Floral Patterns in Gouache: Sketchbook Practice & Illustration

1. Welcome: Hello. I'm Mal Armstrong, a New Zealand based Illustrator, artist, and surface pattern designer. My creative journey revolves around patterns, whether crafted digitally or through traditional means. I am utterly captivated by the process of transforming my art into intricate patterns and then seeing them come to life on products such as fabric, wallpaper, or many other surfaces. Delving into painting patterns within the pages of my sketchbook has been a fulfilling creative escape. Each stroke of paint on a blank page is a moment of disconnection from the world and a reconnection with myself. Inspiration blossoms from the unique intricacies of every flower. Often, the seemingly peculiar ones unveil the most stunning patterns. My focus isn't fixated on achieving realism, but rather on the interplay of colors and repetitive motives. Gouache holds a special place in my artistic repertoire due to its versatility, boldness and its seamless integration with my digital style. In this class, we will explore the allure of Guash delving into various brush techniques and methods. For the final project, you will select a single flower or two from a photo reference and translator into a pattern within your sketchbook. Our journey begins with an overview of the necessary materials, followed by a deep dive into color theory and the properties of guash. We'll then embark on selecting our flowers, crafting compositions, and sketching our paintings. Next, we'll dive into applying the initial Gach layers. Then with the initial Gooch layers complete, we'll add our final touches to our masterpiece. As a bonus, I'll share insights into how to scan and convert it into a seamless repeat pattern in photoshop, allowing you to use your pattern on various surfaces, such as fabric or wallpaper. By the end of this class, you'll possess the skills to fill your sketchbook with enchanting floral patterns, whether you're an absolute beginner or a seasoned painter. This course welcomes all who wish to explore the medium of guash. Let's dive right in and get started. 2. Materials: In this lesson, I'm going to talk about the materials that we need for this class. So firstly, you'll need some guash paint. My preferred paints are these Windsor and Newton Designer guash I also use these PeboGu paints, which I find really nice and also the acrylic ban gosh I will talk about the differences between these in the next lesson. But those are my favorite go to, particularly the Windsor and Newton are my favorites. You'll also need a selection of brushes. So my favorites are these Da vinci cosmotopspin brushes and the D vinci Colo brushes. But you could pretty much use anything you like. In the PDF download, I have a list of all of these so that if you wanted to go shopping, you could go and have a look. The selection of brushes have really taken me years to work out the ones that I really love. It's something that will develop with your experience, your style, and your, your personal preference. Take the time to experiment with them until you find something that you really love because everyone is going to be different with their tastes and how they like their brushes to work. Now, for adding detail to my paintings, I use either these pigment liners, posca pens or colored pencils. These color pencils are fabric castle ones that work really well on top of guash, and I really love the colors. So I quite often use those. But yes, any sort of acrylic paint pen will work as well. Even gel pens work quite well on top of guash. My preferred paper is actually a hot press paper, but for this course, I'm actually doing it in my sketchbook, which is a cold press. So cold press paper has a lovely texture to it, whereas the hot press paper has a more smooth feeling to it. So this one here is a Strathmore watercolor paper. It is cold press, and it's just got the right amount of texture that I like. You might like more or less. It really depends. So that's what I'll be using for this class. Now, a couple of other things you'll need is a jar of water. Paper towels. And you might want to use a needable eraser as well if you're going to sketch in your design. So you need a pencil. And obviously, razor. This one here is Windsor and Newton, and it's great for, like, rolling into a snake and then just rolling over your painting to remove any pencil or just remove the top of it, so you can still see it, but you can then paint over it quite nicely. So I highly recommend some of those as well. So I've provided a PDF download with a list of all of the materials that I use not just in this class, but in some of my other paintings and designs. So you can download that. So now that you know all the materials that we'll be using, let's dive into a little bit of color theory in the next lesson, see there. 3. Colour theory: In this lesson, I'll talk a little bit about color theory to help you come up with the perfect color pellet for your project. Now, I've created a color wheel here using the three primary colors, red, yellow, and blue. Then when you mix those together, for example, the blue and the yellow, you get your secondary and tertiary colors. Then to add value, I've added white for the lighter value and then a tiny bit of black for the darker value here. Also have complimentary colors, directly across from yellow, you have purple across from red, you have green, and then blue and orange. Understanding the complimentary colors, tertiary colors and secondary colors will help you to come up with a really powerful and pleasing color palette. In my work, I tend to lean towards the tertiary and secondary colors as they are more suited to my style, but I encourage you to play with them all to find out what you like best. Here is an example of me using a complimentary color palette in one of my sketchbook paintings. I've used red with its complimentary color green. An example of a secondary color combination would be this painting here. Where I've used purple and green. An example of a tertiary color combination would be this painting here, where I've used orange with a blue green color. Tertiary are probably my most used color combinations. Another favorite way to use colors for me is monochromatic. I'll use one color but with different values. Here is an example where I've used different values of the tertiary color red orange with different values. To produce a lighter color, I add a little white to the base color and to make it a darker value, I add a touch of black or sometimes a burnt sienna. I've provided my color wheel for you to download or you can just create your own using the template I've provided as well. Now that we know a little bit about color theory, let's jump into the next lesson where we will have a look at the properties of Gosh. 4. Gouache properties: There are a few different types of guh. In this lesson, I'm going to talk about some of those different types of gouache and the properties to help you then make a decision on what sort of gouache you want to use. And then we'll jump into the different ways that you can use it to create different effects. To start with, let's look at the two different types of g. Acrylic gouache and regular guh are both water based paints commonly used by artists. But they have some differences in their composition and characteristics. Acrylic guash uses acrylic polymer emulsion as its binder. So this gives it a more durable and water resistant finish compared to traditional guash. So regular or traditional guash, also known as simply as a guash or an opaque watercolor uses gum Arabic as its binder. Gum Arabic makes a regular gouache reactivated with water even after it has dried, allowing you to rework and blend colors even after they have dried on the surface. Acrylic guash tends to have higher opacity and coverage compared to regular guash. It often provides a more consistent and opaque finish in fewer layers. Regular gash is known for its mat and opaque finish. However, achieving complete opacity may require several layers of paint, especially when covering darker colors. Acrylic grah dries to a water resistant finish once it's dry. This means that once it dries, it won't easily reactivate with water. Allowing for layering without disturbing the previous layers, which is really cool. Regular guash remains water soluble even after drying. This allows artists to reactivate the paint with water and blend or rework areas even after they have dried. Acrylic guash tends to have a slightly satin or matte finish, depending on the brand or the formulation. It offers a more uniform finish compared to traditional guash. Regular gouache typically dries to a matte finish. It has a characteristic velvety appearance due to its opaque pegments and matte finish. Acrylic guash dries relatively quickly, similar to acrylic paints. Once dried, it forms a tough water resistant film. On the other hand, regular gouache has a longer drying time compared to acrylic gouache. It stays workable for a longer period, allowing for more blending and manipulation on the painting surface. In summary, while both acrylic gouache and regular guh are opaque water based paints, they do differ in terms of binder opacity, water resistance and handling characteristics. The choice between the two really depends on your preferences, your painting style, and your desired effects. So it pays to really experiment and try them all and find what you like the best. So in this class, I'm just going to be using regular guash. So let's take a quick look at how to use it and how to achieve different looks. Okay, so I've put a little bit of blue gash on my palette here, and I'm going to show you probably the three different ways that I would use guash. And the first is like a dry method. So I just go to use a very dry brush. It's got no water on it and take a little bit of the blue. I haven't mixed it with any water, and then I'm just going to drag that across. You can see it's giving me this really lovely textured look, which is really cool. The second method is just adding a touch of water. I've now dipped my brush in some water, but I'm also just going to use my spray bottle here and slightly dampen it and then mix it in. I want it to be of creamy texture, not too watered down, and then let's paint that one across. Okay. And that's given us a really beautiful, smooth, even look. Then the last one is a more watercolor look. So I'm going to really damp this down with some water. Let's get this one to go. And there you can see it's given this almost watercolor type look to it. So that's one color. And depending on the amount of water I'm adding and the amount of water on my brush. You can get three different looks. So when you're painting, take that into consideration and have it play around with it and try and find the level of water that you most like. I tend to go for the middle one here because I love that opaque look in my wash, but you might prefer a more watercolor look. It just really depends on your style. 5. Finding inspiration: Okay, so where do you find inspiration? I got asked this a lot when I was doing the 100 day project. I often got questions like, how do you come up with a different idea each day? Where do you get your inspiration from all that kind of thing? So I'm going to quickly show you some of the places where I got my inspiration for the 100 day project. The first being out in nature. So every morning, I like to go for a walk with the dog or I like to go for a bit of a run up mountain that's close by me, and I am always taking photos of anything that I see in nature, whether it be a strange looking leaf or a flower, absolutely anything. I often also take pictures of just patterns on things. So it might be a pattern on a leaf, but then I might use it later on as a pattern on a flower. And then if I can't get out a couple of other places I like to get my inspiration from is I like to go to op shops. We call them op shops in America. You call them thrift stores to pick up old gardening magazines like this one. And this one. These are all New Zeland ones. These offer lots of inspiration in regards to flowers. You get really nice close up photos of them. So I highly recommend when you do visit the op shops to go and have a look. For the magazines or even like these gardening books, as well. I think I got this one for, like, $1. So they're really handy. There's heaps of really great inspiration in hair of all different types of flowers, including flowers that I probably wouldn't find around me where I live. So that's a really good way to find them. Another really good book is this one here called floorlegium. The book of Plants. And this one has lots of vintage type illustrations of almost every flower you can think of. So I often look at that to get right down into the details of flowers if I want to. And also, when I'm doing abstract stuff, I often take something from one flower and put it on another flower just to create a whole new looking flower that has no name. That's just the fun of just making up your own stuff, I guess. So, yep, that's a really great book. Another really, really good book is this flower color guide. This has actual photography of flowers. So you can have a browser through there. I got this off Amazon, The other thing about this one is it kind of gives you some sort of meaning for each of the flowers. So I find that really fascinating. And also, there's a little thing at the back, and I've been contemplating doing this. The little cutouts. You can cut out or pull out. I'm kind of thinking maybe if I put them into a box, and then each day I pulled one out, and that's the flower that I needed to draw. So there's hundreds of flowers in here, and they're all in color order as well, which is really cool. Then the other one other thing I like to do is I quite often just doodle shapes of flowers. This is my very messy doodle book when I'm just playing around with pattern ideas. And sometimes when I'm stuck and I can't think of anything, I will just have a quick look through this sketch book and pick something out and just paint that. So this is somewhere where I just play and It's really messy, and it's just me getting ideas out onto paper that I can then go and paint later on. And then another place that you can go is if you want to look online, I highly recommend having a look at Unsplash, which is a website where you can get royalty free images that you can use for your inspiration and there's no copyright on them. So you could draw them exactly how they and you wouldn't have to worry about copyright, or you could use them as inspiration to create your own illustration or painting. So there's a few ideas of where I get my inspiration from, and I will see you in the next lesson. 6. Sketching: Sometimes it's a good idea to sketch out your idea on paper first. I don't always do this. I sometimes just like to let my hand tell the story and create as I go. But in this instance, I am going to sketch out a pattern of flowers. I grabbed this image from Unsplash, and I will link to it in the description below so that you can have a look as well. Unsplash is a really good website for grabbing. Stock images that are free for you to use. There's no copyright issues on them so that you can just create anything from them. So I find it a really good place to find some really good inspiration if you're unable to find that yourself. So in my 100 day project, I created pages of floral patterns and Generally, for that, I would pick one flower and basically repeat it across the page. It's going to look a little bit different. Obviously, it's going to be the same each time that I like to just create these floral patterns in that way. To start with, let's have a look at our cone flower here. This is a cone flower that I love drawing, and I'm going to start sketching out in my sketchbook. Let me just bring up my photo, which has now disappeared. So this is the photo of a bunch of cone flowers, and I'm just going to use this as inspiration to create basically a pattern on my page. I'll leave that there and I'm going to start with the cone area here and just space them out across the page. You can go off the bounds of the paper as well. Quite often, I'll do a full bleed so that it goes right to the edges and off. If you're wanting to say, take it back into your computer and create a repeating pattern from it, I would in that case, try and keep everything within the page and keep a bit of a border around it. It just makes it easier later on when you're digitizing it into a pattern. I'm just trying to evenly space these out just to make it a little bit more even, and I think that'll do. I'm going to go and create some little petals. Later on, when I color this, I probably won't even stick to these leaves at all. I just find this is a good guide to make sure that things are evenly spaced out. You can obviously stick to your sketch if you want. And I might just put some little extra petals coming down here from the top. Just to make it more balanced on the page. We could even have a few poking in here from the side. And now I'm just going to draw some stems. And I might even add some leaves as well to fill in the gaps in between. I think it'll look nice. Okay. Okay, that's looking pretty good. I'm happy with that. I won't add any details here, as you can see, there's lots of details on these flowers, but I will leave that till the end when I've got my color done, and we will use some colored pencils or even maybe some posca pens to add the final details. Now, before we go into the next lesson, which is I'm going to use my needle eraser and roll it into a long worm or snake. Like that. Then just roll it over and you can see it just takes the top level off. That way, when you paint over it, if you're going to have very water down paint like water color, then you're not going to see the pencil. It's just a good way to make it not so obvious. I'll see you in the next lesson, where we're going to add our base color. 7. Base colour: In this lesson, we are going to lay down the base color for our cone flowers. I am going to use just the primary colors and I'm going to mix them to create maybe a burnt Can type color, which you can mix using the primary red and yellow and then just adding in a tiny bit of blue. I've got my yellow and blue on my palette already and I might just give them a bit of a spray and move this out of the way. And I just want you first to get a burnt sienna. I want to add some red and some yellow. That will give you an orange, maybe a bit more of the yellow. Then to get that burn Sienna, we just want a tiny bit of blue. I'm just adding in some more red and yellow as I put way too much blue. Maybe a bit more yellow. And then I'm just going to add a touch of white just to lighten it a smidge. Okay. I'm now ready to paint the area of my cone flowers. And I somehow managed to get some paint on the bottom of my hand, and I have managed to smudge it on my paper, but I'm just going to work with that and we can paint over it so that it disappears. Okay, I have finished all my cones for my cone flowers, and now I'm going to make a light color for the petals. So I'm going to add some white to my Burnsena now I'm ready to paint the basic shapes of the petals. Okay, for my stems and leaves, I have decided to go with a bluish green. So I've put my blue on here. I'm just going to add a bit of yellow to make it a bit of a bluish green, and I might add in a bit of as well. Grabbing a little bit of that orange. And I'm just going to also add some white. Just delight in a touch. Okay. I'm going to start with my stems and leaves. De with the leaves. I just noticed I have missed a little bit of petals here, so I'm just going to add them in. But in the next lesson, we will actually add some details to the cone flowers to make them way more interesting than they are at the moment. So I will see you. 8. Adding details: Okay, it's time to add some details to our painting. And for this, I'm going to use these fabricstl pencils. I find these work really well on top of guash. They have served me well for quite some time. So I highly recommend them. I might also add some of these fine liners, Maybe, I'm not too sure yet. They also work well on top of guash. Or sometimes you can use poscas or other sort of acrylic paint pin are good to use as well. So to start with, I am going to pick out some colors, and I want to pick out something similar, but a little bit darker to what I already have. So I'm thinking this one here, which is Pompeian red, and going to put out a few just to see I'm also going to use this piece of scrap paper just to look at the color and make sure this is exactly what I want. I may need to go with that darker one there. That one there is going to look good on top of there possibly. I'm going to keep that one out. Possibly this one, the slight pink, it's a beige red on for the cone detail. Then we want a darkish green or even a gray Okay, to put those aside. Okay, I'm going to start with this dark gray to add some details to the cones. And all I'm doing is putting some little dashes, keeping it really simple. Okay, next, I'm going to add some details to the petals, and I'm going to use the starker one here, which is the Venetian red. And all I'm doing is just adding a few little lines. I'm going to go back to the gray to add some detail to the leaves. I'm just going to use my needle eraser here to remove some of the pencil lines that are still visible. And I'm going to leave it at that. Now, it's up to you how much detail you put on. Sometimes I'll add a bit of shading and highlights. But for this one, I'm going to keep it really simple as I want to then take this into the computer and digitize it and create an actual pattern that I can then use a surface such as fabric or print on demand type product. So I will be showing you that next so stick around for that. See you then. 9. Scanning & cleaning up in Photoshop: Okay. Now I'm going to show you how I scan in my artwork from my sketchbook, and then we'll go on and digitize it. Then I will show you how I transform that into a repeating pattern that can be used on any sort of print on demand website or you could use it for licensing to accompany. I'm going to scan that in using my Epson printer scanner. I just want to check that my settings are high enough. Before I scan it, I'm just going to check that my settings are at at least 600 DPI. I have one already set up here that I've saved. I know the resolution is 600 DPI. I'm going to change the the document size to maximum only because I know my sketchbook is in an A four. I just want to get the whole screen, and then I'm going to save that close and then hit Scan. I'm going to check that before I commit to it. I want to make sure that I've got as much as I can to be able to digitize it. I can see with this one on the side, it's a bit blurry. But for the purposes of this, I'm only going to probably use a couple of these flowers and then turn them into a pattern. I'm not too worried about the ones around the outside. I'm going to go ahead and commit to that one and save it. Now I'm going to open that up in photoshop. You could do this in illustrator and vectorize it. But for this one, I would like to do it in photoshop. To begin with, I'm just going to crop out the pieces that I don't want and just extract the bits that I do want. I'm just using the crop tool, and I'm just going to chop out the outside of the page. I'm not too worried about the edges. I just want to make sure I've got this flower here in this flower here as those are the two that I'll probably use. In fact, I might use this one up here too, so I'll extend that up. Now, Photoshop does have a new feature called remove background. Now, I haven't had much success using this with paintings, but I'll just give it a go and see what happens. It's taken out way too much. I'm just going to undo that by hitting down command Z, and I am going to do this manually, which I prefer because it gives me more control out of control of the outcome. Firstly, I'm going to use this the magic word tool. I'm just going to click in a white space. I might increase the tolerance there to 30 and just undo and then try again. Then I'm just going to hold down the Shift key and just click some of these areas up here where it didn't select. That's looking pretty good. I'm going to go to select and then in verse. Now it's just selecting the white areas, and I can go down here to the layer mask and click on that and it's taken out the background. Now the reason I use that is because then I can actually It makes it non destructive. I can actually go in and add bits back in that were accidentally taken or remove more if I wanted to. You can use this to smooth smooth out edges if you want to. Then I want to apply the layer mask. Then I'm going to cut out the individual flowers. I'm just going to use the less tool, which is out on the keyboard and just outline around these flowers that are not touching the edge. I just want ones that are isolated. I'm going to hit command or control x on a PC and then command shift and V to paste it back in the same spot. Now we have one layer with all of those flowers except this one here. I'm going to repeat that for the other flowers that I want to keep, so I'm going to keep this one here. I'm going to keep this one here. You can see I just went into the flow there. I'm just going to hold down the shift, which you can see now the assu has a plus, and I can just drag around there to add that back in, and I think I did the same down here. I usually do this with my tablet pencil, but I'm using my mouse, making it a little bit harder then cut that out and paste it. I can now get rid of the rest of those. I don't want them, and we've got three flowers. I want to clean these up a bit as well because as you can see, this leaf is missing a few things and there's a bit of a mark here that I don't like. To do that, I use the clone this one here, which is on the keyboard. Now, if I zoom in here, and then hit the right square bracket, just increase the size. If I hold down the option key and then click, takes a clone of the place where I click and then if I hold it over, that white spot, it fills it in. You can see it's kept the same texture. This is really good for just fixing up little blemishes. Maybe there was a bit of fur on. Keep your scanner, which is always a problem in my house because I have pets and no matter how much I clean it, there's always a bit of fur somewhere. So I'm just going to go around and fix up some of these all blemishes, and then we will move on. 10. Composing a repeat pattern: Now I'm going to take my three flowers and create a seamless repeating pattern with them. To begin with, I'm going to create a new document. I'm going to go to file new and I'm going to create a 3,000 3,000 pixel 300 DPI RGB document. Then I'm going to go back and just grab those three flowers by holding down the Shift key and then clicking and dragging them across to that document. Before I resize them, I'm going to change them to smart objects. To do that, I'm just going to click on the layer, right click and then select convert to smart object. The reason for this is that I'm going to use the pattern preview function in photoshop and it works much better if you use smart objects. It also means that I can rescale them and they won't lose any quality. I will do that for each one. Now if I grab them all, I can use the transform tool, which is command T on the keyboard or control T on a PC. Then just click holding down the Shift key to maintain the dimensions and resize them down. Now I'm going to go to then pattern preview. If I o, you can see it's now showing what would happen if that repeated. Let's drag these around and create a pattern with them. I'm going to start in the top left hand corner. This is the blue outline here is the bounding box of the repeat tile. We want to keep everything in that and just going over the edge to duplicate, I just hold down the option key and click and drag, and then I can flip it to the other direction if I wanted to. I can move it up a layer. Basically, I'm just going to keep moving them around so it looks like a whole flower field of cone flowers and it will repeat seamlessly. With this one, I want to cut a bit of the bottom of it off. I'm going to go down here and select the ask. Then when I hit for eras, I can remove what I need to remove. But if I remove too, I hit the to the black and white over here, I can actually put back what I didn't want removed. I think I will leave that there. If you wanted to add a different background, all you need to do is go to the background layer and then go to layer, fill layer and then solid color and then click, and then you could pick a different color. Maybe a darker color, it's really up to you. Another thing you can do is add it to your patterns panel. Over here in patterns, you would just click on the plus here, give it a name. And there's added to my patterns panel, which is useful, if you want to then maybe put it onto a mock up. Then the last thing you'd want to do is actually export this as a JPEG and also save it as a photoshop file, a PSD file. Firstly, I want to save that as a PSD and also save it as a JP I go to file export and say that as a JPEG and then export. I also if you wanted to put this onto social media, I would create another file, say a smaller one, maybe 1,000 by 1,000, and then you can drag that pattern on there and then scale it. You don't want to upload a pattern that is the actual repeat to social media. Mature create one that is smaller and then obviously put your logo on it, and then export that as a JP. 11. Where to now?: Thank you so much for watching my class. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed creating it. So where to from here. If you want to commit to filling your sketchbook with Guash paintings, I've created a 30 day sketchbook challenge PDF just for you. So you can download that by just signing up to my newsletter using the link below in the description area. I also encourage you to check out my Instagram page at Melt Design, where I share many of my sketchbook paintings, as well as all things, illustration and art and surface pattern design. Thanks again for watching until next time Happy Pattern Making. Sea.