Transcripts
1. Introduction : Hello and welcome to
my skill share course. In this course,
we're going to be painting some tulips
in watercolor, looking at all the
lovely curves that they have in both the
leaves and the petals. We'll be doing
this step by step, and I'll go through the
whole process with you. And I will, of course,
attach the photograph that I'm using below in the
reference section. For those of you
that don't know me, I'm Ali and I'm a landscape
artist from Cumbria. And if you want to see
more of my own work, you can take a look at
my Instagram account. So, let's get ready by collecting
our materials together.
2. Materials : Firstly, you're going
to need a reference. I've got this photograph, the one that I've
attached for you. But of course, you could
use a different photograph, or you could pop some tulips
in front of you in a vase. You're also, of course,
going to need some paper. The paper that I'm using is a Bockingford from
St. Cuthbert's Mill, and it's 140 pounds not pressed. I always recommend
using something at least 140 pounds or above. You can get
disappointing results if you use a paper that
isn't heavy enough, obviously I'm using a pad, but you could use a gummed pad or you could use loose sheets. If you're using loose
sheets of watercolor paper, do remember that You're going to need to take those
to your board. Next you're going to
need some brushes. I've got two here. These are both sable ones. Ones are number six and
ones are number three, and they are both round brushes. You, of course, could
use synthetic ones. And I've got a pencil, just
an ordinary HB and an Erasor. And of course my tin of, my trusty tin of water colors, which you can see have had quite a lot of use
over the years. These are winds and, and
Newton artist quality ones. But you use whatever water
colors you have to hand. And you don't have to of course, use the same colors as me. As colors are
subjective and we can always change them to
alter our artwork. In addition, of course, you're
going to need some water. Always have two pots of water, one for cleaning
your brush and one for adding water to your paint. It's also a good idea to
always have some tissue handy.
3. Drawing : The first step.
Once you're sitting comfortably or standing as I am, I like to work standing
up at my work bench. But if you make
yourself comfortable before you do your drawing, you'll find you relax
a little bit more. Get your paper ready
and your pencil. And then we're just
going to look at the basic shapes that
we've got in front of us. And look at the length
of those tulips as well. So we're going to need
to leave quite a bit of paper for the stems
to be coming up. I'm going to start off by just putting the outline, shape, and the position of each flower roughly they're
going to fit into, more or less an oblong, this pencil line might not
show up too much to you, but it's giving you the
idea of what I mean, we've got those two
touching each other, as I say with my
other tutorials, when you're drawing
flowers, et cetera, when somebody is looking
at your artwork later on, they are not going to have the exact photograph or
tulip in front of them. Don't over obsess about
everything being photo realistic. We've got two nice pairs here of tulips touching each other, nodding their heads together. I'm just putting those in a
blocks of geometric shapes. These oblongs look at the size. The purple ones are
slightly smaller than the yellow one there. I'm just going to make that
one a little bit bigger. Of course, we can erase
all these lines later on. You need a good eraser. Don't have one of those erasers that tears away at the paper. And always make sure it's
clean before you start. Once we've got those position, we will then put the stems in. This first one goes down
and then swoops away. Like I said in the introduction, we really want to look at these lovely curves
that tulips make. You may not know that tulips actually continue growing
after you've cut them. And then they grow
towards the light. You put them on your
side by a window, you'll find that they end up
growing towards the light. See how this one
crosses over and this one more or less touches it there before it
goes down to the leaves. Obviously they're going
to be wider than that, but we're just
positioning things. Before we put the detail in, I'm going to put the leaves that are closest to us in first. If we look how far they come up, this one comes about
halfway up the stem. Again, don't obsess about
them being super accurate. We can't see that stem there. Just get a general feel. What we're looking for is a feel of the way things are moving. Halfway up this one
we've got the other one poking behind these stems. And it goes up between
these two stems and down. Then we need to erase there. This is going to take
a little bit of time. Just look at where the stems and leaves are criss
crossing over each other. Try and get those
lovely curls in. And spend a bit of time getting this drawing accurate of all these leaves and
stems down here. And then we can go and start putting the shapes
in the tulips. If we look at them, they've got a leaf at the front
petal, should I say? Not a leaf going up like this. The fitting into that shape, and then the others
coming, that shapes there, just as a guide for you to
fit all your tulips into, Then we can start and
build it up by making the stems as they are and carry on putting
those leaves in. So I will come back to you
at the next stage where I've got all the drawing done and I've erased some of those edges, and we've just got the flowers
there to take some time. When we're doing
watercolor painting, it's easy to want to get the color on because we
enjoy putting color on. It's a pleasurable
thing to do. We want to see the finished result, we want to see those colors. But really, the drawing
stage, this first stage, is quite much more important in a way than
the actual painting, because once you've
got the drawing there, you're painting to that
shape that you've got. Spend some time making
your drawing that you're happy with because it's very difficult to
change that later on, especially in water color. It's very easy in acrlican
oil because we can just paint over with the paints. But in water color, it's
much more difficult. Spend some time,
particularly with the way these leaves are going over
each other and the stems, making sure we get them right.
4. Leaves Part 1 : Once you're happy
with your drawing. And I've kept it quite
simple, simple outlines. I haven't put every detail of the petals in because we can add some of those shadows
and shapes with the paint. Keep it simple. Just the
basic outline of the leaves, not the veins and things, but do look at where
the folding over. So this is quite
characteristic with tulips. You get lots of curves. And here you'll see, you see the backside and the
inside of the leaf, so make sure you get
those shapes in two. So when we talk about
watercolor painting, we talk about two techniques, wet in wet and wet and dry. In reality, when you've
been painting for a while, what happens is you tend to do a combination of the two using those techniques depending on the subject that
you're doing and on the style that
you want to achieve. We're going to be
doing that today. I think we should set
off with the leaves. We really need to concentrate on where those stems are so that we don't paint over the
stems to begin with. What I want you to do is mix
some colors for the leaves. If we look at those, they're starting to die
back a little bit. So they've got some
touches of yellow on. We need some green and
we need some yellow. We need those two colors to
be the same consistency. By that I mean the same
amount of water to pigment, so that, well, a creamy
consistency would be good. But make sure that
they're both the same so that when we paint wet into wet, they don't make a mess with one area being wetter
than the other. Okay, so we'll do that now. We'll start off with the leaves. We'll leave the stems because they're much lighter in color. And we'll leave the flowers, we'll just start
with those leaves and get those
greens and yellows. To keep it simple, I've
just got two colors. I've got sap green, and I've got Rawsienna. You can make it a little bit
brighter if you wanted to. The reason I chose Racienna was because I want
the yellow tulip, the flower, to stand out
much more than leaves. So I want to keep that quite subdued and
it's a lovely color. So the thing we want to
do is build forwards. So start with that back leaf. And what we're going
to do to begin with is with a good
tip on your brush. So you need a nice point to the end of your
brush to get into those shapes that you've drawn
is to wet that back leaf, you need to carefully go around the flowers with your water. And we're not making
it sopping wet, we're just making
the paper damp. How much water you use
here is going to depend on your brush and your paper because they all hold
different amounts of water. You need to get used to using your own materials and
familiarize yourself with them so that you know how
much water your brush holds and how much water your paper absorbs
with water color. It's all about trial and error. These little five sketch
books are great for that. For doing a daily sketch
in your watercolor. To familiarize yourself
with the medium, you need to think and
do this quite slowly. And think about where
that back leaf is. This is part of this and
this and all this here. Then you need to
get the green load, your brush up so it's
full and just drop that into that water
and steer it around. You're not really
painting, you're pushing it into that
water that you've just popped in there and letting it flow out into that water. You don't need to worry about it going onto those
tulips or those stems. Because you've carefully,
with that nice tip to your brush painted
around those shapes, you just guiding it around. You may need to
reload your brush. Again, this depends
on your brush, how good it is, how
much paint it holds. You will find that
the sable brushes hold much more than
the synthetic brushes. But to be honest, you
can get some really, really good synthetic brushes by putting the water on. First you're making it
a little bit softer and getting a softer feel
across the whole painting, and then we'll bear to put
that yellow into that. It's drying quite
quickly as this paper, it's still damp, but
it's a lovely paper. It does seem to sink quite
well into this Bockingford. We all have our favorites, and this is one I
wouldn't be without. I don't need to tape it or
anything around the edges of this pad because it's
a nice heavy paper. Despite only being 140, you can really put
plenty of water on it and it doesn't okay. So we've got all the greening. If you get areas where you want to move it
a little bit where you think it's dry
as you'd like, you can just tease it around but don't introduce
any extra water. That's the whole
thing with painting wet and wet is that you don't introduce more water and make a higher concentration. Whoops, I've just
gone onto that stem, but what I'm going
to do is leave it because it's much
easier to take that off the stem when it's
dry than it is now when it's wet and we
end up making a mess. Don't worry about hiding
those lines that we did of the curls because we'll
come back to that later. We'll bail to see that pencil more once these
paints have dried. Now I'm just taking the
yellow, and like I said, because it was the
same concentration, it's not going to make a
mess when you put it in. I've gone over the
line again there. I've not got very
steady hands today. Just look at the cheer
lips in front of you or the photograph
in front of you. And look where you
can see the yellow. And don't forget, we
can use a little bit of artistic license if we want to cheer things up and
put extra yellow in. We're not doing a photograph, we're not creating a photograph. We are creating an artwork. And if we want to put
more color in them, we see that's absolutely fine. It's subjective and
it's up to you. Okay, so now I want to leave that leaf to dry before I
go on to the next leaf. And so that's what we're
going to do. We're going to gradually build
up these leaves. You'll see the foreground
ones have much more of the yellow in them. And then when the dry,
we're going to come back and go darker
in some areas.
5. Leaves Part 2 : I'm hoping you can see there. But that by doing each
leaf individually, even though we're
using the same color, you get a crisp outline
where the water goes to the edge of where that dry
paper hits the wet paper. And then that distinguishes
between the leaves. You could leave it just
like that if you wanted to, but I'm going to just
add a touch of shadow just to give us more of
the shape of those leaves. What I've done is with
the green that was left, I've popped a little touch of
Alizarin Crimson in there. So we'll do the same
thing again on top here. We've got it folding over. I
talked about this earlier. I'm just going to try and get a little bit of
water on this brush and very carefully go over
that area to put some shadow, to emphasize that I'm not
going to go all the way down. I'm not going to do it
exactly as it is on the photograph
because we don't want everything looking
really, really dark. I'm just going to
emphasize those shapes. I'm just going to drop into that water some of that green
with the Alizarin added to make that shadow color with a damp brush,
not a wet brush. So get rid of the excess water. You can gently tease
that paint down. You can see how
that's emphasized, the fact that we've
got that curve there. And what you could do
with a nice point on your brush is to
just to pop over that pencil line up
to the tip there. When I talked about
a combination of wet and wet and wet and dry, that's what I was talking about. We can put little
details on top of that. Wetting, wet painting,
Painting wet onto dry. I'm going to put a few more
dark areas in like that. But before I do that, I've got
some of the rowsiena here. If we look down here,
we need to do the same. We've got a curl again, we need to do the same with
a nice tip on the brush, just to again emphasize the
fact that that's curled over. That's going to be enough. We don't want to be putting
in too much detail. So I'll go ahead now and
put some more shadows in. You do this as well and do as many or as few as
you feel necessary. I really want to try and keep
it simple and not overdo those and then we'll come on to do in the flower painting.
6. Flowers Part 1 : Now we'll move on to the flowers and whilst your leaves were dry. And you can make up
your paints ready? In the top one here, I've
got this for the stems. This is again some
of the raw sienna, but this time I've added
some cadmium into that, some cadmium yellow, just to make a different
color to the leaves, because really the
flowers want to stand out away
from those leaves. Then I'm using, for
the purple tulips, I'm using Windsor violet. And for that yellow tulip, I've got the cadmium yellow. And we're just going to follow
exactly the same thing. Again, I'm not going to go
through all of it with you. I'll just start and
do one tulip and then I'll finish them later. We need to let those colors mix, wet the paper across
the tulip and the stem, allow those colors to dry, and then come on later
with some shadows, et cetera, in just the same
way that we did the leaves. Now if you look at the flowers, the light extends up into the tulip quite often as
well, with a lot of flowers. So you need to observe this with flowers when you're
looking at them. Some of the flower color
extends into the stem. Do allow the colors to mix between the stem
and the flower. Don't treat them as
two separate things. Treat the stem and the
flower all as one. So we'll begin again by adding some water to this first tulip. My paper has been
drying quite quickly today because I've got
the radiator on in here. This is something we have
to be aware of and we have to adjust the amount
of water that we use, depending on how warm the room is that
you're painting in. Of course, if you're
painting outside and it's windy or it's very
sunny as well, that can alter how
quickly things dry. We're not going to do each petal individually to begin with because we can put that
detail on like we did here. We can make those
shapes afterwards with adding some
layers of paint. We're just going
to add into there the purple teasing the brush, those curves there, but not coming too far down
because like I said, we've got that light area
for that light area, we're going to pop in this nice yellow
mix that we've got. And you can see
there that's a lot brighter than the leaves. Let it touch the purple if you feel you want
it to be lighter. Because some areas of this
are actually quite white, you can lift them
out with your brush. At this stage, there's some
quite white bits here. We've got light and shade on
the stem as well, obviously. Okay, do them one at once. Let them completely dry, and then we'll come
back afterwards and do some more detail on them.
7. Flowers Part 2 : Now that that's all dry, you can think about putting
some final touches to it and some more detail
and some shadows. So how much you do
really is up to you. I'm just looking at the tulips on the photograph
now and thinking, actually they've
got a little bit of a pink tinge to them. So what I'm going to
start by doing is putting a little wash of pink over
some of those purple areas. This time I'm going
to paint wet on to dry to build a bit
of that detail up, then carefully go
around the petals. Now don't forget with your
water colors that they do dry paler than they go on. You always need a stronger
mix than you might think. You could work wet on, wet again if you wanted to. Or you could do like this and
do a combination of both. Now with the stems, of course, stems are like a tube. The round, they're going to
have a shadow to one side. This is the same whenever you're doing flowers, really obviously, you've got to think about
where your light sources and sometimes we don't need
a really dark shadow color. We can just go over
with the same color down one side of
the stem just to give the impression that that is the side that
the lights not catching. In fact, this one isn't
catching much light at all. You can draw with your brush
at this stage if you want to go over some of
those pencil lines to get some of those shapes. Whilst I've got
that on the brush, I'm just going to
make that little end there a bit where it's twisted, it twists twice there. Now the yellow, and if we
look at the yellow again, it's a little bit orangy. Rather than introduce
another color, I'm going to take
a bit of that pink and pop it in the yellow that we had just to make that a bit
warmer, bit more orange. I'm going to draw with this around some of these
shapes that we've got. You'll see what I mean,
if you take a look at the photograph, how
it's more orange, where those shadows are in the base and just blocking that shaping as you're giving the impression of
detail without really drawing too much detail. I'm going to draw
the line of that petal because it casts a
shadow on the one beneath it. There's quite a bit
of detail in here, but it's best really to
leave some of that out. You'll see here my color
ran a little bit before. Now that that's drying a bit, I'm going to get a
synthetic brush. Synthetic brushes are
much better for lifting out color than your
sable brushes. Have a tissue ready as well
to wipe off your brush, and I can lift a little
bit of that pink out. The trouble with pinks and reds, anything red based, is they
tend to stain the paper. It's never just as easy to lift out as things on the blue side. There we go. Just
softening that a bit. We could carry on, we could put more shadows under
the flowers there, under the head here, let
me just have a look. In fact, what I'll do is
just add a touch of green to that because there is a
bit of green in the stems. All these little
finishing off jobs we could go on for a while, but really we want to keep it simple. I'll just soften that. So what I'm trying
to demonstrate here really is that we're
always doing a bit of a combination between painting wet into
wet and wet on dry. You don't have to just
stick to one or the other in order to find the effect that
you want to achieve. Okay, I'm going to
leave it at that. If you wanted to, you
could put more detail in. You could certainly go darker. If you look at the photograph, you will see it's a lot darker in places
than I've got it. But I wanted to keep
it fresh and light, to have the paper come through those colors and to make it a
bit of a softer feel to it. I'm just looking
at this here and feeling that's where I've
gone a little bit wrong. I feel like this comes
too far down here, and the leaf behind
should be further across. We've just not got that
contrast because we've got light in the leaf
and light there. So I'm just going to tidy it up. These are all little things
you can do at the end. Just stand back, have a look and see where things
need tidying up and leave it overnight and you'll see
in the morning things that need changing for your project. If you want to have a go
doing this photograph that I've given you, then
when you've done that, it would be great to have a
go with a different flower, either a different color tulip, a different shaped tulip. Because you can get
so many shapes in tulips or a different
flower entirely, begin by putting in the basic shapes of the flowers and then
filling in the petals in between that and the basic shapes of the leaves and the stems with your pencil. And then build it
up in this way. Combine in your wet and dry, being very patient,
letting things dry, going off and leaving it, coming back the next day, and gradually building it up.
8. Conclusion : To conclude, you can
see that by using just a few colors and
a few simple shapes, you can make a very
pleasing picture, even though we've not gone into too much detail by combining
those two techniques. By being a little
bit patient and looking very carefully at the photograph that
we have there. Okay, I hope you've
enjoyed that. I very much look forward to seeing your projects
and what you do. Of course, I will
give you feedback as soon as I'm able to on those. If you have any questions in
the meantime, please do ask. You can ask me here on
skill share or you can also ask me in my DMs on Instagram. I will be very happy to get
back to you as soon as I can. I very much hope that you enjoy doing this and I will hope to be back with you again soon with another skill share class. The last thing that I need to
do with this one is let it completely dry and remove some of these pencil guidelines. Do that very gently and you don't damage your paper
or your painting. Okay. I hopefully see you
again soon. Bye bye for now.
Cally Lawson, “Paint like no one is watching"
