Learn to Paint Flowers Using Gouache : Water Lily

1. Welcome to the Class: Art for me is all about trying different mediums and subjects. It's the process of stepping out of your comfort zone to try something different and learn something new along the way. Hi. My name is Bile. I'm an artist and art educator, and is skill share top teacher based out of Den India. I'm also known as Dippic on social media, but I'm constantly sharing my love for art and bits about my life. I have been painting for over six years now, and painting florals has always been on my list. I'm absolutely fascinated by the colors, shapes and textures that you find in them, but at the same time, it is quite intimidating. But if we approach the subject with the right techniques, it is something that is so therapeutic and fun to bate. That is why in this class, I decided to share my process with you where we are going to be painting a water lily together using my favorite medium wash. We'll start off by talking about the different art materials that we need for this class and then dive into the sketch and composition of a water lidy. We'll also be talking about the color palette for this class where we will learn how to make different color mixes using our basic shapes. We'll also talk about the boh techniques and how to apply them in painting lily pads and petals. Once we've gathered all the basic knowledge, we'll dive into painting class project. This class is packed with so much information about wash as a medium because we're exploring this in a lot more depth. At the same time, we'll learn how to break down a reference image into layers, so that it's easier for us to observe the different details in it and bring it to life on paper. Don't worry if you're a beginner because this is a step by step guide, and I'm going to walk you through the entire process of painting this coaches water lily composition. At the end of this class, you'll have this beautiful painting that you're going to be so proud of. If this is something that you found interesting, then join me in this class, and let's paint together. 2. Quick Overview: Awesome, I'm so excited you decided to join me in this class. Before we begin, there are a few things that I would like to share with you. First, there's going to be a reference image. But I want you to know that I'll be there to guide you through the entire process because the reference image can seem a little bit intimidating. But the details that you want to add and not add in your final image depends on you. Always remember that that the reference image can seem intimidating, but we are here to not create a replica of it, but to create our own versions of it. Secondly, under the project and resources section, there are a few things that are uploaded. First, you'll have the reference image. Second, you'll have a basic sketch, the final artworks, sketches under there in case you're not okay with sketching, you can download it and then trace it or you can download it on I mean, print it out on a watercolor paper. That works as well. But it was easier for you. I just wanted to keep that there as a reference as well. Thirdly, you'll find the color palette, but I've mentioned the sates and the different mixes that I've made. Lastly, you'll find the gah technique, the sheet at which we'll paint the gah technique that's there as well. Just a few resources that I wanted to share with you before we begin. Thirdly, we're here to have fun. That's something that I always say whenever we're painting something, it's all about the process and not our final outcome. Make sure that you're going slow if you feel like there's too much happening. To many details are being added. Just leave it there, come back the next day and start fresh. It's all about taking it slow, learning something new and enjoying the journey of this painting process. I believe this is it. Let's dive into the art material lesson next. 3. Materials Used: All right, Let's talk about all the different art supplies that we need to have for us for today's class, starting off with the paper. Now Guash as a medium is not very picky about the type of paper we're using. For today's class, I'll be using my fabriano artistico 100% cotton watercolor paper. You can use any thick 300 GSM paper that you have with you. Me show you this texture that this paper has. It has beautiful cold pressed textures. It's not too grainy, but not too smooth as well. For today's class, I will be just splitting this in half because it's a larger size. I'll be splitting it in half for my class project. Feel free to use any size that you want to use for your artwork. It's not compulsory for you to paint large or paint, very small. Whatever works for you, pick that size. Now, instead of this particular paper, I also sometimes tend to use my Canson Heritage series paper or my Bockingford watercolor paper. Now there are so many options in the market, you can pick any watercolor paper that you want for today's class and any size as well. We're not picky about that. Along with the main watercolor sheet, I have the small sketch book with meet your normal 12160 GSM sketch book. You can use your normal printer paper as well. This is just for us to practice the composition of the water lily, which I will show you in the upcoming lessons. But just keep some plain papers with you for practice. Now the word on discussing papers, let's talk paints. Now, if you've been following me and my classes, you know how much I love the Windsor and Newton gouache paints. I mean, they are absolutely creamy and no other gouache paints come closer to the kind of experience that I have with the Winsor and Newton paints. Along with the Winsor Newton paints, I have my Brusto titanium white with me. I really like the opaqueness of the white from Brustros. But these other paints that I'll be using. I'll talk more about the shades that I'm using in the upcoming lesson, which is the color palette lesson. I'm not going to talk more about the colors and shades that I'm using right now, but just for a reference, Winsor and Newton and Brusto titanium white is all that I'm using. Coming to my brushes, I will be using very limited brushes of one flat brush to be very honest with you. This is my size 12 pan art flat brush. Along with that, I have two round brushes, which is size eight and size four and one detailing size zero brush for all the finer details. But these four brushes are the only four brushes you will watch me use. Maybe I might just end up using three as well. But these four brushes are the main game for this class. Next, I have my ceramic plates to be very honest with you. These are plates. They work really well for making my color mixes because plastic ones have these little puddles, which I'm not really a fan of. So I tend to use ceramic plates or cyamic mixing palettes. So I have two different ones here. Along with that, I have two jars of water. You know how important it is. One is your cleaning one and one is just for your final rinse or just to load up some fresh clean water. So make sure that you have two jars of water with you at all times when you're painting using. Now, these are all the main supplies. Now let's talk about the side supplies. Here I have this acrylic sheet. Now, this is on which I will be taping my paper, just to have a nice, you know, mobile surface for my paper to be on. Now the next thing that we need is pain tape, of course. No tape is to tape down your paper and make it have this little fixed base on the acrylic sheet. Next, I have this little piece of paper just for me to swatch the colors on as I paint. You will watch me use that in the project lessons. Lastly, you need to have your scale, pencil, erasers, all your normal stationary items with you. And this is pretty much it for all the supplies. If you've been painting with Quash, you have all of this with you already. Gather them and I'll see you in the next lesson where we're discussing the sketch and composition of our watery. 4. Sketch & Composition of Water Lily: A. A Let us work through the sketch and composition of our water lily and break it down into simple bits so that the sketching process is easier. If you look at a water lily, you can clearly see how we've got these differently sized petals. We're viewing them from a different angle each time. All the petals are slightly different from one another in terms of placements. But at the same time, the overall structure remains the same. That is your pointed tip and a broader bottom structure. Let's break this down in different petal formats that we see. Looking at the bottommost petal, which is the outermost petal of your flower. This one has a lot more thicker size and it's a lot more bigger in size. I'm going to start off with this shape. I am going for a petal that's going towards the left side. I have made that in a particular direction, which is the left direction. And to show the depth and the fold of my flower. What I'm going to do is create this line on the right side of my structure. When we paint this, it creates that effect that there's a fold in the flower. Similarly, let's take an example that we have a petal that is slightly going towards the top left. It's pointed towards the left and you can see how the top is pointed and the bottom is broader. Again, I've created that little four, where you just leave a little bit of space and redraw the same shape. These petals are examples for the ones that you're seeing straight up in front of you. Then again, we've got some bent towards the right side. Again, creating that triangular conical shape and then creating that fold. The complicated ones are the ones that are in front of you and at the bottom most section. This one looks like a rigged heart if I was to put that in a simple shape. You can see how I've created that structure. This creates the illusion that the flower is bent towards you in your direction or the viewpoint viewer's direction. Okay. This one is the ones on the right side. Bend still in front of you, but bend. Again, it has a different kind of shape. You will notice more about the different directions and the types of petals and the direction in which they're going basically by observing the flowers. I want you to take a moment and observe the flower. To create the main shape of the flower, what we are going to do is create a circle first. This is going to be your outer circle. I'm going to just divide that in four quadrants very lightly and right above the center line, what I'm going to do is create the central circle which has all the stamens in them. Not trying to dive into the biology of a flower, but that's basically the central portion of your flower. I'm creating a smaller circle in the middle in which I will be creating these tiny, tiny filaments, if I'm not wrong or the statements to be very exact, that is the entire structure. These are very similar to your petals, but a little bit more conical at the top and you'll be creating this in a way that the ones on the left side will be bent towards the left. The ones on the right will be bent towards the right, the middle ones will be pointed straight upwards, but I wouldn't want you to point it exactly 90 degrees. Do give them a little bit of a direction. The ones at the bottom of the circle facing towards you. But then again, you can just create them in these downward directions, almost like drawing little vs. But with a bent top. The ones in the middle, the extremely middle ones, they are going to be bent inwards. The outer structure is getting bent outwards. These will be facing inwards. I hope that is making sense. If it's not, please do watch how I'm doing it. I've done that very lightly and added these shapes. Once I'm happy with the way it looks. This is it for the entire section for the inside of the flower. Now, when we're painting the outside structure of the flower, it all depends on where you'd like to start. A lot of times, the most confusing part is where do I begin my flower from. For me, what really works is starting with the central part of the flower and then building your flower, going with the petals outwards. So I'm going to start with a petal inside. Now, if you look very carefully, these petals are very similar in shape to the outer petals that you see, obviously because they are the same flowers, but the size is pretty small. Another thing to keep in mind is the direction in which they are going. It's very easy to create the ones that are at the back, which is the top of the central part of the flower. The ones at the bottom have a different shape because these are slightly bent towards the outside and By outside, I mean has that three dimensional viewpoint. It's a bit tricky to show that, but it isn't possible. Obviously, you'll have to observe this. You can see how I try to place them in a way that I focus on the structure of the petal and where they lie on the flower. You can also look at different reference images of these water lilies or have that imagination in front of you. Now, as an observer, I am looking at this flower, not straight in front of me. I am looking at it from the top, but again, this flower opens up in a way so that it's still in front of me if that's making sense. The viewpoint is slightly from top. All the petals are at the bottom will have a different shape. You can see how once I'm done with the innermost petals, I am placing the outermost petals. Again, keeping in mind that you want to play around with this shape, you can make Certain petals a little bit bigger, certain petals a little bit. You can displace them, but try to keep the size a little bit similar. Over here, if you look very carefully. The left most petal, look a little bit larger as compared to the right one. That's where you go in and correct the shape. When you're in the sketching process of this flower, you will keep going back and forth and that's completely okay because you're trying to understand the placement of it. Placement of these petals is very important if you want to achieve a structured flower. Now, whenever you're observing any sort of flowers, for example, here we're doing water lilies. It's very important for us to break these shapes down in the shapes that we know. Now what that means is, you want to look at circles and triangles and rectangles. These are some basic shapes that we know of. You want to try to break them down in that way so that when you're observing and when you're placing these little structures down, it's easier for you to know where they would go. Now, for me, this water lily looks like a star. It opens out like a star it's got these bigger structures at the outer part of my flower, and you've got these little little petals on the inside. You can see how once I just start playing around, I start adding the petals in the way that I'm viewing them. You will be able to play around with the shape of it and get it right. Now, it's all about practice, and it's all about it might take you two or three tries to get the exact shape right, and that's completely okay. As long as you are able to capture the structure and the composition of the flower. I believe that I am pretty much happy with the way the outside structure of my flowers look. Inside structures. I apologize. The inside structures of my flower looks. I'm going to go ahead and place all the petals that are on the outside of my structure. Over here, I missed a petals. I'm going to quickly go ahead and add that before I add the outermost petals. Again, adding making a few changes in the petals where I'd like to see them a little bit more larger as compared to how I place them. As I was saying, it might take you some time to understand the placement of your petals, the sizing of your petals. But as long as you are observing the flower, observing the placement of the petals, the sketching is going to be a lot easier. If it's something that's completely out of your leak. You are very scared or not very confident about it. That's completely okay. I have uploaded the final sketched version under the resources section of this class, you can download it and you can trace it or you can print it on a watercolor paper and do the entire painting process and not do this part. That's completely okay as well. I wanted to give the sketch a try as well because I believe I'm someone who's not extremely confident with sketching, but it's something that we should all get out of a comfort zone and try. That's exactly what I'm doing here. Trying to just step out of my comfort zone and create something that I probably wouldn't normally. Again, we are o, that is something to keep in mind, observing how each of these petals are placed and then trying to recreate the structure and the composition of a petal similarly on paper. And the base that will help you do the entire structure or the entire sketch is the outer drawing that you had. If you notice very carefully here, my petals are going beyond the circle that I made, and it's completely okay. That circle is only for our reference for us to understand where we'd like to place them. Once we know what the outer shell is going to be, we can go a little bit in and out of our drawing. But you can see how the petals are coming along. We are placing them very carefully Another thing that could really help you, another tip that could really help you is understanding where the petals are starting or where the start or the endpoint of each side is going to be. If I can see that the start of maybe the last most petal is from the tip of the one in front of it, and it ends on the side of the other one that is behind it. You're going to place it in that similar manner. I hope all of this is making sense because the sketching process is really something that comes a lot to you when you're observing it on your own. All right. Over here, I'm just erasing the outermost line that I drawn my reference line. I'm just erasing that. And then I'll go ahead and outline the entire structure. All right. Now that I have erased my reference line, you still have the time to add in a few corrections. Maybe erase a few petals if you don't like their placements, and then once you're happy with it, you can finally go over it and create your final sketch. Now, I'm only doing that for this particular class. I don't want you to do that in your sketch for the painting. Be if your pencil marks are really dark, then they might hinder with your painting process. Although Guash is an opaque medium, you still don't want to have a really dark sketch. I on darkening my sketch and going over with my pencil to final outcome so that you can see what the final sketch looks like. But again, to keep in mind, you don't want to do that in your final class project. Go ahead. Once you're happy with your sketch, you're just going to go ahead and outline the entire structure so that you know what the final shape of your water lily looks like. Here's our final structure of our water lily. Now again, if you remember how we started off with two reference circles and built on these petals one by one, starting from the inside. Remember two circles, circle is going to determine where the sta lie and the outer structure is to understand what the or the area of our flower is going to be. So this is a way in which you can create your water lidies. Again, if you want to change the shape or the direction with which you're viewing the flower. All you have to move is the central circle and that can act as your reference image. Now over here, we learned to sketch from the final painting, but in the class project, we will be sketching our flower out from a reference image like a real reference image, and we learn a lot more about how we observe our flower in that part of this class. This was your sketch part. I will see you in the next lesson, where we are going to understand the color palette for this class. 5. Colour Palette for the Class: Okay. Let's talk about the color palette for this class. Now, in this class project, I will be mixing up various different shades from a limited color palette, which means I'll be making a lot of different colors, the total values of different shades, mixing, let's say whites and blacks and browns in them. I've got different shades of greens. Similarly for the pinks, I've got different shades of pinks, different deeper reds that I've mixed, the orange, the lighter orange. All of those I have mixed on my own, using our basic colors that we find in palette. So let's talk about the colors that I'm using first. Over here, the first yellow color that I'll be using is cadmium yellow color. This is all from Winsor and Newton, by the way. This one's the cadmium orange shade. Next, I have laserin crimson color. So if you don't have laser and crimson, you can use crimson lake for the color. Now, these are the few oranges and yellows that I'm using. Next, let us talk about the pink that I'm using. Now over here, I'm using magenta color. If you don't have magenta, feel free to use your permanent rose color in place for it. Next, I have burn Ciena and burned. Next sap green. Sap green is the only green color that I'll be using. I'll be making a lot of different mixes. Now for the white, I have the brusow titanium white, and for the black, I have ivory black from Windsor and Newton. I'm going to take this out on my palette and let's swatch this out. All the colors on my palette. What I am going to do is dip my flat brush in the water. Load up a little bit of water and create this mix. I will talk more about water control in the next lesson. But for now, I'm just mixing a tiny amount of water in my paint, and I'm going to swatch it out for you. Now, one thing that you will notice here is some colors will behave a little bit more opaque as compared to the other colors. We will talk more about this in the next lesson and how all of that works. But right now, we're just going to be focusing on swatching these colors. A tiny amount of water, a tiny amount of the pigment or the paint, and you're going to swatch it out. Now, make sure that you are swatching it out and practicing this color palette lesson so that you're able to understand the different color mixes that you can make using the shades that are available to you. That makes a lot the entire process a lot more easier because you know the kind of pinks you will achieve. Now, one thing that you can do if you don't have a magenta color is you can mix your crimson lake with your ultramarine blue to achieve a pinker shade, which is similar to the magenta color. If you don't have that, use any pink shade that you have with you, that's completely okay. I'm just quickly swatching all the colors, the greens, the red, the browns. I'm just quickly going to swatch it out and then label it down for you. So Lastly, I have my titanium white color, which you clearly cannot see on the swatchcard, but titanium white is very important color when you're trying to achieve lighter shades using quash. These are the colors, the original shade that I'll be using for this class. Let me label it down field. All right. Now we have the names, you can see the exact shades that I'll be using. And as you can see, we will be mixing a lot of different shades as you can see on the swatch card. Let's make a few color mixes out of these. Now, you can obviously change the shade by the amount of certain color that you're adding in them. But I'm going to give you a few examples. The first swatch that I'm going to create is a mix of my sap green color with a tiny amount of ivory black in it. Very, very tiny amount of it, and you can see how this green has gotten deeper in color. You can see the sap green on top, the original color on top, and you can see how this shade is a lot more deeper. Now to make it a little bit more deeper, you'll have to add more black paint to it. This one sap green plus a lot more ivory black. Again, to go deeper in this color, you will add more black in them. If you want a different shade that's a lot more deeper, you can just add a bit more black to it. The next color that I'm going to mix is going to be Sap green with a tiny amount of burnt umber in there. It did have a bit of black in there. You could say that it did have a bit of black in there. You can say it's a mix of Sap green burnt umber originally with a tiny amount of black, which was remaining on my palette. But originally, the color that I want to make is Sap green plus burnt umber. You can see how this one has that brown undertone, the olive green undertone in it. The color is like an olive green color. Achieve that by mixing Sap green and burnt umber. Now if you want to create brighter shades of green, I'm going to show you the mix that I tend to use a lot, which is Sap green plus a little bit of cadmium yellow. Now when you add a bit more cadmium yellow, and if you want to make an even brighter shade, the amount of cadmium yellow you add will increase. Over here is Sab green plus cadmium yellow, I would say in equal amounts, and you can see how the green has brightened up. It has that beautiful vibrant undertone to it. Now if I want to make it even more brighter, I will add a lot more of the cadmium yellow in it. Again, this mix is more towards the yellow side with greenish undertone, I would say. So when you want to work on lighter greens, you achieve that by adding yellow and white in it. Now, over here, these colors, I would say, are the two color mixes. But if I want a little bit more opaque version of it and a lot more brighter version of it and lighter color of it, I will start adding titanium white in this. The mix that I'm creating over here, as you can see, is sap green, plus yellow, plus titanium white. Clearly, it is a lot more opaque and you use these shades for highlighting your objects. For my lily pads, I'll be using a lot more of this particular mix to show the lighter parts of it. Next mix that I want to show you is just your plain Sap green with titanium white. You can see how they are clearly different. The shade above has that yellowish color in it, and this one is just you could see a pastel version of your Sap green. These are the various different greens that I'll be using in my class project. Obviously, there will be deeper shades with more blacks or browns in them. But somewhat the mixes will remain the same. Just the quantity or the level of it will change, that is the amount of paint that I add in it. Next, let's talk about the pinks that I'll be using for this class. Now, the mixes that I'll be making is using my magenta and laserin crimson color. Again, you can use the pinks that are available with you. Keep a pink shade and a red shade with you and white. That will be a very important role, and obviously, you'll have burnt umber color with you to deepen the tone. Now, this mix is my magenta color with my serine crimson. Now, magenta on its own is very pink. I want my water lily to have that reddish color in there. So that's why I'm mixing magenta with zerine crimson. Next color that I'm mixing is magenta with a lot more of the laserin crimson color. You can clearly see how this color has turned into a deeper red color, but it's obviously a little bit pink in there as well. Now, if I add white to this mix, the color completely changes. It gets lighter and is a bit more opaque as well. This mix is my magenta serin crimson plus white color. I'll be using this shade a lot for the backgrounds or to show the lighter parts of my water lily. Let me show you what magenta with just plain white looks like. Over here, I am mixing. You can mix any pink with just white and you can see how this color is a lot more lighter. It's just pink and white. You can also achieve that by mixing red and white. You will achieve like a pink color. But over here, I mix magenta with white. Next, I'm going to show you to deepen the color, which is your crimson color. I will mix my crimson with a little bit of the pink color and burnt umber. Now for the darker parts of my water lime, I will use this shade. Because this color is a lot more deeper. You can achieve that by mixing your magenta, alizarin crimson and burnt umber color. And just taking some crimson and magenta on my palette because it gets over with all these mixes. But this is the particular shade that I'll be using for my deeper parts of the water. Keep that in mind and make sure that you're creating this swatch card or this color palette class card for you so that you're able to refer to it as you paint. The next mix that I want to show you is magenta with your crimson color and white color. These are all the deeper shades, I would say. When you want to work on the lighter colors or want to show more highlighted versions of the color. I will mix white with crimson and magenta and a lot more white. You have a very, very lighter shade of pink that you can use to highlight the portions of your water lily. Obviously to show the even more brighter parts of it, you will add just tiny amount of the pigments with white. So I'll show more of that as we go. But these are a few pink shades that you can make using your red, pink, and burnt umber, along with white wherever you want lighter shades. A lot more variations of these colors can be made as you tweak the amounts of pinks and reds and browns that you add. Let's talk about the oranges in the color mixes that are the making. The orange will be for the statements of our flower. I have mixed cadmium orange with white. Now this is going to give you kind of like a pestle version of the orange color because you've just mixed plain titanum white in there. To have a color, which is a little bit more vibrant, I would say, I will mix cadmium orange with cadmium yellow and white. Just because I want that opaque version of it, a lot more opaque version of it. I've added white in there, you can see how this color is a little bit more deeper and a little bit more vibrant because it has that yellow color in it. Now, if you want a lighter shade of yellow, you can use Cadmium yellow as is, but to just have a lighter version of it, you can make Scabum yellow with white, and you create this beautiful yellow color that you can use for highlighting your stamens or to add the lighter parts of your stamen. Now, again, if you want to add even more brighter color to it a little bit more highlight to that particular shade, You are going to make cadmium yellow with a lot more white. You're tweaking the amount of white that you add and you create this beautiful lighter shade of yellow. Now, you can see how a lot of variations of these shades can be made just using our basic colors and just tweaking the amount of whites or browns and blacks that you're adding in there. Next, let us talk about the grace that I'll be making. There's a lot of gray that I'm making for the water bit. We've got three different shades that I'll show you. First, being your ivory black with burnt umber. Now the thing here is, I don't want to make a color, which is plain black. I don't want to use plain black in my painting, and that is why I'm mixing my ivory black with burnt umber. There's a lot more burnt umber and just a tiny amount of black in there for us to get this beautiful deep dark shade for the water. Here is a swatch of the color. Next color that I will show you is to just add a bit more white into the mix to create the lighter parts of it. Now you can do the same with any blacks that you have available with you. Again, tweaking the amount of white that you add in there is going to create this beautiful neutral gray for you. You've got your ivory black plus burnt umber and white, right? Next, let us talk about how to get a white. That's a little bit more I would say, lighter in color. A gray that is a lot more lighter in color. So over here, I'm mixing my same mix, which is ivory black burnt lumber. This time, I'm adding a lot more white in there and you can see how the color becomes a lot more opaque as it was earlier. So these are the few shades that I'll be using in this class. I'm just going to label it down for you. And you can also download this from the project and resources section, so you have a swatch card or a mix card with you. We've covered different greens, pinks, yellows, and all the different grays that I'll be using. It really helps you have a reference when you start painting, when you know the kind of colors that you have to mix and achieve. I hope this was helpful for you, and I hope you're going to create your own swatch card for this class, and I'm so excited to see it. This is it for the color palette lesson. In the next lesson, we are going to talk about what control in Guash, that is the consistency. 6. Water Control in Gouache: Let's talk about some goch techniques. The one we're going to talk in this lesson is consistency. Now, consistency is the amount of water and pigment that you're adding in your paint, and it's also how you learn the amount of water control or the kind of water control you're supposed to have when you're painting with ga. Now, we've got a few different consistencies. You've got pea coffee, milk, cream, and butter consistencies that I've named on the left. I've written what it signifies on the right, and we together are going to switch these different mixes of paint and water together to understand how it performs. Now, when you are painting with Gach, different colors have different properties. I'll show you what it means in the end of this lesson. But let's just pick any paint, pick up any shade that you want. And you can start creating these mixes and these swatches. The first color that I have picked up is my magenta color. I'm just going to load up some water on my brush and just a tiny amount of pigment. You can see how I've just loaded very, very tiny amount of pigment. You can see how there is a lot of water in my mix, very little paint, and it signifies your T like consistency. When I watch this, the color is very transparent. It's almost like your watercolors that you work with, because watercolors is a transparent medium. This one is very, very similar to watercolors. Not to the same x. I'm going to add a bit more pigment. The water, the amount of water remains the same. It just has a little bit more pigment. You can see how it's still transparent, but it has a lot more pigment in there. This is going to be your coffee like consistency. Now, to the same mix, if I was to reduce the amount of water and add a little bit more pigment in there. I'm just going to clean my brush and dry my brush, load up some more pigment in there and swatch my color mix. This one's again, a little bit more pigmented. It is a bit I mean, the transparency is reducing slightly, but you will notice how the black line is still visible through my color. I'm just going to swatch this out first and you can see how this one's a lot more pigmented, you're seeing a lot more of the color through. Now this consistency is what we will use for the background mixes. Now, over here, the cream like consistency is opaque and smooth. We tend to use this for, let's say the second layers or when we are building on our layers. We tend to use this consistency a lot because this is where you're going to have a smooth mix, which is perfect for painting with quash. And you will see this beautiful opaque finish that quash is very, very popular for. Now, over here, I've gone over the swatch a couple of times, but the black line is still visible. Now, that is because the magenta color is a transparent color. Even though it's a quash, it is transparent, and to make this color opaque, I'll have to add a bit of white in there. Now, we don't have to worry about that. I just wanted to bring it to your attention that magenta is a transparent color and I'll show you how you can identify these shades. The last consistency is your butter consistency. Before this that we've done swatched, that is your cream consistency. Sounds like a tongue twister, consistency. Which is opaque and smoked. I'm just going to take up some more magenta on my palette, which is directly from the tube. Whenever you're using fresh paint squeezed from the tube without any water in there, I've dried my brush. I haven't added any water to the mix. This is when that is like the natural consistency of guache, which is very buttery. It's not very smooth, as you can see. As I'm brushing my brush over the paper, as I rub it across the paper, you can see it creates the texture. Now this texture is very useful to do the dry brush technique. Whenever you want to add texture and add a bit of highlights into your painting using the texture, this is the consistency that you will work with. You see a lot of the textures on my flower that is done using the dry brush technique. Now, even though this is the thickest consistency of my paint, you're still able to see the black line shine through. Again, it is because the magenta color is a transparent color. These are the different mixes, and that's how you control the water by keeping these like food items in your mind. You've got tea, coffee, milk, cream and butter. We generally tend to use a lot of the milk, cream and butter consistency, but even coffee consistency is useful just to kind of block in your shades. Now, over here, I've also swatched the green color in there. And you can see how the green color like the different consistency gets more opaque as we go at the bottom and the black line is not visible. These are the colors. I'll show you exactly how you identify it. I'm going to take my magenta. This is Alizarin crimson color. You can see there is this little symbol at the back which is a little square and divided into two. You've got these are three different shades, and I'll show you how it works. I've good magenta, crimson, and sap green in there. The first color that we use magenta, you can see how the division is there and it's completely white, which means this is a transparent color. So if I have to make it opaque, I have to add white. Next, you see half, which is semi transparent, and the sap green that I used naturally is an opaque color. Magenta to make it more opaque, you'll have to add a tiny amount of white in there. This is how you're able to identify the colors if they're semi transparent, if they are transparent or opaque. This is it from this lesson. I will see you in the next one where we're discussing the blending technique. 7. Blending Technique in Gouache: All right. So now that we have explored the consistency technique, let's talk about the blending and layering. In this lesson, we'll explore the blending technique and the two different types of blending technique that I'll be using a lot in this class. So first, I'm going to draw two different shapes. One is going to be my lily pad shape, which is, again, looks like a little pack man to be really honest with you. But I'm just going to create this little inverted V. And a circular shape around it very, very lightly. You can barely see the sketch over here. But just create any shape. And the next shape that I'm creating is to kind of resemble the petal. So I've just created a little tier droppy shape for me on the right hand side. Again, this is to show the two different shapes and the two different blendings that I'll be doing, okay? So the first plant that I am going to do is going to be using the wet on wet technique, which is very similar to the wet on wet technique, to be honest with you, where you're using a thin consistency. I would say you're using the coffee consistency, a consistency actually between the coffee and the consistency. I'm just going to take my sap green color, and I've got a bunch of different mixes as you can see on my palette, so you can take your Sap green color, which is mixed with a little bit of brown in there. And then I'm just going to apply that very, very lightly. As you can see, the consistency is quite thin, very transparent paint on there right. You can clearly see the background, which is your paper. So I'm just going to roughly add this color in and layer this across. Now, I could either use a little bit more water on my brush and move the paints around, or I can just layer this entire with the same color. I've used water to kind of create this lighter versions in certain places. But once you add that in, process in which I will take a darker mix. Over here, I've mixed my sap green and a little bit of black in there. Then I'm just going to tap that in while the paint is still wet, and you can clearly see how the paint blends in with the previous color, very, very similar to water colors. Now, this works really well when you're just trying to block in your colors, and this is one way of blending your colors. Now, it's very different from the landscape painting classes that you might have taken of mine. So over here, we're just adding different shapes and shades of color while the paint is still wet so that we have time to move the colors around. As it dries, it'll create a blend and then you can layer over it and build on these color blocked sections, which we will learn in the layering technique. So this is one way of blending. The next way of blending is very, very similar to like layering over, but this is important for you to learn in the blending technique itself. I have taken my pink color, which is my magenta, mixed with white and a bit of red in there. Take any color that you want. Using my round brush, I am just going to go ahead and layer and apply this all over without adding a lot of water in my mix. I'm just going to add that in and create a base layer for me to work on. Added a bit of water just to move the paints around and making sure that I'm covering up the entire area of the shape that I drew. This is what it looks like. I'm going to let this dry first. All right. Now that this section has dried, I'm going to take my round brush and create a darker version of the color in which I'm mixing my laserin crimson with my magenta color and a tiny, tiny amount of burnt sienna in there. I'm going to go ahead and create these little lines moving along the direction of the shape. I'm just kind of flicking out these layers right in just to show the depth that you will have in your painting. Right now, what it looks like is these strokes are resting over your background. Without being blended in. Now, to blend that, what you'll do is, you will rinse your brush, load up some fresh paint. And just with a clean brush, you will smoothen out the edges. What this does is it kind of moves the pigment slightly around the brush strokes, smooth out these harsh edges that you have, and then kind of blends that color in with the background. One thing to keep in mind is you want to make sure that you are rinsing your brush, drying off the extra water each time you kind of brush your brush across these darker colors so that you don't end up moving the paint a lot. You just want to kind of smoothen it out. Now, when you want to build on this, again, you will layer maybe one more time to bring out the intensity of the colors, bring out the lighter shades, and then work with the lighter colors. But this is the method in which you will blend your paint, which is just using water and your brush to smoothen out the edges, and you can clearly see how it looks. Beautiful, there's a bit of texture that's being added in there. These are the two different types of blending techniques that you will use in this class. The next lesson, we are using the gauche consistency and blending technique to learn more about laying. 8. Layering Technique in Gouache: All right, let's talk about the layering technique in guash, which is the process of adding one layer over the other. In leering technique, we start off with the thinnest consistency at the bottom where we block in the colors, and then we kind of build on it by adding maybe deeper colors and light colors and kind of blending them together. We sort of saw that in the blending technique where I showed you that we started off with the base light pink color, and then added a deeper pink color and blended that into the background. Earing technique is very similar to that where you're working with maybe three or four layers, especially for the kind of painting that we're going to do today, and we build on that by laying one a set of colors over the other, which is very similar to the background color, and we add more contrast into our painting, we add more deeper tones and lighter tones and high light pits. I'm going to start off by creating a lily pad first. Again, creating a V shape and a circular structure around it. Pick up any shape that you want in any direction that you want. This is just the one that I am going to pick for my example. Now the first layer that we are going to create is very similar to the blending technique that we learned for the lily pad. I'm going to start off with my sap green color. Add that in all over. So you add in some pigment, load up some water, move the paint around, add in some more pigment on your brush, ay that, move it around, pick up some water. You're just creating a rough base. The areas where I'm adding let's say water are going to be the lighter sections so that I don't want a lot of pigment in that area. Again, if you notice very carefully, the consistency of my paint is quite thin. I'm not using a very, very thick consistency of paint here. Very light, thin consistency. I'm just going to lay the paint right there, fill up the entire structure using this particular color. Once I have that in to place the darker colors, what I'm going to do is rinse my brush and ot up some sap green and my burnt umber with a bit of black in there, that I create this deeper olive green color. Making a center at the dot and creating these lines to show the deeper parts of the veins on my lily bad. Again, adding this while the paint is still wet so that there is this blooming effect in our paints. I'm just going over with a clean brush to blend that in with the background. Now again, over here, as I mentioned, we are just placing the colors and understanding where the colors are going to be. All right. We're going to let this dry. Now that this has completely dried up, it's time for us to go with layer two. In layer two, I want to define the darker parts of my lily pad. I'm starting off with the mix of sap green and brown. And I'm going to layer that on the edges first. So I'm going to layer that on the edges and sort of bring that in as well. So I'm just outlining the structure and slightly bringing it in, leaving a bit of place for me to add in the lighter colors later. So I want darker bits on the edges, and that are kind of moving inwards towards the center. And then I want lighter bits. In between. I'll show you how that works. I'm starting off with the darker colors, placing that in. So I've outlined it. Wherever I'd made those lines, I'm kind of creating these little structures, little brush roofs, bringing it towards the center of the lily pad. And you can see how we have these lighter bits in there as well, right? So the background color kind of lays out a fundamental section for you two, add in the lighter colors. Now for the lighter colors, I'm mixing my white, sap green and a bit of yellow, placing that in all those empty places that we saw. Now, the idea here is to add that in and using our brush, we're going to blend it all together. I've just added the darker colors, and once I'm happy with the placement of it, what I'm going to do is I'm going to rinse my brush and just using my brush, I'm going to blend the colors in with each other. So if you feel like the color is not moving, then you can just add in some more of the taker or the light color depending on what shade is not moving and blend them in together. Now, over here, it has created a bit more definition, as you can see. There is a bit more definition in the structure of my Lilly pad, but at the same time, it does look a little bit funky and still not the perfect kind of structure that we want. What we're going to do here is, I'm just going to add in a bit more of the darker colors wherever necessary and create this unevenness in the structure and blend that in again and let it dry. Over here, the process of doing this is very repetitive. You might have to go maybe two or three times with the same structure where you're adding darker colors and lighter colors and blending that in remember that you're only using your clean brush and water to do the entire blending process. You add in the paint, but to blend them together, try and use just your bruh, round brush, or flat brush, whatever brush you're comfortable with. Over here, we're using round brush. And before you go ahead and start adding more colors to it or adding more details to it and just starting a whole layer altogether. Make sure that your paint is completely dry. I can add more colors over here right now because the paint is still wet and I can blend that in quickly. So here, I just mixed my sap green and yellow together, just to bring in a little bit more definition into the lighter parts of my lily pad, and then I'm blending that in with my clean brush. You can see how I wipe my brush and rinse my brush and then wipe again to get rid of any extra darker colors that we might have. If you note this very carefully, it's very similar to the blending technique that we learn, the second blending technique that we learned. We're going to let this try and repeat the process again. Now that the section has dried, I'm just going to speed up this process because it's just a repetition of what we've done in the past, adding the darker colors, bringing that in you know, understanding the placement of it. It's very similar to the background. But this time we can see how as we add this layer, the paint is again in your creamy or milk consistency, a little bit between them. You add in the taker colors, blend that in and then add in your lighter colors and understand the placements for it, and then blend them together. This process, as you can see, this is the third time we are adding a layer over this, and you can see how this section has become a lot more opaque, a lot more defined, and that's exactly what we want. I've added a bit of just sap green towards the edges of the lighter sections. Then using my clean brush, I'm just going to blend everything together so that there is this beautiful seamless blend between the darker colors and the lighter colors. As I mentioned earlier, this process is a repetition of what we've done in the previous layer. Just this time we're using a slightly thicker consistency. I wouldn't say thick, but a bit more creamier consistency to place the colors in and blend them together. Clearly, this has made the lily pad a little bit more defined. As you can see, we've got this beautiful crevices of our lily pads, the darker color towards the edges, and the lighter colors in between. Just add in the colors and blend them together until you're happy with the blend. And then once you're done with it, you are going to let it dry. I'm just going to move the paints around a little bit here and there to create a bit more definition. I've added a little bit more of the lighter colors again to define the shape. And then I'm going to let this dry completely before we go on and add the next layer over it. Now that this has dry, let me show you how you can highlight and bring out more of the lighter colors in your subject. Over here, I'm mixing my green, my yellow, with a tiny amount of white in there. I've added a bit of white green and yellow again, creating this beautiful lighter mix, the color that we want to add highlights with. You want to make sure that the color is lighter. I'm roughly going to place that in the sections which have the lighter colors in my subject, which is the sections of my lily pad, and I'm focusing more towards the center and slightly bringing it outward. I'm not adding the entire section with the same color because I just want to highlight certain widths. Once I clean my brush, The thing you're going to do is using your brush, just going to roughly blend it out into the background. Very similar to the second type of blending that I showed you, that is exactly what we are doing over here. Blending it with the background so that we're not seeing a lot of the harsh edges. It looks like the colors are blended into the background, but at the same time, you are seeing the light the color. All right. Now that the lighter colors are blended into the background. The next thing we will do is create a bit of texture into our painting. Now, the texture is just to show the grainy parts of our lily pad. Using a thick consistency of the paint, which is very similar to the butter consistency that I was talking about, I'm just going to brush in some of the textures moving inwards to the center of my lily pad. The texture is not a lot. It just creates a light texture which I need and which is perfect for my lily pad. Now, the next thing that I am going to do is just create in a few more highlights by tapping in these dots in the middle and certain areas of my lily pad. Now, what does this signify? The idea that I'm going with over here. It's just to show a few water droplets, a few areas of my lily pad, which is capturing a lot of light and because of the water on my lily pad, it's creating the glowing effect. That's the idea that I'm going in with. I'm just adding this very, very light green color in certain areas. Once you add in the lighter green colors, make sure that you are rinsing your brush, and I'm going to create a few taps with my white paint and just just white paint. So I'm just going to tap that in as well in the middle and just a few other areas. Now the number of taps that you add using the white color, make sure that is a little bit lesser than the lighter green color that you added in. All right. So this is the way in which you highlight layer and you can see how we worked with multiple layers to bring out the essence and the beauty of our lily pad. That's exactly what we will be doing in our class project as well. You're going to be working with multiple different layers, creating various different shades, adding that in, blocking your colors, and highlighting the brighter parts. So we are going to be using all these different techniques that we have learned. That is why I decided to show you how those different ah techniques can be applied in the elements that we're painting in our class project. We've done the lily pads, did the petals, learned how to layer, and how leering plays a very important role when you're painting certain subjects, especially the one that we're going to do in our class project. I've also uploaded this under the project and resources section to make sure you download it so that you have this for your reference. And once now that we've got gathered all of these beautiful tips and tricks, let's focus on creating a final project in the next lesson. I'll see you gather them, and let's begin painting. 9. Project Part 1 : Sketch: All right. Let us begin our class projects. I've taped on my paper on all four sides, taken all the colors out on my palette as mentioned earlier, and we're going to be sketching from a reference image. You'll have the reference image somewhere on the left side of the screen. I'll put that in there and simultaneously, you can also download it from the project and resources section so that you have that for your reference as we are sketching it out. Again, taped on my paper. Let's begin the sketching process. Here's a reference image on the left. You can see how we have this beautiful water lily, that is the main subject, and then you've got these water lily pads. In the background as well. Now, very similar to the sketch and composition of our water ing, we are going to first create the outer circle. I have created a f sketch on my paper so that this process is a little bit more easier for me while filming, but I'll walk you through all the steps. We start off with the outer sketch first. Somewhere above the half of the circle, you will create another little oval, I would say, not circle. It's an oval, and that is because the viewpoint of our water lily is in that particular way. You're looking at it from a height. Now, the inside details, the statements, I am creating, trying to make it all inside the reference circle that I've made, but you can put a few outside as well. Like I taught you earlier or as we discussed earlier, you can create the outer ones protruding outwards, and the ones inside going inwards. We've done that in the sketch and composition lesson. This is just something for you to add in there. Again, while painting, a lot of these things change. Okay. Let's start with the petals. Over here, I'm starting off with the lower petals first. Focusing on the two lower petals that are inside. The innermost petals of my flower, I'm going to sketch it out first. Then slowly, either you can move towards the left or towards the right. Now, whenever you're sketching, a flower, any sort of flower. You want to focus where your starting point is going to be. For me, I started off with the details in the center, and as I go, I'll start adding the details. The way I'm doing it is, I've created those two petals in the middle and then I'm going left and right simultaneously so that I know the way in which I'm going to add these petals. We're going to create the inner ones first, focusing very much on the structure that we're seeing in the reference image as well. So I'm going to create all the inner ones which are shorter in size, a little bit smaller and understand where their placements is, and you're going to go around the entire circle that you've made. Once you're done with that, you are going to understand the placement for your other petals or the petals in the next column or row. The next row rather not column. The next column. Over here, I have that rigged heart shape petal that we've learned earlier, and we're going to have another petal on the side. You can see is the left petal on the inside that I'm trying to create over here. Now, this is going to be a little bit of a back and forth process generally. We're trying to understand the placements and create something similar to the reference image or at least for the composition of a flower. Keep observing the reference image, download the reference image and observe it, and then you can sketch it out. As you observe the petals, you can really tell the direction in which they are facing, how you're going to have the petals place them in a way that it looks composed as a flower and not going all over the place. But the main thing that you'll have to keep in mind is the reference circle that you have. That really helps you understand the placement and the entire area that your flower is covering. Now that I'm done with the lower ones in between these two petals, I'm going to add another petal. Keeping in mind the height difference between them. You don't want to create something that's extremely tall right after the shorter ones. There has to be some harmony between the petals, where it's just slowly increasing in size. Now, these two petals has another petal in between, which is even taller. You want to bring that harmony in the sizes in a similar manner where you start off with the smallest one and then build on it. Again, creating the petal on the left side, bringing in that little line for reference in between to show the fold in my flower. Now, between these two, there is a petal that I see in the back. I'm going to add that in there as well. There might be times where you don't like the placement for it or you don't like what it looks like in the reference image. You can slightly tweak things here and there and that's completely okay. Right. Let's start off with the petals in the next row. Right between these two petals, I see a petal, which is moving towards a lateral facing the left right. I'm going to create that as well. Again, you can see how I tried to keep it right under or inside the reference circle that I made. Along with that, I'm creating the fold of my flower just to put that in. Between these two, I see another petal. Going to add that in. Now you can see how this one slightly goes outside the reference circle, and that's completely okay. It can go a little bit here and there. Even in the reference image, you can see how this one it's moving out of the main circle as you would imagine it. I've added another petal to the lower part of my water lily and not really happy with the fold that I created. I'm just going to erase that out. This looks okay. Now between these two, there is another petal, so I'm going to add that in. Again, coming towards the right side. You can see how there is a little bit of a space constraint, I would say, but that's completely okay. We'll try to fit everything right in. Now, over here, there is a petal right behind these two petals. I'm just going to add that in. Again, in between these two petals, there is one here. Placed that in there as well. Now between these two, there is another petal. I'm going to add that in carefully. You can see. I'm always catching very lightly so that when I erase, I don't have these harsh lines and I can clearly rectify any mistakes that I might see. All right. Coming to the lower parts. We've got three more petals to add to the lower part. I'm just going to add another petal right here. I mean, one thing that you'll have to keep in mind is the starting and the ending point of your lines, and that really helps when you have a reference in front of it. That's how we started with the innermost petals so that we can understand where one petal starts and where it ends. That really helps for you to know when you start with the innermost petals. Now that I'm done with the basic sketch for my water lily, you can tweak a few petals here and there if you think is necessary. But overall, I really like the way this looks, any other shape formation that we have to change, we can do it while they're painting, like just a little bit here and there, you can do that wileer painting. But overall, I'm happy with this. This one, I believe, could be a bit more longer. I'm just going to change the shape, tweak the shape a little bit, and even over here, I believe I could tweak the shape a little bit. This looks good, just erasing any extra lines that I might see, tweaking the shape here and there. This really happens. Like I mentioned earlier, you will go back and forth with your sketch until you're happy with the structure and the composition of your water lily. The next thing that we're adding are the parts of our lily pad. Now, in this particular class, lily pad is not really our main focus. It's just there in the background, so we're going to be painting this. O main focus is to learn how to paint water lilies. But at the same time, I want you to know how you can mix different greens and add them in your painting because it really brings out a no flower is complete without the greens around it. We're going to be adding a little bit of the water lily pads in there as well. On the left corner, I see a water lily. I'm just going to add that in. I has these beautiful folds. It's not an even circle. I'm trying to capture that fold in there as well. If you wish to not capture it in that fold manner, then you can just leave it as well. No need to add that. But I want to capture that little fold in there and it will come out a lot more when you start painting it. Anyway, I really like this little fold. I'm seeing that a couple of times, but it's such a cute fold. I can only imagine what it's going to look like when you start painting it. I'm adding a little bit or a part of the water lily pad here. I'm just going to make sure that I bring in the continuity of the shape because it's behind the water lily right. You want to make sure that there is a continuity in the shape. Lastly, on top, we have another leaf. This one is the largest leaf in this entire painting, I would say, because it's covering a lot more of the surface area, and you can really tell what the shape of your lily pad is. Over here, I'm going to try and bring out the shape as I see in my reference image. Now, over here, we mainly focus on the composition of a reference image as we're painting from it. That's our major source of inspiration. You want to make sure that you're understanding the composition and placing your elements in a similar manner. Again, it doesn't have to be the exact copy, but you want to understand the composition and place them in a similar manner. Anyway. I'm just going to go tweak in a few things here and there or erase any extra lines, reference lines that I might have, and I don't need them. I'm just going to erase them. And tweak shapes here and there. Up until I feel like I'm satisfied with the way my sketch looks. I have uploaded a reference image of the sketch and reference image, I mean just the black and white version of the sketch under the project and resources section, so you can download it from there in case you don't want to do this entire sketching process, and just start painting from it if you paint print it on a watercolor paper or trace it out. Anyway. This is it for the sketch lesson. I will see you in the next one when we start the painting process with the leaves first. 10. Project Part 2 : Base Layer of Leaves: All right. Let's start painting the sketch that we worked so hard on creating. So I have taken out all the colors that I've mentioned earlier, but focusing more on green, yellow, which is sb green, cadmium yellow, titanium white, Ivory black and burnt umber on my palette. All right, I've got these five shades with me that I'll be working on with for the leaves. Now, over here, we will be making different mixes, we'll be making three different tones, and then using it to kind of block in our colors first like we've done in the blending and laying lessons. Let's begin. Right, I will be using a combination of brushes here to create this thing, which is my three brushes. I've got flat brush. Got a flat brush, and I've got three round brushes, like I mentioned earlier. Starting off with the first mix. Over here, I'm mixing my sap green color with a bit of yellow, just to get that vibrant lighter green shade. Here's a swatch of the color that I'll be using. Next, I've got a mix of sap green, yellow, burnt umber, and a tiny amount of black in there. This is going to act as your medium tone. I will add a little bit of green maybe because I want this to be a little bit more lighter, but here's a swatch of that shade for now. I will add a bit more green to make it a little bit more medium to. Now we need a darker tone. For that, I'm mixing my yellow, sap green, burnt umber, and this time, I'll add a lot more of the black. The quantity of black will be more in the mix so that we get a deeper tone of the green shade. Here's a swatch of that color as well. Over here, you can see how the medium tone and the dark tone really don't show a lot of difference. That's why I've gone ahead and added a bit more green so that there's a clear difference between these two shades. All right, Let's start painting using the three colors, starting off with all the leaves first. Starting off with the left one, I am going to start loading up my lighter tone of the bruh, of the paint on my brush, and I'm going to apply it in the entire surface. We don't really need an even surface here. We don't need opaque washes or anything. We are just placing the colors and kind of understanding where the deeper tones of the colors are going to be and where the lighter ones are going to be. Of course, the lighter ones change as we add layers over it and highlight the lighter areas. But right now, we're just creating a base wash. All right, I've taken my size four round brush here and loading my deeper tone of the brush off the color on my brush. I am going to add that in to show that there is a fold in my leaf here and it's a little bit deeper in color as compared to the different areas that are receiving more light. Now, you might notice that the way in which I add the colors is a bit different. They don't look like an exact replica of the color that you're seeing on your reference image. That's completely okay, I really wanted to play around with this and create my own versions of the areas which receive light and dark, even though they're similar, but not an exact replica of the reference image. For this particular lily bad, I have added the medium tone. Again, lightly just brushing across, creating an even wash or a background wash for this layer. And I've added a bit of water in places where I feel like the brush is getting too dry, or the paint is getting dry. So I've just loaded my brush, added a bit of water. And spreading the paint across. Again, we don't need an even bush. Now, switching back to my size f round brush, I'm creating a deeper circle in the middle. The idea over here that I'm going with is I want the area that is around the lily pad to be deeper. Then you've got these veins moving from the center moving outwards. That's exactly what I am covering. Now this might not entirely be similar in placement to what the reference image shows, and that is completely okay. If you feel like you want to add a bit more details into your leaves from what the reference image shows, please feel free to do that. I'm here to just guide you in the process of creating something. Even when you finish this class, it's not just that you have a painting with you of water lily, but you also understand how you approach when you look at a real life reference image and how you bring that to life. Right, make sure that you have two jars of water. I'm going to clean my brush here. And with a clean brush, with just clean brush and a bit of water on my brush, I am blending those little layers of paint that I've added so that they kind of blend in together and they don't look like just harsh lines resting one, you know, next to each other. And you kind of want that blend in them. All right. I'm going to do the same thing for my lower leaves as well so you can mix up your paints and create something very similar in those lower bits as well. All right. I've just skipped that process because it's a repetition of exactly what we've been doing. For the top two. You add the lighter color. Over here, I went with the lighter color, and then with the deeper tone, you will add in some depth. Focusing majorly, I would say in the area towards the edges of the shape that you've made because you want to show that that touches the water and there's a deeper tone of color in there and in areas that are slightly elevated. I wouldn't say elevated, but slightly above the areas that receive no color, no light, or lesser light, is the area that receives a lot more light. And that's why it's lighter in the shade. Over here if you notice, I am adding more deeper tones because it's behind our lily pad, which means it's going to receive a lot more a lot lesser light. Anyway, this is what the base layer of your lily pad would look like. In the next lesson, we'll be adding for the details and bringing out the essence of the shape together. 11. Project Part 3 : Layer 2 of Leaves: Now we're done with the base layer, it's time for us to build on it. Now, very similar to the layering lesson where I taught you that you need to about two to three or maybe sometimes four layers really bring out the depth in your subjects. I personally like to do it that way, it really helps me build on the object that I'm painting. But then again, it's a personal preference. Over here, what I'm going to do is make two mixes. I'll have a lighter tone and a darker tone. The idea again remains very similar. You can have two or three different shades. The idea remains very similar to what you've done in the base layer. We build on the layer that we already have. The main reason that we blocked in the colors in the previous part or in the base layer is so that we have the exact areas or we know the exact areas where we want the lighter and the darker colors to be. Over here, you can see how I'm able to differentiate between the sections where I want the lighter colors with my lighter mix, and I've made three mixes. I've got the light, medium and dark tones. This time I've added a bit more pigments. You can see how this is a wonderful creamy consistency, and this is going to allow me to be able to work with the gah paint and make it opaque. I've added in the lighter and the darker bits, and then using my flat brush a clean brush. I'm just going to clean it and clear it. Over here again, I can go back and forth with the entire process where I'm adding deeper colors whereever necessary and then blending it in with my clean brush or even your normal brush that you're loading the paint with. The only difference lies is when you're blending with the brush that has some pigment on it, you end up mixing and moving a lot of color here and there. If you clean your brush and then add it, you have better chances of not really mixing them together and show that clear difference between the shades. F here, I've added some lighter tones and some darker tones and then blended that in. I will similarly do the same thing for the other areas as well. I'm starting off, I'm going to clean my brush mainly, and then I'm going to load my brush with some paint, making a really nice darker tonal color, darker value of the color. Then you can see how this ones a lot more premia. I'm going to go ahead and create those veins that I was talking about. You can see how I'm curving my brush strokes as the shape of the leaf is going to be in that circular manner. Then once I add that in, I'm going to clean my brush, and then just with a lighter shade or a lighter consistency, I'm going to add that in. Now I've added some medium tones in my brush and I'm just going to blend the darker tones into the background. Over here, what we are trying to do is create a blend of these three colors and be able to show the difference in the different colors that we see in our lily pad. Starting off with the darker tones, then the medium tones, and then right in these sections which had the lighter color, I'm going to go ahead and add in those lighter bits. It's between those two veins where you'll have the lighter color pop up a lot more. That's exactly what I'm doing between those lines that I created, those areas are going to be the sections which receive light. Once you block in your colors again or lay the colors out again, you can just use your clean brush and then clean it out. What I mean by that is, just clean out the edges. If you believe that or when you're painting, you feel that, maybe the darks have gotten lost in the blending process, then you can add that in to define the shape a little bit and then blend it out again. As I've mentioned, this process is really a process of going back and forth a couple of times until you're happy with the way the blend looks. There is no right and wrong here, and I feel like I always say this when I'm painting or teaching in my classes that there is no right and wrong when it comes to this. You know the technique and the ideas to just blend it out. Look at the reference image, see what sections are inspiring you. See the areas that receive light on it and the areas that are receiving the darker tones in it. Then just build upon that. That's exactly what we're doing here. We're building on the light and darks as we seen the reference image and adding our own touch along the way. Now the way down with the top two, I am going to do the same thing for the bottom lily pads as well. You go in with your lighter color and then add in your medium tones and then your darker tones. Keeping in mind that you want the darker tones to be in areas that are closer to the water and to the edges of the lily pad shape that we have. So you'll have to keep going back and forth a couple of times until you are happy with the blend. Here, again, the process is very repetitive. You're just going to go ahead with your lighter tones, medium tones, and darker tones to create a nice blend between the colors in there. I am really liking the way this is turning out. By now, I assume that you are getting familiar with the way in which we're approaching this. Why I'm saying that is because in the next part, I'm going to increase the speed a little bit because again, the process is just a repetition of what we have done in this layer, but we're just going to let this dry and build on it again once it's completely dry and repeat the process this time, adding a little bit more of the lighter tones in the process. If you want to paint along with me and you feel like the speed is too, then you can reduce it by 0.5 and follow me along. It will slow the video down for you to a normal speed. I assume if my math is right. But yes. You're going to do that. You can reduce the speed or you can just watch me do it at two and then follow me along. The process remains the same. You are adding the darker tones, then the lighter tones and blending everything together for the textured beautiful effect in pad. M M. Now that we are done with the top there, you can see how once it has dried, the color has gotten a bit darker, and we're going to repeat the same step for the bottom lily pad. The little bits of the lily pad that we see in there. Go ahead with the darker tones on the edges, bringing that in roughly, going ahead and adding our lighter tones and blending that in with all the harsh edges are basically just blended in. Adding the lighter tones and blending it together. Again, we're going to repeat the process similarly for the other bits as well, which is on the side. Now, for the other section, I will just tell you there is something that you have to keep in mind because that section of the lily pad is behind the flower entirely. What really happens there is, there's going to be a lot more darker color variation right there and we'll also have to add in a bit of shadow that the flower is going to cast on the lily pad. We'll do more of that when we have the flower in place, and then we can add in those harsh definitive shadow patterns. But yes, there's something to keep in mind that in the one in the back which has the flower in front of it directly, we'll have a bit more of the darker color. You can see how we have just gone ahead and added those lighter colors in the middle and then have these darker tonal value of our green towards the edges. Go to go and add that in and then blend it with my brush. Repetitive process, as I've mentioned, and very similar to the lesson that we just covered in the layering bit, right where your layering color one over the other. That's exactly what we're doing. And we're just blending everything in. That's pretty much how this entire process goes. I I can watch for the fact that there are a lot of different layers that we're working it, but it really brings out the painting a lot more. It brings out all those different color blends that you're seeing in the even though they're like three colors. But it really adds to the colors that you view as the final picture is in place. Chap going ahead and added a bit more of the darker tones in my lily pad just to show that little difference between the two lily pads because I felt like they looked a little blended in. I just wanted to add a bit more dark color to show the difference between them. Anyway, I really like the way this works. We're going to let this dry and in the next lesson, we will be painting the background for the water together. 12. Project Part 4 : Water & Water Lily Base Layer: All right. Now that we're done with the leaves, and before we start with the flowers, I want to create a base for the background, that is the water. Now there are different shades that we're going to be working with. Let me just swatch it out for you. First, I'm just going to mix my black and my burnt umber together. And this is going to be one shade that we work with. Let me just swatch it out for you. Here we go. This is one shade that we're using. The next color that I'll use is the same mix, but it has a bit of white in there. You've got your burnt umber, your black, and a tiny amount of white in there. Now there is a bit of green in my mix from the previous blend that we made, but that's completely okay. You can also make a separate blend if you want cleaner section of your mixing palette. Anyway, I'm just going to go ahead and load up my darker color. The basic idea again over here is to create the background wash where we don't have to do it perfectly. We're just adding the colors in there and just blocking in the deeper parts of the water. Using a flat brush. Again, process is very simple. You're just going to tap it very randomly, making sure that you are a bit careful around the edges because you don't want to go into the green. With Gosh, one thing that really helps is that you can lay your green over the black in case you make any mistakes. But still, I would just like for you to be a little bit careful around the edges that you don't go in and cover any of the areas that you have already painted. Along with some sections which have the deeper brown color. I would suggest that you add in your lighter shades as well. I want a little bit of lighter shades in between. One thing that I wanted to do was define the shape of my lily pad a little bit more, so I went in with my round brush and added that in show that separation between the two leaves. And towards the right side, I'm adding a bit of the lighter gray color. Now, you might have a question as to how I'm differentiating where I want the lighter gray and where I want the deeper color. And to be very honest with you, I am looking at the reference image over here, and if you look at it, you will see and notice how there is. There are these lighter bits or reflection of the light on the water. But we're not really going into the depth of the reflection that we're seeing, so we're just trying to capture it in whatever way we can. And that's why I've used the lighter gray color here. It doesn't have to be perfect. But wherever you see this lighter gray color in your reference image, we're just going to place your lighter gray color similarly. Again, it doesn't have to be perfect because we're not working on the exact reflection of whatever light source is reflecting on the water. We're just trying to capture the lighter and the deeper parts of the water just to show that our lily pad and our lily, what a lily is on the water. All right, Jim, just going to cover that in carefully, roughly and create your entire mix for the background. All right. Now that the background has tried, it's time for us to move on to the flowers. I've taken my magenta, my lasering crimson, my yellow shade, my orange shade, my burnt sienna, burnt armber, and white color on my palette. That's on a different palette altogether, just so that I don't end up mixing these two colors together. We're going to start with the painting process right here to block in the colors and know which ones are lighter and which ones have a deeper pink in them. Right. Let's create three different pinks. First, I have my magenta color. I'm going to mix my magenta with my laser and crimson in there and then a little bit of white. You can see how this pink is a lot deeper. I will switch the consistency when I start painting. But just for your reference, this is the pink that I have. You can see it's a deeper pink. Next, into the same mix and clean my brush. I've just loaded a bit of water and added white in there. It's the same blend, magenta, laser and crimson and a lot more white, and you can see how it's lighter shape. Next again, slightly cleaning my brush, same blend, and a lot lot more white in there. This will give you an even lighter shade of pink. Now we've got three different shades of pink that we're working with. Now we're going to start off with the lightest shade of pink and the lightest shade of pink are in the petals that are in the background. The last row of petals, are the ones that are the lightest in shade. I'm just going to roughly go ahead with my round brush and add the lighter shade of pink in there. Now, the consistency doesn't have to be too creamy. We're still working with the milk consistency, and you are going to just load up your brush with some water and some of the paint mix that you had and carefully fill up that area. If it's not even, it's completely fine, it doesn't have to be even. There are certain petals in this flower that are neither pink, like the lighter shade of pink, they're not entirely white. But they do have that pinkish tone in there. That's why I'm adding pink and loading up some more white on my brush, wherever I feel like, it could use a little bit more of the white paint. Again, you can see how uneven my layer is. If it's uneven, it's going to help you build up the layer as we go because we will be making at least 34 layers to this flower as well to add more highlights and preserve the lighter areas that we see. Right. Now, if you see very carefully, this time I'm going with a medium tone of pink, and I'm going to clean my brush and load up some more white in the area and fill up the space because I want the tip to be lighter. I can do that in the next layer as well. But if I preserve it here, it'll be easier for me to build on it. We're going to go ahead and do that to a lot of different areas. A lot of different petals. Now over here, I feel like I want to add a lot more of the deeper pink in there. Then just using water, I'm going to bring it out and blend it with the background. I could also use a little bit of the lighter tone of pink and add that in there. Again, going back to clean my brush and take the medium tone here, adding that in, and then with water, I can just slightly blend it in to create the base layer. Now, The reference that I'm using here is our reference image, the actual photo that we're trying to paint from. I take that as a reference. So you can really see which areas are lighter, which areas are medium pinks. But if you don't want to do that, obviously, you can just follow me along because I am going to be adding my own little touch in between. So here you can see how I've added a lot more of the pinks around the edges, and in the middle, I'm just using my brush and a bit of water to blend that in. So one thing that you'll notice here is, as we come into the inner rows of the petals, I am adding medium tones here, whereas in the outermost ones, I was using the lightest pink color. As we move closer, we will intensify the shade. We make it a lot more pinker. As we add more layers over this, we can really differentiate between the different shades of pink that we use. So here you can see I'm adding the deeper tone of pink, placing the color right in there. Carefully so that I'm in the drawing or the sketch that I've made. Then just using my brush and a bit of water, I'm going to blend it out. Just very roughly so that the section is very uneven so that when I build on in the next layer, I can still preserve the background color and build on it. You'll be doing this for all your petals in a very similar manner. The process remains the same. It is a bit of a time taking process. I will not lie to you. It did take me like two or three days to film the entire section and also paint this, even the first time when I tried it, it take me at least two days to sit down like maybe 2 hours each day to paint it because I was also figuring out how to break this down in a more simple manner. When I was painting florals and trying it off for the first time, I really is someone broke these elements down for me so that it would be easier for me to paint and understand what the thought processes and what goes behind creating your own versions of these florals. Anyway, coming back to the painting. We are reaching the inner part of the petals. You can see here, what I'm doing is outlining the structure because that area is a lot more pinker even in the reference image, and just using a bit of water, I am blending it inwards. You can see how the center portion of the petals are a little bit lighter in color as compared to the outer sections. You will be doing this a lot more for the entirety of your petals that you see because most of them are the inner petals. You're outlining and then using your wet brush, just blending it in. One thing to keep in mind is you want to make sure that the petal that is next to the petal that you're working on has dried before you go ahead and start doing this process. Otherwise, the colors might blend in together. Just keep that thing in mind, that you want to let it dry just a little bit, and then you can resume the process of painting the petals that's next to it. I'm going to make some more of the paint and complete all my petals. So the same process has been followed. I am just outlining and blending it in. Again, even if things are wrong here, it's completely fine because this is just your base layer and there's a lot more building on that we have to do on this layer. We're going to let this dry. Now that this has dried is time for us to work with the layer that is in the middle. That is your statement, the center part of my potteriny. I'm going to mix some burncana, with a little bit of lyserin crimson. This is the mix that I get is this deep red color. And I'm just going to cover the center portion. Just watch of that, by the way, and I'm just going to cover the center portion of my section with this color. Now, over here, when you look at it, right now, it looks a little bit odd. I'm going to lit you because we haven't added the layers. We are going to be adding a lot more deeper pink shade into the water dely as we build on the layers. All right. I did forget to paint one particular petal, so I'm just going to quickly go ahead and complete that in a similar manner, outline and then fill the center portion just with the wet brush. The next color that I'm going to mix is my cadmium yellow color. I'm mixing it on the side, and I'm just going to add in and fill up all these empty white spaces that I see, and it's okay if it blends in with the red color. That is exactly what we want. The basic idea is you're just creating a base layer for us to build on when we add in further details into our water lily. Right at the bottom of the stamen area, I want deeper red color. I've gone ahead and added red on my brush and not yellow, and I'm adding that in, blending the entire section with the colors so that I don't have a lot of empty white spaces once this entire section dries, and if there are, I can fill it up with the pinks and bring in the petals a little bit lower. Right now you've just blocked in all your colors. You know the petals are darker, you know the petals that are lighter. All right. I really like the way our base layer has turned out for the water lily. A lot more layers have to be added. We're also done with the lily patch. In the next lesson, we'll add in further details to our painting. 13. Project Part 5: More Details on Leaves: All right. In this lesson, what we are going to do is add in the finer details on our leaves. As you can see, we have those placements for the lighter and the darker bits on the leaves, but it could be a lot better if we add in one final layer wherever we need to add some more whites and in sections where you want to add in some more depth. O here, I'm creating my dark green mix again, which is a mix of burnt umber, green, and my brown color. And I want to show that little curve that I had sketched out. I'm just going to go around and add in some darker colors in that area just to define it a little bit better. I've created a border there and I'm slightly bringing that color in just to show the fold. I'm also adding a little bit of the darker colors in different areas right there. Now I'm going to clean my brush and I'm going to just blend it out using my clean brush. Now the clean brush is just going to help you not have those harsh lines that you're seeing and will help to blend it in with the background. It's such a down twister to sometimes say certain words together. Blend it in together with the background. Once you have the darker colors in, as you can see, I'm just rewetting the surface. What this does is with guage, which is easily reactivatable. I kind of helps you blend it in. All right, I really like the way the darks look. Now, the next thing that you are going to do is add in the lighter color as well. So over here, I'm going to add in some more white into the mix so that I'm creating this light shade and adding yellow and green together to create a shade which looks like this. So it's a little bit lighter than the colors that we were using in the past. Now, over here, what I want to do, is create this outline especially around the edges, which receives a little bit more of the light on the leave because of those different folds that you're seeing in there. I'm just going to outline it very, very lightly, leaving a little bit of the darker color in space so that when I blend it in, It doesn't look like it's too bright in there. You can see how over here you've got these harsh lines. I'm just going to bring it in slightly and add in some more brush strokes which I can blend in with the background to show that these are the lighter bits of my leaf. Again, cleaning my brush, rinsing out the paint, and then using my clean brush to blend it in. Now over here, it might look like I have a lot of paint on my brush, and that is exactly not what I'm doing. I have just water on my brush and that's reactivating the base layer and helping with the blending process. Now around those little strokes around the edges that I have, I am just carefully outlining and blending it in with the background. Now once that dries, it will dry down to be darker and it won't be as vibrant or shiny as it looks as gas dries down to be mat. We're just going to carefully outline it, and this is what it looks like. Now, similarly, we'll do this for the other leaf as well. Over here, what I am going to do is rinse my brush, load up some light paint because I want to define those lighter areas. All those sections are in between the veins, I'm going to lightly add in some of this lighter color just to bring out and make that section pop up a lot more. Before we go ahead and highlights in our section. So just adding that in, leasing my bruh, tapping out the extra water, and with a clean bruh, I'm slightly blending the color into the background. Again, repetitive process, adding the color, and using your wet brush, you blend it into the background. I'm happy with the way the lighter bits have turned out. I'm just going to go ahead and reactivate the darker color on my palette, and I am going to add it around the edges and define the edges a little bit more. Carefully adding it around the edges and bringing the color in slightly so that it connects in with the c and also adding a bit of the darker color around the center around the left side of the t to highlight or not highlight, just define the folds in Leaf properly. Then again, from the center, adding more definition to the veins. Once you do that, rinse your brush, I've just added a little bit of details there. Not a lot of the darker color has been added. Then I'm lightly blending that in with the background. Again, your wet brush, your clean wet brush, with a tiny, tiny amount of water is your best friend for this entire step, but you can blend it with the background without creating these harsh lines. But at the same time, we're not adding too much water that you're reactivating the entire surface. We're just slightly trying to blend that color in to the color that's already beneath it and around it. Anyway, just with the clean brush, I am moving the paints around in case I don't like the way they have dried down once I've done the blending process. Now that I'm done with a stop two, I'm going to repeat the process similarly in the bottom section as well. With the darker color, I will add that in, define the section, bring the color in, blend it with the lighter color. I'm just creating my mix right here, which is a mix of black, sap green, and my burnt umber. This time, this shade has a little bit more of the brown color. I've added a bit more brown so that I can define this a little bit differently. I'm adding that on the edge, as you can see very carefully because the reference immer shows that the leaf right here has a little bit more of the brownish color as the darker tone. I'm adding that in, as you can see, it dries down to be Matt, p rinsing my brush and then slightly blending that in with the background. Now over here, honestly, you have so much room to play around with the kind of darker tones you want to add, the lighter tones you want to add. As I've mentioned earlier, there is no right and wrong. Just play around with it. See how you want to blend the colors because this probably if you're painting a subject like this for the first time, this is completely new to you, and The more you explore the way in which your colors work, the way in which your blends work, the way in which your brushes work, more you'll understand how to approach the subject in the future. Once I'm done with the darker colors. Moving on to the lighter one, mix of sap green, yellow and white, defining the lighter areas, as you can see, roughly adding that in. I really don't define the shape very perfectly. I'm just tapping it in, rinsing my brush and then slightly blending it in with the background. That section appears to be lighter once it dries down. Again, this is a repetition of something that we've done for the top two leaves, and you're just going to repeat the process here as well. All right, I'm really happy with the way this has turned out. I'm going to let this dry and anther this section has dried completely. I have created a lighter mix for the green, which is lighter than the light tone that we were using earlier. This is to work with the highlights in your painting. What we're going to do is define certain areas and use this to create those water droplet or the glistening effect that I was talking about in the layering lesson. Now that I have this mix with me. I am just going to outline the areas where I added this light to color around the edges of my leaf. I'm not going entirely into the shape. I'm just lightly adding it in areas where I've done that before, just so that when I blend this in, I'm not entirely blending it into the background, but just slightly clearing out the edges. For this, I'm using my size zero round brush, which helps me get more finer details and helps me have more control over my brush. I've just blended that in, as you can see very, very lightly so that I'm preserving this color right there, but the edges are not as sharp. This helps you have that little fold in your leaf. Again, adding a few taps in the center just to have that lighter highlighted effect on my lily pad. And then loading my brush and highlighting certain areas. Now the camera is covering that, but as I move my hand around, you can see how it looks. Highlighting that certain area, roughly, you can see how these are broken brush strokes. They're not entirely continuous brush strokes. Then once I add that in, I am just going to go ahead and clear out the edges. I'm just creating some taps in the middle. And then rinsing my brush and clearing out the edges so that I don't have these harsh lines. Now, this process is very repetitive again. You're just highlighting certain edges of your leaf and then adding these taps in. Once I have cleared out and cleaned out the edges, the sharp edges, I'm going to go ahead and load up this lighted color and tap in some dots. You can pick the sections that you want to tap these dots on. If you confuse where to do it, then look at the reference image, which area shines the brightest to you, is the most highlighted because of maybe some droplets of water on there. You can go ahead and tap that in in that area. I'm going to go ahead and just clear out these edges before I go ahead and start adding those taps. I'm just going to go ahead and tap in certain areas. Now over here, I really haven't thought so much or looked at the reference image a lot to really understand the placement. I'm just going to go ahead and pick up areas where I want to add these taps in and just add them in there. Again, no right and wrong, we're not copying or creating an exact replic of our reference image. It doesn't have to be exactly the same. Feel free to tap these light green dots wherever you'd like. You'll be doing that for all the leaves, just pick up certain areas and tap that in there. All right. As you can see, I have tapped these dots in the bottom leaves as well on the bottom lily pads as well. Then I'm going to go ahead and just add in some more highlights in areas where I feel are necessary. This again is a very personal preference that you'd like to do. If you feel like this area could be a little bit more highlighted. I feel like I could add some more, feel free to go ahead and do that. Again, personal choice, wherever you want to add the highlights, go ahead and add that in. I am just tweaking certain sections here and there, especially at the bottom left corner, those leaves, I added more highlight to separate them from one another so that they don't look like they are a single leaf. I'm going ahead done that in that area and blended certain areas, whatever I felt like the lines were still harsh once they had tried down. Sometimes when you're blending, it might not blend into the background, you'll have to load up some water into it again. Anyway, this is it for this lesson. I really like the way the leaves are standing out a lot more once you've added the highlights. We're going to stop here for now and in the next lesson, we'll add another layer for the background. 14. Project Part 6 : Water Layer 2: All right, Let's go ahead and paint the background for the water once again, just to bring out a little bit more depth in it. I'm taking my flat brush, reactivating some of the leftover paint on my palette. I'm going to mix my black and brown, which is my burnt umber and ivory black together to create this deep almost black shade, but it's really a mix of brown and black together. This time, I'm going with the creamy consistency so that the paint lays out to be opaque and not very translucent. That's something to keep in mind is the consistency of your paints. I'm going for a creamy consistency here. I'm going to add a tiny amount of white in my next mix. I'm just going to keep it ready, which is going to be a mix of the same colors, but this time it's grayer because I've added white in there. I just need these two mixes of colors with me before I start with the entire painting process, which means just laying out the colors. I'm going to go ahead and rinse my brush once I have those two blends with me. And using my round brush here, just for more precision, I'm going to go ahead and outline the objects that I'm seeing just so that I don't cover up or go inside the lines with my flat brush because flat brush, I would not trust myself with the precision of it because I do not have a very, very steady hand. Sometimes I feel that way. So I'm going with my round brush here. And just covering up the edges with the round brush with a little bit more precision. Once I am happy with the border around the object, I can just load my brush and apply paint all over the area. You can also see how I'm loading up a little bit of water just to make the paint more flowy and blend in with the background while reactivating the base layer as well. Over here, the st is entirely the same. We're just going to go carefully ad the edges and then blend it in with the background and just cover up the entire section with mix. Very repetitive process, I'm just going to speed up this part a little bit because we're just covering up our entire area with the deeper paint mix that we've made together. All right. Now we're done with the section. We're going to this. Make sure that you're covering all little bits and pieces using this color. And before we dive into the next shade, you want to make sure that this has come up. So now that the section has completely dried. It's time for us to go ahead with the lighter shade. Let me just show you a swatch of the color, which is my gray color. I still believe it's a bit darker, so I'm going to add a tiny bit of white in there just to make it a little bit lighter. Here's a swatch of what the color looks like. It's just a tiny, tiny bit lighter than the previous mix. Now over here, we're trying to add in those lighter bits into the water because right now looks very flat. I'm just going to outline certain areas where I want the light to be hitting on the water, majorly around some of the edges of my water lily bads, and Next around that aa. You can pick up the sections that you want. I'm really not going with the exact sort of areas as we see in the reference image, and these are just little wigly lines just to show that unevenness that you see in the water and how, because there might be a slight movement in there, the shapes are not really defined. Another thing that you'll notice here is how all the shapes that I'm making have this harsh line around the layer that we already have in the background, correct? We'll have to blend this with the previous layer, and we might have to redo this bit by redo, I mean, just maybe adding some darker areas as we proceed in the later lessons. But for now, what we're focusing more on is placing the lights in the water and then blending it in with the background. I'm just going to pick up certain areas that I want around the flower, around the lily pads, around the edges of the lily pads that I just catched out. You'll notice also how I leave a little bit of gap between there because I want to show the darker parts in there as well, which we can also do as a separate layer. Right now, you just place the light colors using your round brush. Once you are happy with the placements, very randomly this has been placed, I've just picked up all the areas that I want to add that in. Once you're happy with the way it looks, you are going to clean your brush and start blending it in with the background. Now what that means is you want to reactivate the previous layer and make sure that you don't have these harsh edges around the layer of paint that you've just added. For this, make sure that you're using a clean brush and clean water. You don't want to use the muddy mixed water over here. You want to make sure that you have the clean water. And the flat brush was really not doing it for me, so I switched back to my round brush, and you can see how with just water and a clean brush, I'm blending it in with the previous layer. Right now, I also feel like we've added too much of the lighter shade. So as I said, we will fix that later by adding a little bit more of the darker colors in there because I want to see what the dried up version of this looks like. So over here, you're just going to reactivate the paint and blend the edges with the background so that you don't have these harsh lines. The process is very repetitive. I am just going to increase the speed over here a bit because we're just blending this with the background layer. O that we're done with this section. What we are going to do is create a darker mix to add the shadows in your subject. Obviously, the objects that are on the water are going to cast a bit of shadow on the water surface below it. Carefully with my size four on brush, I'm going to load up this darker shade and create the shadow. You can see how I'm adding a little bit of variation in the size or the thickness of my shadow right. Certain areas are thicker, certain areas are thinner, so you want to bring in that variation. If you are confused, With the sizing of the shadow. You can look at the reference image to understand how the shadows are placed on the water. But if not, we are just going to add in the shadows right under the lower part of our subject. We're not adding the shadow behind the top of our water lily, but mostly on the lower parts of it because that's the area that's resting on the water, and you want to show the shadow play in that particular area. That's why I'm adding it on the edges, right where the water lily pads also end on the surface of the water. All right, I'm really happy with the way this is turning out. Like I mentioned earlier, there are certain areas where I would like to add in a bit more depth with the darker color. I'm just going to rub it across the sections where I want that in and then using my brush, I will blend it out. Now this might be very different for your painting, so you'll have to make the judgment of where you want to add the lights and the darks. Just using my clean brush, one thing that I am doing is blending the shadow into the background. Just so that we don't have these extremely harsh lines. We might have to redo this section. I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but we might have to redo this section once we are done with the flower as well. Just because I feel like it could use a different layer, but I want to see what the dried up portion of this looks like. Once this dries and once we're done with the flower, we'll see if we need to add in some extra final changes in certain areas. But right now at the top, I felt like we could use with a little bit more of the darker colors. I've added that in and I'm blending it out using just water and my round brush. I'm really happy with the way this is turning out right now. I feel like we were able to capture a lot more depth in the water as compared to the previous blocking in layer. We might have to build this on, but let's see how we do after we paint the f. This is for this lesson. In the next lesson, we are going to be adding more details to. 15. Project Part 7 : Water Lily Layer 2: All right, let's go ahead and start building the layers on our water lily now, for which I will be using my size zero round brush along with my size four round brush as well. The idea here is to kind of bring out the whites and add in some deeper pinks in areas where required. So I'm going to mix my magenta color along with some sarin crimson shade to create this n, beautiful deep pink color. And on the side, I have the same with a lot of white in there so that I have a lighter pink color to work and the way in which we're going to function is add in the darker shades and then blend it using the light color. I might have to use both my brushes here just so that I can use it for blending and laying the colors simultaneously instead of going back and forth with cleansing my brush a lot. Over here, you can see how I've carefully outlined the petal first, and then using my brush. I'm just going to blend that in with just water, nothing else, just water. And I'll also reactivate the base paint that was from the previous layer so that it helps with the blending process. Along with that, I will add in some of the lighter pinks in the middle because I want to show that the center part of this petal is lighter as compared to the sides. Now, where do I get this reference from is from the reference image. When you look at the reference image, you can clearly tell which petals are supposed to have the darker colors, which ones have the lighter colors and where the light falls on our flower. That is something that will really help you understand how to put in those details. I would suggest that you do look at the reference image when you're doing this, or you can just watch me do the process, maybe paint a few petals, and then you can observe the reference image on your own and then add those details because that is going to really help you understand how to add those colors in. I can just tell you how to blend it, where to add it and how to blend it and bring out the effect. But if you're someone who's very passionate about doing it on your own, then I would really really suggest that you look at the reference image. Watch how I place the colors and blend it in and then try and do it on your own because that is going to be a great exercise for you in understanding how the colors are blended in this particular part. Over here, think of this as a second layer that I'm adding. Again, You're outlining it and using your lighter colors to blend it in with the background and blend the darker color in. So that you have this beautiful seamless blend. Then again, we can build on the texture, maybe in the third layer or the fourth layer to really bring out the highlights. Over here, I am building on the background layer that we had laid out where we understood where the lighter pinks are and where the darker pinks are. And this time we're adding more light into that and then adding in some deeper pinks along the side. What I am really focusing on here, as I mentioned, is bringing out the deeper pink tones and the lighter pink tones and blending them together. The process again, is a very repetitive process for all the petals. Again, what really helps is observing the reference image because you have certain areas which has these beautiful folds for the flower in there. So wherever you have those floral folds, you will just use your dark pink color, and that'll be darker than the other pinks around it. You'll place that and then you'll not entirely blend it in. Over here, I've created an even lighter pink shade because I felt like it was necessary for this particular petal, because this petal is really light, even in the reference image. This one has a lot more light falling on it and it's not as pink as the other petals. I've created a shade, which is still pink, but it's a lot more lighter in its total value and it's a lot more white. All right. Another I'm done with this one. I'm going to add in some light pinks in there here and there. That medium pink tone that we were using, I'm just adding that in just that it doesn't look flat and just white. I felt like this first petal that we started out with needed a bit more white, even the second one could use a little bit more of the lighter color. I'm just adding that in and with my size fo brush, I'm going to blend it with the background so that I don't have these harsh lines. Again, another thing to keep in mind is you want to make sure that the petal next to it has dried completely. Before you start off with the process, otherwise, the colors will blend into one another, or like seep into the petals. You want the colors to blend, but in their individual petals and not into one another. I hope that's making sense. All right. I'm just blending that in carefully using my size for brush here just so that I have this seamless blend between these two particular shades. Now, moving on to the next petal, so I have differentiated between my brushes. I'm going to use a size zero brush to lay the colors and my size brush to blend it in. Again, carefully, I'm laying out the lighter pink color here. Which is very close to white because this particular petal also is white in the reference image, but it's not entirely white. It has a bit of pinkish undertone in it. Then using my clean brush, I'm just going to blend it with the background seamlessly so that it's not just flat and then add in a little bit of the pinker tones. Under the petal that's before it because it is going to cast some shadow on the petal that's behind it. We will differentiate this a lot more in the other upcoming layers that we add. Over here, one more thing that I'm doing is creating the fold. You can see how I've gone with that p and I've added that fold in and I will not be blending this with the background because you want the fold to be prominent. Over here, you're going to be doing this for all the petals. I will increase the speed here just slightly because the process is very repetitive. Go ahead and do this for all the petals. Wherever there's something new that I'll be doing, I will come in and guide you. Oh. In the previous part, you saw how I added the folds in, I wanted to add in the folds before I went ahead and add the colors to blend it that is inside the fold. Again, creating my deep pink mix and my lighter pink mix, I'm going to walk you through this particular petal just so that you can see how I create the blend. We're here very carefully, outing the area below the petal that's in front of it or above it. And adding in this darker color because this is going to be casting a lot more shadow in there, and then cleaning my brush and loading up some of the lighter pink color. I'm just going to make the mix, add that in carefully. And then using my size for brush, I'll blend it out. First, I'm laying the colors right next to each other, rinsing my brush, making sure I don't have any pigment on there and just plain water, and then you can blend it in. You can see how the paint moves around. You'll have to rinse your brush a couple of times if you are working with the darker color and moving towards the lighter one because sometimes you end up loading up the darker pink and not having the lighter color because you blend that in. You'll have to be making sure that you're rinsing your brush a couple of times or just adding a layer of white over and then blending it again. The trick here is to make sure that you're constantly leasing your brush. This is going to be again a repetition of this process is going to be on all your different petals, but this was a different type of petal blend that we did. I just wanted to come in here and guide you through the process. Over here, I've also gone over the pink that was in the fold because there is a lighter pink at the top and it blends into the darker pink. I wanted to bring that in as well. And I will highlight this a lot more in the other layers just so that we can see that difference between them. Let me show you how we paint this petal, which is at the bottom. You will lay out your darker pink here because the pink even in the reference image is a lot deeper in this particular section, creating the brush strokes in the direction or in the fold the way the petal is, rinsing my brush, loading up some of the lighter color in there. Making sure that I have a beautiful creamy consistency of gash for this pot, and I'm going to lay it in the lighter space of my petal, carefully going about the fold, and then once I have laid it out, I'm going to clean my brush and blend it with the darker pink. Just with my clean brush and a little bit of water, you will blend it in with the between the two different shades that you have. Again, where you're laying what color will play a very important role when you observe the reference image or observe the water lily on your own. Because the process in which your blending remains the same, but the way you're able to capture the colors is what really matters, we have almost gone over it, how you're looking at the reference image and placing the lights and the darks, and then blending it together. This is the process in which it works. Now, how you add the details on you. You can follow me along because I'll be building on this in multiple different layers, adding more highlights, adding more lighter toones. And trying to get this pure full water lily to shine and be the star of this painting. Now that I'm done with this one, we're going to do the remaining of our petals. I'm just going to quickly slightly increase the speed. But if you want me to go along with you and if you think the speed is too fast, you can reduce it by 0.5 x and you would have it at the normal speed. Anyway, let's go ahead and paint more petals. Now we're going to work on our petals that are on the inside, the inner petals. I'm creating a mix of my laserin crimson and magenta color, so a deep pink color. This time you want the color to be a lot more deeper. The way in which I add this is I will outline the shape of my petal and create the textured strokes moving inside towards the center of my petal, for example. The idea here is because I want to show a lot more texture in this particular area, I want to show a more of the textures so I can build on it with the lighter tones in the upcoming layers that we do. I'm adding the lighter pink in between here, and then I'm going to blend it with this deeper pink color and make sure that I have this beautiful blend and beautiful textured effect. I'm just going to blend it first just with water and make that brush stroke very similar to the way in which I was laying it earlier. You can see how it's not just plain blend. There is a bit of these brush strokes that are moving inwards, brush strokes that are of flowing, and once they try, they will create a bit of texture in there. All right. Moving on to the next petal. I'm just going to make sure that the one next to it has dried completely before I move ahead and start with this one. We're going to outline the petal, or you can just skip the petal next to it and move on to the next one, leaving the one next to the petal that you just worked on so that it has enough time to dry before you start working on Again, outlining my structure and creating this texture moving towards the center of the flower. But at the same time, you want to make sure that you are going along the shape of the petal. The way the direction in which it's facing, you want to bring in the brush strokes in a similar manner. Once you add in the lighter color, again, create the textured effect moving towards the center so that there's a beautiful blend between the darker and the lighter color. If you feel like you've added too much of the light, then you can always go back and add some more of the darker pink and blend it in. Moving on to the next petal, Outline it, create that texture in with the brushtrokes moving in the direction of the petal, and then with the lighter color at that in and blend it out with just water so that you have the seamless blend. Over here again, the process is very repetitive. You're going to be doing that for all the petals. I will increase the speed here, is the process. It's just happening. You're just repeating the step the same step for all the petals. You always have me as a reference here if you ever feel Oh, I'm going too fast or a lot of details are being added, and I'm so confused, then you can slow down the video, watch me do it. Look at the reference image and make a comparison in how I've added it and how the reference image looks. And then who knows you might create your own version or your own way of adding the details, which could be completely different from the reference image and the way in which I do it. And that's exactly what we want to do. We want to just learn the techniques and create our own versions of these paintings. All right. This process again, is very repetitive, so I'm going to increase the speed, and I'll catch you when there's something new to show here. Mm. All I wanted to take a moment and show you how I paint this particular petal since it's a petal that's facing towards you. Here, you're going to be outlining the entire shape that you drew out or sketched out, and then in the middle, you'll add in the lighter color and blend it out. Again, we can build on this, build on the lighter tones, and add more highlights as we progress in the layers. But you can clearly see how there's quite a bit of difference between the previous layer and now. This one has a color in there and as we move ahead, we'll add in more color into our water. This is it for this lesson. I'll catch you in the next one, where we're adding details to the statement of the flower. 16. Project Part 8 : More Details on Water Lily: All right, Let's go ahead and paint the statement part of our flower right here. So I'm going to load up my size four round brush with some sarin crimson, and I'm going to add in some burnt sienna in there just to get a deeper deeper tone of red. So I might also add a bit of burnt umber in case I want a deeper tone, but for I'm sticking to burnt umber and the lizarn crimson together. The aa that I'm going to focus more on is the bottom, if you're going to divide this in a, then three fourth of the aa is going to be with this color. And then the top portion, I'll focus more with a bit of an orangish color. So right now what we're focusing more on is just building the base for the stamen section or for this internal part of my water lily, so that when we build on it with layers ahead in the upcoming lessons, it's easier for us to understand the placements. So you can see how I'm not really working on the shapes here. I'm just filling up the base color. And be careful around the petals that you've worked on before. The red color the red color is going to focus more on the bottom part because it's going to cast a lot of shadows in this particular area. Then I'm going to make a mix with my cadmium orange and the previous shade that we've used, just a tiny amount of that. Over here, we are going to make those curves that we had sketched out. You might end up with a few empty spaces and that's completely okay because we'll fill up that section when we add more details into our petals. We'll add more deeper tones in that area and we will cover it up. But you can see how I'm creating that statement shape. And you can see more about how the statement shape is placed from the reference image, but it's very similar to the sketch and composition that we had learned earlier. So we created those curves, right. So we're basically just filling in those curves with this orange color, and I'm still doing it even though the red hasn't completely dried because I have a lot more details to build on this section. So it's not that this is eight, and we're just adding highlights. No, there is going to be a bit more details that will build on in the upcoming lessons, but for now, kind of creating a base for it. You can see how the curves on the left are bent towards the left. The curves on the right, the stamens on the right are bent towards the right, and the ones in the center are facing inwards. Very similar to the sketch and composition that we discovered, but right now we are just understanding the placements for it and adding in this orange color. Now, once you see how the orange color is laid out, you really can't tell the difference between where one stamen ends and the other one begins because it's just all blended into one another. We'll bring that out a lot more when we do the second layer. But before that, another thing that we can do is create a bit of partition between them. How you create that partition between them is you start working with the darker color. Once you're happy with the orange that you've laid out, you can rinse your brush. And add that between your two stamens. I'm going to mix my burnt umbo and my sin crimson color with a bit of burnt Cena in there as well. You can see how I'm adding that just to define the shape of the stamen a little bit more. As I do this, it really stands out a lot more and you can really tell, there are deeper deeper. There's a deeper deeper color inside and then the stamen that's outside is receiving a lot more light, so it appears to be lighter. I've added that in between the stamens just to differentiate and make them as individual shapes instead of just being one log. You can do that by just adding a bit of this deeper red color between them. We're going to let this dry and once that tries, and while that dries will work on adding more layers for our petals. All right. Let us go ahead and add in more texture for our flowers, starting off with the outermost petals. Over here, I'm going to be creating a mix of paint that's between your butter consistency and a creamy consistency. It's not entirely creamy, but it's not really buttery that it would create just texture because we wanted to have a blend between a textured effect and a a creamy consistency so that we're able to blend that in. I'm starting off with the lighter color. You can see how I'm adding that in and brushing my brush across the surface or the area very lightly so that I get this beautiful texture on the petal and then loading my brush up with some darker pinks to add more depth into the section or into the petal and slightly blending that in very, very lightly with just my wet brush so that we're not having a lot of water on our brush nor paint. So that we get this beautiful textured effect. If you feel like the blend got rid of the texture, then you can always load up some white and add in a bit of texture on the petal again. You want to be repeating this for all the petals where you start off with the lighter color, and you can see where the placement for the lighter color is from the reference image, but we want to show more at the tip of the petal and the sides have more of your darker color, especially for the petals that are on the outside. I'm just going to carefully start working my way into trying to build more of the lighter tones on the petals and also have the textured effect because we're already done with two layers for the background and now we want to start building on the texture. Once we are done with the lighter colors in case you want to add in some depth. You can always add some texture with the darker color in there as well. You've got this consistency, which is not very, very buttery. Again, keep that in mind. It is still a creamy consistency, but just with a lot less water, and that helps you create a bit of texture on your brush. If you want more control over the way in which you lay your textures, then you can use a smaller size brush because that will give you more control over this particular texture that you're adding in your smaller areas for the petals. All right. So we're going to be repeating that for all the petals, and this is going to take a while so hang in there. And if you feel like you're getting tired midway, then do take a break and come back and start when you that you have the energy to start adding details because adding details can be a bit of a tedious tar, especially if that is not something that you're used to and you're used to creating paintings in one setting, then this could be a good way to learn about patients because that's how it was for me that I learned so much that it's okay if you're not able to create an entire painting in one setting. And it's all about adding details, the more details you add, the more beautiful your painting is going to turn out. All right. Moving on to this next petal, I've added some of the textures with the darker color, even from the bottom part of my petal, and then I'm going to go ahead and add in some texture with the lighter color, almost very, very close to white. It just has a tiny amount of pink in there. Starting from the tip, bringing it down and bringing it and focusing more in the center part of my petal. You'll have to keep going back and forth with this section where you maybe feel like you added too much darker color or too much lighter color, you'll have to correct and rectify as you go. Again, this is something that requires a lot of patience, requires a lot of observation. And just the need to get through this process. Anyway. Moving on to the next petal, over here, we have a lot more of the white petal rights. Over here, instead of adding textures with the white paint. I'm going to be adding texture with the pink paint because I want the pink tone texture over here because we already have the base as the white. Here I'm loading up I brush with some pink paint and brushing it very lightly to create this texture. Especially since we're working with a cold pressed paper, it helps us create beautiful textures on our painting. Once you have the pink a, if you feel like there's too much pink, then you can always go back and add some white in there as well. Again, this process is repetitive, so we're going to be doing that for a couple of petals. T Oh. All. Let's talk about this particular petal where I am going to be adding a lot more texture with pink and the white, which I have done for the other petals as well. But this one, I believe has a lot more of it. I'm going to go ahead and load up my brush with some pink color that we've been using for the deeper textures, and I'm going to go ahead and create this brush stroke in a way that it ends midway. Another thing to keep in mind you don't want all your brush strokes to be even. You can make some that are longer than the other, that adds a lot of variation instead of it being very symmetrical. All right. Now what we're going to do is we are going to go ahead and load up some of the white paint and add in some texture using the white paint in there as well. And make sure that you have a consistency that is between your butter and creamy consistency so that it's not extremely textured, that you're not able to move your paint around, but at the same time, it's not extremely watery or creamy, that you're not able to create textures. I hope that makes sense, right? And once you start adding that in, you get the beautiful textured effect, which are kind of resting one above the other. It's not that all the whites are above the pink, but at the same time, it's not that all the pinks are above the white. So you want to create a variation in which they kind of look very seamlessly blended together. And by blended, I mean, not with water, but the way in which the texture is added. You might do like pink and then do few strokes of white and then go ahead and do a few strokes of pink as well. A lot of back and forth. Similarly with the petal that's next to it, I felt like it could use a lot more of the white or texture, I have gone ahead and added that in there as well. And this petal also could use a lot more of the white textures. I'm going to go ahead and add that in there as well. So a lot more about observation here, right? You are looking at your composition and the way in which the colors are distributed and the area that receives a lot more light and what is darker, and then you're adding the structure and your brush strokes based on that. Anyway, this is it for this lesson. In the next lesson, we'll add in more details to the petals on the inside of the flower. 17. Project Part 9 : Adding Texture on Petals: All. Let's continue the process of adding highlights and billing on the textures that we have been doing in the previous lesson as well. That is adding your lighter colors wherever the light fault or the lighter part of the water lily petals are and the darker bits of it. We're going to be just observing as we see in the reference image. If you're not going to be doing that, then it's completely okay. You can just follow me along. You can see how I'm adding lighter colors or the lightest color at the top of the petal, that is the outer part of the petal, and then the inner part where it meets the center of the flower, you see darker colors. That's like the concept that we are following right here. You might have to keep going back and forth with the color mixes, just remember what the ratio of the paint is. In certain areas, we might have to add more darker colors over here. What I'm doing is the mix the color mix that I've made is a lot deeper and I'm adding the texture using that particular shade and you can see how I'm moving it across the shape of my petal. If you are not happy with the wave the textures look, you can always blend it out. Over here, I'm adding some white textures from the top. One thing to keep in mind is I want to add a white line or a white line that as as a separation between the inside of the petal and the fold that the petal creates, and the little curve that's coming in. The inside of the petal is definitely going to be lighter as compared to the outside, which has the fold. You want to make sure that you are adding a texture in a similar manner. Again, if you feel like you're not happy with the way the texture looks immediately, you can always just use a wet brush to blend it out and then add the texture again over it. All right. Along with the texture at the inside of the petal. I've also added some deeper colors near the fold, and I'm going to blend it out using my wet brush so that there is this beautiful transition between the shade. We've got the lighter color at the top and I transitions into the deeper color as we go towards the bottom of the petal. Again, this entire process is very repetitive where we are adding the texture and then blending in out and building on earlier. Let's move on to the next petal that's right next to it. Now, for this, I believe we could add a little bit of the deeper color as texture because there's already a lot of the white bits in there. That's exactly what I'll do for that. But before we go ahead and do that, I've just blended out the layer at the petal that is below it. Just because I wanted a deeper shade as the blend right below in the bottom part of the petal. Because again, I will show you how we're adding the shadow for each of these petals that is casting on one another when we add a final layer over it for the shadow bit. But right now we're focusing more on the whites and the deeper colors that needs to be added. Anyway. Right now, what I'm doing is creating a darker mix and adding that into the bottom so that inside there is a deeper color. Moving on to the next one, I am going to go ahead and outline this and I've increased the speed here slightly just because there is a repetition of the process. Over here, I've added a bit of the darker pink color and with white, I'm going to add some texture and blend it in Now, again, the entire process is very repetitive, so in the speed slightly. But if you feel like it's going too fast, you can always reduce the speed and it should come back to a normal speed if you reduce it by 0.5. We're just going to cover a few more petals and come back to you when I'm doing something that is completely new or some tip that I need to share that you need to keep in mind. The way in which I'm working on this particular petal again, is the fold, and near the fold on the inside, I've added white strokes and on the outside, you've got the deeper color, just so that the fold really stands up. Now moving on to the petals that are on the inside. Like I mentioned earlier, these petals are a bit deeper in shade. The pink that you need to mix needs to have a lot more of the red and the pink blend, just so that the color is really intense in this particular section. And the way in which I'm adding the color is very similar to the previous time we added the layer where you're making these brush strokes coming in, and then in the middle, you have the white acting as the textured bit, and you can slightly blend it with your wet brush with the background. You're going to be doing that for almost all the petals on the inside where you're outlining the outer section, and then adding whites in the middle and blending it out just so that you have this beautiful textured effect in your petal. You can see how with my brush, I'm just slightly blending it in, creating these brush strokes, creates a little bit of a texture in there. If you feel like there's too much of the white or if there's too much of the pink, you can alternate between the colors and make it stand out more. Another thing that you will keep in mind when you're doing this is you want to fill up any white spaces that you've had because of the statements in front of it. Just make sure that you're covering up any of those white spaces. Again, I'm loading up the pink, making a nice blend, a nice mix on my brush, and I'm going to load it up, making sure that it has that bit of a prime consistency so that I can add those textures, and then bringing in those brush strokes as you can see, filling up any of the extra spaces as you can see, any of those spaces that I see in between the statements that we made before. We're going to cover that in with our rush tkes, leaving a little bit of that white space. Then with my white paint, which is not entirely white. It has a bit of pink in there. I'm going to go ahead and add the texture. This time the brush is really dry. It creates a beautiful textured effect. Then simultaneously, if I need to blend it out, I can always add in some more color or using a wet brush, I can blend it with the background. Again, very similar to the previous petal that we made. This format is what you'll be following for all the petals that you're making on the inside of the flower. Even the ones that are on the top and even the ones that are on the bottom. The process remains the same, obviously, the direction in which the petal is changes. For more references, you can always observe the reference image, the actual flower from the picture that you're painting to understand how those details are portrayed and what details the flower has. You're going to mimic and try to bring that to life on paper. It could be very entirely different from the reference image and even from mine. But this is the process in which you make it. Like I've mentioned earlier, you need to know the techniques, and the way you approach it entirely depends on how you want it to be. Anyway, I'm going to be increasing the speed from here on until I cover most of the petals, and I'll catch you in the last petal. Well, that was quite a process. Working and adding layers to each one of these petals can be very time consuming. That is why I've had to increase the speed in the video. Because of the s's class would be at least three to 4 hours long or even longer. Because it took me so much time to add in all the details in this painting. But at the same time, these details are what really bring out your artwork, and it makes it so precious at the same time because there's so many details that you're observing from a reference image, trying to bring that to life on paper. It is a time consuming process, but at the same time, it's something that you truly learn to enjoy once you have the basics with you and doesn't feel also confusing about where do I begin? What do I So once you have that, this is a process that's so enjoyable, so therapeutic because all those details that you're seeing, you're trying to, like, put that on paper from the techniques that you know and you're trying to achieve the blend in textures, those beautiful textures that you see in a flower. You're trying to achieve that on paper, and I think that so rewarding, even though it takes us a really long time to get the whole thing done. Anyway, I hope you are sorted with all that we've covered so far, which is adding the textures, adding those deeper tones, and adding the lighter bits into your painting. As you can see, once the pink has tried, and as the pink is drying, it brings out the intensity of the color and the flower looks so beautiful and it's really coming to life, and we've got a bit more details to add into our painting. But I'm really liking the way this is turning out for us. Anyway, I'm going to cover in the textures for the last petal, which is on the right hand side. We've got quite a few beautiful textured effect on our water lily. On the entirety of our water lien, we've got a few more details like I've mentioned that we need to add. But this is eight for this part. We're going to let this dry completely, and then we'll add in more details. But before that, we'll add in the colors to the statement. This is it for this lesson and in the next lesson, we'll be adding more details to the stamen part of our flower. 18. Project Part 10 : Details on Stamen: Let's go ahead and work in the central part of our flower. For that, I have my yellow, orange, my red and burnt umber on my palette. What I am going to do is load up some of the orange color, that is the cadmium orange color and mix a bit of white in it just so that it's lighter than the previous layer that we added on it. I'm taking a bit of the burnt sienna color on my brush, and I'm going to mix that in with the orange as well. Here's a swatch of the shade that we've just mixed. It's a mix of your orange, burnt sienna, and white. We're going to load up this paint and start outlining the shapes that we had covered with the orange before. You can see how carefully I am going over the shapes because this time you want to be careful with your brush strokes because you've already done all the hard work in the background and you don't want to create any few new shapes that we might have to cover even though if you do ashes opaque, there's nothing wrong with that. But just slightly try and be careful with the brush strokes that you mix. Here you can see how each of the parts of the statement gets highlighted with a round brush. And it's going in the circular direction all around and the ones in the center are facing inwards. I'm just trying to bring those brush strokes in a similar manner so that they are facing inwards, and I'm making a few tinier strokes and correcting the shapes wherever necessary. Now, if you've caught this lighter orange and it might not seem as light right now, but once it dries, it will be a little bit more lighter than it appears right now. Now the next thing that I'm doing is cleaning my brush and the ends of the stamen, I am blending it in with the background just so that it doesn't look like this layer is just resting flat. On the previous layer that we've had. Next, I've taken my red color, added a bit of burnt umber in there, and I get this particular shade. It's a deep color, which I need to cover all the internal bits and add in a little bit more depth into the section. Using this color, I will cover up all those middle spaces just so that there is a bit of the deeper color in there. You can also add in some more red and a bit of black in there just to get a color that's even more deeper. All right. Once you have placed the color, make sure that you are slightly blending out the ends of it so that it doesn't have any harsh nines and it's not entirely visible for us. You want to make it blended into one another. Next, I'm mixing a bit of my orange color on my palette. To this, I am going to go ahead and add in a tiny amount of white that was already in there. This time it has a little bit more of the orange color in there. Last time it had a bit of burnt sienna. This time it's more orange. I'm going to add this at the tip of the brush strokes that I made earlier. You're not going all the way. You're only focusing more on the tip of it because I want the orange mostly focused on the tip of the stamen. I'm adding it somewhat half it through the brush strokes that we made earlier. Once you add that in, again, with your wet brush, you will just blend it with the layer before it. You can see how there is a bit more definition that's coming in as we add more color over the previous layers and you can clearly distinguish between the shape of the statements. All right. What I'm going to do here is, I am going to add the orange and let it dry before we do anything else. Now that this has dried, I've made another mix, which is a mix of my orange, yellow, and white. A lot more yellow and white and a tiny amount of orange in there. This is the color that I get. Using my size f round brush, what I am going to do is just highlight the tip of my stamen using this color. You can see how it's only the first two or 3 millimeters of the area that I'm covering with this color. Just to highlight that particular bit and show that yes, yellow is the color that's focused on the tip of my statement. I'm also on the ones that are on the inside bit. A little bit on those as well along with the statements on the side and that is a center part of our flower. Carefully adding that in only focused on that tip. Once I'm done with that, I am going to clean my brush, so rinse any pigment on my brush. Using a wet brush, I am just going to go ahead and blend it with the background color. Even the yellow, we are going to slightly blend it with the background. So that it does look like a seamless blend between the yellows, an orange, the deeper colors that we added from before. Just using a wet brush, if you feel like you've moved a lot of pigment, then you're just going to rinse your brush and just for the clean brush. Clean wet brush is all you need to blend it with the background. I'm going to rinse my brush again. This time, I'm going to take a bit of the orange color and add that in areas where I feel like I might have moved a bit of the orange. Anyway. Next, color that I'm making is a mix of more white into the yellow and the orange color from before. This one is going to act like the highlight of the entire thing. Here's a swatch of that color that we're going to use. So you can see how it's a very, very light shade of yellow right. That's what we're going to use. Again, this one is going to cover even lesser surface area as we did before because this is going to be your main highlight. You can see how very carefully going around the sta, the shape, just to highlight each and every section and each and every individual stock, not even stock, I would call it individual statement that we have made each individual strand, and that really brings out the essence of the entire structure together where you can tell. Each and every individual stem away from one another. So you can tell which ones what. But over here, I do feel like I could add a bit of the deeper color. But I'm just going to wait there and before I go ahead and do that, I will blend in the yellow with the background just slightly with my wet brush. I don't need anything else. I just need my clean wet brush so that I'm not moving a lot of the pigment around. I'm letting the pigment be as is, but I'm just blending those harsh lines. Into one another and so that there's a beautiful blend and seamless blend between them. All you need is your wet brush, and you're going to go ahead and blend it in. Ever so slightly, don't move the pigment or the layer that you've added around a lot. Anyway, I really like the way this looks. Once this is done, you're going to let this dry completely before you do anything else. Now that this has dried completely, it's time for us to add in some deeper color. Over here, I've mixed my red paint with a bit of burnt sienna this time, and I'm getting this deep deep color that works perfectly for the inner parts of this stamen section. If there is wherever there is a little bit of space that's left that you could add, to distinguish between each of these individual stocks, then you're going to go ahead and add that in. This is going to help you separate these sections from each other and bring out a little bit more definition into your section. You're just going to go ahead and add in tiny amounts of this deeper color between those individual statements that you've made. Once you're happy with this, we're going to let this dry and move on to the next bit, which is adding shadows into your section. Now, to add shadows, one thing that really works is, again, you're going to make that deep red color, which is a mix of sarin crimson and magenta. You're going to mix that and to that, I've added a tiny amount of burnt umber just to make the color a lot more deeper. Let me just show you a swatch of it. Here's a swatch of that color that I'll be using. And using this color, we are going to go ahead and add in some shadows and deeper bits into our painting. You're going to make sure that the consistency is like the milky consistency. I'm going to add that in areas that receive shadow from, let's say the petal that is above it. To blend it out slightly into the background, I will be using a clean wet brush. Around this particular petal, it use it has a bit of shadow. I'm adding that in and blending, adding brush dropes, and blending it with my clean brush. Even here it could use a little bit of shadow to bring out the separation between each individual petal. You need to have those shadows to be able to say what's in front and what's in the back. Again, even if you notice very carefully in a reference, image, you can clearly tell there is a difference between the petals. You can tell which ones in front, which ones at the back, which one is casting a shadow. It's very important for us to add in those deeper or deeper colors. I'm just going to individually add these brush strokes and blend it into the previous layer. You're going to go ahead and have two brushes at this time, one loaded with this deep paint, and one that is going to help you blend it into the background, which is just clean. It doesn't have anything on it. It's just a wet brush. If again, you feel like you're loading a lot of pigment on that wet brush, rinse it and just use your damp brush for that. All right. So to create that separation between the petals, you're going to look at the reference image, and if you're not, then you're just going to imagine the petals that are inside will cast a bit of shadow on the petals that are in the next row, and that's how you're going to go ahead and differentiate between these petals and add in deeper colors in them. Even the colors that are Even the petals that are behind it are going to be having some shadow from the petal that is in front of it. Keep that in mind. Over here, there is a petal above it. This particular section is going to receive some deeper shade. I'm slightly going to add that in and blend it into the previous layer with my wet brush. Now, carefully loading my brush with some paint. I'm going to rinse my brush here and make a very, very thin consistency because this particular area that I want to cover needs a thin de like consistency for the shadows. Because it's very evident, but it's not blended into the background. I want it to be very, very light, and very, very gentle with the way in which I add the shadow and be very careful when I add the shadow in this particular area because this shade is white. The shade of the leaf is white, and you want to be careful in those particular areas. Even here, I'm very lightly going to add in some of the pigment, and then using my wet brush, my damp brush, I am going to go ahead and blend it into the background. You can see how I'm being very gentle, very careful because you don't want to reactivate or mess around with the textures that you've worked on before. Over here, I added just a tiny amount and then I'm going to blend it with my damp brush. Sometimes it's not going to be very evident when it's wet. But once it dries, it will have an effect. It will dry down to be slightly darker. Now this is something that will come to you to understand what colors dry lighter and what colors dry darker when it comes to painting with quash. But give us some time and you always want to make any sort of judgment once your paint is entirely dry, especially when it comes to painting with a. All right. I'm just going to go ahead and outline even though folds a little bit just so that there is a clear difference between these folds, and you can really identify how the folds are and the way in which they move. You don't want to outline the entire fold because remember we added lighter tones of the pink at the top. Always keep that in mind. You're just going to add in those deeper colors, especially towards the bottom of the petal. So I'm carefully just adding that in, adding those deeper colors in and blending that in with the previous layer. You can also add deeper colors in areas where you think on the outside, you need to add it. Go ahead and add in some deeper tones there as well. This is completely a personal preference here, but the idea is to add in some deeper colors in your painting. All right. This is it for this lesson. I'll see you in the final lesson for this class project, where we're adding finer details. 19. Project Part 11 : Adding Final Details: All right. We're nearing the end, and what we're going to do here is add in any final details that we need to add in our painting. For now, the final details that I'm going to work on is adding just white highlights in my painting. You are going to pick the section that receives the maximum amount of light in your painting and add in the whites mice buttery ture and that's going to create this beautiful textured effect and highlights into your painting. The more dry your brush is, the more texture you're going to receive and the more natural your brush draws are going to look. I'm going to focus more on the tip as you can see, and I'm going very lightly. I'm not really adding a lot of texture and a lot of highlights in my painting because this is the highlights are something that you only add in the areas that receives the maximum amount of light and it's the shiniest part of your object. I'm just focusing very lightly on the textures that I add. If I feel like there's too much texture that I'm also, you can brush it across with your fingers just to blend that in. I'm not using any water here as you can see. I'm just using my dry brush and I'm adding the textures accordingly. If you want to look and observe from a reference image, please take some time to see and notice where the lightest part of your water lily is and you will see that in the image in the reference image and you can add your highlights accordingly. Take a moment, observe and add in those highlights. It really helps you understand the way in which you're supposed to be placing these highlights. Again, it doesn't have to be exactly the same, or neither your painting is an exact replica of the reference image. But again, when you observe it, you can clearly distinguish where the lightest parts need to be. I am focusing more on the tips around the folds in the central part of the petal, especially in the bottom as you can see. I'm focusing my highlights mostly in those areas. And again, to keep in mind. It's a thick creamy consistency, thick buttery consistency of my pain. I'm just adding textures in areas which needs more white. I'm adding that in. But again, keeping in mind that I'm very mindful about the way in which I add these highlights. I'm not using any water to blend it in with any of the previous layers. That's why you need to be a little bit mindful about the way in which you add the highlights. Anyway, this process again, requires you to observe the reference image, understand where the lighter parts are going to be and add in your highlights accordingly. I'm just going to let you observe how I'm doing it and wherever necessary, I'm also blending it with my finger. But see how I do it and then add these highlights into your painting accordingly. All right. I'm really happy with the way these highlights have made my subjects stand out so much. That is why this is probably the last thing that you do when you're painting that is adding in your highlights to make your subjects stand out. I'm really happy with the way the flower looks, but I feel like there's a tiny tag that I can do. While this layer dries, let me just show you how you can tweak that slightly. Over here, I have a mix of my lightest green color along with gray, and I've added a lot more water into the mix so that's a very, very thin milky consistency. I'm adding that to the bottom part of this petal just to show in that fold. Even in the reference image, this part of the petal is a bit green. It has a slight flight amount of grains. I'm not really going to add so much of it. I'm just going to slightly add that a and blend it using my brush. Again, if you don't want to do it, you don't have to do it. I just wanted to add that tiny, tiny amount of green in there. It was just me who wanted to add that particular detail in there. Then I've also added some white over it, a dry textured white over it, just to show that this is not the final layer, the highlights the final layer. Anyway, I'm going to clean my brush, and now we're going to add in a few details for the leaves. Not much here. I've mixed my white paint with the lighter green that we had added from before. Creating this mix, I am going to go ahead. Let me just watch this color out for you real quick. This is what the color looks like. It's a very, very light green gray color, if you'd like to call it. It's a very light green shade. I'm going to add in a bit of water so that it's this beautiful, workable consistency. And I am going to load up my brush with this paint. Wherever we had those taps from earlier when we were paint those leaves, you're going to create a few more taps in those exact locations, but with this lighter color. And you're not going to overdo this sep, you're not going to have a lot more of this highlighted dots. You're going to preserve the spaces from before, and you're just going to add a few highlighted dots in this section. Make sure that you're not overdoing this step because sometimes there is this tendency that we end up overdoing a lot of these finer details. This comes with when you're painting a lot, you know, I think I need to stop right here. But it's also very easy to get carried away with all these different details that you see in a painting. That's why I also say that whenever you're painting something that has so many details, it's okay to take a break and come back to it later once you've cleared your head and you come back with a fresh perspective so that you know, I think I needed to stop right there, and I'm glad I took a break because it's always very easy to get lost in all those details that you find in nature and in your reference images. All right. I've added all these final taps as dots. Very few I'm not overdoing this step. Once we're done with that, we are going to let the section dry completely. All right. Just to create these final taps on my painting. What I'm going to do is load up my brush with some paint and tap it against another brush to create these really fine dots. Make sure that you're covering your water lily while you're doing this with maybe a tissue or a rough piece of paper so that you don't end up splattering any finer dots on them. You can see how I'm struggling with my little rectangular paper trying to cover my water lily, but make sure that you are covering up your water lily or your flower where the green is not present so that you don't end up splattering anything on there. But in case you do you do end up with a few splatters. It's all right. You can always blend it using your water. All right. Now the next thing that we are going to do. Finally, is just work a little bit on the water because I feel like it looks a little bit messy. I'm just going to reduce this step with the same gray that we had used earlier. I'm going to define this shape a little bit better. But by defining I mean, I'm just going to add those lighter colors, wherever those lighter colors were present. I'll also add in some darker colors and then we're going to create a blend and hope that this looks a little bit less messier than it is right now. So you can see how I'm applying this gray color, very similar in those places where we had those grays from the other layer that we had done on there as well. You're just going to carefully add that in understanding the placements of it. Here, honestly, I'm not really following the reference image. I'm just doing something of my own, just to have a little bit of that unevenness on the water and hoping that it looks and matches the aesthetic of my painting. So yeah, this is exactly what I'm going to go with randomly trying to add in those lines just for the lighter bits of my painting. I can see how I've added some right below the folds as well, very, very carefully. And what I am going to do right now is once I'm done with the lighter bits, I am going to go ahead and add in the darker bits. I'm just carefully going around those areas which require those lighter areas on the water. Once I'm happy with the way that looks, I am going to go ahead and add in some darker bits. Now, in case you didn't want to do the step, you don't have to. You can always just skip this if you were happy with the background that you had created from the previous layer, or you could just redo that step once more and let that be. I felt like I needed to redo the section, maybe adding some more darker areas because I felt like this looked a lot more gray. Like a lot more grayer than how I wanted it to look. I'm just going to go ahead and add some darker colors in there. The darker color is a mix of your plaque and your brown color. I'm just going to spread that in between the spaces that had the gray just so that you are placing those two colors together, and then we'll blend that in and hopefully everything is going to look nice. Carefully adding the darker colors in between the shape that we had used or made earlier. We're adding that in filling up the sections because you can see over here it looks a lot more gray right. It could use a little bit more of the black, darker color in there even towards the left side in that section where there is a tiny tiny partition of the water that you're seeing, even those eos, I could add in a bit more black. I really like the way that I've added all the blacks and the grays here. Now what I'm going to do is just rinse my brush. You can use a flat brusher, you can use a round brusher completely your choice. With my clean paint or clean water, rather clean and clear water, I'm going to just blend it together. Making sure that I end up rinsing my brush each time I move the pigments around. I'm going to speed up the process here because we're just blending these two colors together. But make sure that you're ransing your brush each time you move the pigments around. Once the previous layer has tried up, it's time for us to add in the final shadows just to define the shape a little bit more. I'm going to go ahead with this deep black color, which is a mix of black and brown shade. I'm going to create the shadow, especially around the edges of the lower parts of the leaves and the petals of our water lily. You can see how carefully outlining this. We have done this in the previous lesson as well. We're just repeating that step and this time, making it a little bit more defined, and then we will blend it slightly with the background. But again, we are slightly defining the shape here and the shadow that each of these petals cast on the water. So we are focusing more on the lower parts of the petals like I had told you, which touch the water, not the top ones, because they're in the air obviously, they're not going to cast any shadow. Along with that, we will focus more on the leaves on the top part. I've added some more shadows here. We'll also add in some shadows on the leaves on top, especially around the folds. You can see I'm adding the shadows, understand the placements for this. Similarly in your painting, you can add in the shadows. I'm also adding some on the left of the sleave, some here at the bottom, leaving that little gray space right under that. Then even around the fold here, I'm adding a bit of shadow and around the fold here. All right. Once I'm done adding the shadow, you can see how clear date has these harsh lines. Using myth, clean wet damp brush, I'm going to go ahead and clear out the edges just so that they are not that sharp and look like they are slightly blended into the background. Again, very repetitive process. You're just going to do that for all of them. Ensuring that your background has slightly blended in the previous layer and you don't have these harsh lines. I'm really happy with the way this looks right now. We're going to let this dry. The last thing that we are going to do is sp in a few splatters on the water as well. What I have done here is created this gray mix with white, your black and brown color, a lot more white this time just so that it's a lot more gray. What I'm going to do here is cover up my leaves. I'm just using my tissue. I'm going to cover up the leaves and this rectangular piece of paper, and I'm going to splatter some dots on the water as well, just to finer touches. You don't have to do it if you don't want to add in any splutter. I feel like the splutters were calling me, so I had to do it. But again, this is something that's a personal choice. I wanted to add in some splutters on the water. So I went ahead and did that. Again, personal choice, if you don't want to, you don't have to. M. Once you're done with this plata, you're going to let this dry for a couple of minutes. Once your painting has completely dried, it's time for us to peel the tape off. You can see how I peel it against the paper away from the paper so that I don't end up tearing my painting. And bringing out these beautiful edges the entire painting really helps the painting up. I feel like I'm such a big fan of these edges of these tape down edges. I feel like your painting looks so neat when you have these edges on there. I'm just carefully painting the tape off and you can see how the painting really stands out a lot more right. I am absolutely in love with the way this or the final look of this painting is. Honestly, I enjoyed the process of filming this for this class. So let's sign our painting and have a closer look at all the details that we were able to capture. All right. Let me bring it up close and show you all the details that we were able to capture together. Let me focus. If we were able to capture these beautiful textures on the flower, the leaves, even the water, we were able to capture some essence of the different shades that we see on the water. But I absolutely love the way the water ly looks with all those different textures that we were adding together. I hope you enjoyed painting along with me, and this is it for the project lesson. I hope you're happy about this painting. I will see you in the next lesson where I share my final thoughts about this class. 20. Final Thoughts: And this is a two guys. Thank you so much for joining me in this class. I hope you enjoy the painting process and learn something new about wash and florals from this one. Let me know if you'd like to paint a different flower next time, and I might make this into a series. If you've painted along with me, don't forget to upload your class projects under the project and resources section of this class and leave a little review down for me as well as it motivates me and helps me understand what works for you guys as well. If you have any doubts and questions about this class or Bosh as a medium or want to talk about art in general, you can post it under discussions under this class or DME personally on the Simplesc on Instagram, and I'll be happy to answer your questions. I believe this is it from my side. I shall see you in the next class soon. Bye bye.