Learn to Paint a Wedding Bouquet in Watercolor

1. Introduction: Hi, I'm Irina Trzaskos , watercolor artist and illustrator. I love to teach watercolor classes. Welcome to my studio. In today's class, I will show you step-by-step how to paint a wedding bouquet in watercolor. As always, I'll be painting in real time, so you can join me and paint along. If I'll mentioning any other classes or resources during this class, I'll add all the links to the descriptions on the class. If you are new to this channel, welcome and thank you for joining. There's a follow button on top and let's get started. 2. Class Project: So for your project of a class, paint a wedding bouquet, or if you have some pictures of your bouquet, you can paint them to. I'll upload the reference picture to the project of the class. There'll be some extra relatively pictures if you want to try them too. If you want to add them to your portfolio, feel free. I'll be just so excited to see all your projects. 3. Supplies: In today's class, we'll be using our usual supplies; a set of water color paint, and I'll show you the colors in a moment. But if you don't have those colors, it's okay, just substitute them with the colors you like. But we'll need water, a paint pallet, paper towel, watercolor paper. I recommend 140 pounds at least. Cold press will work the best for beginners. Also we need a pencil, eraser, and medium water color brush. This is a synthetic brush by Scott, I think. Yes. This is number 6 and a small watercolor brush, which is number 2. We'll be using quite a bit of colors today. I will mention the brand of my watercolors, which are White Nights watercolors by St. Petersburg. Because so many of you are sending the messages, which kind of watercolors I have, so I'll try to go back to all description of the projects of the classes. Just to add there the brand of watercolor when I'll have a chance. But I'll mention them in this class, for sure. Just in the projects where I mentioned supplies. We'll use chromium yellow and little bit of raw sienna. If you don't have it, just any brown will do it just for tiny branch. Then we'll be using cadmium orange, which I use a lot. Magenta. Then I'll be using a violet or purple, however you call it. It's called violet in my paint. Ultramarine blue, yellow-green, and classic green. These are all the colors we'll be using today. If you don't have this colors, just pick another color which is close to this. 4. Sketching and painting the first flowers: First what we need to do before we start painting is to decide on the composition on our paper. If your wedding bouquet is more horizontal, it has branches coming horizontally then you have to turn your paper landscape and if you're looking like ours is mostly around but has some branches going down in cascade, then you have to have your paper set in a portrait or vertical mode. After that, we don't want our bouquet to be so realistic because it's for a reason we wanted a painting of bouquet and not another photo of bouquet. What we do, we will draw a general shape, which is usually round but it could be a little different too. It's like a little overly round. We'll get to reference picture. Then we have some branches going down, but we don't need to draw them. Then we have to find the star of the show The spotlight remain a flower in our bouquet It's very easy to find because it's the first flower we see when we look at it. Here we can see it's rose. This is the only flower we will be drawing very detailed and we'll be painting very detailed. I did a light sketch here, so it'll go faster. I want the edge, the drawing to the project section of a glass. I have the computer here with preference picture, I'm constantly looking at. Again, it doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to have the same feel as the rose in the picture. Your drawing has to be away lighter than mine. I'm doing it with darker lines, so you can see it in the video. After we have our star of the show, the main flower, which will be even more detailed. We have to look at secondary flowers which are the ones which usually are next to it. We have here two dahlia which we can see and we won't draw them we'll just make idealized circle to show where they are. But we have another dahlia here, almost wide with some yellowish green in the middle. Then we have another garden rose here, and a light pink rose somewhere here. Another little rose here. This is all the drawing we'll do. Just the main shape of bouquet very light so we can erase it after. The main flower, it is the one which draws most attention when we look at the bouquet and the rest secondary flowers just shaped as circles. This is all the drawing we need before we start painting. After we have a drawing of our rose we can start painting. You can see the rose is almost white, very light pink. Lets mix some magenta with ultramarine blue and some yellow. The mix has to have more magenta than other two colors so It doesn't have a grayish pink. We have to cover over the end a little more yellow chipped. It's more neutral and it will cover the entire flower with this mix. If you have a detailed painting like this one, or you have a custom wedding bouquet water. It's good to take a bigger paper than this because the more details you have, the bigger the the paper should be so it's easier to work on. But I use DOM 9 by 12 because it's the one which fits in a camera. But for your own practice is better to take bigger paper twice bigger than the size. While our rose is drying and I wish my pencil lines were not this dark, and I hope yours are not. Let's make some magenta with orange. One of my favorite mixes, and let's start painting this dahlia. Because this rose is going to be pretty realistic, not truly realistic but pretty realistic. Other flowers should be less realistic on the contrast plus we want to keep this some light feel although they can't. In the middle of dial is darker, it has more magenta and then we go with more orange. Later this year I think in August or July, we'll be posting a class about how to paint dials, but for now, this is good just pointy petals. Unless like we did in sunflower class, when we were painting sunflowers. Of course you know how to paint roses, because recently you painted roses in my class. We have our dahlia. I'm trying not to touch for now the rose because it's still wet. Will feel this white line later. On this side we have other dahlia so go the same way some magenta with orange. We're painting the main flowers first and then we'll add other flowers, which are fillers of a bouquet. We have the general shape to do that. Then we'll add the branches and other details. You can print reference picture if you need to. I'll select more wedding bouquet pictures which are royalty free so you can practice. You can share them with paintings after. You can even add them to your portfolio if you want to make it to your career or one of income streams. Custom wedding bouquet painting. This are some very nice gifts for friends who had weddings. Don't be afraid to leave some wide gaps. I'll set always interesting they look like the Sun is playing in the petals and we can always fill them in if we don't like them after. Now let's mix some magenta with one tiny drops of orange and paint this rose. This one will be more painterly than this one, so we can just improvise and paint it in painterly style just with some lines. For thinner lines, I'm just touching the paper. Just a teeny-tiny bit. Move a tip of a brush. For bigger petals, I'm pressing it harder on the paper. A gain, don't forget to leave some white spaces in between. This is this rose. Now let's wait until this rose dries and we'll paint it before we'll start painting other flowers. 5. Painting the shadows: Our main rose is dry so we can start edging the shadows. It's another chance for you to practice your shadowing. Some of you wrote me that it was challenging in the rose class. I mixed some magenta with a little bit of yellow. Yellow neutralizes magenta, and at the same time will make it a little watermark. Neutralize means it will make it not as bright because magenta has some purple in it and purple is opposite of yellow, so they are complimentary. We are making this teeny tiny shadows with very precise shape with just a little bit of smoothening of the edge. Why do we do that? Because we want our petals to be as light as possible and we would've been dragging that color, along the leaf and petals, it won't color of the entire petal and our petals will become all magenta. Just a little bit. This is what I did too much. What I'm doing, I'm putting the color, then I'm drying and putting the color. Then I'm washing the brush, drying it in paper towel, then smoothening the edge just a little bit. The drop just fell. This is the flower which will take the most of our time. I feel like we need some orange, so flower looks warmer. Looks almost like peach and they're inside. Again, this won't look realistic and it shouldn't. There are more petals in the middle of the flower. They are tied. That's why it makes shadows darker. Terrific [inaudible]. Precise enough of a drawing of a flower, probably not. In the middle of the flower, the shadows will be the darkest and then when moving to other petals they'll become lighter and lighter, so we'll be diluting into it with a lot of water outlining those shadows. I'll show you in a second. For these petals we want them to be very watery. When somebody is asking you to paint a wedding bouquet, they don't expect you to give them back a realistic painting because they are looking for a painting, so it has to have this painterly font-style. Don't spend 500 hours trying to clone the picture, the photo and just have fun with painterly style. Add some more details to the star of the show, as I call it. To main flower or sometimes there are more emphasis. Focal point in the bouquet. The main flower is setting the mood for entire painting, that's why you're painting it first. After we do this, it's to be much easier. You can see I made some assumptions which are not in reference picture. But it's okay because it's still our painting. I think we still need to add some more shadows right in a middle of the flower, right here. Make them darker. This is enough for now. After we'll see whether we'll add other elements if we need some more, but probably not. We still want to keep it pretty light and I already feel like I've darkened it quite too much right here. Too much color because our rose was supposed to be mostly white, a little bit pinkish. I'm trying to dilute some of this color. This is our main flower and now we can move into painting other flowers. 6. Adding more flowers: Okay. Now, looking at the reference picture. Next, what we see are these flowers next to the dahlias, which are different kind of roses. I'm taking this cadmium orange and I'm adding a drop of magenta cheat, and a drop of cadmium yellow. Let's paint this rose with a very light orange and will be [inaudible] the color by adding more yellow or more orange to it. It has like these round petals around it. It's called cabbage rolls. In the middle it has this beautiful clusters of petals like this. Let's add a darker drops somewhere here while it's still wet. Beautiful. Try to look at the flowers like there. If you don't know the flower, just look at it as it's a shape. It'll make life easier. Another one of these is right here. Again, have some pink right here. You don't have to paint all the flowers. The important part is to be able to simplify what we can. It still has its feel but it's not a total copy of photography. This will dry later because I added more water to it. We'll have other two flowers here, very light yellow sides, diluted yellow with a lot of water. You barely can see them now. But after we'll add some greenery, they will be seen better. Plus you don't need to see all the flowers equally well. You have to have a feel that it is something there, strong little flower, right? The same thing with this flower behind the rose, has to be really, really light pink. Just like this, some petals. It doesn't look like much now without greenery and all the details, the details, branches and greenery will pull it all together. But now we need to paint the main elements before we get into the greenery painting. Next, I'll make some cadmium yellow with yellowish green. We'll paint a little dahlia here. Again, a lot of water and leaving some white spaces, just make some brush strokes like this. We probably should be leaving even more white. The same thing with this dahlia. It has yellowish green middle. Then we're painting the outlines with very light yellow, yellow diluted with a lot of water. You can see I'm getting outside the lines of the circle I painted before for this bar. It's totally fine. You can change it, while you are painting. If you are seeking for permission. Here's your permission to change change it. This arrows has some shadows in it. Let's show this is a little darker rose like this. Here we have a little rose spot, which is also a peach. We'll add after he drives village of human life change. Okay. These are the main flowers I want to paint for sure and all other flowers which we don't need. Just notice at first are not that important. The flowers you'll go like, oh, there is a rose here. It means that flower is not that important. You could totally skip it. Hey, this is a white rose tried here. Okay. Let's try to paint it but probably will color it, leave it or something. Don't be too strict in these lines, because they are just for you for a composition. But after that they will have to go. Okay. We're done with mythos, oops forgotten. Okay. We've got this rose. We'll take burgundy with some yellow. We going to be even yellow and well, paint just a few strokes to show the middle and then very watery strokes to show petals. We have another rose. Okay, next I'll start painting the greenery and the killing [inaudible] 7. Painting the leaves: I changed my work and I washed the paint palette because now we will start painting with greens and I needed a clean paint palette. But it's that. What we will do next we will just paint everything else. I know it sounds overwhelming, but actually, it's just fun because we did the main part. We have the main flower scene and everything else is not that important and it's fun. How I usually paint just whichever captures my attention, next, let's watch our paint. For now, let's say this one leaves here. I think they're beautiful and let's watch, I'll paint and of course we wont be painting every single teeny tiny detail in this photo because let them be not what we want to do. We have three leaves here. This is greener. Next one is yellower and even has a little bit of orange in it. Lets do that. If they bleed in each other and they bleed in each other, it's even better. That's why we want to call it. The third one is covering this rows and now I notice that dahlia is not being enough. Let's add some petals to our dahlia. I'm so excited. For our dahlia is you remember we need magenta we have a little bit of cognitive orange and specifically those petals, we need more magenta. Let's just add them in here. I think we need more water because I want with previous petals to be seen through these petals and we will still be working on these dahlias because we need some shadows here in the middle, but we'll get to shadows on the next part of the paint. Some more petals. Why not? I'm so excited to film the dahlia clause is summer. I cant wait already to see what you will do with it. What's next? Next I'd love to paint these barriers because, you know, I love painting berries. Again, we need some pink and you can see how I'm getting outside this file. That's one-to-one because we don't want a regular circle enclosed. There are some berries and when we draw at the leaves and the branch, exiting. After the berries, let's paint some more of those magnolia leaves because they are so beautiful right here and we need more cadmium yellow because this is way too dark and the leaf just a little bit bumped into the berry. My computer wherever references, so trying to fall asleep so I need to touch it once in a while. Now it starts looking more like a bouquet. Next I want to paint all this beautiful eucalyptus. We painted the eucalyptus before in the leafs class and in greenery class two different types of eucalyptus I have. I'll leave a link somewhere, well not somewhere in the description of course just as promised. I'm mixing a regular Green Wave, ultramarine blue and that's how we get the cold, beautiful green and I may think by accident, I added some yellow, but I need to add Cadmium Orange. You might notice I use Cadmium Orange a lot and I just refilled it from the paint tube. and some of you were asking if for the paint tuber paint is the same as some would have paint tube. Well, I don't know about all the brands but this white knight watercolor I use I think it's the same paint. It just stays more liquid because it's closed and once you edit in the pan, that's what I do, I adjust by tubes and I refill the pans then it just drys. When you just add water to it, it's back to normal so I think it's the same same kind of paint. I don't know. I should research that and tell you for sure. Maybe in one of my posts. I didn't verbalize it but I just painted this little branch, which is not eucalyptus, but it has the same color. In case you missed it, I did that and for darker color of leaves, I'm using again, classic Green with ultramarine blue and it gives a beautiful cold green. Let's watch, we'll use for darker leaves like here and you can see once we have the darker leaf, it's like everything changes everything and don't try to fill all the white spots, please because some, it's not what you are doing here. That just to have more eucalyptus. Well, maybe this course will take $500. Who knows. Anyway, it's always fun painting with you. I just picture all of your painting there along with me. I hope you do because what's the point of filming all of this in real time? If you're not painting with me and there is a big difference between just listening and if you can understand things and when you take your brush is like a totally different kind of neuron connections happening in our brains and may understand the things like on a way deeper level. Pick a brush and paint with me always. We have more eucalyptus here, but of sudden, I noticed a Naver magnolia leaf, which I like. It's pretty challenging to constantly go back to reference picture. I did enjoy more of making up things and pinching whichever comes to my imagination. But this is a useful test my patience. Some more eucalyptus, this is silver door eucalyptus and we painted it in the leaves class and when I did the winter greenery class and I was like, hey, I did paint the eucalyptus what kind of eucalyptus. Or are there other kinds of eucalyptus we could paint? Then we've painted this eucalyptus plant which was also fun, so is an already leaf here, so it started looking like the kernel and another leaf here and in next tutorial let's paint some filling flowers. 8. Filler flowers: Now let's paint the flowers which are fillers. Filler flowers are called the smaller flowers, which are filling the space with beauty. I'm mixing some purple with a little bit of magenta, so we'll get a warmer shade of purple. Let's dilute it with water. That's a more magenta with a little bit of orange in it. Now let's paint these flowers. I'm just leaving some dots for the middle of the flower. Then I'll take a more watery mix and I'll add bigger petals. Again, we can always make the middle of a flower darker after it dries and we can understand if it needs to be darker. If you have flowers but don't get any attributes too precise with all the details of a flower, just have to reflect the shape as it is. These ones have more pink so I'm just adding in a mix of magenta and cardamom orange, a little bit of purple. These ones will be like this. You don't need to count how many of them are there, just go with your intuition and paint as many as you feel. We can always add more. I feel like this is more than enough. Next let's take some magenta with little bit of cardamom orange and paint some berries which are down here. Need more orange. We have a cluster of berries here. Should be lighter. I should add more water in my mix because this is way too dark. I don't think the bride will say anything, but it's better to make them lighter. Here we'll have another leaf after we dry a little bit. Meanwhile, let's add a little more magenta and a little bit of purple to this mix again. Here we have some more fillers. Lets add some more orange mix again. See, we're now playing with the same colors again and again. Here we have is some cone shaped flower, so it's just like brushstrokes which go in a cone shape. Here we have some other pink. Here again we have some clusters, with more magenta on it. Really don't have to draw any attention to themselves just to be there, to heal the space and to shape the bouquet with their presence. Here I want to absorb some color because this is way too bright for a filler. If you added too much color like me, just add more water and then dry your brush and absorb it. You can see how together with water, we're absorbing the excess of color. Few more here and a little grape shaped on here. You can make up some of them. Nobody will say, "Hey, that berry wasn't there." Here we have some yellow, little daisies with yellow middle. So they'll be some yellow dots. Obviously it always needs some petals. These flowers once they are dry and mine are dry, you can paint on the stems and just put a dot and the line, and a dot and a line. This one wasn't so dry. Its okay. I feel like we need some more leaves here too. This rose need some more petals too, just like this. Let's add some shadows on these berries and some on these ones. In next video we'll be adding the rest of the leaves and the final details. 9. Final details: Okay. Let's start from the top of the composition, and I'll take some cadmium yellow because I see some more magnolia leaves right here. Try to convince pretty painterly. This point, we have one here and one here. Now let's add some ultramarine blue to this mix and have a color shade and a darker shade of green and add some branch here that goes this way. Also, you can see some dark leaves and base right here. Here let's fill the space between the flowers but if you leave some white spots, it's okay. Don't try to fill all the white space, just a little bit so the followers will be showing even better. Try not to smudge here. I think we need a smaller brush. So with smaller brush, let's add these lines. You can see this green blend into the flower, and it's okay. So next, I'll makes more classic, green with ultramarine blue and we'll see where else we need some darker greens; right here and here, we have a lot of dark leaves we still didn't paint. Some are covering this base. You don't have to repeat them, exactly the way they are there. Don't take all the creativity from this process, but just take a pick and paint some leaves, and it's going to be great. Here and here, nice. So you can see how these are, that's somewhere blue. All these are cascading, going down, shaping our bouquet. Now some more precision around here, and one mid leaf here. Some pointy leaf, next to it. It's little warmer shade, I'm taking the classic green. You can see once the darker greens are added, our bouquet's looking totally different and got more contrast. A little bit of greens around these flowers. Some texture on these magnolias leaves. I think we said of magnolia leaves, I hope I'm right. Some on this one. Sometime not to overdo texture because of the variety of flowers we have here is overrated, so much texture going on. Let's try not to overdo it which is very tempting when you have so many beautiful details going on, okay. So few more branches here with some base and maybe some leaves here. I think this is enough. So let's add some more shadows on our flowers. I took magenta, I'll add some green to it, and I'll add some darker shadow here, just like this. Then, let's add a little bit of orange to the same mix, this is too much orange. Let's add more magenta, and teeny-tiny shadows on the main flower, just few lines; here and there. Next, let's add some more magenta to it, and some shadows on our dahlias, like these and on this side, too. It will make our rose look even brighter and lighter. Let's take some brown and add a branch right here for our betas, and maybe a little bit of branch here. Let's take some orange with magenta, and a little bit of yellow, and add some shadows on these flowers and on these ones; these ones need more yellow. So I add it more yellow. Should we mix? So very intuitively, just with few lines. We are adding the textures. So next, let's add few more petals here. If you're not sure where else you need more shadows or not, then there is a simple trick. You can just take a picture of your painting with your phone or any other device, with your phone and in the picture, you'll see better where you need more shadows. Before with phones, the painters would keep their painting in front of a mirror and will watch it through the mirror. In that way, you can see better where you need another shadow or another detail needs to be worked on. But now you can take a picture or scan of a painting and you'll understand if you need more details to be added. So final details is a ribbon, is right here. We need more yellow in our ribbon. So we can't see the stems in this bouquet, but you can always paint some stems if you want to; if you feel like they're missing. I don't. The second ribbon is here. The final detail, let's take some green with yellow, and we have this little branch with some funny leaves like these. So always teeny-tiny details add a lot. The number one, which my computer wasn't going to sleep every two seconds. Another one is right here. Also, we have some interesting leaves. Now when I look at this painting, I feel like I would love to add some stems to these flowers because it's like floating in the air. So let's add some stem on. Let's add one more leaf here. Okay, I think our bouquet is ready. You can add some more shadows on the stems like this, and I think the bride will be happy. 10. Last Thoughts: Thank you for joining me in this class. I hope you had a chance to paint with me. If you liked the class, please leave a review and upload your project to our project section for the class. If you are sharing your project on Instagram, please tag me so I can see your beautiful artwork, and I'll see you in the next class, bye.