Flower Faces in Your Garden Sketchbook

1. Introduction: There used to be a commercial on TV that told us that nobody doesn't like Sara Lee, and that might be so. But I know for sure that nobody doesn't like flowers. Flowers are awesome, gift from nature, colorful. They're beautiful, and they represent good weather and garden time and the outdoors. Happiness, picnics and celebration. They also made great sketching subjects, sketching even fantasy flowers, lots of fun, getting to know the real ones well enough to sketch them even more rewarding. It's not as hard to paint real life flowers, you might think, especially if you looked up straight face. All that being said, I'd like to introduce you to some of my flower friends. 2. The Flower Floor Plan: When we look of flowers straight in the face, our first reaction is usually wonder. And, ah, what a beautiful thing it is. And sometimes if the flowers scented, our second reaction is that we have a wonderful experience of something that smells great. And if we're thinking about drawing the flower, the next reaction. We probably have his intimidation because their wondrous things and they look amazingly complicated and we just don't really feel up to the task. But this is one of those things that's deceiving, because underneath this beautiful complication in nature is the order of nature, and the order of nature is simplicity itself. And so if we were to study flowers face on, we will see a lot of similarities. And we'll figure out, finally, that there's an underlying plan and we can use that plan to approach most blossoms, at least when we're looking forward at hm. So we're going to take a look at that plan, and we're going to decipher the simplest basics of it and make a flower. Plans are like a floor plan for ourselves to start with whenever we're going to sketch a flower. So I'm doing this on the iPad because it just makes it so much easier for me to show you. But you're doing this in your sketchbook with your pencil. Where you doing it On your iPad if you want to. If you have one and you like doing them, it's awesome. We're starting with a circle. A circle is a wonderful thing and is at the basis of so much of nature. And yours doesn't have to be perfect. Mine is because they use procreate to draw it, and it has little tricks that help you. Ah, doesn't matter if you have bumpy edges in your pencil sketch. Oops, just that is mostly around it. Nice bounce circle. And we're gonna think of the circle at this moment, time as a clock and we're going to draw a line through it, going from 12 o'clock to about six o'clock. Watch what procreate will do for me and my crooked line there if I just hold it. See, isn't that nice? And our second line will go from about nine o'clock to about three o'clock. Let's see. I'd be drawn my own straight lines if I could tip this all around. But since I can I'm cheating. And now let's switch this. We now know, I think we didn't know a minute ago, which is where the center of it is, we're going to switch our thinking from clock two pi, and this is now a four piece pie, and we're going to make it an eight piece pie by putting a dividing line right through there and one right through there. Perhaps I didn't hold that one long enough. Did you get the idea? I didn't have this one dark enough beginning. Okay, so we still we know where the center of our circle is. And it's nice to know, because most flowers have a center and most flower centers are a circle. Sometimes, you know, border changed a little bit, but mostly based on a circle. So the next thing we're gonna do is draw ourselves a smaller circle in the middle. That wasn't a circle that was an oval. So that's going away. I'm gonna try a little harder here and there we go. Kind of minds off kilter years won't be. And so you're circles should be centered right around the center, and this is gonna be our flower plan and So you're going to sketch this every time you start to draw a flower the face of a flower and we're gonna use it, you know, And very light pencil. We're going to use it as the underlying plan to arrange. Our pedals and design are flower center. 3. The P Petal: If we're going to arrange petals around our flower plan, we need to know have some idea what pedals air like? And so we're going to run through a study of flower petals because they come down to just a few basic shapes and the first type I call the P Pedal and the P stands for parentheses. We all know how to draw parentheses because we're used to doing it in writing. It's how we hide a little extra meaning when we're writing something. But they're useful for a lot more than that, because if you draw the 2nd 1 not over here, like usual, but touching both ends. You have a flower petal. You have a P pedal. It's also many leaves and many things, but the P pedals probably the basic thing to build on in drawing flowers. And so I want you to take your pencil and go to the back, your sketchbook or on a piece of scrap paper or whatever, and just draw a bunch of people's, draw them fat, draw the long and skinny draw them every which way until you have a real comfort level at drawing this shape and then try make a row of them that are about the same size. That's tricky to, but with some practice and does. It's not exact but close to the same size. So working with your pencil in sketchy way that I would be doing if I was working with paper to, um, you should have a page. It ends up looking like something like this. Here's a couple that are the same size couple more than are the same size. Here's a really fat one, really long, thin one. There is a group of three just on and on. You can bend some over like this. One side's a little straighter than the other. All this happens in the world of flowers, but all of these air P pedals. So let's look at a couple of examples from the world of nature. Uh, what P petals look like when they're in a flower. This is a beautiful prairie, while flower called silent s I l E N E. And the common name is catch fly. It doesn't really catch flies, but it is sticky, the flowers sticky and the foliage is sticky. And so it got that nickname like a fly would stick to it, they could get loose. So however, and, um Anyway, this blossom is very simplistic. Blossom, if you don't look too closely at the center, which isn't as simple, is at the end of a tube, but we're looking at Are looking are flowers in the face in this workshop. And so this is what we see. And so we have five peoples in this, and if you trace over them, you see them very clearly. They have a little notch in the end on some of the varieties of the plant, and I'm not staying totally in lines, but you get the idea to P pedals. And here's another beauty with five p pedals in its construction. This is called Florencia. The common name is Star Flower. It's a really beauty. Um, you confined it sometimes at nurseries. It's a little more exotic. It doesn't just show up geraniums every year, but it's beautiful, beautiful, if you can get your hands on it. And so we're gonna look here at what we have, and we have pedal made of parentheses, even though that was a little bent. They are P petals. Don't mind that lying. That's because it's ipads charging. Well, I'm using the pencil and, uh, doesn't like that combo of my hand touches the screen. But anyway, you get the idea again, even though we have curves and bends in, um, that nature does it make such everything interesting? This is our basic shape of her pedal right here, which is to Princess is coming together. And here's a real beauty. No more. Five pedal simplicity For us, this is a go Xenia. It's a cousin of the Sunflower and of several daisies and even some masters are cousins. So a lot going on with this anyway. Again, what we have gone, but we have making up this flower. This bottom part here is still part of the pedal. Our pedals that are parentheses, pedals meeting at both ends, where their points come together and there's a fat one. Here's one that would have a wrinkle it at the side. Another word. The wrinkle. Here's another one. We can only see part of it, but we know that down here comes together and it's a parentheses pedal. Sometimes nature make little groups there that you know, weren't quite perfect, but that's where it right nature is so beautiful. It's another. We totally understand all about it. Let's add a couple off with our pen now. Very racer. Add a couple off P pedals right here underneath our title and we'll make our next steps on our on our page for pedals and we'll have a model in place. We'll have a reference and then we can print it out and always be able to look at it to see which pedal is the best match for the flower that we're trying to draw. 4. The T Petal: the next pedal we're going to learn to draw is called the T pedal on T stands for teardrop and a teardrop pedal is really easy to make because it's made out of three parts that we know how to draw. It is made out of a pair of parentheses and is made out of a circle. Easy, easy. All we have to do to put them together. So we'd first start with our circle and we draw the parentheses from the side, middle side of the circle till they meet at the top. We love them, come in together at the top, and then we get rid of the top part of the circle that we don't need. And there we have a teardrop pedal Is the water drops? They can be all kinds of things in nature. They can be leaves, but for us right now, they're a teardrop pedal. Now you can have a teardrop pedal in a flower with a little different shape by reversing the parentheses. And so again we would start. We would start with a Sergo, and this time we wished we would bring the parentheses from the same place. But we would bend them the other direction and this way instead of that way and have them still meet and still get the eraser and get rid of the top part of the circle. And you have that shape of a teardrop pedal, and you're going to find this on a lot of flowers as well. So go to practice page or the back of your book and practice drawing teardrop pedals. You can do it the way we did it with the circle on the parentheses, in the erase for the first couple of times until you get some comfort in Freehand drawing. If I don't remember to switch that eraser, I don't know. Freehand drawing, though. Okay, there's that shape right there. That's this one. And there's that shape right here, which is that one both teardrop both used in flowers and just come up with a whole bunch of easy drawn T pedals. When your practice ah t pedal page is done, it might look something like this, and that's what you're looking for. You looking for comfort like these look like somebody drew them. That was very easy with the whole idea, and that's where you want to get all the way from combining the circle. Uh, with the, um, parentheses exercise, you want to get all the way to just comfort and drawing the pedals. And here we have a photo of a beautiful African daisy that has all teardrop pedals on. You can see them right here and right here. The ones on the top layer always completely shows. So it's always fun to do them first because there will be little told, you know, totally show their shape. Ones that are behind part of them will be hidden. So African Days is a great example of tea paddles, teardrop pedals. Here we have a fan flower. They are most commonly seen in purple. But I like to get the way because I think they're interesting. And we can see right here here is the other version of our teardrop petal. And I would grab that again, that little marker I had and show you the shapes. So this guy is coming out of here like this and like this. So here's our to reverse Prentice ease and our circle would be right here. This is fun, right? You never really looked this closely at flowers to see that they're not as complicated this one again. Each blossom comes out of, ah, of a tube like that, but then each one has five of. Sometimes I have seen a different number, but mostly five teardrops that go in instead of out fat like the African daisy. 5. The Heart Petal: This is a bit of Ah, no brainer. But another petal shape is the heart pedal, and it looks like a heart. They can be lopsided. Ah, they can be pretty Even. This can be less of ah V and more of a circle, and they can look just like the one you might drawn a valentine. These edges, just like on the T pedal, might go in and sometimes go out, as in this one. So once it can take your pencil, go to the back of your book or onto a scrap paper and draw some heart pedals until they feel comfortable. Draw them with sites out. Uh, draw them symmetrical and not symmetrical. Draw them with the sides going in like that and like this because many, many heart pedals have a scallopers scoop right in the middle of the top. Your pencil practice heart pedals. Page might look something like this keeping nice and organic and round and plump and you go with with flower petals. You don't always want to go skinny. There's I'm not gonna see never because if nothing thing. But, um, mostly flower petals are nice and round e and fun. This beautiful heart shaped flower is personal ing. We're Moss Rose and they do looking off a lot like what? My wild roses. But my wild roses are wilder than that. Anyway. They have perfect heart shaped petals, and so let's look at a few of them that are just here really defined for us. There's one, and here's Ron. Part of it is missing, but we know it's there. Here's another one, and there's always going to be a little bit off Variation in the shape. You see that edge here? It was a little rougher back here. Here's another heart. Sometimes there will be a little notch like we were talking about. But anyway, this is just an awesome example of the heart piddle. 6. The Fan Petal: our last shape. That's a single shape, is the fan pedal. And when you think of a fan, you think of something that goes like this well, in nature is not quite as geometric. But what does happen is it starts and becomes very big. You could almost call it a balloon pedal as well, but it doesn't really act like that down here. It still has a connector, and so there are a lot of flowers that use that, and so that is a shape. We don't know what's happening. Oh, I couldn't grab the racer. I grabbed the smear tool. And so most of them that you find are going to be on the order of this. And so, uh, they might have a narrow neck that might have a fatter neck. They might have again the outside curve that goes out, or they could have outside curve that comes in more. But anyway, practice that practice a couple kinds of that, that's our fan pedal. I'll show you an example in a second. This is an annual vinca. It's one of my favorite flowers because it will take just about any lack of of caring and still thrive. I've even had. It's an annual and I've even brought him in the greenhouse. And I have a three year old right now. It's It's begging me to quit. Let it quit. But I haven't so far. This is a great example of the fan pedal Gonna put another layer on here so the green will show up. So here we have a fan that goes this way. And here is one that goes the opposite way. And these air fan pedals where the sides bend inward instead of outward. They also come the other way. Um, even in the same flower, if you look here, we have when the spending outward and that's okay, there's nothing to It isn't really, though, because that's still part of the pedal in there. But even if it did happen that you were looking a flower in the face and it had both kinds of pedals, it would be okay because nature is allowed to do that just to entertain itself. 7. The Composite Petal: the final pedal for this workshop. Um, because we're keeping it simple is a composite pedal and it isn't that simple. It looks like it comes out, does a whole bunch of stuff knowing our other pedals. When we look at it, we're gonna be able to tell what it does. It's a combination. And so at one scallop pedal that you might see would be a heart pedal. And then what? It's really God is a teardrop pedal on either side of it like that. You're not seeing that lying is back here, and you usually are seeing like some kind of ah, some kind of an indication, uh, crease or something that goes down makes it look like several pedals at once. And that's your clue. When you see that look that you're working with a composite, sometimes they're not is a symmetrical oris, even as that sometimes there like this and this and this in this, and then they come back down like a like a hand shape, almost, and sometimes they're like a double tier, so they actually are made out of two hurts when this happens. And trust me when you think that way is so much easier than thinking of a symmetrical set of ins and outs as this will be true in leaves as well. So this kind is a heart, and then it is actually sitting on another heart. But you don't see this middle thing here. So what you see, what you see is something like that, and there can be more hearts underneath it. It could be a longer pedal with more parts. Uh, can even do something like to have one more hard up here. But once you realize that instead of trying to draw symmetrical thing where you're going to go in and out and I won't try to have it, have it be not symmetrical but almost symmetrical. Um, your blood better off when you're just thinking that it's been just active hurts or heart and some tiered rubs or heart, sometimes a heart. And then the parentheses, the P pedal, so would be the one that decided this would be pointed. Sometimes the heart would be pointed the top of the heart anyway, all the same thing, and we can draw them if we can figure them out. I'm gonna show you a sample of this kind of pedal in life. It's funny, but this is an old photograph of mine, and my garden changes. Ah, lot every year. And this was at a time when there was a local nursery that always had new stuff. Well, there's little bug in there, too. I don't really know what this is. I was going to guess it was some kind of Xenia, but the leaves aren't looking like it. And then I was gonna think Dahlia doesn't really work like that. But who cares if you run into this kind of pedal, it's just it's a composite pedal. So I'm gonna get money. What color do we want to do? Blue, maybe. And then I'll make another layers so that it will show up and we will look for what we were just talking about. So on this flower right up here, look at this. Here is the heart, and it actually is showing that middle line. And this outside is more less of a teardrop in more of a p pedal because they want to come to a point. Even though this part isn't over here, part of the Middle Heart is coming to a point she You know, you never know. And then the sides air teardrops here. You never know what you're gonna find. But as long as you can recognize what's going on shape wise, it's just fine. If the pedals very, a little, it's fun, actually, Look at this guy over here. I'm gonna turn it. It's got a terrific point in the middle, on the other part of the heart part is round and then they're gonna fool us. They're gonna put a kind of a double pedal here on that side. So But you get the point here is that when you have your eyes open and when you have your peddle reference page that you're going to keep and you're gonna print out, then you are a great identify air of what it is that you need to draw in order to draw the flower. So we're going to draw some flowers now, uh, it's a really good idea to make your pedal reference page. I would I would give one to you accept that your style is going to be different than mine, and I don't want to to dictate that your pedals look like my pedals and so you do to practice on each kind and so just go back to we'll get rid of this and we'll get rid of this and we'll turn that back on. Go back to your pedal reference page, which will have these in the way that you draw them. And this You keep this around your garden journal because every time you see a flower, I really recommend that if you are going to do a garden journal and this kind of drawing and painting is a really good for plant what I call plant exploration pages, I'll buy a plan. I love it and ah, and I want a face forward of the flower to start with. That is three. Identify air for me, and then I'll go on to probably put the seed the leaves the bud on a page. But it starts with facing the flour and figuring out its structure 8. Drawing Silene: I think I miss saying this in the last video, but the first step with with all these phones that are so great and ipads and everything, the first step when you're gonna work with a flower in your garden is to get a photograph and get it as face on as you can. And a photograph is great because it is a working image. It's something that is holding. Still, the wind is not blowing it. It's not bowing its head. It's modeling for you, and it allows you to not only study the shape of what it's made out of, but the other thing is, it allows you to zoom in and see details that you need to see. For example, when you're drawing the center of flowers. The center of the flowers is yard gallery. There's all kinds of stuff that goes on in there. But we do that after we have our pedals in place, because often it kind of just overlaps like what you're seeing here. And there's no point in drawing that First in the Silence Center is really amazing because look at this here, our baby petal shapes on the center. They go all the way around there. So this is a silent and this is a, uh, P pedal. And so we want a place RP pedals on our lightly drawn penciled flower plan. So the first thing you do is you scratch yourself a little circle. It's segment a segment it sake minute anyway, Divided, divided into a pie that ends up having eight pieces put a center in the circle as a guide, and then this is gonna all get raced when we're done. So we're going to make P pedals. We're going to make them about as long as we brought our lines out here. And that is another thing to think about when you're starting out with a circle and that's OK. And that might be any size. If you have long pedals, you might be gone over the edge of your circle. If you are, you might want to draw another circle around this one lake. This kind of parallels. So it tells you how long you're different pedals should be because they're probably gonna be the same. And that's the case here. These air, certainly the same. Now, the only one. The first thing I'm gonna Dio because I'm gonna get rid of that circle. I don't need it, but, um, if you have it, you might need it. So, um, going to get rid of that? And I'm going to look at my pedals over here and say Okay, What? Just start with what, Joe, I know exactly where it's placed. And it would be this guy here with every flower. We're going to start with the center, not by drawing all the wonderful art that's happening in there, but by establishing its boundaries. And it's never gonna be a totally smooth edge. So not to worry about that. But that's where your pedals come out from. And so we want that in place. So our first pedal is apprentices pedal, and we know exactly where to put it. We're gonna put it right down at six o'clock, because that is where it iss So pedal number one. Okay. Is there one ready across from it? No, because this is a five petal simple flower, and so it will usually happen that it will be well is symmetrical, actually, but it won't be all lined up across from each other. So what we have here is we have a pedal here that's going to go right in there. And we have a pedal here that's going to go right out of here. So, um, I'm gonna go ahead and use my guideline here, even though that pedal really shouldn't be that far over around. Think you see how that looks. And I didn't make my pedal fat enough either. If it's fat enough, it will be all right. This one's a mess. That's all there is to that. And so that one has to be done. And I am going to make it a little fatter and just is long. Just about is its other guys. And now we have this, this and this, and we need the one here in the one here and there. Just a little south of our dividing line right there. So this one I'm gonna bring out here and this one, you know, sheer. After my pedals were in place about where they go, I went around my center adding these little teardrops, the two down here in the photo they were a good reference for me because for the width of the pedals, because the pedal on the photo is behind to them. So I use that as a reference. And then I used my little ruler to kind of make sure that they were all sort of the same with although variety and nature's good. Like we said, I don't want, like, really skinny and really fat. So at this stage here, what I would do is if I was going to use ink, I would add, uh, my thin incline if I was just gonna do paint, and I would just make a clean pencil line. But I'm going to go from here to painting this and then add those little telephone pole things because otherwise I can't pain around them and will make a big mess. Oh, and I wanted texture in the center because that does show on the photo to. So I filled my center with a bunch of little circles 9. How To Use Masking Fluid: I've cleaned up my drawing a lot, and I made a decision. Um, it should not put the ink on because I'm going to use a pretty deep color hair, and I'm gonna use our our technique of putting on a deep color and lifting, and that in itself is going to define my pedals. And it would hide an inkling anyway, So all I've done is clamp my pencil mass and just have a light, clean defining lines and the painting of these different flowers that we draw. I'm going to introduce you to a zoo, Many things as I can, and the first of those, what we're going to deal with in every flower when we do face up like this is a background thing now we don't need a background at all. So if you're feeling is that you just want to see that flowers sitting there by itself, then forget about the background. But if you wanted to put in a background, there are several ways to do it. And on this way, I'm going to use a method that uses something called masking fluid. Masking fluid is something like this. And it took me a minute to reach for it. And you see that the bottom is really grody. Here's why. Masking fluid. Well, even with the bottle shut, it will dry up and get all this. It's like rubber cement. So it will get all of this, Um, hardened kind of grew up at the neck, and you don't want that. And so a friend of mine online, um, just gave me an ingenious idea one day, and that was to store your masking fluid upside down. And while does that work because there's no air at the neck. So the cider end or political it where you got to get it from is not polluted with this girl. I've been using masking fluid for as long as I've been using Rauner color and because it's one of the only ways to reliably retain some white from the paper and the tools that I on his use our appellate to put some of the masking fluid in, and you never have to worry about, you're gonna ruin the palate. You're not going to run the palate because if you let it sit when you're finished, this will hard enough into kind of like a rubber. Um, and you can rub it right off the way that you're going to rub it off the paper later, which I will show you. But you can also just get it off of your palate really easily. So don't worry about where you put it in. I always keep a bar of soap and an old brush and a container of water. That is not my paint water. So I'm gonna put some in a little cup like this because when you wash this off into water, it pollutes the water pretty well. So I have some disposable water in a disposable cup. Um, you can get it out of a cup later, but you don't want to bother. So recyclable disposable cup is a good idea. I have poured a little bit of masking fluid into this palette. I have my bar of soap. A little bit of masking fluid goes a long way, so don't overdo it and was not want not right in the brush that you you should be one that's cheap, you know, and and ah, not precious. On the other hand, it should have some kind of function to it because, like If you use one of those splayed out horrible ones that putting kids paint kits or something, you're not going to be able to get this where you want it. And so it's important to have kind of a nice brush, but not a brush you care about. So maybe your synthetic grounds that get old and they're not behaving for you anymore, something like that. And then keep the same brush around for this because when you wash it later, it'll be fine to go again in the reason that it will be fine to go again is because of how we do this. So I have wet the brush thoroughly and I'm coming over to my bar. So and I'm acting like it's, uh, paint pan or something. What is doing is filling the bristles of the brush was soap missus, much as I can. Then when I go into the masking for the soap is going to keep it from totally coating the bristles. You come to your shape that you want to protect from your background and you painted just like you would use paint with the masking foot, so there's that pedal and move quickly um because you don't want this drying. I just went into my little guy there. You don't want it drying on the brush and you don't wanna have to dip into many times because you have to wash and re soap. So move along. And you know, the more that the fluid starts to dry, the thicker gets, too. And the harder it is for you to, um, to stay in the lines, which is kind of important in this case, because when we are done putting our background on what's left when we picked this masking fluid up is gonna be our flower, and we are going to want the edges of it to be as nice as they can be. So he's gonna be some screw up because it's hard to always be able to see the masking fluid . So you do go over the lines a little bit, and little corrections have to be made later. But the idea is to try as hard as you can to actually get this thing painted. Justus, if you were painting it with a color, I'm filling in my middle here, and then if you tip the book, you're going to be able to see where it is and where it isn't. And I have a couple of little messes here. I went out of the line pretty badly there. And Ah, the problem is, if you're trying to remove it, you can be in some trouble that you signed did that right. And it worked. Just push it with your finger. Maybe a little bit All is gonna happen is you're gonna have more white space around your floor that you don't want. So if you can see and I don't know there, I'm gonna come this way. You see that? It's shiny and just like water color as it gets not shiny. It's trying. And around here's is a quick process in more humid areas. Probably not, but I will be back when it's tried to show you what we do next. Oops, I forgot to say about cleaning the brush off so you clean it really well in your disposable water and because of the soap on it, it's gonna come off. Basically, all of the goo is gone out of here. It is not, however, gone out of here. You're going to get rid of this by any means just rubber. It's not poisoned or anything else. I dump it in the driveway gravel sometimes, or I'll just stick a whole paper, tell peace in there, and it will soak it up and I'll throw it in the trash can. 10. Wet on Wet Foliage Background: we will want Teoh paint are abstract bloody background in greens because its leaves and things behind our signing flower. And so I'm don't going to do a little paint prep here to get myself some fast acting liquid when I need to go for it. This is a favorite tool right here. This is a water bottle that will output one drop at a time, and you can find him on Amazon and you can find him, um, add at finer stores, probably at craft stores. I don't know, but I'm going. I'm used them all the time to add just a single drop or 22 different pate pans in my palette, and I'm going nuts here. I got I'm pre wedding, um, five of these, and that's probably overkill. But I'm just doing it so that it's there. And this is going to be soaking in the paint wells and gain a paint ready to to move to liquefy so that you can make the kind of watery consistency that you're gonna be looking for. A lot of artists use misting bottle to do this, but it's not my favorite thing to do because it what's everything and, um you don't want everything went especially like I tell I keep a pretty neat palette, but there's paying up on these rises. And if that all gets what it could run into another, well, or all kinds of things could happen. So all right, so what am I doing here? I I have a kind of a big brush and and picking up water to get the brush wet and then slop in here and just make some liquid pain of that green, okay? And I'm just kind of blotted off, and we're going to my next green. 1st 1 was kind of a graph screen. This is sap green. Daniel Smith Color. This is a very nice levi kind of green. And ah, this is hunters. I believe in ground. And, you know, it might be Ingraham Sap Green. I don't know. This is served. That's right. This is Daniel Smith. Serpentine grain. This is sap green by, um, Ingraham. And then we have hunters green, which is here, and that's an M. Graham. You see, I'm not even milk consistency here. I'm kind of going for a watery, so I have a lot of flow going on when I do this. And this is Ah, Daniel Smith again. It's, um, adventuring green, which is a real or green appetite. Yeah, bring appetite. It's a really, really dark green, um, almost a black green. So I now have what? Paint sitting and waiting for me for what I'm gonna dio. And what we're gonna do is we are going to the back door to practice this because you have a beautifully drawn flower. You put all the work in damask in the flower. You're going to get the hang of what we're doing in the background before you start doing it and make sure it works for you. Her background is going to be using a wet in went technique watercolor technique. Um, if you watched any water color videos, you've seen it, and it just means that the background of sweat with either color or plain water and that you add a wet paint into that in it it flows, they flow into each other. You do it just a little bit of blending. You don't need very much, and the whole thing works better if you pre what, and I happen to have a pretty green water hair there. You can see that. And that was from me dipping and going in and reading these paints. And so it since my background is screen that I have no issue with doing a free wet using green. And I can also tell where I have it. Now, this would be going over and around your flower. You just had to pretend because right now it's just here, and you want to have at least a light green a middle green in a dark green and, well, everything is nicer. What I'm gonna feed. And so my light green and just see what happens here. Isn't that nice, huh? And you see, just running around. This is the beauty of water car. Now, in our quick drying environment here, it's gonna be a little different than where you are. And that's why have you trying this in the at the back door? I'm gonna add a a little mid tone. Although the serpentine has some other little red bits going on gets good for texture But you could be using any light any middle, any dark green you want to. I'm gonna jump over the hunters such a little bluer. Once it's on there, you can mess with it while everything is still, uh, help it to do some of it spreading around on. Do you can wait a minute, because is it gets drier, is going to spread less. So depending on how much like foliage you Rana indicate course. This is great for doing trees and everything else, But right now we're doing the background in the garden. If you see color areas that you wish were more widespread, you can get in there and help with that wet brush. And finally, I'm gonna just put a little a screen appetite here and there. Um, because it gives some drama now, I don't want to poke it out. Look, And that's why I go back in and I just do stuff, and that's just a complete random I do not have any kind of plan. I'm doing this. I just don't want polka dots, so I'm just gonna get things going on, so it'll kind of blend out to nice graduations. We wait for this to dry and show that to you in a minute. So we're all dry here on our back porch and our test area, and you can see pretty well how this and we drive very fast here and so at your place. If it's human, you would have these dark spots perhaps, you know, flow into each other a little larger, a little smoother transitions. And anyway, if you like what happened, do it again or not. Let's say this. If you really like what happened and you have a handle on it, then let's go ahead and do the background behind your mask flower. If you don't like what happened, take the time. Now do it a second time. Do it 1/3 time. Change up this or that may be a larger block of the darker color, so maybe adding more water on the radio to spread more. Just make sure that you don't work in dry areas. It's got to be wet. If you go into an area that stride with another wet paint thing, it's gonna do a whole another number that you don't want to happen. Called a collar flower, it looks like really bad, so practice practice, practice when you're happy will go paint that background on the flower 11. Painting the Background: the pictures worth 1000 words. So sit back, relax. Listen to nice music and watch me paint this background way . - Now I'm going to switch to a water brush just to work the edge that I don't want hard, remember? Or water brush has has a damp tip and it keeps wicking Boisture. So it's a good way, Teoh. Just wash things into nothing. I also see that I want some darker in hair. For some reason, it just didn't get there. And I'm gonna help. It just spread. But the brush when this background was still wet I couldn't do this if it was dry. Okay, You let that dry for a little while and, uh, you see what happens? 12. Removing Masking Fluid: So I have my my very green background on here in my masking fluid is still on here, and I'm going to remove it and find out how many little mistakes I had when I do that, I guess this is a pickup eraser. It's like made from, like, what would be a crepe sole on shoe. And if you were working with a paper that's 100% continents really tough and you can just go in it, do this to get it all out. But if you're working with Stillman and burn like I am and most sketchbook papers, even the heavy ones, they're not 100% cotton. They would have a more delicate surface. And so I want to just get started with this very gently, just starting to lift the masking fluid from the corner. And you see, I've got a string on here, it kind of wads. Ah, and I'm not picking and it's called a pickup eraser and you pic with it. But I am not doing that. And then when I get to a certain point, I sometimes use my fingers to get some of it off. But anyway, gentle is the word and you're just getting this out of your way. Sometimes you can peel it like that, but not being harsh about it. I also want my pencil lines that are still under there, and, uh, this would erase those and then run your finger real lightly over where you've removed it. Because if there's anything still there, you're gonna feel it. And there we have the exposed flour. There's still a piece. I can feel it there against the greenback ground Now. When I started to learn to paint with acrylics, I was always intrigued by the fact that the teachers would say, There's an ugly stage. You're going to go through an ugly stage. Don't let it upset you. And I thought, Well, watercolors not like it, but it is. It was into this kind of stuff. You have ugly stage. I am going to have to go in with my pencil and just do some line correction. And you will, too, because if you're perfect the first time you do this on really shocked, I'm going to clean up these pencil lines, and a little bit of that can smooth the edge as you see right there. But there are gonna be places that I have to go in and I have to paint a little bit of green. And I'm going to do that with another method with our colored pencil, then yet method, which is not gonna wash back into all of this and make me more trouble. Now, it is very, very important that you don't leave at least in these books. But in most places, don't leave this on for long. I don't mean you got to get it off in seconds. But I have had some major disasters happen because I left the masking fluid on for, like, a week or something. Or don't let the book get hot when it's because it won't remove, it'll turn yellow, and it will be just something you don't want to see, and it will never come off and so very important to not wait more than 24 hours for sure to take this masking fluid back off. I'm gonna clean my pencil lines up and then I'm gonna come back and we're gonna paint this little puppy 13. Repairing the Mask: I'm going to show you, Um, too little cleanup methods. One to get rid of green That shouldn't be there and want to put back the green. That should be there. And the first I'm gonna do is the removal on. This is how you can often, if any of the pigment if the pigments not to staining you can also often fix accidents after the fact after it's dry. And this is a clean ah, water brush with nothing on it except Clearwater. And I'm going in to dampen that green along there and you know, So I have my paper told clean one very close by because I'm gonna blot it after I drew it. Didn't make sure all colors over the brush again. Try it again. And you want your touch to be very gentle so that none of the paper pills up and loses any of its surface structure. So I had I had not painted the max the masking floor close enough to the edge and had that green stripe. But now that's gone. And I don't see any other of that direction of problem. But I sure see where it's white were supposed to be green. And so I'm going to find a watercolor pencil that picks up one of the greens in hair. More than likely the darker version, because it'll look better coming out like at a shadow edge. My second type of repair is going to be filling in, and I have a This is a, um, chrome oxide green watercolor pencil. Its favorite castel of director Baro Dara Ray. I don't know any way. It's a chrome oxide green, and it makes a nice dark. And the first thing I did is I went in this little crease here that needed it, and I just applied to pencil drying. Then I barely touched it with the water brush. I'm gonna do it again here so that you can see now that's going in dry and very late at the edge there. I don't want a lot of pigment right there and then barely barely touching it and allowing it to blend away into this color without coming out, making big marks right here at this edge. I am thinking I will go take the color right off the lead and feed it in here rather than do a dry, wet kind of thing. Obviously, that's obvious. And I don't want that something to come back. I'm sort of pet it and spread it. Still not crazy. I need a little more. Still not crazy about this. So I'm gonna go a little darker, let it look like it. Cast a shadow onto the leaf there and see if we get away with that. We won't really know until it dries. Uh, I'm going to do that right down here to in the little space. The end of the pedal over here is gonna be a little tougher, because this wasn't didn't have any darks in this area, so I'm gonna have to introduce them. And these are judgment calls, and I don't even know what's gonna happen until I see what happens. So could be all wrong. You can go and dry very, very lightly, and sometimes you can hide things that way. But it still shows to me. So I'm not real happy, but I'm not going to just put the dark right there because I would love that. Look, we're But if I If I put it very lightly all along that into the pedal when I blend it with a little water. It might just come off looking like a shadow, but we're not going to know until we try. Not too much water either, because then you're gonna get everything. All these pigment particles floating around. We don't want that. That's not terrible. I'm kind of happy. But then you would say, Why isn't there any in the shadow in this area? So I just put a little there to make my story realistic. No, no, that's working for me. And I just have one more spot that I think is trouble. And it's a very white spot right there. I'm not even gonna read it. I'm just gonna allow that to do what it does, and I'm gonna do a little dry pencil right there. Now, I got to remember I did that. So when I come in with wet red pain, I don't touch that. But that's not bad. Start. So I think I'm happy with my background, and I'm gonna get onto painting my flower 14. Painting Silene: I'd like to talk for just a minute about the powerful use of color charts. I have a color chart for every palate in my life, and I have a lot of pallets of color. Different brands, different, you know, ones made out for gardening. I have. I even have a little guy. I keep it specifically for terra cotta pots. I have a stack of these for certain projects. There are some downsides to being a complete color mixer, and one of them is not being able to repeat a color. I mean, you can mix gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous colors, but if you can mix it again, a lot of people see my palate. Mud is so cool. Well, that might be true, but come up with it a second time. Like if you're doing a serious of illustrations, if you have to match a color. I guess my problem is I've never been a hobby artist. I have been a professional artist all my life, and my my results are kind of dictated. They just have to be what they have to be. So if you have a serious of illustrations and you have this gorgeous red and one of them. You better be able to come up with it for the rest of them. And so I have always been a person who believes in color matching by getting as close as you can with a manufactured color. And men do You're mixing from there? If it has be warmer, cooler, bluer, greener, whatever. Start with the best match you can get. So here I have the iPad, uh, picture of our flower, and here I have my main studio palette color chart. This matches positions and everything where my paints are on my palette. So I know where to go to get them and what they look like and what they look like. Dark, what they look like light. And so I'm looking at this to say what is going to be my best match. But I put it here My best match to this red. And the closest thing I see here is mission permanent red, but and it would be beautiful. I'm not sure if it's Rosie enough. Um, it might be a little too yo a little true. Warm. This is another bunch of reds. It is on another pallet, and I use this specifically for flower painting. And so I want to look here and see if something looks like a better match. Uh, this spiral crimson Daniel Smith is kind of clothes a little dark, though. Also, Quinn rose by AM Graham there in the corner. That is pretty close. In fact, that's really close. We have already talked about my dark to light watercolor technique in other classes. We're gonna go through it again because you can't have receipt enough to get it to work, right? This is a wonderful technique. It takes a lot of practice, and then all of a sudden you go. Okay, Now I've got it. So I used again my droplet bottle put a couple of drops of water into the crimson or no, Quinn Rose. It is, isn't it? Whatever that was when I chose and I'm getting a wet brush and I'm going in, and I'm gonna mix that water to make a high pigment color almost down as it would come out of the tube of this crimson. It's not cream, it's not even half in half. But it's not skim milk either. Like, what are water like with our green background wash. We wanted watery. This time we want to carry a lot of pigment cause we're gonna pick the color back up. So I'm just doing this till I get something. It looks like vitamin D full fat milk, and I'm put it on the pedal heavily carrying a lot of color with me groups I'm not seeing very well. But it's a good thing that I'm gonna be painting those little guys the same color because it doesn't make it as critical to understand the lines up there where the lines air kind of challenging. So a ticket more pain. So I don't run out because I want the whole pedal to be covered in a nice deep version on the color. Okay. And I am going to clean my brush and dry my brush on the paper towel and go back and softly with my brush and pick up and smooth this color. Now you can see in this process. If you're using a light touch, you're starting to model, as they call it the pedal. It's looking light and dark. It's looking like it has maybe some highs and loves. You don't have to go back and input stripes in sometimes because you already get this going on when you are doing your lifting. And so it's just introducing a little more damp moisture and then picking up the color and you only have a little bit of time. I want a little darker over here on this, said, You only have a little bit of time to screw around with this, and then you've got to get out, and if you don't, you'll pay the price for it. But I like that side a little darker. I liked it a little darker up here, and now it's about finesse, Really. It's about getting your brush nice and damp, but not right, even if the end spread out, that's okay. That works, too, You see, using the brush on its side and a little dirt, I might just bring out like a flower petal does. And I don't want to hurt edge. So I'm gonna work with that, and, uh, I'm going to quit. I'll done get out because the very next time I touch this, I'm gonna be in trouble, and I can see that right now. I do have, if I could see well enough Yeah. No, I'm good on that. I'm not good here. I'm gonna paint this over and lift because this is that little baby pedal in there and it's gonna work out for me. But, um, I'm OK for the moment. I'm gonna let this pedal go so you don't work next to something that's already wet and in this case, are pedals don't overlap. And so that's not an issue. But it's going to be in our other pedals where we're not this simplistic. But this in this case, you can move to the next leaf and do it again. I highly advise, especially if you haven't taken my other classes and seen this happen a few times that you do some practicing in the back of your book. One student ask a question. It was just not working for her. It turned out that her the paint that mixed that she used was too thick. It was more like cream, uh, than, like, you know, whole fat milk. And we all know those liquids. So you know the consistency and the people who cook. You know, your eyes that comparing with a stage of something was something else. I'm going to, ah, to go around and do my pedals and I will be back to talk about the center and then what we're going to do about those little sticky Oh, telephone pole things. I still haven't looked that up. You can tell, right? 15. Painting the Center: So here is my flower painted in except for the center. And we want to look at the center now because sometimes they're very hard to see. And that's what's really wonderful about the iPad, cause here's a picture of it, and you know, when we get in there, it's not all that how much detail? Because I wasn't doing a close up when I shot this, But we can get in far enough to see that if we did way temporarily with our telephone poles and stuff, it looks like black and green in the middle of their and ah, that's what we're gonna go for when you have something sort of weird to work with. You're not sure how to do it. Experimenting is the rule of the game. And so what I have here is a watercolor pencil in black. I'm on my back porch. Are we happy for that back porch? And I have done a flower center here, drawn in black, outlined in black and because it's water colored pencil, I am going to find out what happens if I take a water color marker and I lightly go over. The moisture is going to move the black. Am I gonna end up with any spots of green? We don't know. So let's see. Oh, like in it? No, Norris, I'm not like smush ing everything that way, because then I'd lose the green. The black would take over for sure. I'm kind of like just at this is Ah, you know, a water bear, a brush tip, A soft brush tip. I'm sure you could do it with a bullet tip marker to I'm happy with that. Let me show you a little more clothes of a view. Can you see it out? I like it. I like it. So I'm going to do that with my flower. Well, I brought my sneaky trick, uh, to my flower and did it the same way as I did it on the back door. And I'm going to show you a close up of my center. So is black, but he's got little hands of the green in it. So now what remains is the challenge of the telephone poles. Now, you probably knew this already, um, not really called sticky up things or telephone poles or called stamens. And I knew this a while back I'm a big gardener. But of course it just went right out of my mind. And I couldn't when I did think of pistols and Stamos couldn't figure out which one was which. So I thought I would just wait and calm sticky up things any way this is gonna be challenging. This is all painted, and probably what I need to do is used some kind of a no opaque thing to put these in. But first of all, I have to make a plan for where should they go? Because in the original photo there, it's a big old mess, and I don't think I want to do that. So I'm gonna go to the iPad again. If you don't have an iPad, you could get a clear piece of something. I mean, even just plastic from a blister pack and put it over your drawing and then, you know, practice with a Sharpie or something just to figure out where you want to place it. But I'm going to show you how to do it if you do have an iPad. So I have the photograph of the styling flower in the iPad. Obviously, we've been working from it. And so I just went in to procreate, and I put an extra layer on top, and I just drew these stamens and I didn't use riel color. I just used a yellow so I could see it and a green for the two things at the end of each one. I guess that these things at the end or what actually holds the pollen, which is kind of interesting, and they're pretty delicate. But I did not want all of those ones in the original photo. Uh, they were kind of they would mess up the look and so I just kind of put them, Yeah, with this way, this rate, this rate, this way, this way It was very it was arbitrary. But I'm thinking by looking at this that if I do it this way on my actual drawing that are painting that I'll be okay. I don't mess it up too badly that this was a bit sticky. I tried, um, my posca pins, which were supposed to be an opaque, um, kind of acrylic paint pen. And I tried it in the color that I kind of a straw yellow that I want to use for stems here . I wasn't getting enough opacity. And so I went to my to my white Posca pin small tip, and I did my all of it underlying in white so that my new color would show up against it When that was dry, I used a straw yellow posca pin to go over these the thread like things there. And now I have to decide what I'm gonna do with the cross pieces, which are kind of like a yellowish green. Well, putting in the, uh, stay Mons was not for sissies. So here's my advice. If you are sitting in a studio with a lot of mixed media, you know, maybe acrylic paints, maybe a little gua sh these little markers colored pencils and you want to fool around doing it. Uh, I showed you I started with white so that I could do something over the top of it. And then the color match was pretty rough. But I think I got close because if you look in a photo, they show up is kind of green on the end, and so I got close. But if you don't have a lot of resource is of that type. My best advice is to leave those out of here. There's something called artistic license and allows you change reality when it suits your purpose. And I think for any beginner Ah, it'll suit your purpose not to put thes steam un's into this particular flower. Maybe someday you can come back and do it. But it was beautiful already without those. If you recall, so it will be fine to be left as it ISS. Now, when I first started this workshop, I had this really, um, optimistic vision that we would work through drawing all of the techs of petals. We would do a flower for each and I want to get carried away. And I'm trying to give you a lot of art school stuff as we go. And so I came to realize that that would be a very, very long class, and you wouldn't get to it very soon. So what I've decided to do is make flower faces a two part class and this is part one, and in part two, which will be along as soon as I can finish doing by samples, we will draw flowers this realistically and we will cover everyone of the petal shapes. And then I will be giving you photographs to work from of some other flowers that you can go ahead and recognize on your own and proceed from there until we meet again. I hope that you will work on and finish your silent flower an example of the p pedal and uploaded and show us in projects. I will also put in projects a few source photos of other flowers with P pedals, and you are welcome to download those. Print those work from those and see if you can figure out on your own what the formation is of these people flowers and what the colors are and completed. Drawing either with no background at all or with the foliage background to also show us in projects or any flower that you find in your garden. Because tis the season right now, so you go out and see if you can recognize you might want to run through the introduction video again and watch the flower slideshow civic and spot the pedals that are parentheses, and I go on your own garden or to the garden centre. If anybody lets you these days and see if you can identify the flowers with the people and take a picture of them and draw them and show them to us, and then we'll move on to the teardrop and the heart and the fan and the composite in our next section of this workshop.