Introduction To Watercolor: Painting Magnolia Flowers Using Simple Techniques

1. Introduction: I find watercolor to be a perfect medium to start with. No matter if you're a beginner or more experienced, there is so much to gain from learning watercolor painting. You got to love the painting process and the final artwork which looks great not only on your roll, but also digitized and printed on products. My name is Jane Beata. I'm a professional watercolor artist and a teacher based in Slovakia. Welcome to my studio. I sell and exhibit original paintings and out prints. Occasionally, I even create illustrations for clients, do it printed on products or in publications. I also have a YouTube channel where I share my painting process and watercolor tutorials on a weekly basis. I started to experiment with watercolor about 10 years ago and I instantly fell in love with the medium. Watercolor allows you to finish paintings more quickly. Often even takes the wheel for you and to create these beautiful abstractions that elevate your painting without much effort. Compared with other mediums, it does not require a large or expensive set up to start. The painting process is just so enjoyable. It's almost therapeutic in a way. Personally, it helps me distress and get lost in the process instantly. In my studio, I often run live watercolor workshops and our greatly enjoy passing my experience and observations about watercolor to other people. In this class, I walk you through fundamental watercolor techniques. I'll help you pick suitable materials for a start and a limited palette of colors. We'll go through color mixing and I will introduce basic approaches to painting with watercolor that you can apply to paint any subject. For the class project I'll walk you through the entire process of painting a beautiful watercolor magnolia. I'll show you how to create a simple sketch and then transfer it to watercolor paper. But, I'll also provide you with my sketch if you wish to skip to painting right away. We'll paint the magnolia flower step-by-step from initial washes to final adjustments and deepening of the color. I will also show you how I create expressive splatters and decorate my paintings with them. If you're truly eager to learn, I have two bonus lessons in the end of this class, where I'll create and walk you through a step-by-step two more magnolia watercolor paintings. If painting with watercolor is something that you'd like to learn and you're ready to learn, grab your brushes and join me in this class. 2. Class Orientation: Hi everyone, and welcome to the class. I'm sure you're excited to start painting right away, but let me first say a few words to get you acquainted with watercolor and how this class is organized. Watercolor medium is sometimes surrounded by a myth that it's very hard and uneasy, and when you are learning by yourself and by trial and error, that it can feel exactly like that. Follow proper direction and carefully designed exercises, you can learn very quickly. I find watercolor to be a perfect medium to start even before under traditional art techniques such as oils, acrylics, and gouache, it can give you a great advantage. It is because it requires minimal setup to start, you can literally start painting with watercolor on your knee, painting time is very short. Watercolor paintings look also great, digitalized when printed on products, that you can always gift or sell the original painting. And probably the biggest advantage of watercolor is how great it feels to paint with watercolor, the process is very enjoyable, it is distressing, very entertaining, and it's a huge reason to take it as a hobby. When I first started to paint with watercolor, I thought it was insanely hard to control. But when I started to practice the two approaches, it became clear that there are ways to control watercolor and give it boundaries. Only after several tries, I already more or less, knew what I was doing. These beginnings were what I had in mind when designing this class. Let's starts with the lesson about the materials so that you know what to prepare. Make sure to set up your painting space with all the tools that you need to paint along with me throughout the class. In the following two lessons, I'll explain color mixing and basic watercolor techniques. The color mixing lesson teaches you how to combine the limited palette colors that I selected for this class and how to create lots of options for you to paint with. The basic watercolor techniques lesson explains two fundamental watercolor approaches in detail and I also designed a painting exercise where I show you how to use these approaches to paint individual flower petals. I want to really emphasize the need to paint all the exercises, maybe even a couple of times if needed. Theoretical knowledge acquired by watching the videos without painting is not going to translate into the muscle memory of your hand moving across the paper, and so the only way to learn is to paint along. At the same time you are saving so much time by taking this class because this is a great way to acquire good painting habits right from the start, and you will most likely destroy much less paper than average self taught person does at the start of their watercolor journey. Your class project will be to create watercolor magnolia painting. My class will take you throughout the entire process, from creating the sketch to painting last details and decorating it with expressive sliders. Make sure to take a photo or a scan of your final magnolia painting and then upload it to the project section of this class so that I can see it and give you feedback. If you're like me and want to learn a bit more, I added two bonus lessons for you, and you can find them as the end of this class. In each bonus lesson I create an extra watercolor magnolia study from start to finish, even though in a slightly quicker way to demonstrate my approach to using watercolor techniques to paint flower studies in general, and you are more than welcome to create those extra studies with me. The class has a section called Project and Resources, and you can download my sketches and reference pictures from there. I also added progress pictures of all three studies to help you with this overview of the entire process. Now you are ready, so grab your brushes and let's start. 3. Materials: In this video, we'll go over all the materials needed for the class. I will show you exactly what I was using, but also suggest alternatives, since it is not necessary to have the exact same supplies. You'll need a watercolor paper first. I'm using canson Moulin du Roy paper that's made of cotton, but you can use any watercolor paper that is at least 300 gsm or 140 pounds. This means that your paper is thick enough to withstand water. I recommend that you choose a cold-pressed paper when starting out with watercolor, which means that your paper has some texture. This type of surface is slightly more forgiving than papers that are either too smooth, or too rough and can really be a great help at start. Next, you'll need watercolor brushes. I am using silver black velvet series 3000 S brushes in sizes six and eight, but you can use any round brush in a larger and a smaller size, either with synthetic or natural bristles. Just make sure that the brushes have a sharper tip and larger brush should be able to hold more water. Watercolor brushes can be very expensive, so don't buy many. Two brushes are more than enough for the start. To mix your colors, you will need a palette. I'm using a white porcelain kitchen plate for that purpose. You'll also need a masking tape and a jar with clean water. Kitchen towels are also very important and a necessary tool, and to speed up the drying process, I also have a hair-dryer at hand. We'll also need a drawing materials to create sketches. I use a cheaper printer paper for my sketches and a mechanical pencil for drawing. You can also use an eraser, mine is fabric castle dust-free. To transfer my sketches, I use a graphite stick, but this is an optional material, a regular pencil will do the job as well. Lastly, we'll definitely need watercolor paints. You can use either sets of paitns in dry paints, or paints in a tube. Either use F9 and a brand doesn't matter much any student or artist, range of watercolor paints will do. I would only avoid paints for kids and low quality supplies, as those might perform very differently. I use quite a variety of brands and from those I picked a couple of paints and colors for this class. You don't have to have the exact same colors, just pick something that looks similar from what you already have. First on my list is magenta. I use the one batch mincut, and it is a very transparent, cool red. When you water it down, it appears like a striking pink color. Next one is alizarin crimson, this is a slightly darker, deep red. I always get these in a larger tube from Winsor and Newton, since this color is very versatile and I use it often. Most beginner set of watercolor paints contain these colors, so you shouldn't be having a problem in getting one. We'll also use green gold, it is a very light green color, and when you water it down, it appears almost yellow, which makes it quite handy for mixing not only green parts of the flowers, but also creating orange undertones. My tube paint is by Daniel Smith. Next one is, cerulean blue, and it is a warmer blue color. We'll use it to mix purples and creating shadows. This one is by Daniel Smith and it granulates quite a lot, which gives the painting some extra texture. Lastly, for darkening our mixes, we'll use neutral tint, mine is by Daniel Smith and this color is neither cool or warm. It will help us to achieve more contrast and overall comes in quite handy when painting a wide variety of subjects. That's it. These five paints are all we need to create a wide range of colors, and once you have your materials ready, you are all set up to join me in the next video, where I'll show you how to mix them. Also, a complete list of the materials can be found in the class description. 4. Color Mixing: Hello, there. Remember those five colors we talked about in the previous video? In this one, you'll learn how to mix them to create all kinds of secondary colors and ultimately make your flower studies really pop. The five colors in our palette are magenta, alizarin crimson, green gold, cerulean blue, and a neutral tint. Let's see what happens if we combine them. For this exercise, grab a spare piece of watercolor paper. First, let's mix magenta and alizarin crimson. New color will be slightly different from both. Something in between to red and too pink, which is what we'll later use when painting flower studies. Next combination will be magenta and neutral tint. Grab a bit of both with your brush and mix them on your palette. Resulting color will be purple, and depending on which color dominates the mixture, will the new color appear either more red or more deep purple. Sort these mixtures to your paper to see what types of purple can you get. Now try to mix alizarin crimson with neutral tint. You will get deep red mixes that almost appear brown. Try mixing combinations of these two colors with either red dominating the mixture or the neutral tint. Once again, the point of this exercise is to see what colors you have available and how to get them. Next mixture will be magenta with cerulean blue. Because my cerulean blue granulates, the mixture will appear grainy, which doesn't have to be the case on your paper. This is not a mistake if your mixtures are smooth, it's just that this particular pigment that I am using happens to be a granulating color while the specific pigments that you are using might not be. But granulating or not, the resulting color will be a bluish purple. Next mixture is alizarin crimson with cerulean blue. Resulting purple will be brownish and quite different from when using magenta in this mix. Now try mixing neutral tint with cerulean blue to get some dark and deep blues, which might come in handy when painting shadows. Here is the first part of the exercise. Quite a lot of colors, don't you think? But we are not done yet. Let's see what happens if we invite green gold to the party. Let's mix some magenta with green gold now. Since green gold is quite close to yellow when watered down, it creates mixes that look orange. Similar mixes can be achieved when mixing alizarin crimson with green gold, but these will appear even cooler and a bit brownish. Combination of neutral tint and green gold gives you quite a range of darker greens. It is fun to see how the green changes depending on which of these two colors dominates. Careful with the amount of neutral tint here. Since it's very dark, it can overpower this light green easily. I would rather add it to the mixture slowly and in small amounts to see what it does. Now try casually adding a bit of cerulean blue to this mixture. This creates even more variety of blueish greens that are really interesting and you're going to use them in your paintings. Congratulations, you've finished both parts of this color mixing exercise. By now you should have a pretty good idea about what your palette can do and what colors are available to you, even how to get them exactly. Now when you and color are no longer strangers, you are ready for the next lesson where I'll show you two basic watercolor painting techniques. 5. Basic Watercolor Techniques: In this video, let me explain how watercolor behaves on paper. If you're new to watercolor, it is crucial to understand this as it will save you lots of time and hard feelings. Grab a piece of watercolor paper and join me in this warm-up exercise. First, prepare watercolor paint by adding water to it on your palette. This technique is water-based which means we paint almost with tinted water. Paint a circle. Because the paper is dry, water will stay inside the circle. You can even see it running inside its wet shape as if it's trapped inside. This is a principle called wet-on-dry. If you paint on a dry surface, water with your paint will always stay inside an area that you dampened. Important note is that this area will have a hard edge around it after it dries. Let's wet half of the paper with clean water, and then try painting a circle again. Watercolor now spreads all over the place since there is no dry boundary to keep it inside. This principle is called wet-in-wet. Notice how we still can see a circle that we painted, but instead of a sharply defined shape, We get one that appears blurry and we call this a soft edge. Let's paint a circle again, but try to gently get rid of all the excess water. I always remove it with the tip of my brush which helps me avoid patchiness of color. This is how we must paint if we want to achieve a flat wash of color. Paint one more circle, but this time leave quite a lot of excess water inside the circle and let it dry. The result we get is very different. When painting this way, we often get expressive textures with rough and dark edges. In the next exercise, I will show you how to use both these approaches to paint different parts of the flower. This is how we prepare watercolor paper for painting on it. Use masking tape to mount that paper to your table or some board. Masking tape should always cover at least a centimeter of the paper from all sides, and the rest of it should be pressed firmly against the board to hold the paper in position. The purpose of this is to keep the paper flat. It will always buckle a bit while you are painting, but if you mounted it properly, it always dries flat enough. Let's sketch a basic shape of a flower petal. Cover it with a very transparent wash of paint. We are already familiar with a wet-on-dry principle, and so we're going to use it to form the edges of this petal. Now, it's time to take the advantage of the wet-in-wet principle. Flower petals will rarely appear flooding color. While the wash of paint is still wet, let's add some more pigment to the bottom of the petal to create a gradient. Shade of the new paint can spread in a damp area uncontrolled, but it cannot leave the boundaries of the petal. Use your brush gently to push it back and forth if you feel that the new paint is escaping its position too much. You can even leave some of the pigment with your brush to create a soft highlight. Grab your smaller brush and load it with more pigment. We're going to draw these veins inside the petal. On a magnolia flower, they appear as a blurred line, so drawing it while the previous wash is still wet will give us the soft result we are looking for. My tip is to wait a minute to have the water calm down a bit, but not too long for the wash to start drying. Drawing the line a bit lighter will result in a new paint spreading slightly less than when placed in a freshly painted wash. However, if you wait too long and the wash dries, it won't spread at all. You can use your brush to gently push the paint back and forth again, to help the line form in your favor. Observe the water and paint and how it behaves. This experience will be your source when creating paintings. Let's draw one last petal, this time from the side. In its shape, it will resemble a canoe. Grab your brush and paint a first transparent wash just like we did before. You don't have to use just one color. I often start with one color and keep adding another into the mix as I go and this results in a gradient. Let it dry. Look at these lovely sharp edges that clearly define these leafy shape. We are now going to add another layer of paint to one side of the leaf to shape it even further. By working in layers, you can develop your subject more, you can sometimes even use a second layer to correct accidents from the first one. Take your time to finish this exercise and observe how watercolor appears when wet, compared to once it dries. There is a slight shift in overall darkness and saturation of color. The dry finish will always be lighter and less saturated, but how much different exactly? Depends on the type of paints and paper you are using. You will be able to anticipate these shifts in time as you get more used to your own watercolor materials. Last thing I want to show you here is how to correct the veins on the first petal with a second layer. Slight correction would be helpful because the first layer didn't dry quite exactly as I planned. You can always cover the entire area with clean water, and try painting them again inside this second wet wash. New paint will overlay the previous one. Just make sure that the edges of the second wash align with the first one, otherwise you'll end up with double edges and that might not look so great. Before carefully removing the masking tape, make sure everything is completely dry. Because this lesson covers the fundamentals that are crucial to this class, I've added a summary that you can refer back to throughout the class. There are two ways to paint with watercolor; you either paint on a dry surface or to a wet surface. On the dry surface, watercolor will stay inside the wet area and forms sharp edges after it dries. In a wet surface, watercolor spread inside the wet area and forms soft edges after it dries. If you remove the excess watercolor from a wet area, you will achieve a flat color look. However, if you want to achieve a more expressive and textured look, you can leave a lot of excess water inside the wet area and let it dry. Always mount watercolor paper to a board or your table before painting; this prevents buckling. During the flower petal exercise, we fill the first petal with a wash of transparent watercolor, then we added some more pigment to create a gradient and pushed it back and forth with the brush. To create veins, we simply drew lines into the wet wash; lines then appears softer because of the wet surface. If you want to add more veins or add more color to the petal later on, simply wet the entire petal with clean water and add more pigment into the wet area. Second layer overlays the first one. We also painted a second flower petal using two layers of paint, but this time using a wet-on-dry principle. This helped us to create a sharp, darker side of this petal. Congratulations, you are now ready to begin working on your first watercolor magnolia study. In the next video, we are going to prepare the sketch together. I'll see you there. 6. Creating Your Own Sketch: In this lesson, we'll create a sketch for our class project, Magnolia watercolor painting. With that being said, you can focus solely on the painting process in this lesson, and just download the sketch from projects and resources down below. But I highly encourage you to follow along this lesson, and create your own sketch as drawing will always empower you and give you lots of freedom to create your own original artworks later on. Let's grab our sketching paper and your preferred pencil and start drawing some lines to indicate a very rough shape. Let's bring in the reference picture. Try to make your first lines very light and make as many of them as you need to get the shape right. The purpose of this first draft is to decide where the flower fits on the page and how big it's going to be. My first draft looks like this. It looks more like a couple of simple geometric shapes than a flower. This is what I believe anyone can draw no matter your experience. Some questions I might ask myself as I work on my first draft are how wide is this flower overall, if I compare it to its length? How many larger shapes does the flower contain? Do they run in the same direction or have different directions to them? How they compare to one another in their size, and so on. In the next phase of my drawing process, I'm starting to slowly refine a larger shapes that represent individual flower petals. I've already drawn a rough shape of every petal, but we need to go over each shape and adjust some lines to bring it closer to what a pedal looks like. Usually this means transforming lots of initially straight lines into curves. I would suggest starting with the pedals closest to us, since they overlap the rest of them and appear like a solid base. Take your time, drive slowly and observe your reference a lot at this point. Some questions I might ask myself as I work throughout this refining process are, how wide is the bottom of the flower overall compared to the opening at the top? How are the pedals that we can't see attached to the flower? How sharp is the tip of every pedal? Does this curve look natural, and so on? It's okay to correct mistakes with an eraser and clean your sketch from previously drawn draft lines. Once you commit to a line, you can make it slightly thicker and your magnolia flower starts to appear on a page. Keep your eyes on the reference picture for as long as possible. Now is the time to address all the proportion problems, because once we transfer the sketch to the watercolor paper, it becomes impractical to correct it anymore. Make sure that you are happy with your sketch before you transfer it. Congratulations, you are now ready to transfer your sketch to a watercolor paper. I'll show you how to do these in the next video. 7. Transferring the Sketch: In this video, we're going to learn how to simply transfer your sketch to the watercolor paper. Once you've finished sketching, turn the paper around. We're going to cover the back of the picture with graphite. You can use regular pencil or even charcoal for this. I use a graphite stick since it is slightly quicker to cover the entire area with it compared to the regular or graphite pencil. These marks don't have to be neat, but they have to cover the other side of all the lines of your image. Are we done? Good. Let's turn the sketch back and grab a watercolor paper. My sketching paper and watercolor paper are always cut to the same size to ensure that the drawing fits on the page exactly as I planned it. Whilst I can't resize the flower at this point, I can align it slightly better on the watercolor paper during transfer, which is another advantage of having a sketch on a separate paper. When you position your sketch on a watercolor paper, you can fix it with a bit of masking tape so that it doesn't move much. Now we'll just trace over the lines with a sharper pencil or a pen. These lines should now appear on the watercolor paper. You can lift the sketching paper slightly and check if the lines are transferring nicely every now and then. If the lines are not very visible, it could mean that the graphite layer isn't thick enough and that you need to go back and add some more graphite to the back of your sketch. But it can also mean that you're not pressing firmly enough with your pencil. On the other hand, you don't want to press too hard. Either, it' s best to avoid scratches in the watercolor paper. When you're done, remove the sketch and you can now use masking tape to mount the watercolor paper to your board or table. We already learned how to do that in a previous video about watercolor techniques. And with that, you are now ready to begin painting your main project, which is Watercolor Magnolia Study. Lastly, note that there is not just one method of transferring your sketches. You can also use a window or a light table and trace over the sketch. However the method that we use today helps you to transfer your sketches to any type of surface, even wood or canvas, which is why I use it often. Now that we mastered a lot of preparations, let's begin the painting process. I will see you in the next video. 8. First Watercolor Wash: It's time to grab your art supplies and join me in creating our class project Watercolor Magnolia Painting. In this lesson, we're going to paint a first watercolor wash. We'll cover how to set up for a painting, how to mix and evaluate the colors of the first wash, where to you use wet in dry and wet in wet approach. Let's get started. This is how I set up for painting with watercolor. My watercolor paper is mounted to the table or board. Palette, paper towels, and jar with clean water are on my right side slightly higher than where my hand rests on the table. If you're left-handed, you might want to keep your tools on the other side. The purpose of this first layer of paint is to create harder edges around the entire flower, which will help us to separate it from the white background. To create a border, we need to use the wet in dry principle, and so I'm going to make sure not to accidentally wet anything outside of the silhouette of the flower. I'm going to mix color now to paint a very first watercolor wash. I'm adding magenta and alizarin crimson into quite a pool of clean water on my palette, and then testing the paint on a spare piece of watercolor paper to make sure that the mixed color is what I need. The flower is very light and delicate, so make sure that your first wash of paint is transparent and light. I am searching for a better matching color now. The first mix of reds didn't look quite right. Adding a bit of green-gold makes the mix a bit more orangey, so that wasn't what I needed either. Lastly, adding a hint of cerulean blue made the initial light mix look just right; still pink, but slightly cooler. This is something that you need to judge visually and make a call whether the paint matches or not. But with practice, this gets much easier and intuitive. Let's start painting now. All I'm focused on right now is to get a clean edge of the flower silhouette, I no longer worry about the paint that is prepared on my palette. If you don't premix a sufficient amount of paint beforehand, it makes you lose time while painting and creates irregularities in your wash since some parts of it dry before others. Preparing your paint and making decisions about its color is a very beneficial habit. It's a small thing that makes you paint nicer studies right from the start. When painting your first wash, make sure you're leaving a bit of excess water behind you as you go. A wash that is just about wet will dry in a few seconds, but a wash that is sufficiently wet will take some time to dry, and this is what we need to use in our advantage. Now that I've covered the entire area with transparent paint, I focus on keeping it wet. I'm adding clean water inside the wet area and also add a hint of transparent orangey color to a place where those front petals are since their color base appear warmer to me than the rest of the flower. I'm also trying to clean up the edges with the tip of my brush to avoid shaky lines. Your smaller brush will help you with this. I'm going to use the first wash to already move forward with the pink texture of the flower. More specific, I want to paint in the blurred pink veins at the bottom of those two frontal petals. For this, I'm mixing a more intense combination of magenta and alizarin crimson, and then adding a hint of green-gold. All the combinations, I swatch beforehand on a mixing sheet of paper and then visually compare to my reference. The final combination included a cerulean blue mixed into those two reds. This shade looked the most appropriate. My flower silhouette is still wet since I spent a great deal of time adding water to it. With a smaller brush, I start drawing lines into the wet wash. If you remember the wet in wet principle from previous lessons, you know exactly why the paint spreads outwards. I usually just observe what the paint does for a few seconds to see how fast it spreads and which direction, and then use the clean damp brush to gently leave the pigment that went in a bad direction. I'm trying to leave the pigment everywhere where on my reference I see an almost white area. I'm also erasing lines between the pink veins with this technique to make it look a bit more similar to how the texture appears on the reference. It takes a bit of patience to push the paint here and there to make it sit where you need it to, and the goal is not 100 percent precision, rather having it roughly at the correct place. Also, this stage should not take more than a few minutes because we run the risk of overworking the paper when we keep it wet and then poke on it for too long. Here I'm adding more pigment to the bottom of the flower. It doesn't show like this on the reference exactly, but on a white background, I feel the bottom should stand out a little more, and so me adding color to this area seems like a solution. Now, carefully evaluating if what I painted into these layer looks okay and if it does, I let it dry. A layer needs to dry properly, and so do not continue adding next layer until you make 100 percent sure that there is no more wetness on your paper. This is what the first layer looks like when it's dry. Just look at those nice sharp edges that formed around the silhouette of the flower. In the next lesson, we're going to paint the petals in the back. 9. Petals in the Back, PART ONE: In this lesson, we're going to paint some of the petals in the back of the flower and so the painting moves up one stage into this. Let's get started. I always start by preparing the paint first, just like we learned during painting the first wash. Now I'm searching for a color that looks close to how those back petals appear on the reference. At first glance, it looks gray by the color also reflects hints of pink and blue. My first instinct was to start from the violet mix used in a previous layer and add more cerulean blue into it. You need to water down your paint a lot to achieve transparency. I also experimented with adding green gold into the mix, and the result was a greenish-gray, which wasn't quite right. I kept adding cerulean blue, and magenta until I achieved the color similar to the one on the reference. Keeping the wet on dry principle in mind, if I want to paint a petal that looks sharply defined and separated from others, I only need to wet one area at a time. I painted the petal on the left in the same way than we did the first wash. Only, now the width area is much smaller. Make sure to keep the edges as clean as possible and avoid painting outside the lines. I'm now trying to add more pigment into this wash so that the left and the right side appears slightly darker than the middle of the wet area. That technique is the same, pushing the pigment back and forth a bit to get it sit at the proper place. This creates a subtle gradient. Here I'm painting those two very small shadows at the top of the flower. Then continuing to cover the right side of this closed flower pupil, and then moving on to the inner side of the right-back petal as well, using the same approach. None of these areas are touching, therefore, the paint from one wet area can't bleed into another area. All the areas that we just painted will get a sharp edge after they dry. This will actually allow us to recognize them as a separate petals. This is the last area to paint and we are finished with this layer. Before we add more paint anywhere else, we need to dry everything. Congratulations, you are one step closer to a beautiful watercolor painting. In the next lesson, we will paint the rest of the smaller petals in the back. I'll see you there. 10. Petals in the Back, PART TWO: Let's preview what we're going to paint in this lesson. It's the rest of the petals in the back of the flower. Make sure you dry the entire paper before starting this lesson. I'm going to paint this larger area first. Is this flower pupil in the back? The color here is lighter than the color of the petals in the back that we covered in the previous lesson, so be careful not to paint these too dark. My mix of paint contains mostly just a hint of alizarin, crimson, and magenta, with maybe a bit of cerulean blue to create that slight hint of coldness in the left corner of this area. This is at least what I see when I try to compare my painting to the reference visually. Here is the corner that I view as a slightly darker than the rest. To darken it up, I'm adding more pigment into the wet area by gently dabbing my brush into it. Using the wet-on-wet method that we've practiced before, I draw the vein that appears on the right side of this petal. You've seen this technique before. I already used it in the first wash, but let's try this again because only practice will allow you to have more control over this process. I'm lifting the pigment that went in the wrong direction with a damp brush and then adding a hint of clean magenta into the vein to make the colors really pop. It's better to wait a bit before adding these last touches of paint until the wash is no longer excessively wet and so that the new paint doesn't spread too much. Lastly, I'm painting this petal on the right, or at least its outer side. It is much lighter than the inside of this petal which we previously painted, so I'm starting with water down magenta. This is just the tinted water to keep the petal light. All we want here is to create a hint of a gradient that appears rosy at the bottom. I'm also adding just a bit of cerulean blue because, at the very bottom edge, it appears like the petal is slightly in shadow. Since I want to keep this edge almost right, I'm lifting the excess pigment around it and I also tend to drop a bit of clean water to areas that I want to lighten. We can even keep it expressive like this and let a water bloom form here because, in my opinion, it gives the petal a more organic-looking texture. You know the draw by now. Let's try everything and in the next lesson, we'll paint the largest and most colorful front petal of this magnolia. I will meet you there. 11. Front Petal: We are only going to paint a single petal in this lesson, and that's the large petal that's most visible to us from this angle. This is what we're working towards, and so let's get to it. It seems that this petal has much more pink veins showing than the rest of the petals, and the color also gets quite dark in the bottom area. Let's start with transparent wash of paint first. I fill the entire area with almost clean water. I'm starting to slowly add a mix of magenta and Alizarin crimson to the wash, trying to create a gradient from pink to clean water. Here, as I approach the bottom of this petal, I need to add a darker paint, but also find the correct shade. When in doubt, I always grab a testing paper, which is just a piece of spare watercolor paper and try to mix and swatch colors. Here is where our color mixing class comes in handy. Just remember the secondary shades that we developed by mixing magenta with neutral tint. Here they are as a refresher. I've chosen a mix that matched my reference, the closest, keeping in mind that the wet watercolor always appears slightly darker than when dry. I'm being very careful around the edges. I want to keep them sharp and clean, not to accidentally wet anything outside the lines. This is slightly easier to do when working with darker pigments because the line is more visible right away. As I approach the top of this petal, I paint with almost clean water. The petal gets very light here. If you accidentally get pigment in this area, just try to lift it with the damp brush as soon as possible. That should help. The hardest part is always drawing the veins wet in wet, but we already practiced and so this will be a piece of cake. I prefer my small brush for this. As usual, after I draw a line, I observe what the human does and then try to influence the flow of pigment in a preferred direction. You can even literally erase the line with the damp brush, if you wish, and that's thanks to the wet surface. This technique is quite simple in theory, but it takes me long minutes to get to a point where I'm satisfied with how the petal looks. It is just a small area, but I'm trying my best to place that color as close to where I see it on the reference as possible. Even though our objective isn't to create a copy of a photo, I want the flower to look relatively realistic. But at the same time, I don't want to build any more layers here. So I'm working the paint back and forth while the surface is still wet until I feel that the petal looks close to the reference. Here, I want to show you how the color changes during drying of the watercolor. When you're ready to stop adding and pushing the paint around, you can use your hairdryer and dry the entire pedal. Here it is. Our watercolor Magnolia emerges nicely. Follow me to the next lesson, where we'll paint in some finishing touches. 12. Final Deepening and Correcting: In the ideal world, I would be done painting this magnolia. We went through every petal already and yet, now that we look at it and compare it to the reference, some areas are too light, some veins not visible enough. These last stages, what I call a correct everything that went wrong, and is part of every painting process. In this lesson, we are going to try to go from this to this. Let's keep the reference close so that we can visually compare our painting and find the most eye-catching things to fix. First are the veins at the bottom of the flower, which gives us some more intensity of color and texture. I'm going to wet this area and then try to draw more veins in it using a rich pigment. Here I'm trying to create a soft shadow, adding a bit of pigment into the wet area and pushing the paint around. It's a small adjustment but makes the petal look a bit rounder. Probably the greatest adjustment will be the darkening of the petals in the back. When I first painted them, I didn't use dark-enough color to make these corners appear as deep as on the reference, and now the painting lacks contrast a little bit. Adding third layer to these areas should help. As a shading color mix of neutral pink and cerulean blue comes in handy, but I also mixed in the reds to create a deeper violet mix for the darkest parts. My strategy was to place the darkest color first and then continue adding more transparent paint to fill in the entire area with. If I wasn't working this part of the process on autopilot, I would have wet the entire area with clean water and then edit the pigment into it. This prevents unwanted patchiness of color, but it's also slightly slower and sometimes when I'm in the zone and space out during painting, this is how I cut corners. I'm trying to get the color right this time I don't think adding a fourth layer would benefit the painting. And so my objective is to achieve appropriately dark paint in the corners of this wall to go against a lighter front petal. Last, adjustment of the same character gets done over here. I'm making sure that the upper part of this area remains light enough. Finally, I'm done with the flower. In the next lesson, I'll show you how to paint the branch and we are almost done. I'll see you there. 13. Branch: In this lesson, we'll paint a branch for the Magnolia flower using just one layer of paint. The simple approach is rather decorative than realistic. In my opinion, it pairs so well with higher detail that we achieved for the flower itself. I personally do not want the branch to compete with the flower, just to act as a support. With this in mind, I also do not want to use a color that would be too saturated either. I'm searching for a muted version of an earthy green by mixing green gold and neutral tint. All I'm going to do now is to paint in the silhouette of the branch. I also leave out some dry parts of the paper here and there that will act as highlights and add some texture to the branch visually. Let's add a darker green mix of paint to this wet wash here at the top of the branch. Here is where the flower would cast a shadow on it, and so it seems like a good idea. I am [inaudible] the paint on my brush as I go, painting each segment of the branch with slightly different shade of green. Here the paint is more transparent and almost yellow and this gradient looks quite nice. Lastly, a few drops of clean water go into the wet wash here and there. This pushes the pigment towards the edges and forms a nice silhouette of the branch. Last, addition of a dark paint underneath the flower and we are done. Let's dry these and then follow me to the next lesson where I'll show you how to add some lovely watercolors splatters to decorate the painting. 14. Splatters and Finish: We are now at the end of the painting process. In this lesson, within just a few minutes, we'll add tiny watercolor splatters to our painting. This stage is optional, if you feel happy about a clean result that we achieved so far, feel free to skip this step. I personally enjoy using a lot of these more expressive elements in my watercolor paintings, so I'll go ahead and show you how I do it. Make sure that you dried everything before creating splatters, and then mix any transparent color that we've used so far. I prefer shades of purple, I have them on my palette anyway, just water them down so that they appear transparent. Load your larger brush with the paint, and then tap the brush so that the drops of paint fall to the paper. It's great to have a dry paper towel in your hand while doing this, because if a drop lands where you don't want it, you can just remove it within seconds with the paper towel. What I do is to use this approach to create larger and then smaller drops, and some are more transparent than others. In other words, quite diversity of drops, best way to dry this is to leave it on the radiator or somewhere warm, but maybe skip the hairdryer for this one as it can blow the drops into a messy shape if one is not too careful. When everything is dry, you can slowly remove the masking tape from the watercolor paper. Congratulations, you painted a watercolor magnolia flower, and I'm so proud of you. 15. Final Thoughts: I really appreciate all of your hard work and effort. I know that watercolor can be tricky at times and require some patience and some practice to get through the initial rough patch. From my experience, if a complete beginner creates about 10 watercolor studies or paintings, they already feel confident and know what they are doing most of the time and so this learning curve is something that I'd like you to consider when you are tackling this new medium. It doesn't even matter if those first paintings turn out exactly as you imagine them. Just try to stick to your practice until the 10th piece and you'll see how much that helps. Luckily, watercolor doesn't take too long and so those 10 studies are only just a couple of hours worth of work. I'm here to help you with this endeavor as well and so I created two more bonus lessons, where we'll together create two more watercolor, magnolia paintings. With all the exercises that we took throughout this entire class, you are halfway to feeling really confident with watercolor hopefully. I'm also very excited to see your class project, so please take a picture or a scan and then upload it did down below to the project section so that I can see, comment on it and give you a thumbs up as well. If you are sharing your work to social media, you can tag me on Instagram so that I can repost your work in my stories and don't forget to follow me here on Skillshare as well. That way you'll get notified once I publish a new watercolor class and I hope to see you there. 16. BONUS I - Magnolia Study in red: Welcome to a bonus lesson. In this lesson, I will show you how I painted another magnolia watercolor study. This one is slightly darker in color and might even be a little easier than our first study. Let's get started. First step is to create a sketch. I always sketch in the same fashion as explained in the main lesson, but let's recap this. First, I use very light lines to roughly indicate the basic shape of the flower and place it on my page. In this step, I make decisions about how big I want the flower and where I want to position it. Afterwards, I only refine the shape using thicker lines. You are welcome to download my sketch from the resources section of this class and use it to start painting right away if you wish. There you can also download a reference picture as well. Transferring the finished sketch to a watercolor paper is quite easy. I use my graphite stick to create a layer of graphite on the outer side of my sketch. Then I position my sketch on top of the watercolor paper, secure it with masking tape, and simply trace over. Now we are ready to paint, but do not forget to mount your watercolor paper to a board or your table as always. I'm now going to apply the first wash of paint. If you remember from the main class, first wash is always on the more transparent side of things, which means you are diluting your pigment with lots of water. Because this magnolia is darker and there are no highlights, essentially the entire flower is in mid-tones and darker tones. We are going to use a bit more pigment in the first wash than usual, I am using a mix of alizarin crimson with magenta. I'm covering the entire silhouette of the flower with this first mix of paint. We will later separate the main flower from that pupil, but for now let's treat them as one. After I painted the first wash, I added more pigment inside the wet area and quite a pool of clean water too. Dispose then align on my table until it dried, and the excess water formed these two lovely large blooms that are quite expressive. You don't have to do this if you wish for a smoother result. I personally love these blooms and let them in my works quite often. But if you're not a fan, then you can just remove the excess water from the underpainting and let it dry. That way, the blooms won't form. If you remember from the main lesson, we also need the underpainting to form darker hard edges around the silhouette, and that's what the extra water helps with as well. Let's now give more depth and structure to some of the petals. I started with the largest one in the middle and painted the entire area with transparent mix of magenta and alizarin crimson. Into this wet wash, I added quite intense pigment, but only at the bottom since that's where I see the color getting dark and saturated on the reference. While the wash is still wet, it's a very good time to draw those veins in. Let them slightly bleed, but you can also use your brush to lift the paint if it runs in a wrong direction, or redraw the vein until you get the look that you are looking for. I know wet-in-wet takes a bit more patience. Sometimes the color behaves in a way that's not to your favor, but be patient with it. Just observe what it does and you'll eventually get the hang of it. Now, moving on to the petal on the right and using the same technique, just making sure that this particular coverage will be more transparent than the one before because that's what I see on the reference. I'm also drawing some veins inside the whitewash. I'm now forced to continue with the petal on the left because there is no other area on my painting that needs deepening and does not touch other already wet areas right now. If you're not careful and start painting the remaining petals now before these wet areas are thoroughly dry, the paint will bleed and you won't achieve the separation of the petals. We need every petal to dry on its own and the painting side forming that hard edge that we talked about previously, which will give every petal its own shape. Be patient or grab a hairdryer and make sure that everything is dry before moving on to any other area. Now, I dried everything and can continue to paint the rest of the petals. The larger petal on the left of the main flower will take a few minutes to get the gradient dried and then the veins as well. I'm always trying to not rush myself and keep in mind that if I can manage an area to remain wet for as long as possible, then I can keep on repairing and correcting what's happening inside it until I'm satisfied. If your washes dry too fast, you must add more water to them right from the start and keep loading your brush with watery pigment when painting. This is something that you will get used to as you paint more and more of these studies. I'm now going to finish painting the remaining part of the petal that's hidden below the pupil. Same technique, but I had to also leave some of the pigment to lighten an area since it was getting too dark. This few areas on this particular part of the petal are the darkest or one of the darkest areas, and so I mixed a bit of neutral tint into the mix of magenta and alizarin crimson to just slightly increase the darkness. We'll now be able to move on to the pupil. The pupil also consists of about four areas that need to be painted separately. I'm always keeping in mind gradients if I see an area on my reference that's slightly darker on one side and lighter on the other. No matter if it's tiny, I try to create a gradient in my painting with my brush. A good example is the triangular shape in the bottom of the pupil. Here I'm slightly adjusting the intensity and the darkness of this tiny area in the pupil by adding an extra wash of paint. I'm also adding extra clean water into the wet wash, and that will form more of the blooms that I really wanted to have in this area. Slight adjustment also was required in the very first petal that we painted, and so I added an extra wash here as well with a bit of darker mix of color. Just a few more touch-ups and adjustments on the pupil and we are done with the flower. Now the almost final part is drawing or painting the silhouette of the branch. You remember the color mixing from the main class, that stays the same. But also the painting technique is very simple, so let's recap this. I am not painting any details to the branch itself, I'm simply creating a gradient that's transitioning from darker green to lighter green. I always make sure that this wash is very watery because I also want the silhouette of the branch to form hard edges. My branches, when it comes to flower studies, are always more decorative than exhaustingly detailed, and that's how I like to do them. I think the main focus should remain on the flower itself. Very last finger splatters, which I think that will complement this composition greatly. Make sure that you are loading your brush with lots of paint that's very diluted with water and more on the transparent side of things. Here is your second magnolia flower study. I am so proud of you. Make sure you include it in your class project pictures so that I can see it. If you want to dig even deeper and create one more flower study with me, then join me in the second bonus video. 17. BONUS II - Advanced Magnolia Study : Welcome to a second bonus lesson in which I will show you another example of how I paint flowers studies with watercolor. The more you paint and exercise your newly acquired skills, the more fearless and confident you get with the new technique and soon you'll be able to translate photos into paintings by yourself. This last study, is slightly more advanced because of its lightness and more curved petals, but all the more beautiful one is finished. Let me show you how I created it. First step is always a sketch. Remember light lines and rough shapes first. Careful about the flower size and where it's placed on your page. After you've got that down, refine the shape and add the necessary details. You are already a pro at transferring your sketches I'm sure, just grab your pencil or a graphite stick and covered the back of the paper with it. Place the sketch on top of your watercolor paper and trace over it. After you mount the watercolor paper, clear your table or board, you are ready to begin painting. We are going to create an underpainting first. This will give us that hard edge around the entire flower, and now we really needed because the magnolia is very light at some areas, almost white. My color base is a light mix of magenta and alizarin crimson. But here I am also adding cerulean blue to it and a bit of green gold. This initial wash isn't in just one color. Some areas appear more orangey and even the bottom of the flower isn't pure red when you look at it. I am experimenting with these four colors and trying to add them into the underpainting where I see them on the reference roughly. Important to note is that you have to lift the pigment and add cleaner water to areas that are almost white. Those are the petals at the top and the side petals also. My underpainting looks like this when I'm done with it and now I let it dry. I'm now trying to get these gray veins in. I watered the area beforehand and then tried to push the paint back and forth as you usual. The gray is a mix of neutral tint with a bit of green, gold, and magenta watered down. This needs to be dried after you are done. Next, I decided to paint these darker area of the pedal to get the sharp line that separates one side of the folded petal from the other, you need to paint it wet-on-dry. You can again play with color inside this whitewash to get a gradient similar to the reference. Color, doesn't need to be exactly right, and mine isn't either. But I try to pay attention to where the color gets darker and try to add more pigment to that area. This was a real chase of color, but as long as the area is still wet, you can add and remove as you wish. Moving on to the petal above because it doesn't touch the wet area below. I'm creating a gradient because this area has pink at the bottom and white on top. I'm adding cerulean blue also to indicate that it's slightly in the shadow, and I really like how my granule thinks cerulean blue adds texture to this petal. Here I was correcting a mistake as I disrupted and edge of overlain pedal. All you need to do in these case is is to lift the pigment with paper towel and then draw a new border of the wet area. It works about 95 percent of the time. I'm now going to try and paint all the pedals that don't touch one another so that they can try to get together and get those lovely sharp borders. I always wet the petal with either clean water or a transparent pigment and then try to influence gradient inside the wet area similar to my reference. Clean water plays an important role in here. Edit everywhere that needs lightening or lift the pigment from the wet wash. If I feel that the pink veins bled into one another too much, I add clean water between them with the tip of my brush and lift the pigment here. This works very well to create veins that look similar to the reference. This particular area is probably the most complicated part of this study. Problem with this triangular shape is that you have to try and paint as clean edges as possible. Because these edges influence the shape of all the nearby petals and folds. Also, there is a very dark gradient here that I'm trying to get right and the paint is harder to influence wet and red when it's inside a small area like this. Luckily, I have enough time and patience and I play with this area and the color in it until it feels like all the colors at the right place. Here you see me lifting some of the pigment to lighten the right side of this area. Also, I had a hard time to keep the edges clean here and I accidentally dampened the nearby petal on the right. So I made a decision to treat this area is one for now and extended the gradient to that petal. I also tried and lift the paint here to get that white border, but it wasn't working well enough while the paint was still wet. In the end and after some struggles, I decided to dry everything with the hairdryer and the paint was so easy to lift with a damp brush afterwards. I also used a stiffer synthetic brush for this. In-between the lifting of the edge, I added one more layer of paint to the triangular area to increase the saturation since the drying caused some fading of the color. Finally, after one more drying of this area, I am lifting the white border on the right petal. This helped me to clean up the center of the flower really nicely. This technique works miracles. Just emphasizing that I'm not using any pigment to paint and the entire paper is completely dry, it's only a wet or damp brush with clean water on it, not a pool of water. Gently draw a line with a damp brush maybe several times back and forth. Then use paper towel to get rid of the pigment that got lifted by this. Here are some final touches in the bottom of the area. I'm not drawing the veins inside the wet wash, but rather wet and dry and then try to smudge them. This area is so tiny that wet-on-wet did not really work for me I tried, but the wet-on-dry, if you then try to slightly smudge the line with the damp brush, that should work. There is just a couple of remaining areas that also need final touches and those are mostly the very light areas and so we need to cover them up with water beforehand and then draw those tiny veins into the wet area like we see on the reference. Both of these petals took a few tries to get at least close to what I saw on the reference, especially the bottom one was a bit more complex. I think the challenge was also the size of it. Working wet-on-wet on a larger paper gets a bit easier in my opinion. Drawing the silhouette of the branch with watercolor is almost the last step that we're going to take. This is a very easy addition as the branch is very simplified. I only add more pigment into the wet area that's closest to the flower and more water into it as I paint it outwards, as if it was fading away. Now just a few splatters to give the painting more expressive watercolor feel. Here it is one more magnolia flower study. You are such a trooper for getting it this far in my class and I'm so grateful, for being able to be your guide today. Lastly I just want to encourage you to paint as many studies of different motifs as possible. Keep it simple and don't let photographs limit you. There is no need to be a 100 percent precise in your portrayal of natural things like this. There is always room for experiments and self-discovery. But also don't be afraid to throw away something that isn't working and start over. Always have fun and put your best works on a wall or a shelf to keep yourself motivated. I can't wait to see what you create.