Happy Watercolor Daffodils - By the Book with Sweetseasonsart

1. Happy Watercolor Daffodils - Intro: Hi and welcome to happy watercolor daffodils by the book with sweet seasons art. I think daffodils are the most cheerful flower. And I looked through a bunch of vintage art books to get some inspiration for our class today. This is a great class for beginner or intermediate watercolor painters. And I know we're gonna have a great time today. Your project will be to paint your own daffodil bouquet, just like the one we're going to practice together or switch it up and paint it your own way. Either way, I'm so excited that you're here to paint with me today. I can't wait to see your projects. Let's jump right to supplies and get started painting. 2. Happy Watercolor Daffodils - Supplies: Really quickly before we start today, let's just review our supplies. We need a 140 pound cold press water color paper. That's a 100% cotton any kind will do. This is a scratch sheet. It's the back of another one that I'm going to use just for our quick practice. I like to use watercolor block, but you can just use sheets. That's fine too. We need some brushes. These are from the pigeon letters. I have a big fat one here is the 16. I have a 62. And that's because we have some small detail to-do and some big fat leaves will need water and paper towel. You can see I've already used this one quite a bit. Obviously we need paints. This is my very messy palette, but I'm gonna show you the paints that we're going to use today. In our greens, we'll use a green, gold, a sap green. Probably just those two. We will use some indigo blue. You'll want some indigo. I love the granulation of that indigo. This is a Davies gray. We'll use some of that for the white petals. We will also use some lemon yellow and some Winsor yellow deep. Those will be our yellows for our petals and centers. I'll also use a little cadmium orange and burnt orange. That's for that really bold center of the daffodil. We'll use a little bit for that. I'm pretty sure those are the only paints will use. I'll put up a paint supply list as well. So you can see that in the projects. I thought we'd use some inspiration. This is a buy the book class. So I have a couple of books that had some daffodils which I also did not realize are called narcissists or there are also narcissist that are very similar. Sorry for all that. This is a really lovely photo so I can get it so it doesn't have any shine on it for you. Sorry, with the lighting, It's a little rough. But I love this photo because it shows the big beautiful leaves, the thick beautiful leaves. It shows very distinctly the centers and then the shapes of the petals, which are really pretty like to sort of see shapes coming together and we'll practice those. And this also has the leaves going up behind and we'll do a little bit of that as well. It shows a really thick stem. So that's really pretty inspiration photo I found the one I'm going to keep next to us today from this book called treasures of botanical art. This is by the folks at the Q, the royal cubic technical gardens. I love this book has a lot of lovely, really lovely florals in it, but this is the one that caught my eye. I'm gonna set it off to the side here so we can look at it while we paint. I liked this, a photo of this drawing specifically because it shows both the white petals with a yellow center and then the yellow petals with the orange center. And it even shows sort of a budding flower. And again, it shows the pretty different tones of the stems. You can see there's a lot of blue in that center stem. And then some green, gold and lighter greens and the other ones. So those are our supplies. I'll keep our inspiration right here next to us. So you didn't have to go searching for one. And we'll get started on painting a lovely little daffodil bouquet. 3. Happy Watercolor Daffodils - Practice: I wanted to start with a super quick practice. We will really be jumping almost straight into painting. But I did want to take the back of this sheet and practice just two things. One is the centers when we do the centers and again, more loosely interpreting this, we are going to be doing Ziggy zigzaggy lines, if that makes sense. I wanted to practice just getting a bit of pigment on the end of your brush, a decent amount of water and really just practice these centers. We're going to keep it really loose. That's kind of what it would look like on this one. If we had something like this, then we might fill it in fill it in with yellow or something once it was a little drier, I guess. If we have one that's straight on or we have one that's at an angle. Let's see him do an orange. We'll do it like this. Then. Maybe you're going to see the side the barrel of it. I guess maybe I don't know what it's called. Then the other thing I wanted to practice was just doing a few petals. I like a mix of lemon yellow and Winsor yellow deep for the petals. They're kind of lemony but not entirely, so I don't like it to be totally lemon. I feel like that can get very fluorescent almost. I wanted to practice some petals. So on this one for instance, the petals might come off and I'm gonna put some water on there. Like that. It's sort of like backward C loops, Forward. See, that's really how we're going to do them. These aren't overly pointed. Maybe we want to keep them a little flatter at the end. I like if they touch actually into the the rest of the flower because this, like I said, is a very loose interpretation. I was just going to practice. And I like when there's some white left in the center, because if you can see there, it's not just all filled in and perfectly one solid color. We can even add a little color to the edges. Or if we want to down the center. I think the contrast looks really nice. We can even go in and do a pedal that's mostly water like this. Then go back and add more detail. For instance, with, with paint. I just wanted to practice the little center part a little and the petals a little with you to get a sense for how that would, would look and how we might make the center of something like that. Remember that you can always pick up pigment with a dry brush. If you clean your brush off, you can pick pigment up. And then you can add something different back on these, I'm going to leave a lot of whitespace to, I feel like that keeps it loose and it keeps it dimensional. And so you see like here where we have our zigzag top, I've left the barrel not completely attached. I think that shows you more of the separation of the two. That's enough practice. And now I want to jump into doing, I think, maybe a three daffodil bouquet. Let's go and do that. 4. Happy Watercolor Daffodils - Flowers: All right, So I think on this we will do three flowers. It's just a nice way to do it. I think maybe we'll start with our lemony yellow one up here. And I'd like to do the very bright center first. Then we'll do the petals once that's a little bit dry. So it's just a zigzag. It's easier to add than to take away. So I like to just go in and touch really lightly. That's very, very light and I think I'm just gonna leave that for one minute. I want to add yellow in the center and I want to attach all of our beautiful paddles, but right now it will just bleed away. If we do that, let's go over here and start this one. And I think we can do it, do it like that. I really loved the yellow ones, but let's try one that white as well. I'm going to do pretty lemony yellow. Let's go ahead and do the zigzags of this one. Like that. I think that works. Now on this one, you see somewhat of the barrel coming back. So we might, we might add in a little bit of that. I'm going to use a little winter yellow deep just to make it a little bit of a different tone. We don't see a lot of it. We see a little sort of coming back. Again. This is a loose interpretation. We're not trying to make it. This is beautiful botanical art, but it's very accurate and we're not going to be that accurate because we're doing loose florals. I'm going to pick up, you see some of that green is hanging out there to pick up a little green gold, water it down a lot. And I'm just going to touch right along here. Then we start our petals. We're going to pick some of that up. This one is still drying, so I'm gonna start the petals on this one before we finish the center. Let's say lots of water on your brush to start, we can always add more paint, but it's harder to pick it up once it's down on the paper. So get your gray, your Davies gray and water it down a lot. Then we're just going to take some petals off the backside of this. You don't think I'm going to bring them out of the front, but well, let's just see how it goes. I'm going to take one and bring it off here. See that already has a lot of pigment. So see how I'm just going to move a C-shape and a C-shape. This petal comes off a little forward, so I might bring it out a little like this. Just so it curls around. That makes sense. And then I'm going to bring it down and touch it to the green because I want those bleeds, I want that. Look. Let's do our next one. Let's go off the back a little here with our C shapes again, if you get a lot of pigment like that, just get your brush with a lot of water and come back in with a lot of water. Wanted to just bring it down here into the greens. I'm touch it with little green gold because I like how that looks. The petals there. I think that's pretty, these are gonna be very hard to see without much pigment in them. So let's see how that had some gray at the tip where the petal was folded. I'm gonna go ahead and add that. All right, let's do another petal. Again, lots of water, not too much pigment. It's bring it out. Just gonna do light strokes like this. Keep it very loose. Let's get a little more green and bring that in. I love that. Maybe touch it with the little gray at the edge and bring it down just two. You can see there. If you look at this quite a bit of gray to make a white paddle, we all know that's white, but there's quite a bit of gray to it. Let's keep moving around our flower and we'll see this one, this coming down. And it's a little bit tucked behind so we could bring it like that. Then fill in with some water here. We can go back and add some dimension to these as we go. I'm going to attach this again with the green and see those bleeds are coming. I really loved those. And we'll make sure you guys can see this. Let me try to put this at a little bit of an angle. I'd like to do maybe one more petal here. I'm going to bring one more petal off the front here like this. Like this petal. He's gonna come out like this. This petal is behind this one, so we can make that edge darker. And then this petal is going to be behind this one. We can lighten this edge and darken that one. Now we'll have to come in and do a little clean up here with our center. But honestly, that's kind of fun. Ladder stem back here and that one will be kind of neat. This makes it a little wonky, but I love it. What I want to do in this tool right now is clean up this area a little bit. It's a little more yellow. Make that a little bolder. Then I also want to go in here, add a little more yellow to the inside. That's coming out like that. That's pretty. Then I'm going to go ahead and put some of the green in the center. This is going to be mostly green gold. I am going to darken it slightly with sap green because I want there to be dimension. I want it to look like it's the inside. Might even put just a tinge, just a tinge of the Indigo. A little goes a very long way with the indigo. You've got to be a little careful with that, but let's go ahead and dash that in. See how it's right up against that ruffle. Hospital call them ruffles. I don't want to blend it in that way, but I want to bring it out this way. I think that looks pretty yeah. I think that looks pretty good. Again, it's pretty loose. Bring the barrel out a little on the sides here where it would come out and flare out like this. Little darker, give it a little more contrast. There we go. We'll add his stem in a minute. Let's go back to our first daffodil. On this daffodil, and you can see the center has a lot of lovely yellow in it. I do want to bring this in a little bit to the center as well. Probably go in and put a little of the green in there too. At some point, you'll see I'm blending it a little bit with water with the edge of our orange ruffle just because I want there to be sort of a gradient. I'm kinda pulling down from that. Let's start off on this side and they'll really be the same shape as these. And we can leave the whitespace like we did on these. But these will be a lemony yellow with a little bit of Winsor yellow D, which is a modem just like we practiced. Leaving some white space. The edge isn't exactly pointed like we might do with a leaf. Let's do another one. Let's do this one coming out this way a little. I think that looks pretty great. I'm going to do one over here. I'm gonna start off mostly with, with water. Then we're going to add in the pigment. Remember that the paint will go only where the water is. So wherever you put water down, That's where when you touch it, it will flow. For this C right there I touched a dry spot, but there it's wet. I want to keep a lot of dimension in these flowers. They don't want them all to be this sort of plain, flat yellow. When you do a wet on wet technique like that, you get a little more dimension in the petal. I see it's lighter in the middle and darker at the edges. The other way to do that is get a dry, clean brush. You can pick pigment up, see that out of the center. You can pick pigment up. Or you could go back in and get a little paint and touch your edges. The center like this, which I think is really always nice. It gives the impression that the center is sunken in, like a flower would be. A couple of different ways to do. The petals. Will do one over here. Maybe this one is a little bit behind the other one. So it comes out like this. All right, I'm going to try to squeeze in two more. You can basically see about six petals on that flower. So I'm going to try to stick with that generally. I'm going to go in wet on wet over here and we're gonna get very close to our other flower, but that's totally fine. These are very close together here as well. It makes for a nice composition. Now I'm just adding a little pigment along the inside. Just to keep everything a little interesting. What do you think? I like the shape? The darker pigment here and along here. Maybe the last thing we'll do is one up here that's sort of maybe a little bit of a hybrid of the two. We'll do a little bit of a bud. Then we're going to start adding in stems and more centered detail as we go. If you look at this bed, it's gonna be a lot of gray water down. We'll do at kind of an angle. It's kind of a wide pedal. Goes to a rounded top. If you look at, has a pretty good vein in the center of the gray going up. And it also comes down into some green. Add a little bit of the green there because that'll be at the stem. Then there are some other petals going off a little on the side here. Almost to look like really. I'm just looking so we have our big large petal then we have one to the side. You can even fan it out a little. Then let's get a little that green gold. We're all this kind of goes down in to a stem curve like that and it'll be like that, it'll hide down behind that. Also a good bit of yellow on that, but I am going to bring that yellow up along the side of this one, curve it around. There's a little at the base here. I think this is really more of just that lemony yellow that we can darken a little bit with some of the Winsor yellow deep. Maybe like that. Again, just sort of a loose interpretation of what that looks like. Again, there's a good bit of gray in it, so we do need to make sure it has some dimension to it. We can't be afraid to put a little bit of pigment in there. Otherwise, it just really disappears right onto our page. Now I look at this and I looked at all the dimension on these petals and I think these came a little flat. I also want to go in here with a little bit of the gray. And I want to add in a little bit of shadowing right here on this petal because it's tucked behind that one. I think the add some dimension to it. Let's see. Maybe also on this side of that petal because it's tucked behind this one. To not be afraid to give it that shadow. So now you can see how nicely it looks like this is tucked behind. Then really lightly with maybe a two is to get a little wet gray. And let's just really gently add some sketchy. See the lines. Just some sketchy. We don't need a lot. Just a few lines here. Maybe along the edge. If it's too much, you can gently brush over it, but I feel like that add something nice to the daffodil, needs a little bit. You see this one with the shading in here, has the shading up here. We'll soften that. But then we can add just a few lines going up. And that was a little aggressive hormone. Take that back with some water. That's the beauty of it. You can always do that. Take some of those lines up. Along the edge of the petal, fills out the shape a little. I'm going to go around and do that to these petals. We can even do a little bit of dimension over here with a little bit of the darker yellow. Honestly, if you look at it, it's almost like it's got a little of the gray in it. When you look at that. I'm going to take a pretty light hand on this because I don't want to take an overwhelming let's quickly add the center of this one. I'm just going to get some of that green gold. And then I am going to add the sap green into it with again, a little bit of the indigo to darken it. Let's just go in and add that right along the back side of this. I'm just gonna give it a little texture. Now let's jump to the next section and get some stems on these flowers. 5. Happy Watercolor Daffodils - Stems + Leaves: All right, So now it's time to put stems on these and I'm gonna start with a stem for this one because I think it's gonna be the stem that's in the front. You can't see where it attaches to the back of the flower, but we can sketch it. I have a six here, sketch it lightly. The inside going down. See this one has a lot of indigo. I'm making one dark thin line. The reason I'm doing that is because you can always make it fatter, but it's harder to skinny up a stem. Once it's Giant. Then I'm gonna go and get just water on my brush. I'm gonna come down the back side. Too much water. It takes them off. I'm just going to come down the back side of the stem and touch the back part of the color to create somewhat of a gradient. Now that can be hard to see. But this stem you can see it's darker on the edges and it's lighter in the center. And so you don't want it to be perfectly all one shade. I'd like to darken one side of my stem and paint it in and then come back and do water down the other side. Then if you come back on this inside part with a little more color, you're going to get a great bleed and a really cool look to your stem. I think it doesn't have to be perfectly smooth and straight. Now where it meets the flower, it would be darker because it's shaded. It's behind this petal. So that's gonna be darker. That's a lovely, to me, a lovely stem. It needs more though. We need some leaves and then we're gonna come in and do this stem behind and this stem behind. But if we take care of this guy first and we're going to do some nice big fat leaves and they're going to have a good bit of indigo. Yes, some of the green goal, but also a good bit of indigo. When we do these leaves, I'm gonna do the first one pretty well as well. This is the motion. It's touch lightly, push down and curve and let up at the end. I'll show you what I'm talking about. Let me put it here. That's where this guy's going. Just a bit. I want it pretty wet so that it flows across the page. It doesn't always work, but let's try a little dab. Then we push down. I'm not, I'm not, I'm gonna have water here. Come push down. We have our big, big brush, and then we're going to let up. Now we've come to the petal. So I got to stop because what I want to do is then continue it up and let up at the end. Alright, so not perfect, but that's okay. Here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna get our six and some dark, darker pigment. We're going to put some dark pigment here and dark pigment here and maybe along the back side. And we're going to bring this baby right through as if it had come right up the other side. So see how it's got all this movement to it. Because we twisted and turned as we came through. I really like that and then we make this dark because it's behind this petal. Let's take a look and see what do we think. Dark down here and a little up at this curve. I liked that leaf. Let's do another one. That's a little bit even darker than that. Going back this way, up this way. Even amount a little bit. It Let's make sure I've got enough water hopefully this time. Again, trying to drag your hand through your wet leaf. I should've done this one. This 1 first but more at an upward angle. Touch it down here. Down push nope, didn't get it wet enough. And finish. Let me try that again. Down. Push, finish. Okay, so fun. That worked a little better. I'm going to add a little more green gold. I feel like he's getting really flat. So I'm going to fill in a lot of this in where I had. And try brush, especially here. Then up. Let's darken, darken. Here. We may go in and add some more texture and more color to that as we go. This is still wet so we can still darken. So they would come in at the base. We do want to just make him a little lighter right there. Then this curves in and that curves down, right. So this is a little bit where the light would hit him. There. That's fun. I think we should go ahead and put a stem for this guy coming down as well. Again, let's sketch it in. Basically, I think the stem would come right off of this petal and it would go here and down through there. Now technically he's not part of the stem, but we could this guy, but we could end him there if we wanted to or we could bring it all the way through. It's whatever we want to do. But now we have an edge so we can, we can go ahead and make a little more. We try to think about how it would flow right through here. Get a little darker where it meets this stem, it's behind the shadow and then darker where it goes down here. But let's go ahead. I'm using a two on this because I want to be pretty precise. Let's go ahead and add some water. A little water here. Just to make this stem a little more interesting. Curve all the way in, I guess. I don't know. All right, So this and this this is our made-up, this is our pass-through. We want that to really show. That's where those two went behind and this is where it goes into the flour. Going to thicken this up, down here a little, I think. Smooth it out. I like to kind of make that precise because I really like how it looks when it looks like it's going behind. We go. All right, now he has his stem too, and we have to do a stem for this guy as well. Don't forget that while your leaves are wet, you can add shading and shadow to them. I did not quite mean to add that much. Indigo. Okay, we got to figure out where this stems going. I'm gonna get the two again. I'm gonna get a good bit of green goals and all that. I think the way this is coming, it's kind of a straighter stem. It's coming down. I'm going to sketch really lightly. It's coming down here. It's kind of a straight stem. Think it's something like that. We can do the same thing. We get some water. We already have somewhat of a stem going on there. Get some water and just pull out a little of that color. Try not to get it on the petals themselves. Then we'll do the same trick. Where we put a little more dark, dark here behind and it's dark where it goes down into the base. Si it's hitting this cool dark. They're getting a little see if I can pick up a little of that pigment. Got to drop, just wipe it away. I'm going to take it like that. Then sometimes it helps us to step back and look at it from a distance for a minute to see. Does that look good? Does that look right? I think for now we'll leave it. I still feel like we need another leaf in here. It's gonna be really tricky now to place it because we have our stems and our flowers. We're going to be a little careful. We're going to sketch a leaf up to here. I think it sounds risky, doesn't it? I think we can do it. All right. We'll take some light pigment. Will figure out that that leaf came. I got an idea if that leaf came off of this stem. So this guy, he's got a leaf. If it came off right here. And it went up like this. All right, Well, we've committed now, haven't we? It's going to come off this guy touching to this stem. And it's going to go, and it's gonna go fat, then it's going to go smooth. What we have is it's more of a side of the leaf, actually kinda like it. I'm kind of glad we did it. Worth the risk. I'm gonna get a good bit of indigo because this leaf is now at the very back, very back of this piece. And attaches here. We want to make that look right. Coming off this guy. Off the back side basically. Then it's gonna come up here and it's literally coming right out of the top. Awesome. That's fun. Yeah, I feel like it balances it out some. But this has gotta be a lot darker. To get the feeling of how far behind this flower it is. We really need to darken this. And it needs to go with the edge of the flower. We may have to come back and hit this with color a few times just to make it make it work. What do you guys think? How are we doing? Do we want to touch it anymore? Do we want to leave at do we want to add any more green? There's a part of me that wants to green this guy up, up here. I don't know. The touching too much disease is a real thing in watercolor. I have it. No, I think we might be good to go guys. Again, this has to be dark. It's going to feel like maybe it's too much contrast, but we really want that yellow flower to pop. Gonna touch up the stem a little bit here. Alright, and then I'm going to just make, darken this area up a little to want to make sure we have the dimension that we want. Yes, this is loose, but it is still trying to show you where things fall. On the page. We're in the bouquet. You get it on there. Then you feather it out with water because you don't want your super hard line there. Well, I think we're about done, so let's wrap it up in the next section with some final thoughts. 6. Happy Watercolor Daffodils - Final Thoughts: Okay guys, I think we've done it. I think we've finished off our daffodils for the day. I really hope that you have had fun painting daffodils with me today. I hope your daffodils are cheerful and brighten up your day. Please post your projects to the projects page. I would love to see them and give feedback. I would love for you to leave a review for my class if you have time. And I just so appreciate you showing up to paint with me today. I hope you'll share your projects on Instagram and tag me so I can store them and share them with the world. Thanks again, and I hope you'll paint with me again by the book.