Jewel-Toned Botanicals: Watercolors for Beginners and Beyond

1. Intro: Jewel toned botanicals: Hello and welcome to my home studio. I'm Emily, and in today's Skillshare class, our goal is to relax and have fun while painting with watercolors. This skill shirt tutorial is designed for beginners and comes with three different projects, a colorful eucalyptus spray, prickly par cactus and an agave plant. We'll add some jewel toned accents to brighten up our botanicals and leave them beautiful enough to hang in any room of your house. The class includes printable templates for printing the outlines directly onto your watercolor paper using your home printer and traceable templates, if you'd rather trace the outline onto your paper. It also includes a video tutorial to teach you how to print on your watercolor paper. In the step by step video tutorials, you'll learn how to create these paintings using basic watercolor techniques like wet wet and wet dry. We'll also take a look at layering and using blooms to your advantage. So get your paper, brushes, and paints, and let's get ready to paint some jewel toned botanicals. 2. Supplies Needed: All right. We'll start off this tutorial by talking quickly about the supplies that you'll need. First off, you'll notice that in all the tutorial videos, I will be using a practice sheet like this with all of my colors along the bottom. That's because I actually sell these as kits, where the paints come included, your design is printed on your paper and it comes with a brush. And so to translate them into skill share, I'm still using the paper here and all my paint spots. But when I'm painting at home, of course, I will use a traditional palette. So the colors that you will need for this project or colors that are similar that you might have at home, I am using a combination of Daniel Smith watercolors along with Windsor Newton Cotman. With Daniel Smith, I am using Green Gold. Quinacridone magenta, Undersea green and deep sap green. If you don't have these exact same colors, particularly with undersea green, you can mix your own undersea green at home by mixing a French ultramarine and a quinacridone gold. Those are actually the two pigments that make up undersea green. Undersea green is a granulating color. Meaning that its pigment is going to granulate as it's drying, you'll see a speckled look to it. If you don't have French French ultramarine or quinacridone gold at home, I would suggest that you can use a sap green, maybe add a little bit more of a gold or a brown tone because this undersea green is a little bit more earthy and brown than your traditional sap green. Your deep sap green, of course, is just a darker color. And then with our Cotman water colors, we have Indigo and Prussian blue. You can use different brands, if you'd like. Of course, Windsor and Newton Cotman is the student grade brand of Windsor and Newton. The difference between student grade watercolors and professional grade watercolors is the amount of fillers that it has. So you'll often notice that your professional watercolors, like Daniel Smith, have a much richer, more vibrant color than your student grade. All right, Let's move on to your palette. In this tutorial, I will be using a plastic yogurt container tap. At home, if you have your own porcelain palette, Porcelain palettes are great. It allows you to mix your colors and to see them really well. You can also use a plastic palette that you might have at home or even a glass plate also works. You'll want at least one cup of water. I usually like to paint with two glasses of water. This just helps to have one on hand in case one gets really dirtied up. For the brushes that you'll use, you'll see me using a round size four brush in the entirety of all three tutorials in this Skillshare video. However, you can choose any other size of round brush. I would stick around four, five, six, those numbers, maybe a size three or two for some of the finer details, but I don't really think you'll need a brush much larger than a six or an eight. The brushes that you see here are silver limited black velvet brushes. These are brushes that I use professionally at home. If you're looking to purchase any brushes at home, these are a great way to start with your watercolor collection, and a size four and a size six for the work that I do tends to be the most versatile size brushes. You'll also want a paper towel or a cloth. In the tutorials, the projects are printed onto arches cold pressed paper. Your arches paper is going to look like this. It might come in a pad of paper. I like to buy in pads of papers instead of the very large pieces of paper because I like to work smaller. I tend to buy arches this size, the A three size, which is just under 12 " by just under 17 ". And then I like to cut these pages down to size, so I can actually fit 28 by tens in each page. So this pad of arches, cold pressed paper, even though it has 12 sheets, I can I can get 248 by ten out of this pad of paper. If you are painting, for example, the cacti or the Agave, something where you're painting a larger section of paper, you can always tape your paper down onto the desk that you're working or onto some other waterproof surface. All that's going to do is it's going to keep your paper from buckling while you're painting. You will see in my tutorials that I will not tape them down. Another option if you don't want to tape your paintings down is to purchase blocks of watercolor paper. So a block of watercolor paper is glued at the edge, and so when you paint, your paper cannot buckle. And then when you're done painting, you can use a palette knife or another sharp knife to let's see where the opening is to cut your your paper off of the block. My suggestion would be to spend the most amount of money on your paper, because in my opinion, a high quality paper that's 100% cotton, such as arches is going to give you a much better product than a low grade paper. You can always save some money by purchasing student grade paints. And then if you continue liking water colors, you can purchase professional paints to get a little bit higher pigment. More than welcome to use whatever paper you have at home. Just make sure that it is a thicker paper, so I wouldn't suggest using anything under 140 pounds, which is 300 grams. And if you are purchasing a brand other than arches, I do highly suggest that you try to have it be 100% cotton. 3. How to Print Your Watercolor Templates: In this video, we'll look at how to print templates, Trace using those templates and Trace using your phone. I'm going to talk quickly about printers. Not all printers are designed equally when it comes to printing on your watercolor paper. The first printer I want to talk about is the Epson workforce W F 78 40. I just purchased this printer, and I am in love with it. It's an ink jet printer. It uses pigment ink, which is known to be waterproof. So when you're looking at your printer, pigment ink is better than die ink. The ink that this printer uses is called Durabrt ultra Ink. That means that when it's printed and you use your watercolors on top of it, those that ink will not bleed. It does have a rear feed, which is definitely useful. You will need to use rear feed when you are printing on watercolor paper. However, you do need to load it one by one, which can be tedious, and it is a very large machine. Next, we're going to compare that with a brother laser printer. With laser printers, a lot of people will tend to use a laser printer instead of an ink jet for printing templates on watercolor paper because the ink used is a toner. Toner is waterproof, whereas pigment and dyes can be not so waterproof. You do have a rear feed option, which you will need for cardstock watercolor paper. However, some laser printers don't print color very well, so you have to be careful when choosing your laser printer. There's also some concern that the heat used to print using lasers will ruin the sizing of your watercolor paper. Others have used them and think that they're wonderful. I personally don't have any experience with laser printers, but this is just what I've been reading as I've done research. Lastly, we'll talk about the Con TS 95 21 C. This is the printer that I'm using in this video tutorial. It's the first printer that I started printing on. I have been printing both prints, cards, merchandise, as well as some templates. This is also an ink jet printer, which can cause some concern because the die used in this printer is a die ink. Dye inks tend to be not waterproof and will bleed slightly versus the pigment ink used in my Epsin printer. After I noticed how much bleeding of ink, this was causing on my watercolor paper, that's when I decided to purchase the Epsin workforce. The cannon printer does have a rear feet option, which is necessary when printing on cardstock or watercolor paper. However, you do still need to load it one by one, or otherwise, it will jam and cause a complete mess. As you get ready to print on your watercolor paper using your home printer. Just be aware of these differences knowing that the template that you print might be waterproof, or it might not be waterproof. It might bleed slightly. If this is a concern for you and it ends up being troublesome, remember that there are templates for tracing in this tutorial as well, and it might benefit you to trace the template instead of print it directly on your watercolor paper. Let's take a look at how to print using my canon TS 95 21 C. If your project is meant to be printed on an eight by ten inch of paper, you will need to cut it first. I do recommend using a cold press paper w of at least 140 pounds. Once your paper is cut, you'll once again scroll down to the printable template section of your PDF. Continue scrolling until you find the eight by ten inch design that you'd like to print. For example, this Pony, go find the printer icon and click Once again, you'll want to check to make sure that you have your printer selected. We do not want to print all of the PDF. We just want the current paper. Make sure that the current view is the design you want to print. Right now, we need to choose a different size. Currently, it's on a seven by ten inch size of paper. We're going to click on page setup. Then paper size. And you'll notice that there is no eight by ten option, so we are going to have to manage custom sizes. Once again, we need to create our own custom size, clicking plus bot button, and we'll rename it eight by 10 ". Change the width to eight The height to ten. Once again, we don't want any margins. We're going to change every margin to zero. Then click k. Check the paper size once again to make sure it's the correct size eight by ten, then click. Now, it might be the setting fit. We do not want it to be fit. Remember, we want it to be printed on the button to the right that says actual size. So I'm going to click on actual size. You should see, once again, the red box around the area that will be printed. C heck again that you have an eight by ten inch piece of paper. Make sure that it's on the correct portrait versus landscape. If it's landscape, it will not fit within the red box. And then click print. Once again, you'll load your pre cut paper in the rear tray of your printer. Make sure that the rough side is facing up. These designs are meant to be printed on, so you'll notice the lines are a little bit lighter. You're all set to paint. If you don't feel comfortable printing out the template directly on your watercolor paper, there are also darker templates that you can download to use to trace the template onto your watercolor paper. As soon as you open up the PDF, you'll need to scroll down past the printable templates to the traceable template section. You can use the following templates to print each design onto regular 8.5 by 11 inch paper and then trace it onto your watercolor paper. You'll note that these traceable templates have darker outlines. Scroll down to the template that you'd like to print. If you're printing a watercolor card, you'll notice that it has a box around it. Click on the Print icon. We will not print all. We'll click on the current selection only. You'll check the paper size. Right now, it's on eight by 10 ", so I need to go down to my page setup. Find paper size, and click on US Letter. Click Okay. Now, it doesn't matter if we have fit or actual size. Either one will not change the size of your printout. It will be the same size. Once again, make sure that you're printing to an 8.5 by 11 inch piece of paper and then click print. Another option for your traceable templates is to trace an eight by ten inch template. Once again, you'll scroll past your greeting card template or your five by seven template, and then find your larger eight by ten. Click on the printer icon. Once again, we are not going to print all, we're going to print the current selection only. Check the paper size that it's 8.5 by 11 ", which is a normal letter size. If it is not on that normal letter size, you'll need to change it using the page setup. Find paper size and find US letter. Click Okay. Make sure once again, it's the correct size for a normal sheet of paper, and then click print. Since you're using regular plain paper. You can either load it in the rear tray or you can load it in the lower tray. You'll notice that your template comes out nice and dark. To use your tracing template, first, place your watercolor paper on top of your dark template. You'll need to line it up correctly. Then use some masking tape or painters tape to secure your watercolor paper on top of your template. Use either a light box or a bright window to trace the template onto your watercolor paper. Last option is to use your phone to trace the templates onto your watercolor paper. I like to use an app on my phone called Da vinci I, where you can upload any picture or image that you'd like to trace. Using the classic mode, you can move and resize your image to help you draw it onto your watercolor paper. To use this technique, you will need a phone holder so you can look through your phone as you're tracing your outline. Please do remember that these templates are for personal use only. It is illegal to paint them and then sell them for money. Enjoy painting them for yourselves or to give them as a gift. Thank you. If you are interested in these designs printed on your watercolor paper, but don't have a printer at home, you can always purchase one of my watercolor kits on my website. Paper, paints, and a brush are included in the purchase of your kit. 4. Eucalyptus, Part 1: For this eucalyptus painting, we'll be using mostly a wet on wet technique to drop in colors into each individual petal. Now, the colors that you'll use are green gold, acido magenta, Prussian blue, indigo, and undersea green. The only color on your practice sheet we won't be using for this project is deep sap green. So I'll start by simply adding a few drops of water to each color. This is just going to activate the colors so that they will be ready for me when I want to use them. Like I said, we won't use deep sap green. I'm going to show you what it'll look like using undersea green. I can wet my color. And using this color, I will paint wet on dry to the very top leaf. Now you notice that my color is not extremely dark. I am using quite a bit of water and I'm not pulling directly from the paint. I'm taking some paint off to the edge and then pulling it onto my paper. If you're finding that your color is too dark, you can simply add some water to a plate. And then add some of your undersea green to that water. That way you'll get a tone that isn't too dark for your first layer. While our leaf is still wet, I'm going to drop in another color. I might choose, for example, quinacridone magenta. As I drop it in, I'm going to stay closest to the stem, and I'll let this water carry the pigment wherever it would like to go. I'm going to do something in addition to help this pigment mix itself on the paper, and that is to add water to my painting. I'll clean my brush and using the water that's on my brush, I'm going to tap and drop some water directly in the center of this leaf. I'll do it a few times. What you'll notice is that the pigment is going to be pushed to the outer edge. I'm going to then dry my brush. And lift some of that liquid that I just dropped from the center of that leaf. I'm just going to lift a little bit of that liquid, so it's not a complete pool. What we're left with is a ring around the outside that is much more dense and dark than inside. That's kind of the look that we're wanting. Now we can continue with the rest of the leaves of our eucalyptus spray. We do want to be careful to do these two at a time and making sure that we're not touching extra leaves. So I'm able to do these next two because they're not touching the first. However, once I move on to these, I will not be able to do these two eucalyptus leaves until these first two are dry. So once again, our first layer is wet on dry. So because I want my first layer to be a little lighter, I'm going to put some water on my plate. I might choose a different color such as indigo to start with. I'll grab a little bit of indigo. Put it on my plate. And now I'll use that indigo to paint wet on dry, meaning I have a wet brush and I'm painting on dry paper. I'm going to paint both of these leaves at once and then drop in some brighter colors while they're still wet. All right, now that I have that first layer, I can wash my brush off and choose any of the additional colors to drop in. Let's see what happens if I drop in this green gold. Once again, I'm going to drop in some of that color closest towards the stem. If you notice, I'm just dotting the color. And as I do, that color is spreading even more. Now, when you're painting double leaves, you can choose to either add one additional color or two additional colors. So I think I'll take a little bit of this Prussian blue. And maybe I'll add a little bit of this Prussian blue just to this upper side. Once again, I'll clean my brush. Now it's time for our next step, which is dropping in water to force these blooms. Wash your brush, grab some water, and drop it towards the center of each leaf. Then immediately dry your brush. And now you can start to lift and move that color wherever you feel you need it moved. Re wetting the area is basically just another way to help move the color around the paper. Now we can continue. I have these next two here. I have two base colors. Perhaps I want a third base color. Remember our base colors are going to be our lightest colors. I'll add some more water here, and perhaps I want some quinacridone magenta as a base color. I'll add some quinacridone magenta. And now I can paint wet on dry. So you have a little drop here. I'll suck that up with my paper towel. Yeah. Now, like I said, I'm going to skip these two because as you notice, the bottom bun of this hamburger is touching the next bow tie. If I were to paint this next one here, the colors are going to bleed into this set. I'm going to ski it and come back. There apicoec I end of the 5. Eucalyptus, Part 2: All right. Now that we are done painting all of our leaves. We do need to let it dry thoroughly before we paint the stems. You can tell that my painting is still wet because you can see the light shining off of the wet areas. So typically, it'll take anywhere 10-20 minutes for your leaves to dry completely where they have a mat finish. And then we'll come back and finish the stems. Now that we've given our leaves some time to dry, we're ready to paint the stem. First step, you'll need to clean the plate you're working on. We need to mix the color for this stem. Next, grab some water onto your plate. We'll be using two colors to mix. First our undersea green. Maybe two or three brushflls of undersea green, and the second color is indigo. Same thing about two or three brushflls of indigo. You should have a nice deep color for the stem. Now we're ready. I'm going to tap my brush a few times onto my plate just to release some of that liquid that's on my brush, so I can have a really nice fine point. I'm wanting to tilt my brush in the most vertical position that I can have it. I do not want it to be parallel to my paper because I want the tip of my brush here. I will start at the very top with a very light brush stroke. If this is something that you'd like to practice first on your practice sheet, I highly suggest taking some time to practice and see if you can paint some very thin strokes on your free space. I like to keep my wrist on my desk, and I'm only moving my fingers. I'm doing small sections at a time to make sure that I don't have to do one single long stroke for my stem. Coming back to my final piece. You'll notice that I'm going to skip some of the eucalyptus leaves. The reason being is the ones that are like a hamburger shape, one on top of the other. The leaf on top is actually the leaf that's the most in the background. The one in the front is actually protruding out towards you. The stem theoretically goes in between those two. I will leave that open. I'm not going to paint my stem on top of the bottom most leaf, and I'll continue on. It'll go once again through the top leaf of that hamburger bunch and not through the bottom. You will go through the bow ties. And all the way to the base. If the line that you made is looking a little bit to translucent, transparent, you can always go ahead and do another line with your paint brush. I'll move on to the second eucalyptus branch. Remember that you can turn your paper so that it is the most comfortable for you to paint. Once again, I'll paint a stem the top of the hamburger, leaving the bottom bun open. I can always stop mid bow tie as well. It's just your personal preference there. Through the top of the bun, leaving the lower bun without a stem. As I continue down. Once again, through the top of the hamburger bun, stopping in the center, skipping the bottom. And since this is only one of the hamburger buns, I can go through. Or if you're at home and you don't like how that looks, you can keep your stem behind that single leaf. Once again, you can go back and check out your stem, see if there are any places that you need just a bit darkness added. The very last thing that I want to show you is what it would look like if I were to add a second layer of color onto some of these leaves. While you're painting at home, you'll obviously notice that your colors are going to be different than mine, be it that you're using different colors or you're using opacities of colors? You might notice that your colors are slightly lighter and less vibrant than mine. You may notice that your leaves are looking to purple or too red and you'd like them to be a little bit more green or teal. So perhaps I'm looking at these two leaves here, and I'm wanting one leaf to be a little bit darker than the other. So I can make a second layer on one of those leaves. I'll add water to my plate. And now I need to choose a color for that second layer. So perhaps I want it to have a little bit more of a pink tinge to it. Maybe I'll add a little bit of quinacrodon magenta to that water. I do need to have this second layer, like I said, be a little bit more transparent. And if you get any accidental slaters, right away before they dry, lift them up with your paper towel. All right. Now that I have a water down color, I can work on painting the second layer. I need to fill in the entire leaf using that second layer color. Now, because you're using high quality paints and high quality paper, you will not have any of that previous layer lifted up. If you were to use lower quality paper or lower quality paints, you might notice that instead of adding a layer sitting on top, you might be lifting some of your paint up. I can add a second layer to any of them that I'd like. It's really up to you at this point and your judgment based on what you see and what kind of colors you want. So perhaps I want a of this magenta at the base here. I can add a second layer on top. And you notice how it completely changes that color. Instead of it being more of a green tone, it has a little bit of this pink tone to it. Oh. 6. Prickly Pear Cacti, Part 1: Just like with our eucalyptus spray, we will need to mix a base color to paint each of the paddles of our prickly par cactus. The base color is going to be more transparent than any of the other colors that we drop in. So we need to have quite a bit of water to mix our base color. Add quite a bit of water to your plate. Throughout this painting, you might need to mix more base color as there are quite a few paddles that you'll need to paint. The base color that we'll use for all of the paddles is going to be this undersea green. So wet the color, add some of that color to your water. Now, we can check this color by painting it first on our practice sheet. It's a little light for me, so I'm going to add just a little bit more color, a little bit more pigment. Okay, that's better. Now that we have our base color, now we can talk about the process. I will be first painting my base color wet on dry. Meaning I have a wet brush, and I'll paint on dry paper. Then, while it's still wet, I'm going to drop in an accent color on each paddle, just like you did for your Eucalyptus spray. The accent colors that I would suggest for you are the first four colors on your practice sheet. Green gold, quinacrido magenta, Prussian blue, and Indigo. Our deep sap green we use around the edges of the paddle, as well as dotting in the center to create some thorn looking spots. Let me show you what this looks like. Step one, paint wet on dry for one pedal. I might start towards the bottom, just because if I make a mistake, it'll stay towards the bottom of my sheet instead of one of the more prominent paddles. It's always a good idea to start your painting towards the bottom. Perhaps I'll start with this guy here. As I'm painting, I'll come all the way to the edge. I'm constantly grabbing more liquid from my plate because I need to make sure that this paddle stays wet. I might go back to the area that I just painted, go over it one more time just to make sure that it stays wet for the second step. Now, the second step is to clean your brush and choose an accent color. Perhaps for this accent color for this small one, maybe I'll choose a little quinacridone magenta. I'll grab a little on my brush, and I'm going to add that color to one section of the paddle. Be careful here about over mixing. If you start to mix too, you're going to overly blend your colors. So if you noticed, I added that quinacrodona magenta, and then I stopped. If I were to keep moving my brush back and forth, I'm going to muddy the color and turn it into a nasty brown. Now, I'll wet my brush and I'm ready for painting the edge of my cactus. With a wet brush, I'm going to activate deep sap green. I have deep sap green on the tip of my brush, and now I will paint all around the outside edge of the cacti. You, you should notice that your color is starting to slowly sep inside. If it's seeping too and it's overtaking the paddle, that means you have too much liquid on your brush. With too much liquid on your brush, it's going to take over everything on the inside. To fix the problem, Make sure that you tap your brush on your paper towel before you grab some of the paint. You want mostly paint and not so much water for this step. Now I can paint a few dots in the center to mimic the thorns. My dots, I am painting in a horizontal fashion. I'm painting both the dots and all around the edge while the color is still wet. This is known as wet on wet. If you wait too long for the first layer and your first layer dries, this will not work. Make sure that you are fairly quick after you paint your first layer to then grab your accent color and the dark edge around your paddle. Let me show you what that looks like again, what those three steps look like. Now, I'm not going to be able to paint this paddle here until this first one dries. So perhaps I'll paint this little tiny guy first. Remember, step one is to paint inside the paddle. This is wet on dry, a wet brush, on dry paper. I'll go back to the area I painted. Make sure that the whole area is wet before I clean my brush and grab an accent color. Perhaps I want this whole group down here to have the same accent color. Maybe I'll choose Quinacrodone magenta again for this accent color. I'm going to choose about the same location for this accent color. Remember, I'll drop in some of that color and then I'll leave it. I want it to naturally expand. If I use too many strokes, it'll mix the color and it'll turn muddy. Now I need to paint around the edge. I'll take some deep sap green. Directly from my paper. I'm just having enough so that it's on the point of my brush. I don't need to roll the whole brush in the paint. Now I can paint around the edge of my paddle. I'm going to start at the top and paint around the edge lifting as I come to the base. Wherever you lift your brush off of the paper, that's where the majority of the pigment is going to stay on your paper. If I were to start at the base and pull upwards, I'll have a dark spot of deep sap green at the top. Now I'm ready for the dots of the thorns. Same thing. I will dot a few thorns. And now I'm going to wait to let that dry. Let's move on to a bigger cacti paddle. Now, this is completely up to you if you would like to lighten that first layer of your cacti for the paddle. You can always add more water here to your undersea green. I'm noticing that these two paddles are pretty dark colored. 7. Prickly Pear Cacti, Part 2: You can notice that I have quite a lot of liquid on my paper. With watercolors, you shouldn't see your brush strokes on your paper. If you see your brush strokes, it means that you're not using enough liquid. I'll go back to that same area that I just painted to make sure that it's nice and wet. You can tell that my paper is nice and wet because I can even move around that liquid. You see there's more liquid here. I could move it down further, can move that liquid all around. That's how wet this section of my paper is. And I'll paint around the edge here. I am going to leave a little bit more of that pigment on this underside where the next paddle is attaching. More water you have on this paddle, the more that it's going to seep into your first layer. If you're not noticing any of that green color seeping into that first layer, it means that your first layer is not wet enough. Now we're ready for our dots of our thorns. I'm dotting in a diagonal fashion. I am keeping them somewhat spaced out. I don't want to overcrowd my dots. Let's keep painting a few paddles using the same technique. The base layer first and accent color. Then at the very end, deep sap green all around the edge, as well as some dots in the center. I'll speed up this video. You are more than welcome to go back to the beginning and introduce yourself to these concepts. H. Cacao act H Now, this paddle in the center here is going to be slightly different than the other paddles that I've painted so far because instead of forward facing you, this paddle is actually tilted. You're seeing the skinny edge of this paddle. There is a little line printed here that's to show you that it's at the side. I am going to continue with the same steps I've done. Except for, I'm going to create a shadow along this back edge. And I'll use this green gold to highlight the front edge. So I'll talk you through it. First, just like before, we'll wet our area and paint it using that first layer of undersea green. Once again, I'll go back to the very tip top and make sure that it's nice and wet so that it won't dry on me. Now I'm ready to drop in the colors. I'll start with the highlight, this green gold. Now, I'm almost pretending that the sun is coming from this left side, which is why I'm highlighting using green gold on the side of these paddles. I'm going to do the same for this paddle. I'll highlight this edge. And then I'll clean my brush, and I'll use a little bit of indigo to add a little shadow on this left hand or on the right hand side. I need a little bit more than that. All right. Now I'll continue with the same step as before, adding that deep sap green all around the outside edge. I do want to try to keep a skinnier line on this left hand side, where the highlight is. I'll start on the right hand side because then I can use some of that deeper color that's already in my brush and use it up before I get to that left hand side. Now that I've used up some of that paint, now I can continue on to this left hand side. Looks like I'm running out. I'll grab a little bit more. I'm grabbing little bits of paint at a time, just to make sure that I don't have too much on my brush. Now, I am going to add one extra step here, and that is to add this little center line with this deep sap green where it was printed. All right. And the very last step before it dries, is to add a few of those thorns. As you can see, just that little bit of shading has helped to kind of out that. We'll continue on with the rest of the m. A. 8. Prickly Pear Cacti, Part 3: Oh Now, for these ti paddle that are ahead of the rest. They're in front of the other paddles behind them. I do want to keep the accent color quite light. If you notice the accent color that I added for this paddle behind here, I use some of those blues and indigos to make it slightly der. I am going to try my best to keep this paddle and the one above it slightly lighter than the rest. So I can always lift some of this color up. And the accent color that I'm going to choose is going to be this green gold so that it's nice and bright in the foreground. Now, remember, the same holds true for the paddles that are in the background. So for these paddles that are more in the background, I am going to use a darker accent color, particularly close to the areas where it is behind the other paddles. So I'm using an indigo in this area to help give this sense of dimension. Isn't. Cc O. A. Octo 9. Prickly Pear Cacti, Part 4: Now that we've finished painting, the majority of our paddles, the only ones left are these little tiny, they're actually flowers that will eventually blue. So there's four at the base here, three on this paddle, and one over here. I will use still some undersea green as the base here. So I'll need to mix some of that at my base. The only difference that I'm going to paint for each of these individual ones, is that I'm going to add a dot of quinacrido magenta at the tip of each. That way, it'll just act and mimic one of the flowers about to bloom. I'm going to tilt my paper so that I don't rest it on the area that's already wet, and I'll start by showing you one of them. Same thing. I'll start by painting wet on dry. Wash your brush. Grab some of that quinacridone magenta. And then I'm going to add some of that quinacridone magenta just to the tip. Now, it is quite watery. It will start to set down. That's actually what I want. If you'd like, you can always add just a little bit of that deep sap green around the lower edges. Just make sure that you're not bringing any of that deep sap green up to the tip top. Now, if you notice that your magenta is coming down too far, you can dry off your brush. Make sure it's clean from that deep sap green. Dry it off, make sure you've got a nice point, and then you can lift in that middle area so that it does not sat down quite too far. Now, here my colors are starting to dry, but they're starting to look a little too uniform. I am going to drop on purpose a droplet of water to push these a. The same thing here. I'm going to push that pink, and I'm going to push that dark green down. With just one drop of water in the center, it'll push both of those in opposite directions. Now, I can also speed up this process by doing more than one at a time, except for this one that's hiding in the back. I can't do that one yet. I need to wait for the others to dry. But I can do all three of these at once or two at once, depending on how fast I work. Remember that you can turn your paper so that your hand is not resting on the area that is still wet. First step is to paint wet on dry. I I'm going to do all three of them at once since they're fairly small. You at home get to decide if you'd like to do more than one at once. All right. Lastly, we can add a little bit of details to each of the paddles. To do that, we need a light layer of undersea green. We'll be adding a second layer on top of the paddles, but we will be making sure that this layer is nice and light. So we do want to add quite a bit of water. Member. I'll start once again at the paddles towards the bottom just in case I make a mistake, then at least it won't be some of those center paddles. I'm going to take quite a bit of liquid on my brush, roll it all around. I want my brush completely loaded, and I'm going to paint on top of the dots that I made for the thorns. I'm just painting circles on top of these dots, and I'm connecting some of these circles together. Now, to do this, I'm using the edge of my brush. I'm not using the point of my brush. It's going to make it a lot quicker if you can use the edge instead of the point. So when I make these big circles on top of the paddle, what you'll notice is that it gives it just a little bit more te. It's more similar to the texture of these types of cacti. We'll do the same thing so that you can see a little bit more how this texture starts to look. Remember that we're making large dots on top of the thorns. I'll show you what it looks like on one of these that's slightly lighter. Now these dots, like I said, they can connect. Some of them will connect, and not all of them need to connect. Just like in nature, we have we don't want it to be too uniform. You notice here, some of these circle dots that I'm painting on top are connecting, others are not. This will only work if your layer is nice and light. If you have too much pigment, it might end up looking a little distracting. So make sure to test this out on some of these paddles that are lower in your painting. Just in case if it's too dark, pat it off right away with your paper towel and then add some water to that mixture, so it's nice and light. Now, I don't have to add this texture to every single th I might choose in some of the areas that are more highlighted. For example, here, I might choose to not add that texture. 10. Agave, Part 1: The first thing that we need to do for this painting is to mix our base color. We're going to be using a lighter base color to paint every single paddle on this agave plant. Grab your water, add quite a bit of water to your plate. We'll need actually quite a lot of this base color. If you do run out, remember that you can always mi. Once I have quite a bit of water on my plate, I'm going to start with undersea green. So once I have a little bit of undersea green, I'll wet my prussian blue, roll my brush around a few times and add that to the undersea green. I'm wanting a teal color. I do want this color to be more of a more of a blue teal than a green teal. So I'm looking to add, maybe just slightly more blue than green. Remember that I do have a little section here on my practice paper that I can use to check my color. Add a little bit more water. It seems like the color is getting a little dark. And now I'll check it on a free space on my paper. So this is about the color that I'm looking for. Our first step is to paint wet on dry, meaning I have a wet brush, and I'm painting on dry paper. I'll start by working on just one of these paddles. Wet on dry. I'll continue to make sure to bring quite a bit of liquid to my paper. If your color is too dark, you can grab some water directly from your cup and add it to that mixture just to lighten up your color a little bit. Now, as we're painting these paddles, I should note that the little thorns at the very tips, we will not paint. Those are going to be a magenta color. So we're only painting the paddle part. We do want to paint this. Slowly making sure that we have our color all the way up to the edge. And once I finish filling in the paddle, I'm going to go back to the very start and rewet the area, making sure that it stays nice and wet. Remember that we need the area to be nice and wet to drop in our accent colors. Now that I have it nice and wet, now I can choose an accent color to drop in. I'm going to start with this green gold. I'll grab some on my brush, and I'll maybe to add some green gold just along the edge here. Clean my brush. Now, I also might want to drop in some darker tones where the paddle connects to the plant. The darker tones are going to be indigo. I'll grab some indigo from my paper, and I'll drop in some indigo where this paddle meets the plant. When I say drop in, I'm actually dotting the liquid because I have enough liquid on my paper. As I dot dot dot, the pigment is going to be pulled into that liquid. All right. Now, I can always add in a little bit more of this undersea green. If I'm feeling like it needs to be a little bit more green, you can kind of play around with your colors here. Now, I will be adding some water here to purposefully create a bloom. A bloom is made when you have add water to color. Now, this area that I just painted is still a little bit too wet to add the bloom because I do want to be able to see the edges of the bloom. I do need to let it dry slightly. While I'm letting that dry, I'm going to actually mix some purple color for an accent color. To mix that purple accent color, you'll need a little bit more water on your plate in a different section. Once again, this accent color is going to be nice and transparent. We don't want anything that's too bold for our accent colors. So quinacridone magenta. I'll mix it with some Prussian blue and that will give me a nice purple tone. Now, I want to make sure that this mentioned this purple, excuse me, is nice and light and isn't too dark for my agave plant. If it's too dark, it's going to kind of take over those greens. All right. Now that I've mixed it, I'm going to take another peek at this first paddle, and it's looking like it's starting to dry, but it's still a little too wet to add this bloom. So I can tell that it's still a little too wet because as I move my sheet, I can see a really nice shiny sheen on that reflection, meaning that it's completely wet. In the meantime, I might paint a smaller section of the paddle, perhaps this little section here. The little tiny sections here, I do want to keep nice and light. I might lift some of that color up by drying my brush and just lifting some of that color so that that section is nice and light. Perhaps I'll do some of these other little tiny baby sections here. Now I can show you that the shine on this paddle is significantly less, especially considering the shine of the little sections I just painted. But I can tell it still wet. This is the stage that we want for a very defined bloom. To create this defined bloom, I take my water, and I'm going to drop water into the center or a certain space in my paddle. Maybe I would drop it there and a little bit further down. As I drop the water, I'm just tapping my brush to get some of that extra water off of my brush. What you'll notice is the water is going to push the pigment to the edges. It's going to give this almost stained glass look where the edges are darker than the inside. I'll show you what that looks like with some other sections of my paddle. Now, remember that each paddle, I need to let dry completely before I paint the paddle immediately next to it. If I started to paint this paddle here, my colors will start to bleed into each other, and I won't get this nice line and nice edge. So I'm going to have to work on a completely new section, so perhaps I'll work on this section right here. 11. Agave, Part 2: Now for some of these paddles, I will want to add water immediately for my bloom. Some of them, I want to create a more distinct bloom. Others, I just want to add some water right away just to push that pigment to the edges. This is what happens when I add the water immediately. You'll notice that it pushes the pigment to the edges. I can then lift whatever pigment I want from the center, say it's too dark, or say I wanted to add a little bit more purple in a section that got diluted. O. O As we move on to some of the larger paddles of our painting, remember that you need to constantly go back to that first area that you painted to make sure that it stays wet. I will sometimes rotate my paper so that I don't accidentally it with my hand. It also allows me to get nice and close to the edges. If when you're adding your, if your color mixes too much with your base color, you can simply lift some of that color up, some of that base color and then drop some of your purple on top. With this purple color, we want to avoid mixing it too much. Or otherwise, you're going to create more of a blue purple color. You can notice that I did have some color leaking into this panel next door that simply tells me that this panel wasn't dry enough. If that starts to happen to you. My advice is to let it dry completely first before you try to fix that spot. If we were to try to go in right now with our brush and fix that with a damp brush, all we're going to do is end up ruining that paddle. We're going to it dry completely and then we'll go back and see if we want to fix it when it's dry. If you notice a stain or a spot on your paper, the best thing is to the stain right away using clean water and then use your paper towel to lift it up. So I can tell that this larger paddle is ready to add the water because once again, I noticed the shine on the paper isn't as shiny as the more recently painted. I'll grab some water and drop it into the center of the paddle. You'll notice already that the pigment is starting to be pushed to the edge, and it's creating a harder edge that looks a little bit like a stars or a firework pattern. Remember that we had a little bit of a problem with our color interacting with this paddle that wasn't dry. We have the same here. Now, this section isn't dry yet, so I can't work on this to soften those edges until it dries. This section, though, I can tell is dry because it doesn't have that same shine. So I'm going to show you how to clean that edge. You'll need to wet your brush. And then you'll tap your brush on your paper towel because we want it damp, but we do not want it soaking wet. And then we'll come back with a damp brush and just kind of rub the edges out. Remember that whenever we fix sections like this, that first layer has to be completely dry. There. This area, I cannot fix yet because it's still wet, so I'm going to let this section dry before I clean up this paddle. Now that this section is completely dry, I can fix the seeping color, so I need to wet my brush and dab it onto a paper towel before I start to blend these edges here. I might need to rewet the entire section of the paddle in order to do this. But since it's already wet, if I notice that the stain isn't going away, I can add a little bit more color to the whole paddle to kind of cover that up. Once again, I can only do this when both the paddles are completely dry. A Oh. 12. Agave, Part 3: Okay. Now that I'm done painting every single section of my Agave plant. I need to let every single section dry before I can put on the second layer. In order to let it dry completely, I'm going to take around ten to 20 minutes to let each section dry. I will continue to check in light by moving my paper under a light to see if I notice any glossy sections. If there's any gloss at all, it means that it is still too wet to add the second layer. Now that we've let our sections dry enough, we'll go back and add a second layer wet on dry. So I'm not going to wet each section. I'm going to paint just some shadows on each of these sections to give it a little bit more dimension. First, you'll need to clean your plate if you haven't already. Then add some water to your plate. We'll mix a slightly darker teal color than what we use for our base color as this second layer. Instead of using undersea green for the second layer, I'm going to use this deep sap green. So roll around your brush and add it to your water. You'll probably need to do that two times to get enough pigment. Then this is a little too green for my agave plant. A gave plants tend to be, like I said, a little bit more teal or blue in color. I'm going to add some Prussian blue. Trow my brush, add it to my color. Now using the practice section of my paper or any free section of my paper, I'm going to test my color. That's looking pretty good. This second layer, even though we do want it to be slightly darker than our transparent layer. We do not want it to be opaque. Since we're adding a second layer on top of color that's already on the paper. We do still need to have that watery translucent quality. If it's too dark, say we use color directly from the plate or from our paper, and it gets to be too dark, for example, this darkness, and we won't be letting any of the colors underneath that we already painted shine through. So we do need to make sure that that layer is still quite watered down. Now that my paint is ready to go. Now I'm going to look at where exactly am I going to paint this second layer. I do want to add some details along both the edges of these sections, as well as closest to where these segments are connecting to the base of the plant. I'll start with this largest section here. You'll grab some paint, and I'm going to start with making a few strokes horizontally along the base here. I know it's going to look like it's quite dark, but it will dry a little bit lighter, so I don't have to worry about that. I'm also going to make some vertical strokes along the edges. I'll start at the top. I'll push slightly harder in the middle and then I'll lift my brush up. That's going to create this nice edge of the section. I'm going to do that same thing on the right hand side. Little pressure at first, press down harder as we get to the center, and then lift lighter as we come down. Now, the only reason why I'm not too concerned about these hard lines is because I'm using quite a transparent layer. I want you to notice your own color at home to see if it's light enough. Are you still seeing the color underneath? If you're no longer seeing the color that's underneath, you are going to need to add more water to your second layer color. Then I might add just a blob of color to this section here up top. Once I have this circle of color, I'm going to blend out the edges. I'll clean my brush, tap it on my paper towel. And then I'll just go around these edges with that wet brush just to soften those edges up. This is the only one that I'm going to soften the edges. I can also make it a little bit darker by adding a little bit of that pigment already in. All right. Now I'm going to look at some of the other branches to see if the other branches, the other sections to see if they need any darker hues. I know that this section that seems like it's protruding towards you, is going to need a little bit of work. I'm going to add a little bit of a darker layer here at the edge of this corner here. But I'm also going to add a little bit darker towards this bottom. Then I'll look at this section, this triangular section underneath. I'm going to add a few strokes coming up to this thorn that's coming out. Once again, I can soften any of these edges by cleaning my brush, tapping it on my paper towel, and then softening that edge up. Oh coverage coverage. Oh All right, once again, I'm going to look in the center here because that's where I want my darkest colors. So I'm looking to see if I need to add a third layer anywhere. And it's looking like maybe I'll add a little bit here at the base. With water colors, we can add anywhere from one to about five layers. You do want to start to limit yourself after about five layers only because it tends to my up the colors that you painted. All right. Sometimes the hardest part with water colors is knowing when to stop. And so I'm going to stop there, let it dry. And then the last details that I'm going to add is painting the little ths. 13. Agave, Part 4: All right, the thorns on my gave plant actually are slightly a reddish hue. So I can mix a new color here. I can clean a section of my plate as long as I'm done with those that second layer of color. Add a little bit more water. And this time I'm going to add a little bit of this quinacridone magenta. I want to start to turn this quinacridone magenta slightly brown. In order to do that, I can add a bit of green. I'll add some of that deep sap green to start to turn this slightly brownish hue. To me, this is looking a little brown. I'm going to add a bit more of this quinacridone magenta, just to brighten it up a bit more. I think I added a little too much green. Let's check and see now. It's a little bit brighter than the other color. So we're wanting something around this color. So we still have that brightness of the quinac magenta, but it's just muted slightly by the deep sap green. Now, to do these thorns, you are going to need quite a fine tip. So being that this brush is a size four brush, one thing that we can do to make sure that we don't have too much liquid on our brush is to tap it on our paper towel before we start to paint. Now, as I paint each of these thorn sections, I'm going to take that, that color, and I'm going to pull it slightly around each section as much as you can pull it. If you're finding that this brush is a little bit too large for you, you don't need to worry about having it come the edge all too. One tip for you is to fill in the thorn. And then using the liquid that's already on the paper. I'm going to just slightly continue to touch my paper here as I pull it inwards. I'm going to do the same thing on this edge here. I'll use whatever pigments here. Pull it in. It's a very light touch. As I'm coming around the edge here, I'm lifting my brush up until it no longer touches the edge. Oh And you're all done. You might notice as you finish your painting that your paper has warped slightly after painting. If that's happened to you, you'll need to wait for all of the paint to dry first. It has to be dry to the touch. Then you can either lay it flat in between two heavy books to flatten or you can flip it over and use a hot iron to iron the backside of your paper to flatten it slightly. 14. Follow me on Social Media and say Hi!: For watching. If you enjoy this tutorial, please follow me on social media. Check out my website, and make sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel.