FUN with Viviva Watercolors!

1. Introduction: Okay. Hello, there, friends. Welcome to my very first class teaching with the Viva Watercolors. I hope you have your handy palette here. These colors look like little pieces of paper, but they are the most vibrant, wonderful paints I have ever worked with, and I'm so excited to share them with you. They're also super easy to use extremely portable, and they will create colors. Beyond your imagination, they totally blew me away. That being said, you're also welcome to use your own water colors if you have them on hand, or if you want to buy a different brand, that's perfectly fine. The most common kinds you'll find come in little tubes in liquid and you squeeze them out and add a little water or you'll find them in hands that are already dry and you add a little water to reinvigorate them. You won't have the exact same colors I have, if that's the case, and that's also totally fine. You can just kind of use what you have and adapt them to mix them together or whatever you need to do to make them similar to the colors that I'm using in the class. This class is specifically intended for people who've never painted with watercolor before or if you've painted with watercolor just a little bit, or if you've done it a whole bunch, but just want a fresh way of doing it in taking the ks out of watercolor because watercolor can be a little off putting. It is a little bit finicky. But in this class, we're really going to explore just letting the color have a little bit of control and seeing what comes of it as well as just enjoying these incredibly intense colors. So we're going to be painting from this photograph and We're going to end up with something that looks like this. It may look a little bit complex, but it's really not. I'm going to walk you through it step by step, and we're going to have a great time. Grab your cup of tea, your glass of water, your cup of coffee, light your candles, open your window, whatever it is that you want to do to set your mood and your area, and let's get ready to have some fun together. 2. Materials: Okay. So we're just going to walk through the materials for this class. So first of all, you'll need your water colors. As I mentioned in the intro, it's fine to have your own set. If you have some at home that you like to use or if you want to go out and buy a different brand, that's completely fine, or you can have your Viviva color set. The original set that you should have been able to order using the link for this class. You will need a couple of brushes. I only have two. You can have a variety. You can have more than that. I would recommend having at least one larger round brush and one smaller round brush. Round is just a term used to describe this type of brush, which is circular along the base, and then it tapers to a point. A lot of most brands come with a number. You can see this one says number four on it. But the numbers vary with brands, so I can't really tell you what size to get necessarily. But this smaller brush is about Oh, an eighth of an inch wide and the larger brush is about a quarter of an inch wide. If you get slightly smaller, slightly larger, that's completely fine, or if you happen to have brushes at home that are approximately like this, you can certainly use those. You'll also need a rag or a sponge to absorb extra water in color. You'll need a small jar or bucket of water. You will need the reference photo printed out preferably on photopaper. See how shiny that is. That makes it so that the colors are as vibrant as possible in the reference photo that you're copying. And that will help you to have a very vibrant final image if you have a vibrant reference photo you're copying from. If you don't have photopaper or a photo printer, it's fine to printed on copy paper and you can just kind of exaggerate the colors on your painting as you see fit. You will need a piece of heavy duty watercolor paper with it's going to be a five inch by five inch picture. So you want at least that big definitely a little bit more, so you can have a gutter around the image. But any size is fine as long as it can fit a five inch by five inch frame on it. And then you'll need a scrap piece of paper of any size, the same paper that you're going to be painting on so that you can see how the colors will go onto your paper before you put them on. You'll need a light pencil. I actually have a fairly dark one. This is a number two pencil, just a standard writing pencil. But you should have an H pencil. It says right here, H B right above the number two there. H stands for hard B stands for black. This is just a middle range pencil. Black pencils are the darker ones, hard pencils or the lighter ones. If you can get a pencil with just an H on it, 2h4h6 H, just H, that would be your best bet for watercolor because you want your lines to be nice and delicate and light and not show through the final picture. The reason I'm using a darker pencil is because if I use a very light pencil, you won't be able to see my drawing. I'm doing my drawing in a dark pencil so that you can see it. And you'll also need a ruler just to create the frame on your picture. A optional but recommended is a hair dryer for blowing dry your colors between layers. You can also just let it air dry or use your breath to blow dry it. It just takes longer. So it's up to you. Anyway, that should be all we need to get started on our beautiful flower painting. 3. Mindset: So this class number 1 is about having fun and just like you to kind of get into a good mindset before we begin the art process. Having fun, relaxing, and being okay with mistakes. Watercolor does have a reputation for being a little finicky, having a mind of its own and it can do that. But you also have a mind of your own. And if the two of you come together, you can have a beautiful relationship. Just make it a dance. It relieves a little bit, you lead a little bit. Maybe you decide when to kind of make it do what you want it to do. And other times you say, you know what, watercolor, you can have this one. I'm okay with that. So just kinda get that hat on and get ready to have a good time. And let's get going. 4. Drawing the Frame: Alright, so we're ready to get into the drawing part. The first thing we need to do is draw a frame onto our paper that matches the size of the picture. So this picture is five inches by five inches. You can feel free to center it on your paper or not. It really doesn't matter as long as there's a little bit of space around the entire frame. And the reason for that is if you want to put it in a picture frame when you're done, you would like to have a little bit of a gutter around the entire thing just to tuck underneath the edge of the frame. So this my paper happens to be 6.5 inches wide, which is plenty of space. So I'm just going to cut an inch off on the left side and start at one inch and then go to six because that equals five inches. So I have a little bit more gutter on the left and the right. That does not matter to me. And then I'm gonna go down the paper and do the same thing a few times so I can draw two totally straight parallel lines. Move up a little bit and I'll do one inch, so six inches. And then I'm going to connect my marks. And you want to do a minimum of three marks, because if you do too and one of them's off, it will definitely throw off your, the parallel NUS of your line. Here I have one is a little bit off, but two of them line up. So I'm gonna do this and see if that works. Let me just double-check everything to make sure it's five inches and it doesn't really have to be exact, but it does help if it's square and if the corners are totally perpendicular in order for before framing. So now I'm gonna go along those two lines and just make a couple of marks for five inches somewhere. But it helps if you line up your ruler like I did horizontally on an exact inch mark, or I could use the full length of the ruler. Am I? My paper happens to be 11 inches long, so I can cut in three inches on each side and know that the remaining space will be five inches long. So I'm marking it 38. Just kinda whatever you need to do to make a five-by-five square. You can also use a t square if you happen to have one that makes making a square much easier. And again, I know I mentioned this in materials. I will probably mention it again, but just know I'm using a darker pencil and I'm pressing harder because I want you to be able to see my lines, but you should be using a light pencil and pressing very, very lightly. What you ideally want is to barely be able to see your picture. That actually doesn't really apply to the frame because that's going to be hidden anyway when you put it in a frame later. But when you're drawing your flower, we definitely want it to be very light. So now we're going to get onto the composition, placement, and size of the flower. 5. Drawing First Measurements & Lines: So now we're going to get onto the basic drawing of the center of the flower and the first few measuring marks and lines you're going to make for the first few petals. So because these are the same size, you may have seen this in previous courses I've taught. If you've taken any courses I've taught. But I'm just going to show you a pretty simple way to replicate what you see here, here by some simple measuring technique. Just use your pencil. And we're going to measure and place the center of the flower first because that's where everything radiates from. So it's a really good anchor point, an anchor shape to draw from. So I'm going to just measure one side. It doesn't matter which side you start from. I happened to be starting on the right. You could do the top, bottom left, whatever. I'm using the tip of my pencil to see where the edge of the center is. And I'm marking the side of the page with my thumbnail on my pencil. So I have a very exact measurement of how big that is. And now I'm going to just pick it up, move it over and tip my pencil down to make a mark there. And that's where the side of that shape is. And I'm gonna do the same thing for the other sides. So the bottom edge, which I'm choosing to do next will be here. And now that I have a bottom and a left, I can either continue the same way I just did. I can measure the space or I can use my new marks to measure. So I'll show you that I have embark on the right. So I'm going to see how far it is to the left. And I have a mark for the bottom, so I'm going to see how far it is to the top. And that's my oval or how big my oval is going to be. And from there, I'm going to draw approximately the shape. An oval. Don't worry about all the little bumps and stuff. You'll do that with the paint later. This is just a basic drawing. It looks a little big to me, so I'm just going to double-check and make sure that's right. I'm going to check the other the other spaces that I didn't check because checking things that you hadn't checked yet is a great way to legitimize what you've done. No, that's about right. So it's just the shadowing and stuff that's making that appear smaller in mind, bigger and that's fine. So now a great trick for when you're trying to draw multiples of something. In this case, flower petals, is to do the ones as far apart from each other as possible first, and I'll explain that. For example, the North most and South most petals are the furthest away from one another on this flower. So those are a great place to start, or you could do East and West. The reason for that is once you get those established, it's so much easier to fill in what's between them rather than starting with one petal trying to get it just right doing another petal, doing another petal. What ends up happening is we're trying to judge as best we can, but we end up with too few petals are too many petals and they're all scrunched together and you have to erase and start over. Big caveat here that is, only if you care that it looks just like this or really close. If you don't care, it really doesn't matter. You can skip over this measuring part if you prefer. You can freehand it. It's totally your call. But I'm showing you this in case matters to you and you really want the practice for drawing a real image very accurately. So we'll start with the North pedal. It starts right at the top of the flower, which is, it's right in the center of that oval, so that's easy to see. And then I'm going to use my pencil to see which direction it points. It's not going straight up. It's tilting just barely to the right. And I'm just gonna take that and move it over and hold it with my finger and make a little mark. And then I'm going to draw a line very, very lightly. Yeah, I'm going to draw mine darker so you can see it but you draw your is very, very lightly. And you can double-check it if you want. Same thing on the bottom. The bottom petal starts a little bit more to the right, it looks like then the very center of the oval. And it tilts in this direction. So I'm going to mark that with my finger and make a line. And then I'm gonna do the Eastern West ones. So I'm going to pick one, I guess I'll pick the lower of the two. That looks like it starts right about here on the oval. And that if I put my pencil through it is very parallel to the bottom of the page, so it really is going to go straight across. This is where at least for me, I'm convincing my brain to copy what it sees, what's actually there versus what I think is there. Because what I think is there is a pedal that tilts down a little bit, but when I measure it, it doesn't tilt down, it goes straight across. And then I'm gonna do the one on the left. I'm going to make a mark there. Measure the angle that one tilts up quite a bit. Something like that. I'm going to double-check that. Yep. And your align loops. So that is our basic framework for our very first few measurements. 6. Drawing First Petals & More Angles: So before we proceed into drawing the shapes of the petals, I just want to emphasize at this point that one of the temptations when you're in a drawing like this, if you care about, again, if you only if you care about making it really accurate, is to kinda say good enough, I'll fix it when I get to the painting. And I just want to caution you that that that can be a slippery slope. So if you know right now for example, that your angles are off, take the time right now to fix them because it will make a big difference. It will eliminate so much frustration, so much erasing. In the end. If you don't care, then go for it. No problem. So we're going to go ahead and get onto the petal drawing now and I have the angle. I'm just going to see how tall each petal is by measuring using the same technique I did before. This one is that long? This one, my pencil lead is over here, so I'm going to mark it with my fingernail. Make a mark here. Is that long? This one? That lung. And the left one is that loan. Now that I've got the length and the direction I'm going to draw the petals and this I am eyeballing. And I'm just going to copy approximately what I see. Always erase if you're not happy with it. No big deal. So something like that. You can also actually, I should have mentioned you can check the width if you care about that. So on this one I'll show you, I'm going to just make a mark trying to center it. For the, I measured the widest part of the pedal on trying to center it over that line so I know how wide it goes and that can be helpful. It's just another way of making your drawing really accurate. And less guesswork. That looks a little round to me. So I'm gonna make it point here. And then the next pedal. It doesn't matter what order you do these in. By the way, that one's more of a flatter, shapeless, less like, more like a surfboard. And this last one, this is an illusion, it's coming out at us so it appears wider and shorter, even though it's not in real life, that's called foreshortening. You may have heard of that if you've ever done figure drawing, especially comes up a lot. This one is because it's so wide and it's such an illusion. I'm just going to measure the width while I'm halfway through the drawing. That looks about right. And then there's a really round part at the beginning, flat and kind of ends up there. So as I mentioned before, one of the biggest secrets to being a very accurate jar is drawing what you actually see, not what you think you see. So that's where all this measuring comes in and it's helpful. But you can take it as far as you want it to go. So I'm going to start drawing the rest of the petals. And you can choose whether you want to do angles for all of these or you can just free handed, it's totally your call. I'm going to put a few more angles in because I feel like some of these spaces are too big for me to just guess by I. So this next petal, which is pretty much the center one between those two. Oops, I forgot to make well, yeah, that's right in the middle throughout to make a beginning mark is pointing in this direction. And the length is there. And here, let's see. There's really three, I guess I'll do this middle one. It's kind of behind this smaller one. But it's really the most central between these two. Looks like it's just a little closer to that one though. The direction that way links. And then this one is very central to these, to the direction. This one's a little wonky x. It's got a wide left side. So I'm just going to measure the angle to the point. And then here I guess I'll do this one, even though it's very much leaning towards this pedal. But it's either that one or this one. It looks like the direction that one is here. Double-check that. Yep, that looks good. 7. Adding More Frontal Petals: So now that I've got the length and angle, I'm going to draw the shape of the petals in this one here, that, that one's behind, that little one. So I'm going to just measure the width because it's a little tricky to figure out how big it should be. And obviously you can't see the left side, so I'm just guessing where it would be. I'm also looking at the space like how far would that be away from this pedal that I've already gotten drawn in? It looks like about there and there. And I'm just drawing the full pedal even though you can't see it because it's easier generally to draw a full shape than it is to draw a part of one. And then this one. Oh, I forgot to do a length on that one and do the length. No. Going to be there. And I'll do the width on that one too. That's the one that kinda the point is closer to the right. So I'm not going to make, I'm not going to center the line between my dots. I'm going to make my dots, my, my right dot closer to my line there. Now it's starting to look like a flower. It's gets pretty fun pretty quickly. That's going to just lean over there and then kinda do something like that. And then over here, this kind of curving into the tip and dipping down little wave. I'm going to start from the beginning and meet my own line Parkway. I think I went a little far. There. Are wheel and last one of this round. That's got a little cool wave on the left there and do something like that. And something like that. Alright, so at this point, I'm going to start free handing the angles because I've got enough information here to tell me kind of where the other petals will lie relative to what I have. I'm just going to measure some lengths. So where do I want to start? Let's see. I guess I'll go over here. So measure this pedal right next to this shorter one. That's going to stick out to about here. And I'm just going to go for that. And you can go ahead and measure all of them and then go back and draw this point. Because you have all that other or the other petals drawn in. You can kind of do it in whatever order you want. I'm choosing to draw the petal here right after I measured it because I want to see it. It's pretty I'm going to skip the back ones. I'll do this one in the middle there between these two. That is, That looks like the tip of it falls a little closer to this petal than that one. So I'm gonna make my dot there. And then just kinda draw that in. So it touches this pedal surround or are on the right side. And touches lower about right there. And then here I'll do this one that's right next to that one. And since I have, I'm able to come out from behind this shape, I'm not going to draw the whole thing. I only did that over here because I didn't have another shape to for it to disappear behind. This one is really wide and it comes pretty close to this petal on the way down, but it doesn't touch. Just going occurs in Let's see. Do you want over here? How about this one that's a little bends at the top. So that one's going to be this long. And the tip of it seems to come closer to this top petal and the bottom one. Yeah, that looks about right. It's going to waive its way up, bend in, touch the tip, come around and then get very close to this one on its way down. Alright, so that's our next round. And now we'll get onto some back petals. 8. Adding Back Petals: All right, so I'm going to start here with this one. Why not from the center of the flower to the very tip of it comes out to about here. And just judging the distance from that tip, it looks like it does something like that. Something else you can do if you're, if you're not sure where something goes is measure angles against something that's already there, so I know where that tip is. I can use the edge of my pencil to measure the angle between those two and see if that's right. And if the length and the angle match, you know, you put it just in the right spot and I happened to have guessed correctly there, so I'm not going to change it. But if you didn't guess correctly, you can just always move it over a little bit. Here's the tip going into that pedal. Now I'm going to just start going petal by petal and filling in the ones that are missing. This looks like it's about there. And I'm going to measure the length now between this tip and that tip to see No, I'm a little off, so I'm going to move that one over to the left. And I'm going to check the angle between the two. The more, oops, I'm off there too. So that needs to come in a bit. Maybe I mismeasured the length of it in the beginning. Oh, I did. Okay. That was a problem. Not a huge deal. Totally could have had a longer petal and nobody would have ever cared. But since I found it, I'm going to change it. Then there's another sneaky one right behind this petal. I'm just going to measure the length from that tip to that tip. I could measure the entire length also, that's completely fine. Just showing you different ways of doing this. So that looks like it's about right there. And it kind of sneaks out right from behind the very top edge of that petal. And then it's very round right here and disappears behind. Not want to get rid of this sketchy stuff up here. And make that a little point here. Got one dark petal sneaking out from behind this one here, that one so teeny and it hugs the shape of this one so closely. I'm not even going to measure it, I'm just going to draw it in. I'm going to make that one disappear a little lower. Loops. And I kind of made it go behind this one, but that's okay. That does not bother me and I'll see you this next one. And do something like that. So they're right out to the tip and disappear behind that pedal. Got those two. Next one. Tip looks like it's about equal distance between these two. Wobble my way down there, big space. And then we got this little petal which was in the front of the bigger one I measured earlier. Skinny. So that's going to be about right there, very close. And it almost has the same body of this one on the way up. And then it's gonna do this little flat thing at the tip and incur around and kinda takeover. Go a little over the midline there. And then down into the bottom. 9. Finishing Petals: What else do we need? We need these longer ones back here. So this one, the tip looks like it's about right here. I'm gonna measure the distance from that pedal that looks about right, so that'll be fine. Three around edge on the left. Oh, and actually, I'm going to put this one in first because it's in front of that one and that'll just be a little easier. That'll be about here. Definitely leaning to the left a little bit more up in this case, I guess. And then I'm going to finish this other petal that goes something like that. It made it a little round at the tip. No big deal could leave it if I wanted, but I'm not going to because I don't feel like it. Let's see. And then This last one, I think that's the last one, but I'll go around and double-check when I'm done. That will be about here. Something like that. And then lastly, we'll draw this little oval in the middle. So I'm going to just measure how far across it is, how tall? And it looks like it's centered. I'm just gonna make sure it's a little higher than it is. It's a little closer to the top of the flower. Then the bottom. And the size of it is in the middle. So I'm gonna move that over and just draw an oval. And then we'll do our erasing next. 10. Finishing Drawing Touches: Okay, and now we can go back and erase. So we want to get rid of our original angle lines. Definitely don't need those anymore. Get rid of any some darker spots that you might have used as measuring marks like the tips of the petals for those initial shapes. Watercolor, being transparent, often will show initial pencil lines if you don't erase them, release thoroughly. So we just want to get rid of those entirely. Wipe off the crumbs. And I've still got a few little dots here. That won't matter as much because we're going to do all that dark gray stuff, but I'm still going to get rid of them kind of on principle. Now, if your drawing is anything like mine and looks dark like this, you definitely want to go back and erase very lightly. So I'm going to just show you how it should look. I'm not going to erase my entire drawing no, because as I said, I want you to be able to see my picture so my, my pencil lines are going to remain fairly dark. But what we want is something like this. For your entire picture, we want to barely be able to see your lines, to be able to see them, but as light as possible so that they won't show through the final. Oh, also will need to get rid of any lines like this that we don't need anymore because another pedal is overlapping. So I'm gonna put my pedal back in so you can see it. You do not need to do this because we want yours to stay light. Now take just a look around, make sure you're happy with it. Is it convincing to you? Do you feel excited about painting it? Is there anything you want to change? Now's the time to do that. So I'm just realizing there I think there's maybe another petal right here that I missed. Yeah. It's it's right here. It kind of fills in this gap between these two. And it's hiding mostly behind this one, but I'm just going to add it. So it's gonna do something like that. It really disappears before even it gets to the tip. And I'm just going to look around. Did I get all the petals? Do I want to add anything to? I don't wanna make anything shorter or reshaped. No, I'm pretty happy with this, but you go ahead and take a look, make sure you're happy with it. Again, it does not have to be exactly like this, but the requirement is it has to make you happy, it has to make you feel good about it. So do whatever you need to do. In order to achieve that. I should have mentioned we're not drawing any background shapes because that's going to be just a fluid, beautiful mix of colors. And it's going to be really fun exercise because you'll get to experience watercolor in the technique of wet into wet, which we'll get onto next. 11. Background Practice - Lighter Greens: All right. So go ahead and move your beautiful finished drawing aside. We're just going to do a little practice test run of the colors for the background before you put them onto your painting so that you can kind of get the feel for different ways of applying it. So first, on scratch paper, go ahead and just draw a few flower petals. Nothing fancy. You don't have to measure. And we're going to actually, let me do that a couple of times. I'll do some over here too. We're going to try a couple of different ways. The first way, use your big brush, get it sopping wet full of water, and just brush water. All right next to it. So be careful not to get the water into the petals. If you do, this is where you want to make that mistake because you'll see what happens when you put the color in, it'll bleed into the petals and that can be very frustrating. So really use the very tip of your brush. You can go right along the edge. It's helpful if you're pointing the tip of the brush. Against the pencilne using the edge of the brush to wipe along the penciline If I'm trying to keep this edge sharp and I'm pointing my brush that way, that's the hardest way to do it. It's not impossible. It's just more difficult. So it helps if you're really using the tip of your brush to sort of outline the petals and then filling in with water. And we want to use a lot of water here, and I did get some water into the petal. So you'll see what happens there. So for this first sample, we're just using a ton of water. You can sort of tilt it in the light to see how much water you have everywhere and add more where you need to. And we're not going out anywhere specific. So just stop where you feel like it. Now, you can dab your brush on your towel a little bit if you still got a ton of water on there just to get most of it off. You want to damp brush, but not sopping what? And we're going to go into our colors. We'll use the green first light green and sap green. So flip to the tab with the light green and sap green. That's these two right here and open it up. They're the top two here. And you can see I've done this before. I've already used a little bit of it, and just kind of rub your brush into the light green and it'll turn dark because you've just gotten it wet. And then just drop a little bit of the light green in to the water, anywhere you want it to go. Just sort of play with it. It just is so vibrant. I just love the way that. It's like glowing. It looks like a highlighter or something. So put it wherever you want it, dab it in, and then you can rinse your brush by rubbing it on the bottom of your water cup. Move that into the screen so you can see it. Touch my towel again, and I'm going to grab a little bit of sap green and try that dropping some of that in. 12. Background Practice - Darker Greens: And I'm dropping it in among the spaces I've left from the light green. I can also drop it directly into the light green if I want. It's kind of creating this little webby sort of texture, which is lovely. That's just the watercolor paper texture showing through the paint. If you like that, leave it alone. If you don't like it, you can mess with it. Try not to mess with it too much, though. The more you mess with it, the more the colors will just kind of turn into one color. But if you want to, you can get all the water off your brush or most of it and go back and sort of dab at the edges to sort of get the webby effect a little bit smoother. That's totally fine to do. And then we're going to move on to a little ridian and a little peacock blue. This is the These are going to be the cooler colors. These were very warm green, very yellow, vibrant greens, and now we're going to add some darker stuff. Look at that. Oh, my goodness. It just makes my blood boil. I mean, I guess that's a phrase you use when you're angry. I'm not angry. It just makes me feel so good. It makes me very excited to see these colors go onto this paper in this way. It's so incredibly brilliant. I don't know if I've ever used water colors that were this brilliant before. Anyway, my water is starting to dry a little So the colors aren't spreading as much. So I just rinsed, touched my towel a little bit, and I'm going back and pushing them around. But I'm sort of enjoying some of these areas that are not spreading very much. So I'm going to leave them alone, and I'm not going to put the varidian everywhere. I'm going to put a hint of it over here. I'm just sort of dabbing at it because I want it to look like it's going behind this petal, not stopping abruptly behind it. So I'm just sort of spreading it out, so it looks like it keeps on going in the background. And then we'll do a little bit of peacock blue, which is one of my very favorite viviva colors. It just happens to be near and dear to my heart. And what's so interesting about peacock blue you'll notice, which is similar to some other colors is it appears like a metallic magenta, but then when you put it on the brush. Oh. Look at that. It's just this wonderful turquoise color. Well, that's very dark turquoise, so it's hard to tell right there, but It's very turquoisy. I also just put it into yellow so it appears greener than it would on its own. You can just mess with that as much as you want. You can see where I accidentally got some water into the petal, that's where the green blood into it. If that happens to you, don't panic. It's not the end of the world. Once we dry it, I will show you how to get it out. 13. Background Practice - Drier Paint: So now we're going to do a similar thing, but with less water. So I've scraped some of the water off my brush and I'm just going to go in kind of outlining the petals. I'm doing that the hard way, keeping that edge sharp, the hard way, like I mentioned before, but I'm going to just put the water on very, very thinly. So I'm going to tilt the picture in the light to see how much water. And if there's any drips, I'm just going to wipe them off. So I just want the paper damp. And this is actually not in my opinion, the best way to paint because you're going to have trouble getting your colors to spread. But if you prefer that, then maybe you like that, and you can do it that way. So you can see, when I put my green in, I'm really brushing it. I'm forcing it to go where I want it to go and putting it where I want it to go. But there's very much the colors are not spreading by themselves because I'm painting so dry. Same thing with the sap green. I'm going to get that and put it in where I want it to go. And my water is starting to really dry now, so I'm having to really put it where I want it. It's almost like coloring with a crayon or a marker or something where it doesn't spread anywhere. Do the same with the ridian. You can see it's the wettest on the left there. I'm going to use the very tip of my brush to get right up next to my flower petal. Add that in spread it over here on the right. Again, I'm just making up the pattern and making up where the greens go. Okay. And if I want it to be as vibrant as that, I can certainly do that. I can put in I just got a lot more paint on my brush and I can put in bigger brighter patches and rinse and touch my paper towel, but I'm going to have to go back and kind rely on my brush to spread them around because the water is not doing that job for me. And I'll do the same with the peacock blue hoops. Get a little bit more. Okay. Okay. You can see the two different effects and the two different experiences you might have using more water and using less water. Now we'll blow dry. So if you have a blow dryer, go ahead and blow dry or you can just let it air dry and then I'm going to show you how to remove mistakes. I'm going to go ahead and blow dry. A good way to test it is just feel it with the back of your hand to see if it's completely dry. And then when it is. You can get your brush damp, touch your paper towel to get any extra moisture off and pointing your brush towards the edge you want to keep sharp, wipe at the mistake and try to push it back. And rinse and touch your paper towel fairly often. You can see it's turning the whole edge of the petal green. That's okay. It will probably work to your advantage, actually, to have a little bit of the background color bleed into the petals because in art, photography, real life. Everything reflects everything next to it. If there's a little bit of green in your flower petal occasionally, it's going to act as a reflection. Don't worry if this happens to you. What you do is pull off as much as you can. You can see I can't get it all off. There's a little stubborn green spot there, but I'm not going to worry about that. I'm going to let it be what it is and do the best I can to cover it with yellow and purple in the final. If it's still there, so be it. If that happens to you on your initial background on your picture, and it really bothers you and you don't want to continue. That's fine. You can continue or excuse me, not continue. You can trace your picture onto a new sheet of watercolor paper and just start over. You can do this painting multiple times if you want. The point is to have fun. Hopefully, learn a little bit in the process and just let the colors kind of take you where they want to take you. All right. With that, let's get onto painting our background. 14. Painting Introduction: So this in my opinion, is the most fun part of the painting, which is the first layer of color because you get to see those colors go on and they just capture your heart and, and take them, take it with you, take it with them. Anyway. A couple of things to just caution you about. Common mistakes are over brushing in watercolor, which is when something isn't quite going what you want, you tend to brush and brush and brush and that'll weaken the paper a little bit and it probably won't end up achieving effect you want. So I just want to encourage you to brush as little as possible to achieve the effect you want. And the other thing is painting too slowly or tentatively as sort of an expression of, oh no, I'm going to mess it up to try to let that go. If you have that in your head, try to just go for it and just kinda push the paint around and let it do its thing and you do your thing. I know that's easier said than done. I just kinda wanted to put plant that seed in your mind in case it makes any difference. So the last thing is before we get started, just take a look at the photo and absorb the qualities of the flower. Is it kind of velvety? It's got these beautiful textures like the sensor, little stippling parts, the beautiful lines on the petals, the blurry background. Just kinda look at it and notice those things. And that's all you have to do. It will kind of inform your painting as you go. All right, let's get started. 15. Applying Water to the Background: So we're going to make our background now just mainly for the sake of showing you how to use it. So you can choose to use it if you want. Your beautiful, the viva watercolors set came with a mixing pad. So in case it wasn't clear how you apply it, you just take this as the mixing pad and I've already applied mine. You just take it and peel off the sticky thing and stick it to the back page where it tells you to stick it to. And then it folds into your book so you can conveniently carry it anywhere you want. And when you want to use it, you just fold it out. So this is where you mix your colors. If you choose to mix, I'm going to show you how to do that right here. And again, you don't have to do it. You can just paint straight from the swatches onto your paper. So you can just start with a wet brush. And I'm going to bend that back a little so it's more flesh with the table. And you can just apply a little bit of water in my water is greenish from our practice, but I kept it that way on purpose because we're doing a green background and I want or I don't mind having a little bit of green tint to my water, but you can certainly get freshwater if you prefer. So we're going to mix a little bit of sap green just to rub it into your water, they're going to go back and get a little more. And then we're going to mix a little bit of viridian into it because the colors in this photo reference are a bluer, cooler green. So I'm just going to use that as one of the base colors. So just kinda mixing them together. And it makes the viridian not quite such a blue-green by adding the sap green to it and add a little more sap because the viridian is stronger than the SAP. So it took over pretty quickly. And that looks kinda like the color I want and I'm just going to have that on hand to drop in as one of the colors I'm going to use. And add a little bit more water just to make sure I have a little bit more paint. Now I'm going to set that aside for a minute for when we're ready to paint and I'm going to apply the water to my background. And again, I'm using this slightly greenish tinted water. Part of the advantage. Also as you may be able to see the water better as I apply it. So that works in our favor. So you have to kinda go into a lot of the crevices of the flower. So use the tip of the brush and do that. I recommend using lots of water here because it's going to take us a minute to go around the entire background and put the water on and we don't want our initial water to dry while we're in the process of applying the rest of the water. 16. Finish Background Water/1st Colors: So I'm being very careful with the tip of my brush and those corners. And out here in the area away from the flower, I'm being very kinda sloppy with it. It's totally fine to get it outside your frame as well. That is just kind of dead area that you won't see if you decide to frame your picture anyway. So that's just scratch paper. But do absolutely get your water all the way up to the edge of your frame. Don't leave any of the background showing with just plain paper. Some really getting it just sopping wet. And the other advantage in my opinion, which we saw in the practice we did a few minutes ago, is that it allows the colors to spread better. If it's very wet, the wetter it is, the more the colors will naturally spread on their own. So if you like that effect, which I do, then you will enjoy having a very wet background. Almost done putting the water in here. And then I'm going to go around and just sort of move it around. I want to make it fairly even evenly wet. And now I'm going to go in with the color I mixed and drop it in where I want it. Just allowing it to bleed. I'm not too concerned about what shape it takes right now. I'm just trying to get a presence of it most in most places. So I'm just really kinda going crazy. But the only part not to go crazy on is right next to the pedals. There'd be very controlled right next to the petals. I'm going to put my colors down so I can hold onto my painting with my left hand. It'll help keep it more steady. So I've got that in there and now I'm going to go in with some of the colors we used initially. The light green. That is just amazing and that's not even in the picture by the way. So you can make up whatever colors you want. Say you want to better know a gray background or a blue background, you don't have to use green. I'm just approximating the colors I see in the photograph. And that's part of the fun of this. You can do whatever you want. It's phenomenal. So that's sort of the technique and we're going to continue in the next video in a minute. 17. Finishing the Background: So I'm just going to continue adding more light green. I'm a little addicted to this color, so I'm putting a lot of him and just low the brightness and the vibrancy of it. So gorgeous. And I'm going to add, I'm going to add a little bit of plain viridian now. It's a stronger bluer color obviously than the one we used. The one we mixed with the sap green earlier. And to have both of them will just add some subtle variation. Oh, look at that. It spreads so nicely. This is just making my world right now. Going outside the frame on purpose. Totally cool. Trying to just get sort of an even presence of each color. Oop, I got some injury to the petal right there and now I touched it, so I definitely got some in. But that's okay. We can use our removal technique. And as I mentioned before, not the end of the world. It will count as a reflection and part of the uniqueness of your picture. If that happens to you. And if it doesn't, that's also fine. And now I'm going to add a little peacock, one of my other faves. And at this point I'm feeling like I had a little more sap green I think are a little bit of sap green. I never did add any. That was just playing. Yeah, that'll that'll add a little bit of sort of nice. Nature is neutral because I'm going a little crazy with the brights here. So we want something a little more subdued and sap green is just that thing. So I'm kinda just using my brush like I would use a crayon now I'm almost coloring with it. My water is starting to dry a bit, getting some more sap green on my brush. So because my water is starting to dry, it's getting the paint is not spreading as well as it was in the beginning, but that's okay. It's still quite damp. So I'm not going to have any hard edges. But I am now I think I'm satisfied with the color, so I'm just gonna go back and adjust areas that I want to add a little blending to like up here. I'm not super happy with the way this looks. I'm just going to dab at it a little bit to encourage it to spread out. That seems a little too much contrast to me. So I'm going to merge those together. And then maybe I'll leave that alone. That's kind of an interesting thing down there. But I'm gonna go back and make sure I got right up next to all my pencil lines, those teeny little corners between the petals are especially important. You don't want any white showing through your final picture. And now is really the time to get your background the way you want it. So anywhere you have less than the fine is point. Feel free to use a smaller brush to if you're big brush feels too cumbersome. And there we go. Pretty happy with that. So off-camera, I'm going to blow dry and get some freshwater. Definitely get freshwater at this point because you don't want green water when you're trying to paint bright yellowy oranges and purples. And you can blow dry or you can let your picture air dry. Either way, make sure it's completely, totally warm and dry before well, just dry. It doesn't have to be warm but totally dry, not even a little bit damp. Before we start the next section, which will be painting our flower. 18. Painting Yellows: So now we are just about ready to paint our flower. One thing I forgot to mention in the last video was the green we mixed. You can just take your towel or a rag and wipe it off. I wiped it off while the camera was off, but that's how you clean your mixing pad and then you can tuck it away for when you want to use it. Again. One thing I also didn't really emphasizes this. These little plasticky sheets between the colors are such a wonderful way of being able to use your colors and still close it up when it's damp. It's just the most wonderful design. So if your colors are a little bit damp, don't worry about it. You can just fold it up into itself and they'll just kinda dry. It's also it's probably better to leave it open to drive. You have that option that if you're traveling or you know, in a hurry, you can close it up and it won't, the colors won't affect one another because the sheets fabulous. Anyway. So we're going to start by, I'm going to try to get rid of that blemish that I left yesterday, excuse me, left in the last video with a damp brush. I'm just going to dip my brush in the water and touch the towel and then just sort of wipe out it and it's not going to come off all the way at all. All I'm trying to do is lighten it as much as I can. So I'm just sort of agitating it a little bit. The thing you don't want to do here is over brush it because the paper will start to weaken and pill up a little bit and even rip if you over brush. So after I've brushed a bunch and I see you know what, it's really not getting any lighter. I'm going to stop and just let it be what it is and I'll paint over it and we may be able to see it through the final product and that's okay. So now we're going to get onto the painting part of the flower. And unlike the background, which was very loose and watery and we just got to play with the color. We're going to try to replicate approximately the textures of this flower just sort of as a way to have some fun with it and an exercise. So you can kinda learn how to do that. So you can flip your book open to the yellows. We're going to use chrome, yellow, and yellow ocher for this part. So grab your in my case, my largest brush but it's you're about eighth inch quarter and I can't remember however big it feels to you or it feels appropriate and get it wet, touch your rag and grab some chrome yellow and just brush it in. And my I'm brushing it in and it's pretty dry, so I'm going to get a little bit more water, a little more color, and just brush it in. And I'm going in the direction of my flower petals. And I'm gonna go up a little higher than I think I need to, because I want there to be no real white showing between the yellow and the purple. Whoops, need a little more water. So you'll kinda get a sense for when you need to dip in the water and when you've got enough on your brush to kinda go for it and just look at each pedal and how high the yellows go and make those lines go in the direction of the petal is pointing and you really can't go wrong. Just a little bit down there. Keeping in mind also we're going to be layering darker yellows. So this is only your very first layer. A little more paint. And as you can see, the chrome yellow when it's very saturated on the brush comes off more orangey, whereas when there's more water and less paint, it comes off more yellowy. And I'm just sort of letting it be that I'm not going to try to make them all uniform because I personally don't want to, but if you want to, you can certainly do that. Make them all very orangey are all very yellowy. Totally your call. Whoops, I went up a little high on that pedal that didn't have any much yellow on it. Too busy talking. I wasn't looking. But that's also okay because I'm having a good time. And I'm also going to put just the first layer around the outside edge of the inner part of the flower. And I'll just put a little dot there for that little bit just as a place holder. And now I'm going to switch to my yellow ocher and sort of just dab that in and you can see it's, it's a lot darker. So I'm just kinda using it around the edge for right now to dot in and then I can always add more. I started on the side or it's shady and dark here because I had more paint on my brush. And then as I move to the left, it gets lighter and lighter and the paint whereas off the brush. So that's kind of a nice effect. And then I'm going to go in and just pull up a few little lines into the yellows that are still hopefully a little bit wet. Just to start to create that line effect at the base of the petals. 19. Getting Started with Magenta: So I have not blow dried this. It's still damp. Um, a little bit. But you can choose to blow dry it if you want to really keep separation between the yellows and purples. Watercolor is so finicky, you can really go either way with this. As long as it's not sopping wet. If your yellows are sopping wet, I would definitely touch your towel, touch any major major drips, touch the towel again, just kind of continue soaking them up or you could just take the corner of the towel and go around and soak up any major drips. That's fine too. And then blow dry or just let air dry a little bit so that the purples don't absolutely just take over into the yellows. Now we're going to switch to magenta and violet. So flip over to your purple. Purple tab, which is the last tab here and we're going to start with Magenta, which looks dark brown. Obviously, feel free to just take a little bit and test it on your test sheet. If you want to just see what it looks like, look how beautiful that is. We're going to be using Magenta and then violet, which looks oddly enough, green is not green. It is deep purple. Beautiful. That's what those two colors look like, feel free to test them on your sheet just to get a sense for them. I left a little bit of a drip on there, so I'm going to just get rid of it with my brush. Okay. And we're going to start with the magenta. We're not going to use too much violet because it really is a very reddish purple flower. I'm going to start with just a little bit on the tip of my brush and I'm going to start at the tip of the petal and pull down because I want the darkest, most intense part of the color to be farthest from the yellows. You can see I'm leaving a lot of white and I'm leaving some lines. So I'm going to do a few petals at a time and then I'll show you what I'm going to do with these lines. You can also see where the green accidentally went into the petal. I'm going to paint right over that and it will just become a part of the petal. Okay. So I did a few petals and you can really do more than that at a time. I just stopped there so I could show you what I'm going to do. So then I'm going to rinse my brush, touch my towel, so I have just a damp brush, and even though these are starting to dry, that's actually going to work to your advantage because you don't want it super drippy, can go back and just plant your brush in the purple and pull a little bit towards the yellow and look at how nicely that just blends. I'm going to touch the towel again and do it again with the next petal. Okay. Kind of pulling it down into the yellow, and I'm getting these little abrupt ends, so I'm going to rinse my brush again, touch my towel. Go back pointing towards those abrupt ends. I'm just going to push at them a little bit, say, get back towards that purple part. I don't really want you to come down this far. I'm laying the whole brush down, using the body of the brush and just pushing them away, and that'll help to create a blend there. If I'm only using the tip, it tends to just keep a hard edge. So anytime you want to just force a color back into its space, you can really use a very clean bruh, damp brush and just lay it down and push at it. Actually, this one, I don't want to do that so much with because there's really no yellow down here, so I'm going to instead use the tip to just agitate the color and encourage it down into that space. I'm going to mess with these ends a little bit, but they're not really moving, so I'm going to get a little bit more paint. Dab that into the top to darken it and add a little bit more to the bottom just to cover up those ends. Now you can see my yellow is dry, and that's why I'm able to go in here with the magenta and not worry about the magenta bleeding into the yellow. Up here, I put magenta next to Magenta and they bled right into each other, but that's okay because they're supposed to be the same color. It's a good rule of thumb with water color. Anytime you don't want something to blend, make sure they're one color is at least, very dry next to the other. Anytime you do want them to blend, you can have any range of dampness. So I'm going to keep going here a little bit with the magenta and just keep doing petals. I'm going to do the same thing. I'm just going to do a few at a time. Pulling lines down, but leaving some white. What the heck. This one doesn't have any yellow on it. I'm just going to paint the whole thing, magenta. Because I'm painting the whole thing, I started from the bottom because it doesn't matter where I start from since the whole thing is the same color. Rinse, touch my paper towel, go back and push push at these edges a little bit. Use the body of the brush because I can see the paint is starting to want to go down towards the yellow, so I'm going to really push it away. Same thing here. 20. Gaining Momentum with Magenta: So I'm going to go back and get some more magenta and just keep right on going. Another thing you could do is skip around a bit. You don't have to go petal by petal in order. I'll do that now just to show you the advantage of it. It's a small advantage, but useful sometimes. And that is that the petal is not touching, then because the petals are not touching, you don't need to worry about them bleeding into one another at all, like here, I said I didn't care about it, and I don't But if you really want to keep them separate, you can just do petals that don't touch. Now I'm awkwardly having to point this way, so I'm going to turn my paper, so now I can point more naturally towards the ends of those magenta areas and push at them. Rinse touch and a little more magenta. This is I'm going to just prop this open, this flap open, so I can get at the magenta more easily. I'm going to keep going. If you see something happening that you want to stop, like I'm seeing an edge forming there. I can touch and go back and adjust it a little bit while it's still wet. That's the best time to do it. But if it dries, you can always go back and do it later. Don't worry about it. Just let go and have a great time. Look at these colors. Doesn't that just make you want to sing? I do not have a nice singing voice, but man sure makes me want to sing, Oh, I got a little bit of green on there somehow. I don't know how I did that, but I'm going to rinse and try to get that off. Just touch it a little bit. Wipe and let that be. Go back and get a little more magenta, keep turning. Oh, my gosh, these colors just I keep saying it. I'm sorry. I'm just so excited about them. I've never quite worked with colors that are this vibrant before. And I am a colored junkie, so they are barking up the right tree. So you can see, I'm leaving some lines showing, others are more blended. I'm just kind of allowing them to do what they want to do at the same time that I'm kind of making them do what I want them to do. So it's a compromise. It's almost like a relationship between you and the brush and the paint where you allow them to have a little bit of control, kind of like a kid. And then if you allow them to have a little control, then you know, they'll probably eat their broccoli. Maybe they'll eat the broccoli. I'm going to put some lines on this one, lines on this one. And at this point, I've stopped looking at the photo. I've memorized this process, and I'm just really enjoying putting the color on and pushing it around and not being too concerned with following what that looks like, exactly. Although it's right there for me if I want to reference it and try to copy something more precisely, which you are more than welcome to do. So now I've gotten a bunch of petals that weren't really touching. I did those last two touching. I'm going to get rid of this little orange pool there, and I'm going to go back and fill in the back ones that I skipped. This one is pretty purely magenta, and it's in the back and the sun shining from the top creates more shading on the bottom edge of the petal. So I'm putting my first strokes on the bottom edge, so it's darker right there. And then I'm going to pull up. And I'm going to leave a little white showing there, rinse touch because I want this to be lighter pink, and then I'm going to just drag the color into that white space. Also, I've got this is that little point thing we were talking about with the greens. I'm going to just take the very tip of my brush and make that extremely pointy, make it really disappear into that crevice, give you a little closer view of that. We really want those points between the petals to be very fine. 21. Painting More Magenta: So I'm going to just finish off these back pedals. Making the darker parts on the bottom edges. Like I did here. And now I'm just sort of using that as a rule, making the bottom edge of the petal a little darker because I know the sun is coming from the top. Rinse touch and sort of wipe a little bit of dampness into that top area to get the pink pinky color, pull it into the darker part. I'm going to skip this one for now because I don't want those two to bleed together. I want to create a little bit of an edge between them. So I'm just going to go over here with the light pink I have in my brush and paint this one. Again, feel free to switch brushes. I, for some reason, just like to use a single brush often. If it's so functional as this one, it already has a really fine tip, so I really enjoy just keeping going. But you can absolutely use a smaller brush for the tiny stuff. And this petal, the left side is mostly in shade, except there's a dark shadow on the right side. So now I'm kind of flopping back to copying the photograph. Not sure really why it doesn't matter. I just felt inspired to go back and look at the shadows more. Okay. Okay. Okay. I'm painting in just the dark parts wipe on the towel and then pull the color into the white areas to blend it like pink. Then at the base where the yellow is where it meets the yellow, I'm going to turn my picture and push up towards that magenta to really force them to blend together without one overtaking the other. I feel like I want a little bit more pink on this one. It's just not quite deep enough. I'll add a little more right into the water. Oh, I can do this one too. I'll put some darkness right here. Rinse touch and pull that up over to the right to fill in the right side with color. 22. Finishing Up with Magenta: And keep going. These petals are very much in sunlight, so I'm really not going to make too much darkness here. I'm just going to put in a few lines and see how that works, and I can always add more, and then I'll go back and brush the water into them. And turn my paper so I can push those edges back. I want a little bit more pink, it turned orange because I let the yellow go up a little farther than I thought I would. But that's also fine. It's still pretty. That's going to be a very blendy petal. I'm going to skip that one for now, let that one I just did dry a little bit, and I'll go over to here. That's. So I just have pretty pure pigment on my brush. I don't even really have much dampness. Excuse me. I don't have much water. I have dampness only. I'm going to get that really fine point in there. I left a little bit of white showing on the edge because I want just a hair, a suggestion of lightness there. So I'm going to point my brush towards that edge perpendicular to that edge and just sort of brush along to encourage the paint to fill that up. And that got two lights. I'm going to add some more paint. To light for my taste anyway. I want it to be a little darker along the inside edge. So I'm just getting some really saturated pigment and then dropping it in. I'm dotting it in so it fills out that space. Now I'm going to go back to here, the petal, I skipped because I didn't want it to blend with this one and fill that in. That one goes purple all the way down to the bottom, but it's very light. I'm going to start with brushing my darker color right where the shadowy part is. And there's not a lot of separation between these two. Even in the photograph, they almost look like the same petals. So I'm painting it in, and it looks like the front petal is kind of blending with the back on, but that's all right. That's just the way it looks. And I'm going to brush that out in fill up the area with a lighter pink. And then same thing on the very bottom edge here. Pull that down. Lastly, one petal left. I'm just going to fill that in solid for right now, and that is our first layer of magenta. 23. Painting Violet: Okay, So I took out my sketchbook, my watercolor sketchbooks. I wanted to show you this. This was my practice for this class. And you can see I use both Violet and magenta here. There's a purply blue presence in a lot of the petals and the magenta, which is a lovely choice, I thought. But if you don't want to use violet, you don't have to, because the magenta alone really replicates this more accurately. So I just had some fun with the violet and I'm going to do, I'm going to add some violet. Now, in the event that you'd like to do that you can follow along. If you don't, you can skip ahead and not put that in. So for those of you who wanted to violet, I'm going to grab a little bit on the tip of my brush, just like I did with the magenta. And I'm gonna go in and I'm just going to pick a petal that I want to put a little bit of color on and kinda start at the darker part and pull some lines down just like I did with the magenta. I'm going to do a little bit here. The one thing about, oops, that's the wrong color, scrubs and Persian blue. One thing about the violet is it can enhance the darks a little bit also because it's a slightly, well, it's not really a more saturated color at all then the magenta, but it's bluer. So it adds a little more dimension. I guess. Either way, I just think it's pretty so I'm putting some in and I'm going to put a few in and then go back and adjust, wipe out them. I probably let that dry a little too much, but that's also okay. And just allowing the watercolor to be watercolor, where else DO? And this is a very dark pedaling gonna put some here or this shadow we part anyway. And I'm putting that in and it's like, whoa, that's a lot of blue violet, but that's all right. I'm, the more kinda you put it around in other petals, the more natural it seems. You may also want to just watch this section if you're curious what it's going to look like and then decide if you want to do violet, totally a good idea of a fine idea to put some in here. So I'm kind of gravitating towards just putting the violet where I see the darker parts on the pedals. So now I'm sort of doing just one at a time because I felt like leaving it to too long. Did not I ended up kinda just pulling the color off because I had the wipe it so much. Let's see where else. Put some over here. Exaggerate the shadows on this pedal with the violent. Go back and brush. So now I'm now doing two at a time and just all over the place, but I'm just sort of letting my brush go. I'm letting my brain do what it wants to do. Because often my brain is so in the mode of doing what it's supposed to do, and it's really nice to just sort of let it fly. Teeny little point there. Rinse, touch in white that a little bit, but it can be a pretty hard edge because that's a pretty sharp shadow right there. And I'm gonna go back where I put the original violet and kind of brushed it off and just do a little bit more rinse touch. Yeah, it doesn't really need that much agitation because they are it was already a wet surface, so it sort of led by itself. Let's see. Anywhere else I want to put it. I think I'm pretty good there, but I am going to try to get rid of that edge. That's because I don't like that. It's very much. So I'm going to push it that some of these edges have dried and I'm going to let them stay that way because I think it shows off the character of the paint kinda beautifully like right here. Right here, I've got a little hard edge right there, but I'm going to leave those alone. I think it feels kind of organic and pleasant to me. So that is where I'm going to stop with the violet. 24. Painting Burnt Umber & Slate Black: So now we're gonna get to the center of the flower and looking at it, I realize I don't know why I stopped so short here with the yellow. I wasn't really paying attention. So I need to put more yellow in all the way up to the center ring before I can keep going. So I'm going to start with chrome yellow and just fill in this area. Nothing fancy, just kinda smeared in there. And then blow dry. I'm gonna hold everything down so it doesn't blow away. And curates dry. Yes. Okay. Now we can go in with the burnt umber and the slate black for the center. So flip open your book to the burnt umber, which is this little one right here. And with a damp brush, get a little of the number. And you can just sort of dotted around the edge. And that'll create sort of a underlayer for the black. You don't go all the way into the center, just put a little around the edge. And at this point you can also use it to sort of dot in around the edge of the flower. Just little dots of it kinda around that out exterior line. Hopefully you're not really seeing your exterior line anymore. You can definitely see mine because I left my lines so dark. But at this point, as you're putting the burnt umber and hopefully the lines are mostly disappearing and being replaced with your gorgeous colors. So do something like that. Pull up a few little lines up. And I did this on purpose first because I want that to have a little bit of drying time while I'm doing the the these other details before I put the slate black in. So I'm going to rinse my brush. And the slate black is this grayish tab at the end. It's the very last color in your pamphlet. So just grab a little bit of that, go ahead and test it on your test sheet if you want first, and just put it in and it should bleed a little bit with the burnt umber. If you're burnt umber is still a little wet. That's kinda what we want. So that's pretty much it. And don't worry if it feels too dark because you can rinse, touch and go back and dab at it to pull some color off. And what we're going for as kind of a light, medium gray. Don't worry at all about the texture right now we'll put in little dabs and dots later. You're just getting an even layer of color on. Then you can get a little bit of sleep black and go in very conservatively put little dots into the shadowy part of the center on the right. And your numbers should still be a little bit down. So it'll bleed a little bit with it. If it's not, that's fine too. You just put, you're just kind of exaggerating the shadow a little bit. And then you'll see around the outside edge and other areas. There's little dots kind of around. So you can put that in a very minimally try not to evenly space them. That's the first rule to making an organic form is things are not perfectly shaped in nature. Well, that's not true, I shouldn't say that, but flowers have a lot of variety at least. And by perfect, I mean symmetrical. So once you're happy with that, once you feel like you've got a good sense of lots of dots, then you can stop and we'll get onto the next section. 25. Adding Texture: So now we've got all of our basics in most of our really good base textures. We're going to go back and refine a little bit so we can add some of these nice lines to the petals. I'm finally going to use my small brush. So you can use your smallest brush and just get a little bit of magenta going and pick a petal, start at the tip and pull lines down. So when you're pulling the lines in, you're going to follow the curve of the petals. So on this one and see that, that line, it's kinda curving up towards the top of the petal. So I'm gonna do that, just follow that curve and try to lift at the end like a fine little point there. Rinse touch. And if I need to, I may not even need to just sort of pull the n down a little more to really make it disappear. So you want to do a few of these and then once you get the hang of it, you can do kind of several at a time. You can also practice this like anything we've done so far on your test sheet before you apply it to your flower. You can also choose not to do this. Maybe you're happy with the way the flower looks and you don't want any of these lines and that's also fine. So continue if you feel like it. And you can just put in a bunch of these little edges. So I have very little water on my brush. That's how I'm getting the lines so, so tiny. I'm going to exaggerate. I'm also going to just as I go, Oh wow, That's shadows are dark enough. So I'm gonna put in some more magenta right there. Just go nuts. Feel Free. Free, Free, Free, fun, fun, fun. Hope you're enjoying this as much as I am. Like a kid in a candy store. I see a little bit of white showing through right there. So I'm just going to end here. I'm going to cover those up with my brushes. I'm going, I see my paint from my other flower bled into this pedal a little bit. I know that's wet, so I'm taking a chance here by blending it because they might just kinda bleed together more than I want them to. So if I really cared, I would blow dry it first and then do that, but I don't really care. So I'm not going to do it. And I'm going to wipe this edge. I don't like that edge pointing my brush perpendicular towards the darker edge, so I'm forcing it back that way. And then I'm going to keep going. Let's see, I'll go this way now. So this petal has some and aligns right down the center of it. Oops, I kind of went the wrong direction. Who cares? Rinse, touch, go back and wipe those a little. They're stronger than I want them to be. So I'm going to just pull out them a little bit to soften. And now that I've done these petals, I definitely wanna do the rest of them because it seems a little unfinished. So I'm going to just go ahead and keep going. I'm going to turn my my pictures I go. And it might also help if you're doing this and you want to copy to turn your reference photo the same direction as your picture. Because then it's just really easy for you to look up and see what you're doing. You can also do this with a violet after we're done with the magenta if you choose to. Definitely an option but not required. As if any of those is required. Nothing. All for fun. Darken this shadow the lines, lines, lines already kinda have some, but I'm going to add a little bit more. And it's got kinda of a strong central line. And this one, I didn't even look at it, But at these tips are a little too abrupt to blend. So I'm going to go back and jab at those a tiny bit. Same thing here to sort of pull out them, agitate the tips. Pull down. And this one has two large kind of lines sections on it. So I've made those and then I'll go back and push it the tips. A little bit here. Oops, went outside. That's already know this, make this pedal a teeny bit longer. Push it those tips. For the last one, I'm going to turn it upside down because I just realize I'm kind of craning my wrist again and push at those. I'm pretty happy with that. 26. Finishing Textures: So I'm gonna go in and do a little bit of violet lines. This petal seems a little too light to me. So I'm going to put in some lines and shading here, line all the way to the tip. Sheets emphasize that dark shadow. Same here. Put it in a little bit of lining and the colors already so dark, I really don't need to do much to the, oops, I got the Persian blue again. Keep dipping in the wrong color. I don't really need to do much to the lines. They're just sort of blending into the shadows naturally. Little bit on this one. And I'm happy with that. So now we're going to move on to the black against flip, flip to your slate black. And we're going to put in some dots in the center, make sure you're centers completely dry, which I'm sure it is by now. But just make certain you get a lot, a little bit of dampness on your brush, lot of paint, and just start sort of putting dots in, noticing that the darker part is slightly darker part is on the left. So you're going to emphasize the left with more dots over there. They're not bigger or smaller than the right side. There's just more of them. So as I move to the right, I'm putting fewer. And that creates the illusion of light coming from the right side, except immediately underneath or not underneath, I guess right next to the yellow ring on the right side. The black seems to get a little more intense. I'm going to put some more concentrated black there. And then I'm going to go back and do a few more dots in the shadow part on the right here. And just a few more along the edge a little bit. Definitely don't want it to look blackish because it'll seem kind of Ashley, you're just trying to put in some little pops of shadow. So in addition to that, you'll see there's little bits of black showing through the yellow pieces around the edge. So you can put, I need more dampness because the tip of my brush is starting to split a little bit, which is creating less than awesome dots. So put just a few in the yellow. And the trick here to make it look like it's getting, the yellow is getting more dense as it goes away from the center, is more black dots close to the center, fewer away from it. So I'm just putting very little, very spaced out away from the center. But as I get closer to it, putting in slightly more and that'll just make the center look like it's sort of generally gradually starting to spread out into these little yellow dabs as it moves away from the middle of the flower. Just take your time with this. The thing about black is it really doesn't come off. So you do want to just be deliberate and happy with where you're putting it and not rush. And I'm pretty happy with that. So now I can just go back and kinda look around and see is there anything else that is standing out? And one thing I see is there's actually some white paper showing through right there. So I'm gonna go back to my yellow, my chrome yellow, get just a little bit and fill those suckers in. And then another thing that's standing out is the, the ends of these magenta lines are too strong for me. So I'm gonna go back with a damp brush, clean damp brush and just push them a little bit to try to encourage them to soften. Or so this is the time where you just look around and see if anything bugs you if or if you want to add anything else, maybe something's not dark enough or saturated enough. So you can just add more to it. And this violet petal is really popping to me, not in a way I'm enjoying, so I'm going to add a little bit of magenta to it just to make it match the color of the rest of the flower more so I like the darkness of it. I just don't like how blue it seems right there. So the magenta will add a nice kind of red, reddish coat to it and make it not as not as not as much of a standout. So if you're happy with it, we are done. And if you're not, you can just continue to monkey with it as long as you wish. As long as it is feeding your soul. 27. Signature (optional): So if you'd like to sign your painting, I'm going to guide you through that process. You can do it with a brush and paint or you can do it with a pen. I'll show you the pen secondly, because that's the probably easier way to do it. But if you want to sign with paint, use your smallest brush. And you have a breast that's even smaller than this. The smaller the better really for signing. And you want to pick a color that's similar to your background so that it doesn't, you don't want your name just glaring off the page. You want it very subtle. Not much water, just a damp brush. I'm going to use sap green for mine. I'm just going to get a little bit of parents. If your brush, go ahead and practice this on your test sheet to if you want, before you get started. And you can sign your whole name, your initials, just your first name, whatever. Keep it a little ways away from the edge though, because when you frame it, your frame is going to overlap into your painting a little bit so you don't want your signature being cut off. So I'm going to put it a healthy distance into the picture and just write my firstName. And I'm just using my brush like I would use a pen and just try to do it quickly. Because if you do it slowly, you'll you'll have a little bit of a shaky signature probably, or it won't look quite like you're writing, so do it like you would be signing anything in real life? And I just signed my firstName and that's fine too. If you want to use a pen, you can do that too. And that's just like your signature. So I'm just going to write my full name. We're here. And you may even want to put the year or whatever version of the date. Good rule of thumb for signatures. Bottom corner is a great place. Some people, some artists sign right next to their subject. I prefer to keep it in the corner. I feel like it keeps the focus away from your name and on your picture. But really either way's fine and just keep it small and subtle. And it will just kind of add a little bit of personalization to your picture and show your pride, which you have earned. 28. Congratulations!: You did it. Congratulations, I hope you're super happy with the product you came out with and more importantly with the process you've just got to go through. If you're not for some reason, that's fine. You don't need my permission to feel badly about it, but I give you my permission. If you don't like it, that's okay. That's also just human. We're not always going to love everything we do. But try it again, or maybe you decide I never wanna do this again, and that's also fine. You can do whatever you want. But if you did like it or feel like you could get something out of it. I hope you continue exploring with the viva watercolors or with any watercolors. But the vivace are, as you've just experienced. So intense, so beautiful, so versatile, so much fun. I just had a great time playing with them and I hope you did too. And thank you so much for joining me on this journey.