangement and I will speed through adding my green to that arrangement. Now we're back to our organic flat lay and not everything on here is dry, but we can go ahead and start moving on to adding in some different colors. So I'm working in two colors at a time. So the next thing that I want to do is I want to go in with my tan and my mustard yellow to kind of add in those details. And I'm working off of my notes too. I know that tan isn't super opaque, but that's okay And when I was applying my green, my darker green, especially, I had to add more ink to that. So just work off of your notes and remember what you wrote down. I'm going to just figure out what I want to be brown. I know I wants these little stems, some of these leaves and branches to be brown and probably, maybe that was right there. So we'll just go ahead and start adding that in. Again, I need to start the top. So I don't smudge my own paint, and I really like how that's bleeding, kind of creating that cool texture. I'm completely fine with texture. You might not want that for your painting and that's fine, and you'll also notice that I am working pretty fast and that's because I do this all the time. You might not be able or won't be able to go as quickly as I am going with the paintbrush and that's fine. You just work at your own speed and take all the time you need. I'm going to go back over so this kind of create more opaque shades. And this one's a little bit wet stills, I'm just going to be careful. But it's okay with me if colors bleed into one another. If you don't want that, then wait completely for it to dry, and let's just do one of these little filler leaves here in this tan color. And now I'm going to move on to working with my mustard yellow. I know that I want the middles of some of these to be yellow. So I'm going to start here with this one, and I'm going to color this entire circle yellow. I love this color. This may be my favorite color in the whole world. Once again, I'm going to set this aside and let's move back to our bouquet, and I'm going to speed it up again and add the same two colors to my bouquet. Next up, I am ready to add my blue and purple, and remember from my notes, I really liked the lighter wash, this blue with the darker on top of it. So I picked out these little blooms right here that I'm going to do a really light wash blue, which means I'm going to have more water than pigment. And then I'm going to add the darker blue on top when we do our details. So I think that's a little bit too much water. I'm just going to soak up some of that water with my brush, dab it off on to the paper towel and try again. Easy. Okay, that looks pretty and I'm going to add the blue in a darker pigment for the center of this flower here because I love a blue center. And no, is it realistic? Absolutely not, but none of these [inaudible] really are so move on to purple. And I want these little doodads here to be purple. I think I need blue to balance me out in one other place. So I'm going to add some blue up here to this far. I'm going to turn my paper around so that I can. So when you're adding color, it's important to think about balance and where you're placing your colors. So I've got green pretty much evenly spread all the way around. Only got purple in one spot, which I could add purple over here to this little flower because I don't think I'm going to use purple anywhere else. So once again, let's do this. And don't worry about this part being perfect because I know right now this doesn't look like much. But when we add details, this is going to come to life and it's going to be really, really gorgeous. Okay. I'm going to set this aside to dry and do the same thing with my bouquet. Now, we're back to this. Isn't it really cool that we're working on two paintings at the same time. The last two colors I have left out are this pink and peach. So I'm going to go ahead and apply those down. We're going to have to add less water to this one when we create our flowers. I'm going to go in and start adding to this bloom right here. I'm just going to cover the whole thing. I'm not going to worry about only going around the outer section because when we add our detail, I'm going to be adding detail to the inside of that flower so it doesn't really matter if it's colored in right now. Let's do this one, and we're going to add a super light wash of pink to this flower here. Now what am I actually going to do is I'm going to leave this bloom white and we're just going to add some shading to it when we add in our detail. So I'll explain more about that in that step, and I'm also going to leave this bloom white, color in this little leaf here. And I'm going to leave the top of this flower blank as well. so anything that I'm leaving blank at this point is going to come more to life when we add detail because balance, like I keep saying, is super important. So it's good to have some flowers that are more detail and less than base coat if that makes it. So we'll finish up our bloom with this last step and then we'll be ready to let these dry completely and then add detail.
7. Lesson 5 Part 2: Coloring Your Florals: Our balloons have dried completely and we want to be extra, 100 percent, sure that they have dried. Because when you're adding details, like this one's still a little bit wet. When you're adding details, your ink will bleed if what you're adding it is still wet and it will not look crisp and sharp and we want them to look pretty crisp. I've also got my reference out here because this is where I really drew in what kind of details I wanted to add to my blooms. Then I've got my little swatches so that I know what I'm looking to do. I'm just going to start with the green. Remember we are using the oily nib part of the tombow dual brush pin. Or you can use concentrated watercolors and a small brush. For this one, I want a line to go all the way up through here. I'm not really worried about keeping in any sort of boundary because this to me is where that word expressive comes in again to describe these florals. They're just their own thing and I love that. It gives it personality, it gives it interest, it's unique, it's not something that you see all the time and I just really like that. For this one, I am going to draw my line through here. I don't know that I will do the little detail lines and these as much as just drawing this line through the center, that connects them to the stem. I think that looks pretty good. Once again, I'm going to do the same thing, I'm not going to draw an outline, of course you could if you wanted. But I like how it looks without. Let's move on to our other green here. Forgotten a place. I'm just going to do a little bit of line here. You could either color this whole thing if you want. I'm just going to leave it a little bit painterly looking. So that's how it like how it looks. I'm going to just draw a little line here. That looks good. Let's go ahead and move on to our blue blooms. I love how these look. I wanted to make these a lot, a light wash of colors, that I could add in my detail with this dark ones. So I'm just going to do a coloring in the center. Not going to make it perfect. For this bloom, I'm going to do the same thing, I'm going to color it in. Because I know for my swatches that I really liked how the peach on the pink looked, I'm going to add in some stripes, just like the ones that we added in our sketch. I'm going to add in some stripes that extend outward because I love how this looks. Then I'm going to go back and add even more detail to the center of that because as I'm working through this, I think I want to add in some black, but we'll wait and do that here in a little bit. While I'm here on the peach, I'm just going to go in and I'm going to outline these and then do a quick line of the center. Next, let's do our brown. Now we're going to add some of that tan detail to the blooms that I want to leave light. You might also have noticed that I have not outlined or added details to some of these and there is a reason for that as we go in and finish this up but I'll explain that in a minute. For now I'm going to actually just be brave and use the brush tip for this because I don't really use this pin for lettering. But I know that I want to add some sort of shadowy details to the center here. So I'm just going to use my brush pen to do that. Quick flick downward to add some shading. Then I might just quickly do the same thing for this little guy. Now let's add some of that black detailing that I decided I wanted to add in. Sometimes I use black in my illustrations and sometimes I don't, but it always adds a really great feel and finish. We're almost ready here actually to go in and start erasing our pencil marks. So we're really almost done with this. Now I'm going to go in and just add some little black dots here. Some really tiny black dots you could even use a permanent marker, could use an ink pen like I'm using, drawing pin, anything, any black dual brush pen that you have and it's totally fine to go out of the lines. I'm going to do the same thing here in this blue center. I'm going to add bigger dots. Just going to barely give this some detail. I'm going to add some dots to this to this, I'm going to do some stripes and I'm to adds some little hairs to this. I'm going to go in and erase and then we're going to see what we need to do to completely finish this one up. When you're erasing, just be really careful and really gentle and make sure once again that everything is completely dry. After erasing, there's definitely some spots that I need to work on because you can't tell after the pencil marks are gone that this is supposed to be a daisy or whatever it's supposed to be. I'm going to grab this and I'm just going to gesturally draw in some petals kind of represent what that is. I'm going to do the same here. I'm going to finish up adding detail to this little guy right there. I think we can safely call this one completed. This is what the organic, flat light layout of expressive brush pen florals would look like. I'm going to speed up through finishing off the bouquet using the same techniques that I've done here and then I'll meet you back here when it's done. Here are our final works of art that we've created using brush pens as watercolors and very minimal other supplies. I am so thrilled with how this has turned out. This would look so perfect in a frame, in a bedroom or in my office I think is where I'm actually going to put it. Then this is perfect to post on Instagram to add a little colorful inspiration to my feed. I hope that you have been following along creating your own versions of these, and I hope that you'll be sharing them with us in the class project section as well as sharing them on Instagram. If you'll skip on to the final words portion of the class, you can find out how to share your work with me on Instagram to make sure that I see it and also some other classes that you can check out.
8. Final Words: Thank you so much for joining me for Expressive Brush Pen Florals. I'm so happy that you decided to take this class, and I want to see what you create. Make sure to share that here in this Skillshare page. Share your project or tag me on Instagram @kileyinkentucky, and use the #ExpressiveBrushPenFlorals, so that I can see what you make and share it with the community. Also, if you're interested in learning how to letter, you can check out my other Skillshare class, Lettering and Color. That would be the perfect class to take now that you know how to create floral illustrations, so that you can create some beautiful things combining lettering and your new skill of illustrating florals.
