Inky Florals: 3 Floral Styles Using Only Black Ink

1. Class Trailer | Welcome!: Hello, and welcome to my Skillshare class, Inky Florals, three floral styles, using only black ink. I've been painting and drawing florals for as long as I can remember. But since I started painting them with my old pot of black ink, I became obsessed with the dynamic styles and varying techniques that ink allows for. In this class, you're invited to explore three unique styles of expressive florals using only one medium, ink. Throughout the lessons, you'll learn how to use ink like a watercolor, to create a more traditional watercolor floral in Style 1. In Style 2, we'll change it up and design some more gestural, painterly bouquets that require as little thought and practice as possible. In Style 3, we'll explore a block printing style of floral that uses negative space and clean lines to make a bold statement. This class is meant to challenge you to think outside of the box, and to look at your medium and your subject in a new way. No matter what tools you have on hand, I'm confident you will complete this class feeling more creative and ready to incorporate these techniques into your everyday creative practice. 2. Tools + Materials: This class focuses on exploring the medium of black ink throughout all three styles that we'll do in this class and the ink that I am using is this Dr. Ph. Martin's Black Star waterproof, India ink and it's extremely pigmented and it is definitely waterproof. If you're using a potted ink like this, I would just make sure that you have a pallet or a devoted bowl or dish or something that you don't mind having this ink in because it probably won't come off after it's dry. I have this little palette right here. You can see that all the ink is dry and it might have a little bit of reactivation with water, but it is not going to reactivate like a watercolor. Once the ink is dried, you will probably have a hard time getting it out of this palette and I'm just going to be putting fresh ink on top of this. That's what I'll be using as my palette throughout this class, specifically for the first two styles that we'll do in this class, I am going to be using different types of round brushes and round brushes, if you are familiar with watercolor or familiar with lettering are brushes that are tapered at the end. You can see all of these brushes have a little tapered point at the very end and that's what makes them called a round brush and they're just super flexible brushes. You can get a variety of stroke thicknesses when you are using these brushes which we'll go over in a minute and I've got different sizes here ranging small to large and also different qualities of brush too. These two black brushes are super cheap and they have held up well and served me well over the years and so you don't need to have an expensive brush to create beautiful results. These two brushes are a little bit more high-quality. This one is a handmade brush by Sugar House Ceramics. They also make this brush rubs that comes in super handy for me and I will link them in the materials and resources section of this class and this is a mop brush that I ordered online. This is an expensive brush but it does some really cool stuff, so I'll show you all of that in a minute. All you really need is one size of round brush that you're comfortable using and you can go ahead and get started with this class. If you don't have potted ink and a round brush, no big deal because there's other substitutes you could use throughout class. This is a pinto ink brush that I've used a lot for lettering, it's really pigmented. It's got that tapered tip at the edge and the ink flows very freely out of this brush. Once again, all the tools will be linked below if you want to order any of these things or use them to create the different styles. I'm also going to be using a fine liner pen. This is a micron size three and I use this specifically for getting really crisp, clean edges and so if you have one of these lying around or any sort of black ink pen, that's going to come in really handy. A pencil is always really nice to have. You could use a black brush pen of some sort if you have that on hand and I'm also going to be using this Sakura Gelly Roll White Gel Pen. This is a size eight and this comes in super handy for the third style that we'll do, which involves having really crisp edges and drawing some white space into our shapes. As for paper, I am going to be using watercolor paper for the first style, which is a watercolor style. If you don't have water color paper, a mixed media paper would work, but any other type of paper would probably get warped from just the amount of water that we're going to be using. I have my watercolor paper cut up into some different sizes, not necessary, not required just something that I wanted to do and you can use whatever size paper you have on hand. For the remaining two styles of florals that don't involve water, I'm going to be using a super smooth ultra white card stock. Any kind of thicker card stock will work for this. It doesn't have to be totally smooth, but smooth always helps, I think. Last but not least, you'll need a jar of clean water and you'll probably have to change out your water a couple times throughout class just because this ink is so pigmented and it gets into this water and almost makes it unusable after a certain point. Then you also need some sort of rag paper towel, something that you obviously don't mind getting a little bit stained because especially if you're using the type of ink that I am, it does not come out. Once you've gathered up all of your materials, we can go ahead and jump into the next lesson. 3. Get To Know Your Ink: Before we jump into our first style, let's get warmed up with some ink and a paint brush just because I think this medium can feel a bit intimidating if you've never played with ink before. Using a round brush is also something that might be a learning curve for you if you've never used one. To prep my ink station, I'm just going to pour a little bit of ink into my bowl. I'm actually just going to use the dropper to just get a few drops into the bowl. You really don't need a lot, a little bit of this goes a long way. That's about how much ink I've got for our little test. I'm going to grab a piece of this small watercolor paper, I've got cut out here, put my paper towel to the side. I'm going to wet my brush just a little bit. I think a wet brush works just a little bit better with this ink, it doesn't need to be soaking wet, just a little bit of water stretches out your ink a little bit more. I'm going to dip it in here. Just start making some strokes with your brush to get a feeling for how the ink reacts. It is so black, so opaque, pretty velvety. My brush is already starting to be a little bit dry. If you want to get a brushy texture with ink, it is so easy to do. It actually creates some really cool textures that you could use throughout your work. Dip my brush into water that had just a little bit of ink on it. Just by adding a little bit of water to that brush, I'm able to use the rest of the ink that was in that brush to create a light black or a dark gray watercolor effect. If you remember, we're going to be doing watercolor for our first style. This is a good chance to play around with using the ink like you would with watercolors. The more pigmented your ink is, so the less water that you're using with your ink, the darker it's going to be. But if you add a little bit of water to that and just a little bit of water off to the side here, and then I'm just touching the ink and pulling it into that puddle of water. Able to still get what would be considered a really pigmented black watercolor effect. You can see that these are already drying. These have a really fast dry time, which is pretty cool, and they dried to a very velvety, smooth look. It's actually very satisfying to look at. Another thing about this ink that's really cool is since it is waterproof, it's not going to be reactivated when you layer on top of it. If I wanted to grab some more ink, maybe in a little bit of water. I can go over these inky areas, where I treated the ink like watercolor. If it's a little wet, there's going to be some minimal bleeding, but it's actually really great for layering. You can do very crisp lines, dark spaces on top of paint that's already been laid down. Which is great for adding details, and this is what is so fun about using ink. You can do really dynamic pieces of artwork with just one color. It's really fun to experiment, stretches your imagination and shows you what potentially is possible. We'll put this a to this side. I've got a piece of card stock here. I just want to show you the difference in what painting on the card stock feels like. It's a little bit smoother of an experience, super opaque. Once again, my brush is giving me that same awesome brushy texture. But this is where you want to be wary of using too much water because your paper will work. It's been seconds since I lied this ink down on the paper and it's already completely dry. But this is definitely something that working with the ink in the card stock is a different feeling for the user than it is working with watercolor. I don't know that it's something you would be able to tell much of a difference of in the class. But if you have any card stock on hand, I definitely encourage you to experiment with that. I'm going to add a little bit more ink to my palette. The reason why I'm adding just a little bit at a time is because I can always add more ink, but I cannot reactivate my dried ink once it's dried up. If you use a lot of ink, there is potential that it will dry before you can use it all and then that's wasted ink, so just be mindful of that. Another thing that you might want to do, draw this off, because I don't want to use too much water on this card stock, is to experiment with using your tapered brush and making different thicknesses of lines. If you barely apply any pressure on a tapered brush, you're going to get a super thin line just like that. But if you press down and apply pressure, you're going to get a thicker line like this. Just practice making this thicker lines, letting up, alternating. If you're familiar at all with brush lettering or with watercolor lettering, it's the exact same principle using a round brush or using a tip of a brush pin that is flexible where you can apply thicker or thinner strokes depending on how hard you press. Take as much time as you need to play around with your ink and your papers, and experimenting with how much water you want to use in your watercolor technique and what kind of strokes you like, because that will help us when we're moving on to our first style. 4. Style 1: Practice Painting Leaves: For our first style, will be using our ink as a watercolor. Go ahead and put a little bit of ink and your palate. If you don't have ink, you could use a pretty pigmented black watercolor, and just use less water with it to make it more opaque. I don't know if you have ever attempted to paint any watercolor, botanical, or floral before. But If you have, it's the same basic principle. Is one of my absolute favorite subjects to paint with any type of medium. I love doing florals with black ink, because I feel like it's a bit of an oxymoron, because usually flowers are so colorful and pretty and happy. The black ink definitely gives a more moody, almost a vintage effect in some cases. I'm really excited to show you my technique for doing this. I'm going to grab, probably to start out, I'm going to grab my smallest round brush. I'm going to get it a little bit wet. I'll water and then put some ink over to the side. Now, this is just going to be for practice. We'll do a stem that has a lot of leafs coming off of it, to get you practice for drawing these leaf shapes. There is a really simple technique to doing this using the tip of your brush that has ink on it. Barely apply any pressure at all. I want you to just drag your hand up your paper, and draw a stem. Just the thinnest stem you can get. Making curve outward like that. Then you can even draw one that comes off, branches off, and then even another one that's a little bit smaller now. You're barely applying any pressure to the paper. This requires a little bit of practice. I like to hold my hand on the paper. Then keep my hand held right up against that paper as I'm moving it. In whatever, direction I'm going, that helps you stay a little bit more steady. Grab some more ink, and then to do or leaf shapes, this might require a little bit of practice, but it's absolutely addicting. You want to pick somewhere on your little twig to start. You're going to take the tip of your brush, barely any pressure you want to start coming off your stem. You want to draw the tiniest little, then shape that's going to be your connector piece. If you're thinking about how leaves are attached to a stem or a branch, there is that little thin place where the leaf comes out from. You're going to do this without picking up your paint brush. I'm just showing you step-by-step so you want to make that little thin. Then connect your piece with a very tip of your brush. Then you want to press down, and apply pressure and drag outward. Then you want to release pressure still moving, to create the pointy end of your leaf. You want to just continue doing this. It's one continuous motion. You can watch me do this again, and press lightly, then start to apply more pressure. Then release that pressure. It doesn't have to be perfectly straight. In fact, I think it should have a little bit of movement on the edge, because that looks a little bit more realistic. Just practice doing this. It is like I said, super addicting. Then I just like to turn my hand this way. Doing the same technique to get these leaves on the other side. I have yet to need to reload my brush up yet, with more ink. Ink is just awesome. Might add just a smidge of water. It's okay if you're, leaves are different tones of black, because I think that makes it more interesting, makes it look a little bit more like watercolor too. I'm just going to continue doing this all over my stem. Once this area has had time to dry, I'm going to go back in, and just create leaves right on top of these that are here. Gives it a lot of dimension. Another technique you can do that looks really good is you can draw 1.5 of your leaf. You would maybe apply a little bit less pressure, in that middle portion of the leaf. Then you come right in on the other side, and you just want to leave the tiniest little bit of white space in between. I'm going to zoom you in here so you can see what I'm talking about. When it come into the side and I'm going to just going to leave like the littlest amount of white space. Just like that. Once again, this takes a little bit of practice, but I bet you'll find that this is absolutely addicting. You'll want to do it all the time. Now, that these have had a chance to dry, I'm going to grab some more pigmented ink, and layer right on top of these here. These darker ones will look like they're the ones that are in front of those ones back there. This is how a real life branch would be that has a lot of leaves. You just got the different layers. If it stresses you out, takes the fun out of it to think about how this would look in real life then don't think about it. It's your art and you get to do whatever you want with it. It's really something that I want to impress upon you during this class is that there are no rules. You should treat this class truly like a style study, and use it to figure out what things you like, and what techniques you like. How to look at tools and subjects. It may be a different way than you had before. This is a really great exercise to do, when you're in a rut, and you feel like you're a little bit drained creatively. About done with this one. Then go back over these so they're a little bit darker. 5. Style 1: More Leaf Styles: Creating leaves is super easy. My number 1 tip for creating leaves is to use a round brush. If you're feeling a little bit stifled at using the round brush technique, you can just draw a leaf shape with your brush like this and just fill it in. Then just add that little connector piece to the end and then make sure that you give it that tapered edge as well. You can also do a round style of leaf as well. Something that comes out like this and then just fill that in with color. There's a lot of different lifestyles that you can do. Please do not get caught up on having to do the same type of leaf over and over again. I want to show you what the different sizes of round brush will give you because even just moving up one level of size gives you a much larger leaf. Don't have it, load it up. You can get a much larger leaf moving up in the different sizes. You can also do a leaf with a jagged edge, which you see a lot specifically with roses. Once again, this takes a little bit of practice, but it's fun to do flick up and move around and give yourself leaf with some edge that's a little bit imperfect and a little bit different than the normal leaf. Not all leaves are perfect. Then once these areas have dried, you can go in, grab some less diluted ink and then add some detail lines to this as well. That can do a lot for giving your leaves depths if you're not real comfortable with working with watercolor. Then lastly, I want to show you what this mop brush will do, so it's pretty cool. It's a little bit difficult. I find that I don't have as much control with this, but sometimes that can be a good thing because it's super flexible and soft. It gives you this rounded edge of a leaf which is totally fine. That could be the look that you're going for. But I find I don't have quite as much control over this one, but it still can serve it's purpose. Why don't you go ahead and use this time to practice coming up with as many different leaf shapes as you can before we move on to our next lesson, because we are going to start painting a rose and it is going to be awesome. 6. Style 1: Practice Painting Roses: If you have never painted a watercolor rose before, there is a little trick that I like to use. You can look at as many reference pictures of roses as you want to help you grasp this idea. But a rose is basically just a spiral when you're trying to paint it. There is going to be a center and then it's going to spiral outward. Then the further you spiral outward, the more space between the spirals you get. You want it to be uneven, so this is going to be the basic rose shape that I like to paint on top of for practice. If you rely too heavily on using this spiral technique, I think sometimes your rose can look a little bit stiff and won't look as organic. But if this is your first time doing this and this is a great little template to use. Now, the middle of your rose is going to be the darkest part. You want to grab your pigmented ink and you want to just make your little darkest spot right here in the center of your rose. This is your darkest spot in the center and then you want it to come out. Just a little bit like that, so you're starting the spiral. Now from here, you want to continue on this spiral and you want to definitely utilize the different thicknesses that you can get with your tapered round brush. You want to also leave some white space in -between each stroke that you make, you're going in a spiral, but not following directions too closely and you're connecting some areas and you're leaving some areas. Then after you use the ink that's on your brush, you want to add a little bit of water because you want your strokes to become lighter the further out you go. I'm going to add a little bit of ink here to middle to emphasize how dark the center is. Then just continue following that curve and I want it to be a little bit uneven. I want one side of my rows to be coming out a little bit further than the other side. Right now it's looking a little bit too stiff for me. Let's make another one together. Got all the bark coming off of these handmade brushes to. I'll see if I can do this without the spiral, it might look a little bit less stuff. Remember, your darkest part of your flower is going to be in the center and then you also want to start making some thicker lines as you go out orbits. Also, okay, to include a couple of thin lines in there too. Just to break it up, you don't want everything to look the exact same. You don't want it to be perfectly uniform because that's not really how roses look. Another tip of painting roses is if you want to paint a rose that being pictured from this side or at an angle. Your center would then be moved to one side or another of the rows and then you would build outward around it. This rows right here, the one I'm building it right now by accident looks like I'm viewing it from the side.I might continue to build out petals to this area and then maybe add some like little thin lines, the top here. It looks like I'm looking at it from an angle and the stem will becoming this way. Your leaves are going to be coming in this direction, whereas this rose is definitely, you're looking at it head on and then your leaves are going to becoming to the side like that. That is a very popular technique for painting rose is I'm going to grab my mop brush. I am going to do some leaves here out to the side following these little messy than I made. Roses are one of those flowers that they actually do have a lot of leaves on their stem. You can do. This is probably way too many leaves, but you get the point. Go ahead and practice painting these roses as many times as you need. I'm going to go ahead and grab a new clean sheet of watercolor paper and we are going to draw our final rose projects for this first style. 7. Style 1: Class Project: Now let's take our leaf practice and our rose practice and put it together in creating a beautiful watercolor rose print. I get all my brushes lined up over here. I've got enough ink and my palette that I can start working on it. I'm not going to sketch or anything. We're just going to start out by kind of mapping out where we want everything. For me to start mapping out florals, I like to start with my stem and just know where my stem is going. I'm going to grab some ink and then I'm going to draw. My rose is going to be the star of the show. So this is going to be my stem and then I might have even another different twig, maybe even a rose that comes out. I don't know. We're just going to see what happens. This is creative study. There are no rules, no plans. Let's start. I'm going to grab my medium round brush to create my rose. Could use any size brush you want just as long as you're comfortable using it. I want them to be pretty large and I want them to be viewed from an angle, so my center to be right there. Then I'm going to build out my rose around that center area. Just wetting my brush, and then I'm just going to use this ink I already have laid down, pull from that. If you get too much water on it, you can just draw your brush off, pick up some of that water with your brush. I need a little more black ink here. Still too much water. This can also look a whole lot like a penny too. So you know what? Whatever your flower looks like, just tell people that's what it is. Say, "Yeah, I totally meant to draw a penny. Totally meant to." Pennies and roses, they have a lot of layers to them. That's going to be my first flower and then my second one, I want it to be just like a little bit smaller and in this general direction. I'm not going to add as many layers to this one because my thinking is maybe this rose is a little younger, a little fresher than the other rose and it's not fully grown yet. Is that a thing.? While your ink is still wet, totally fine to go in and give it a little bit depth. Let the colors bleed a little bit. I'm going to make this center darker. Now I want to add on my leaves. Actually, I do want to add just a little more definition to this one. That looks good. I want to add some leaves coming out here, like there just below this rose. I'm going to do that first and I'm going to leave a little bit of white space. I don't want them to be so perfect. Perfection is just not my thing. I tend to like art that's just a little less realistic. I don't know why. Maybe that's just because that's what I feel comfortable doing. Just go in and add your leaves. However you want, whatever sizes you want, flowers are not all uniform. Some can be larger than others. If you wanted this to be a rosebush, you could add some thorns here and there. Definitely adds a little something to it, don't you think? 8. Style 2: Abstract Bouquet: For style number two, in our style study, we are changing directions completely. This time where we had to practice with our watercolor type of floral, this time there is no practice. We're going to dive right in headfirst because this style of floral is a very wild, abstract, gestural, freehand situation. Some people will be totally freaked out by the idea of not practicing and just jumping in, but I promise it's so good for you to do it. The one thing that you might want to do for this lesson in particular is to grab some inspiration photos because I like to do bouquets or flowers that are in some arrangement. I've got Pinterest pulled up. What did I search for? Flower bouquet, and I like this one. This is a really good place for us to start. This is from Urban Outfitters. It's just a floral arrangement in a glass vase. This is super simple, super easy. I'm going to be looking off to the side of my desk at this picture while I'm painting. I'll explain what I'm doing as I go, so let's just start with something that's simple like this. You can watch me do this and then we can try it again together. How about that? Actually, I'm going to use my smallest brush. Make sure I've got plenty of ink in my palette. This style is completely wild. There is no rhyme or reason to what we're doing. I'm just going to start by messily drawing out the shape of this vase, and I am letting my brush do whatever it wants. Just take advantage of the sensitivity of your round brush. This is about the shape. This is just for practice. This looks great already. Then I've got my stems inside. It's fun to start with a clear vase because you can draw those stems going as fast as I can, not thinking about it and the queen of over thinking, this is a good exercise. We've got some leaves, so I've already gone out some the lines here, that's great. We're going to have to make this something that exists outside of our glass. Now we do. Why don't we do this? Let yourself go off course, let yourself make decisions that are not represented in your inspiration photo because you're just practicing and playing around. I'm just going to draw some lines to represent flowers. I'm not really too concerned. Definitely not concerned about realism, not concerned about overlapping, and I want my wildflower to have some height. We've got some leaves that are coming up here at the top, so just paint those in. Then this stem is coming all the way up here and we've got a couple of little buds that are popping up off the sides. I'll just paint those in little dots. I can't tell you how fun this exercise is. There's one bloom in my photo that's right here in the middle, but I actually don't think I'm going to include it. I think I'm just going to add one more crazy flower here. It looks like we need something over here just for balance. Some flowering that looks like that, it's going to magically appear over here. I think I'm going to call that done. This was a warm up round for my gestural abstract bouquets. I want you to try this with your inspiration photo. Just look off to the side, use the sensitivity of your brush to get thick lines, really thin lines. Think about it like you're scribbling almost and just completely let yourself off the hook for having to be perfect or having to create something that looks realistic and just really let yourself play and have fun and explore. You can even do this, I think with watercolors too. That would be beautiful to let all the different colors run together and bleed together, and have just a true experiment to see what would happen if you applied the same style with a different medium. I'm going to try a bigger one, but a little bit more wild and crazy with some different types of blooms in our next one. 9. Style 2: Large Abstract Bouquet: This one I think I'm just going to go off the cuff. I'm not going to look at an inspiration photo, just because I've done this enough times. I have a vision of what I want. If you're not comfortable, just use inspiration photos. You can even sketch a really rough drawing out with a pencil. But the point is to let go and try something new. For this one, I want my vase to be more of a traditional type of stuffy looking vase. I don't know what kind of decoration that is, but I like it. I'm going to start out the gate drawing some wild florals. I love the idea of botanical parts of the leafy filler greens in a bouquet. I love it when bouquets are just a lot of greenery. The idea in my head for this one is that this is a bouquet that is just so green, and lush, and wild, and crazy, and unkept. Somebody threw it together with some things that they found in a garden. It just looks a little bit wild. A technique that's really fun to do with these brushes is, I need to turn the brightness down here, you can create a wild wobbly leaf just by applying pressure and then wiggling your brush a couple of times. Something that you can do to give a little bit of movement and motion to your leaves. I just want this one to be full as they can be. I had a couple different types too. I think I'm going to add in a bloom here. Then maybe another one here. One thing with these paintings that I've noticed I like to do over time is I like to add height, just by creating these little stems that have a lot of different leaves in it. You can do a couple of those at the very top of your painting to give it height, to give it a little bit of motion, a little bit of interest. You can just draw some leaves up near the top, no real rhyme or reason, and it usually looks pretty good. We need to get some more flowers, I think over here and over here. It might be a big rose type of flower. I'm going to do our rose technique over here to the side. Then we'll have our leaf coming out side of that. I just splattered paint. I've got to wipe it up while I still can. This one's definitely messier than the last one and that's okay. I think I'm going to call this one done. This was an example of a larger, wilder abstract that has a few more types of blooms in it. Once again, I cannot wait to see what you do. I hope that you put your own spin on this. Try something new, add a color in there, and make sure that you show me what you work on. 10. Style 3: Folk-Art Inspired Plant: This final style of floral is directly inspired by a block printing or a folk art type of flower that uses really clean lines and a lot of white space or negative space to create a really bold flower. I have some inspiration photos that I've looked at before sitting down to do this and so I just encourage you to search out block printing florals or folk art florals and get some ideas for how you want your flower to look. My favorite style of floral or botanical to do in this style is potted plants because it's really fun to decorate the pots. In this style, because there is so much you can do with just white space and stripes or a polka dots or other things like that. So get some inspiration photos that inspire you and make you excited to try this style. Let's just go ahead and jump in. I've got my tools here that I'll use to create this style. I'm not going to be using my potted ink for this just because I have to do a lot of coloring and it is hard to color and fill a space that looks clean with the potted ink and I might not even use those just because I want this to have really clean lines and look really bold and modern at the end, so I'll just be reaching for different things depending on what feels like it might work best. I am going to start with a pencil sketch because I want this to look good. I don't want to just dive in with ink because there's definitely more of a chance that I will mess up. Let's start sketching out a style that's pretty easy, so I want my pot to just be a plain old square, slightly more rectangular than square, and I'm going to do two flowers that are coming up out of this pot that are in this folk art style. I want my stems to be long and skinny, I want them to be pointing in slightly different directions. I'm not the best at straight lines, I'm not the best at symmetry, so this is good practice for you if you're somebody that feels like they don't have a good grasp on drawing. I definitely don't. I'm going to make a U-shape, which is going to be my flower. Not sure what kind of flower this is. Don't know that I've ever seen this type of flower in real-life. I'm going to connect this at the top so it is going to be kind of an oval shape flower and then to show the inside of my flower, I'm just going to draw a circle like this. You've probably seen this style flower before, and then inside the flower to show the inside, we just have some really simple polka dots that are not placed in any certain way. My leaves, I'm going to draw symmetrical leaves all the way down my stems on both flowers. Now I want to fill in my shapes. You could do this large area with whatever ink you want, I'm going to use this ink brush. Once again, this is linked below to be very careful with this brush because a little bit of ink goes a long way. I'm just staying clear of the edges because before I tackle the edges, I want to give this ink a chance to dry it's very wet, does take a little bit to dry. Going to just go ahead and outline the edge of this with my micron pin so that I can get a really crisp clear boundary. While that is drying, we will go ahead and outline our flower. The center of this flower is going to remain white, so I'm not going to be coloring it in. Her flower will be black. Now I'm going to keep coloring in, I'm going to my brush pin to cover these edges here because I have a little bit more control over this pen. Before adding in our white details, I want to just make sure all the ink is dry because I want to go ahead and erase pencil marks. Also want to clean up any edges with my fine liner that look a little bit too jagged, need to be a little bit more crisp. Right now it might not look like much, but once we add our white spaces with the gel pen, it's really going to pop. The first thing that I want to do is go ahead and go over the pot to give it some detail lines and I want to just do a really simple grid pattern and if you're using a gel pen, the key with a gel pen is to not press too hard and to just barely graze against your paper because that will allow the ink to flow out a little bit more and it's going to be a brighter white than if you press down really hard. I'm just going to rub my gel pen off on a separate sheet of paper to see if my ink is coming out and it is, so just going to barely glide against the paper I'm just going to do lines that are spaced out about as evenly as I can just by eyeballing it, I'm not really into doing anything exact if you can tell. Then going to turn this over on the side so that I can complete the rest of my lines, so I think I've got room for three lines here. Looks pretty good, I'm just going to add a little sent a line to the centers of my leaf. Then three little lines or more, four, five my lines to the top of my flower and the bottom of my flower. This is the basic idea of creating a folk art floral. Let's go ahead and move on to our next plant design with this style. 11. Style 3: Modern-Inspired Plant: Now that we've gotten one style under our belt, let's do something that's a little bit bigger and maybe a little bit more complicated that is going to look super cool. One thing that I'm really into right now, I am doing a gallery wall in a couple different rooms in my house and so I am wanting different types of art. As many handmade pieces of art as possible and a lot of them are mine. One thing that is working really well for me is to do these folk art style potted plants that are in a bigger scale so that I can frame them and they look really nice and neat and clean and so this is my inspiration for creating this. I want it to be on a bigger piece of paper, at a bigger scale and really clean, crisp lines so that I can put this in a frame and it will pop on my wall. I've got a practice sketch that I did over to the side but you can follow along with me for this one. I'm going to sketch lightly so that my pencil marks do come off a little bit better. I want the top of my plant to be about right here. I am going to be trimming my paper after this is done to fit in the frame so it doesn't have to be perfectly centered or even unless you just want it to be. You can also digitize this, bring it into Photoshop or Illustrator and clean it up and then scale it and print it out at whatever size you want. My pot is going to be a more organic style than the last one. That just fits my style a little bit better. The plants that come out of it, I want them to be really leafy. I'm going to do three leaves per stem. One thing about drawing plants is being conscious of a balance and evenness across your plants so I like to have height. Height is something that I appreciate in a plant or in a floral bouquet, but I also want to have an even amount of fullness on either side. That doesn't mean that it has to be perfectly symmetrical but if you have a lot of plants up here and a lot of height, you might want to have a lot of leaves or something happening here in this opposite corner. That's just a little bit of a rule that I like to follow that makes it a little bit easier when you are planning out a bouquet or an arrangement like this and I'm not worried about my leaves overlapping because we can represent overlapping leaves with a little bit of extra white space so this leaf is going to come over here. This is going to be my plant, so these are just leaves. Not anything special, not any flowers or anything like that and just for my own personal reference, I'm going to draw. I want my pot to have some decoration so I'm going to leave a chunk of white space right here and then pretty much everything else is going to be colored in black so I'm going to go ahead and do that. I'm going to line my shapes first and then I'm going to color it. Now that everything is filled in and dry, I'm ready to go in and add details with my white gel pen. This is going to be really fun because we get to represent overlapping leaves by utilizing where we put our white space. First, I just want to go ahead and decide which of these two stems are going to be in the front or the back. There is one leaf that comes out here and then there's one leaf that comes out here. Where I draw my line will really show which leaf is in front, so I think I'm going to draw a line right here along the edge of where this leaf would be to show that this leaf is in front. If I had gone ahead and drawn out the edges around this leaf then this one would be represented as being in front, and then same thing for this one. I think I can just fill in around that leaf to show that this one is in front as well. Now, I'm envisioning that this leaf has a line down the center and then it has a lot of lines that are coming out the side of that central line and maybe it even has two sides of the leaf. One's a little more detailed side and one's not. You can use your imagination about what your leaves look like but I think I'm going to start by drawing a line and I want to represent some movement. I don't want this to be perfectly straight. Even though that's the point of this style, you get to put your own spin on it so I'm just going to give a little bit of movement coming out of each of these and I might favor one side as well so the line might be a little bit more to the left or right of the leaf and not perfectly in the center. Just to give some interest and all those lines are going to meet in the middle. Next I want to add my lines and for this one, I'm only going to add lines on both sides to half of these leaves and the rest, I'm just going to do lines on one side. This is just a stylistic choice. Like I said, I had sketched and mapped this plan out in my head before I am drawing it out here with you so I know what I want to do and that's something that I would recommend with this style because when you're using white space to represent parts of your design, it might be something that you need to give a little thought to in the beginning before you sit down to draw. Our leaves are done. Now I get to move on to the pot which is super exciting. I want to add some lines both to the top and the bottom, but I want them to be going in different directions just because I think that's more interesting. I'm just going to draw some lines. Going to go back in with this pen and just add some, I don't know, dash marks here to the center. This is a brush pen in case you're not familiar and it's like our tapered paint brush. We can apply more pressure to the tip and it will bend and give us a thicker stroke, or we can apply less pressure and we'll get a thinner stroke. This is a brush pen that's typically used for brush lettering and I do have a class on Skillshare called lettering and color and I teach the fundamentals of lettering with these pens that Tombow sells. Tombow's the company that makes these. They have a version of color pens called Fudenosuke colors and I teach all about the basics of lettering with those pens so if you're interested in learning that, how to use a brush pen, that's a great place to go. This is done. This looks awesome. I am so happy with this and you can see how these are two different styles. This is more straight lines and a little bit more of a fulky representation of this style but this uses a little bit more organic lines and more realistic leaves and things like that but still it's really bold and it pops with all the black and the white space. I encourage you to try this style out for yourself and to put your own spin on it. Look at inspiration photos online and see what you like. Look at things in your house and see what else you can use black and white with to create something that's really special and unique and I can't wait to see what you make. 12. Thanks for Watching! What's next?: Thank you so much for joining me in this class. Make sure to post your class projects, so I can see them and your fellow artists can be inspired by your artwork as well. If you enjoyed this class and you'd like to learn more from me, to get updates on upcoming classes in my latest projects, you can sign up for my newsletter using the link in the about section of this class and you can get all those latest updates sent right to your inbox. You can also follow me over on Instagram @kileyinkentucky, and make sure to follow me on Pinterest @kileyinkentucky as well because I'm always posting inspiration there. I look forward to seeing your projects. Have fun creating.