Loose Floral Play! Watercolor OR Gouache Painting FUN! Modern Flower Techniques

1. Class Trailer: Let's explore the fun and playful world of loose florals, from soft petals, to dreamy leaves, to bold strokes, and vibrant colors. This class will take you on a journey of self-discovery, creative play, and we are going to be fearless, whether you're an experienced painter, or just starting out, this bite-size comprehensive class is for you. Hi, my name is Yasmina, and I've been painting for over a decade. I want to show you how easy it can be, and how fun. My style is loose and dreamy, and lately more loose. One of my favorite things to paint loosely is, you guessed it, florals. I want to push the boundaries loose floral play even more, and I want to share that joy with you. We're going to begin by covering everything you need to know from recommended supplies, to loose brush plate, to the wet on wet technique, and then we'll go over tons of flour ideas that will inspire you to create your own unique florals from your imagination. We'll cover three main styles. The doodling, the delicate, and the loose. We'll also combine all three. We're also going to learn how to paint fun leaf, and vases. Then we'll learn how to build your visual vocabulary, by studying more flowers. We're going to talk about finding inspiration, or even cover some composition tips. I'll introduce you to one of my favorite waste paint. We're going to make tons of tiny little floral bouquets that are just so cute, and so quick to make, so we can make tons of them. For the big finale, you're going to choose your favorite tiny piece, and transform it into a larger finished painting using either watercolor or gouache. I personally will do one in each medium to show you the possibilities. Speaking up, you can use watercolor or gouache in this class. You don't need both. This class is super whimsical, fun, and freeing. It's designed to make you a floral play pro, and equip you with lots of skills that you can use in your other art as well. From imagination, to intuitive painting, to being okay with making ugly art along the way, we are going to grow as artists. I'm so excited to share this class with you. Are you ready to explore the limitless possibilities of loose florals and have tons of fun along the way? Join me in this super exciting and inspiring class. Grab your brush, and let's play. 2. Quiet Your Inner Critic: Hi, welcome to the class. I'm so excited that you joined. But first, let's talk about the inner credit. You might have heard this term already. It's just the voice in your head that's meaning critical of everything you create. It's like, oh, that's ugly. You can never be a good artist. You suck at this. Just a mean voice. We don't want him. What we're going to do is when we hear that voice, we're going to say shhh, we're just going to have fun and play in this class. We're going to learn a lot and you're going to learn how to let go and be intuitive with your work. It's just so important to not worry about results. Because guess what? Sometimes you make ugly stuff and sometimes you make pretty stuff. But you'll always be able to enjoy the process if you choose to. But if you choose to listen to that inner voice, it's going to hold you back. You're not going to create as much art. You're going to be afraid to try new things. It's just not what we want for this class. This class is more about being intuitive and free styling and having fun and experimenting. To do all that, you have to say no to the inner critic and just have fun and play. I also find in my more serious work, the more I let the inner critic takeover and the more I criticize and analyze what I'm doing in the moment with my paints, the less fun I have in the moment and the less the results look good. Usually they don't look great at all actually. I'm going to just be okay with making mistakes, with making ugly art. In fact, one out of two of my pieces, as you will see in the future lessons, don't turn out so good because I like to be loose and that's normal. If maybe only one out of five of your pieces looks good, that's fine too. You shouldn't try to put such high expectations on yourself. Everything you paint teaches a lesson, you're always getting experience points and leveling up, even if you're not aware of it. Subconsciously, you're picking up all techniques and ways of painting that you can use in the future. You will only improve with time as better to have lots and lots of practice with painting lots of different pieces than just painting one perfect piece and obsessing over it. You're going to learn a lot more from quantity, not quality, especially if you're a beginner. Look for just one fun technique that you learn from every piece and look for something in there that teaches you something, even if you don't like the results. I'm excited to start. Are you? Let's dive in. 3. Supplies: The supplies for this class are so simple, you just need watercolor or gouache paints, and I'll talk about the difference between each in a second. You'll need brushes. Any size or type is just fine, but if you're looking for a brush just for this class, I'd recommend one or two round brushes, a bigger one for bigger things and a smaller one for detail. You will need a smaller brush for the tiny paintings we will be doing. A Size 4 round brush is perfect or you could do a two or even a zero, but any brush is fine even those really cheap ones that come in sets will work well. You'll see me use various brushes in this class and I'll usually name them. Paper is a necessity and this needs to be thicker, especially if you're using watercolor. If you are using watercolor, I would go with at least 140 pound paper, but if you're using gouache, you can get away with it a little thinner, as low as 100 pounds. The last few things are a jar of water to clean your brush, a paper towel or cloth to control how much water is on your brush and to also help clean it, and scissors or a paper cutter will be used to make tiny pieces of paper to paint on. You can also use a simple ceramic plate to mix your colors on if you wanted. You also have the option of using anything else, like I will use color pencils in one of the lessons, and you can use any mixed media supplies that you have. You can use pastels, ink, anything you like. Don't feel limited in this class, I just want you to do your own thing and have fun with it. Another optional thing if you go with watercolor paint, is just white gouache, or a white ballpoint pen, or a Posca marker, or even white acrylic paint, just something that can add white on top of your paintings, this can really add some pizzazz to your florals. White gouache is my preference especially for this class because you can mix it with any watercolor color to make a lighter opaque version of that color in case you need it to fix a mistake, or add detail, or to paint on top of a dark glare, since with watercolor we can only go from light to dark and not vice-versa because it's transparent. This is the main difference between gouache and watercolor. Gouache is opaque, so you can paint with a lighter color on top of a darker one. Even though watercolor has this limit, some people prefer watercolor to gouache or have gouache, not watercolor, whatever you have is fine because if you dilute gouache, it looks and behaves a lot like watercolor. In fact, you can't really tell the difference, just the particles are bigger. Another fun perk with gouache is you can paint with it on a dark background like you'll see me do in the final project. I personally like to use both mediums, and it's up to you which one you want to follow the class with. You can also use both if you have them, but you shouldn't have to go out there and purchase the other medium if you don't have it, you can use either or, it doesn't matter. The majority of the class will be done with watercolor, but everything I do with it can also be done with gouache. The only reason I chose watercolor is because I know that more people have it than gouache, but I'll also show you a gouache painting in the final projects. You'll have an idea of how you can use these properties to paint loose florals as well because you can use all the techniques from watercolor with gouache, but not all of gouache techniques with watercolor. Gouache has its own unique properties. But don't worry about all that, just paint with me. If you're curious about my current favorite supplies, I have an extensive list on my website that breaks them all down for you. Now that we got our supplies, let's talk about being loose with our brush. 4. Getting Loose!: Before we jump into painting our florals, let's talk about getting loose with our brush. In this class, we will play a lot. I want you to grab all the brushes you have. It's okay if you only have one round brush or something or any brush, just master that one. Also you can use your scrap paper or the back sides of failed paintings if you wish to save paper. Have some fresh water and grab a color and let's play. First off, I want to talk about dry brush technique. This is where we show the texture of the paper by using very little water and more paint on our brush. Having a dry brush gives us this rough texture. The more water you have on your brush, the less texture you get. If you paint quickly, you get more texture as well. Texture is super fun to incorporate in your work, especially if you're painting loose. If you want to master it, just play with your water to paint ratio to get it as textured as you want. This is all just practice and play. Here I have more water on my brush and there's much less texture. If you don't want any texture at all, make sure your brush has enough water on it and just move your hand slower. This is a cat's tongue brush. I rarely use it. I think I've used it twice, but it's so fun to see what it can do and get out of my comfort zone. Take whatever brush you're using and use it at different angles with different speeds and just be loose with it. See what strokes you can make. These scribbles may not look like much, but they can make some fun flowers and leaf shapes. Learning how to paint quickly and loosely starts with gaining confidence and letting go by practicing, by getting to know your brush. See what happens when you just paint with the tip of your brush and edge of your brush and then press down on it a little bit, press down on it more, press down on it a lot, see what happens, what strokes you make with each press. Usually it'll go from really thin to really thick. I also want to point out that when you paint slow, you can control your brush easier. Here I'm making this line straight. It was no big deal, it was easy. But in this second example, even though I tried harder because I went fast, the results were still crooked. We are letting go of control when we paint quickly. But nothing is stopping you from painting some parts fast to make it more loose and other parts slow to make it more perfect. The contrast makes it more interesting to look at. Now I grabbed a flat brush, I can make a very thick and uniform line with it and a thinner ones on its side. I played with trying to make it feel loose with a thicker line. Again, just get to know your brushes, anything you have. Here I grabbed a very small round brush, which you can use for fine detail. If you're a beginner, I recommend you have one because it can be hard to just use the tip of your brush like I usually do. I like to use it for stems if I want a dooly line, but I usually end up just using one larger round brush and you can do so too with practice. If you were to master just one brush, the best would be a round brush. Next is my normal round brush that I've had for a very long time. It's seen a lot of use. The point is not as thin as it used to be, but I still love it for looser paintings like florals. If you want a super sharp point, I recommend this Trekell brush. It's wonderful for making details and also you can make thicker strokes with its body. But I actually really like warn brushes for loose florals. I think they make them more fun and whimsical. Don't worry about having cheap brushes. Again, I just play with my brush and just get comfortable with it. See which brush you prefer the most. Maybe you will try different ones with each painting. Maybe you'll just use one, whatever you like to do. But getting comfortable with your brushes helps you to just play and do your own thing when you're ready. If all your brush strokes are very clean and neat and perfect, try to loosen up. Try to just flick them with your hand and see what happens. Quicker brushstrokes have more life in them. They're more fun and whimsical. It's okay if you're a perfectionist and that's all you feel comfortable with, but I recommend that you just play and try different ways of painting and see what sticks and what you enjoy doing the most because you never know. Sometimes perfectionist need to let go in watercolor. That's it. We just practiced using our brushes and there's no right way to do this. We're just getting comfortable and learning what strokes our brushes can make and what we enjoy to do the most. Now let's talk about an important concept in watercolor that we should keep in mind. 5. Wet on Wet VS Wet on Dry: Whether you're using watercolor, or gouache, there is one thing I want you to be aware of. This does not apply to dry media, or paints like acrylic paint, or oil paints, just to watercolor, or gouache. If you wet an area with water, or wet paint and then add color, the color will spread out to wherever there is water. This is called wet on wet and makes gorgeous bleeds. You can add multiple colors, they'll all mix and mingle. On the other hand, if the paper is dry and then you add color, it will stay exactly where you put it. This is called wet on dry and you use this to add detail, or make clean and perfect strokes. How much the paint spreads also depends on how wet the page is. Here I wait a little bit longer for it to dry and when I add the details, you can see it spreads less. If I want it to be completely crisp, I need to wait for it to fully dry before adding another layer. Also watch out for your paints still being wet even when you don't use too much water. If you really want to check for wetness and want to be neat, you can check out glossier paint is, water is reflective and dry paint is not. Here the paint was still wet in some parts and dry in others. I think this actually makes a really fun and gorgeous look. I encourage you to be more loose and bold when you paint and let the paint do its own thing. But this is something important to be aware of and can frustrate a lot of beginners. I think this is a secret magical feeling of watercolor, or gouache. We play with wet on wet, and it's especially useful in loose florals. But one thing to be aware of is if you're working with a lot of water, maybe cut back a little bit because when you add more detail to your painting while it's still wet, you don't want it to go everywhere. You want to control it. Just get used to that water to paint ratio and how what your pages, or how much the paint will spread, you'll learn how to do all that if you just practice. You can also just make loosen dreamy florals with no details and lots of wet on wet play, or you can make them just detail with no wet on wet play. You can do whatever you want. I just wanted you guys to be aware of what happens with this effect. Now let's paint some flowers. 6. Flowers: It's time for flowers. This is actually my second watercolor florals class. The first one we concentrated on using references. I'm playing with what we see. In this one, I want to paint from our imaginations because all of us have an idea what a flower looks like even if we never painted one before. Even if those ideas are childish they can be super cute when done with watercolor. But before I show you examples, I do want to say that I have lots of experience setting and painting flowers so it's so easy for me to make them up. But if you've never painted them before, it can be challenging to just make him from a void. Nothing is stopping you from using references of flowers or getting ideas of shapes from other artists as long as you don't copy them directly but just get inspired by them and put a fun twist on what they did. I will talk more about finding inspiration in a future lesson. But I believe anyone can make flowers, it just takes practice. So don't be scared and try it, and remember that no matter where you're starting with your skills you can only go up from here. Let's start with some simple ideas. Grab a round brush that you're comfortable with if you want to follow along. Again you can use the backs of failed paintings which I encourage you to do to save paper and not to worry about practicing and not making something pretty. We're just learning. Have press your brush and make a bunch of quick lines that meet in a center point and you've got yourself a daisy shape. You can always add in more colors while the paint is still wet for that fun wet-on-wet effect. I love to do this to make my color schemes more interesting. You can also first paint in the middle in this case a circle and then add the petals around it. Notice how I drew them with open shapes. I call this a doodly flower because we didn't fill in all the shapes. It's like a doodle but with paint. You can make your petals longer or shorter or thinner or thicker whatever you like. The next one is just making up circular feeling shapes by using the natural shape of your brush. You can just do circles but they won't feel as organic. Just you see shapes with your brush. You just got to try it until it feels right and there's no right way to do it so just have fun with it. You can leave white space between petals or make one pedal come out or whatever you like. The next one is like the first one but instead of making them all around we're rounding out the petals as they go out to meet at one point on both sides. I also made my line thinner by not pressing on my brush as much. Here's another doodly flower idea. I love doodly flowers. Start with a small daisy shape and add lines all around it a couple of times. You can make a huge flower with this technique or you can do half-daisy shapes and little dots for the feeling of tiny flower clusters. Or just press down your brush and randomly put shapes down facing random directions and make a triangle outline of the shapes as I did here. A lot of flowers look like this as well. Or you can make longer shapes that are similar but are very close together imagining a single stem and boom this looks like lavender because we use purple but you can do any color you like, how flibby believable? If you're going to add a stem to a shape like this, I like to do it after I paint in the flowers. I think it makes it more dimensional. You can wait for the paint to dry if you like but I also like it bleeding. But I definitely like to add stems later especially if I want to make flowers overlap. Planning the flowers first helps do that. It's okay either way, it depends on your style. Now notice how at the top flower the paint was still wet and the green bled into the flower slightly. I love this effect. Next, we got a quick brush-play mess but our brains will automatically think flower. This is what we did when we were getting to know our brushes. You can really make any shapes you like as long as they're a little bit circular and organic. Now if we add more details [inaudible] really look like flowers. I use wet on wet to add a second layer of a different flower shape and look how dimensional and fun that is. I loved the wet and wet play here as well. Here I use the brush in an angular way to make a circular shape. To me, this mimics how petals look like in a rose of similar flowers. By using quick strokes, it makes it feel more alive and adds a touch of texture. Again here I used quick strokes to make a flower like the top one but with less petals. See how different they feel. This bottom one has more texture to it and just feels more loose than the top one. Lastly, I had fun with this childish doodle but it's so cute. Your flowers can be super simple if you like. You can always go in later with your layers fully or mostly dry, and add details with a darker color. We can only work from light to dark with watercolor but if you're working with gouache, you can do it vice versa. If you're planning on adding detail later and you're working with watercolor, it's always good to start lighter and then work your way up to being darker. But it's okay if you make a mistake. I'll show you in a future lesson how I would use white gouache to fix it. Now I'm adding just a few simple details here and there and look how much more dimensional all the flowers feel. I especially want you to see how the lavender feels more full in 3D by adding a simple shading with the same color. I also think yellow can be a superpower with floral planting. When you add yellow it makes everything feel more bright. Since it's such a light color, it doesn't take away from the main flowers too much but adds a lot of pizzazz. I love to use yellow for filler flowers or centers of flowers but that's just a tip. If you want to practice this more grab a blank page and fill it with flowers from your imagination. I recommend you just use one color because then you won't be distracted by color and you can just focus on the shapes of your flowers which are very important. Color can be done in lots of different ways. But if you get the shapes right it will always look good. You can be as playful and whimsical as you like. It's always good to practice like this before doing final pieces because you'll make the mistakes that you're going to make when you practice and you'll learn a lot and then in your final pieces, you'll make less mistakes. If you've never painted florals, I encourage you to just give it a go and have fun. You can be as playful and whimsical as you like with your shapes and you can even pause here and try to copy what I did and then also try to make up your own. Play with line, with shape, with the way that the flowers are bending with the shape of the silhouette of the flowers or the petals, or the shape they're all making together, or is it a bell? Is it an open-petaled flower? What is it? Just be playful, make it any way you want it to be, and have fun. This page is just basic ideas but I'm going to break it down to three main styles that we can use in this class. Let's get into that. 7. The 'Doodly' Style: The first style is called the doodly style, and I showed it to you already. Let's look at a few more examples. For this style, I recommend a smaller brush. I'll be using a Size 3, 0 they're round brush for the first two examples to show how a smaller brush would give you more detail, but you can use any brush you like. Like I said before, just a tip of a round brush is fine. With this one, we start with a simple center with a circle and dots around it. Notice, I'm not trying to be super neat and perfect, but you can if you want to. I just personally like this messy style. Then I hinted the petals with simple lines that are a little wavy. Having more detail like this can be super fun. The second example, I'm doing an outline of a flower shape that I showed earlier, and the look is very different and feels elegant, doesn't it? I kept all the shapes very rounded. This is still a very simple shape. Adding details like circles and outline leaves always makes things fun too, especially in this style. Now, I'm going to switch over to a Size 6 round brush. Here I start with loose strokes that meet in the middle point and are thicker in the front, and then I add in some circles for the middle. Now, I'm just using the tip of the brush and I go back in and add detail using a darker color. This is a nice way to layer from light to dark and to add detail. If you don't want any bleed, let the previous layer dry fully before doing this, but I don't mind a little bit of bleed. But if you're having a lot of bleed, you're probably using too much water on your first layer or just let it dry a little bit longer. This style tends to look more dimensional even though it's loose and doodly. You can do this with any shape. Just do a really, really light layer, and then just add detail with the doodly style. Next, I did a rose shape by drawing lots of half circles and it's really loose and I'm just making it detailed in the middle and then going out. These are just wobbly lines attached. Then I paint in the bottom part of it and that's because the half-oval shape is something I see roses a lot and it gives it more dimension. Then I go back in and thicken out all the lines and add more. If you change your shapes while the paint is still wet, you can't tell, but I recommend working quickly if you do this because it can dry faster than you think. I added a darker color in some parts and even more petals. Notice how I utilize the whitespaces to show separation between the petals. If you make less whitespace, it look more organic. If you make more, it look more doodly. I added in some not filled-in stem leaves. I'll show you a few more rose examples in one second. This next one is done with super loose and quick strokes. You can work quickly and achieve this look, and it's built on imperfection. I add little centers with blue and some details plus leaves and stems done in the same way. This can be more cartoony, or childish, but I think it's so fun to paint like this, and the results can be so cute. You can do this with any flower shapes you like. This last example is more mixed media and it's inspired by my previous class in botanical doodling. I'm going to be using waterproof ink, but you can also use graphite pencil or colored pencil or marker, whatever you like. You just put it down first and make a little doodle of a flower, and then you add watercolor on top to define it, or you could do the watercolor first and then add ink on top to define it. You can even start with just a watercolor blob and then make up a flower shape on top. This is a very fun look and it can be super creative to do. If you want to use ink in this class, go ahead. Nothing is stopping you from playing with supplies. Now, I wanted to show you some more rose examples using the doodly style, because it's such a versatile style. I love to play with how dark or light my paint is, layering and using wet on wet or even quick and messy strokes when I do the doodly style. The sky is the limit. Look how different all these roses feel, and look how fun they are. These were all done with simple strokes and were done very quickly. I encourage you to play with whatever you want to do. You don't have to follow my flowers exactly, I encourage you just to see what you like and just do your own thing, but you can also copy me. That's just fine. Now that we learned about the doodly style, let's talk about the delicate style. 8. The Delicate Style: The delicate style is more about fine detail and precision and sweetness and dreaminess. I will show examples of the size 6 round brush, but this time using one that has a very pointy tip so I can get those nice and thin details and stems. I personally love it for this style, but you can still use any brush you like, or use a bigger round brush and then a tiny one for detail. In fact, I recommend this if you're a beginner and that's hard for you to use the tip of your brush. But you can look at the delicate style with any brush. It just helps be able to make thin strokes. So we're going to use the side of our round brush to make these thicker strokes that are touching some parts and not others tainted a floral shape. Again, we're just making up the circular shape and we're pretending there's petals on the outside. The trick is not to leave too much white space and to make your strokes random. This just takes a little bit of practice so don't worry if you don't get it right the first time. The shape can be very different. I mean, there's all kinds of different shapes with flowers. Next, I use a similar technique, but this time in a circular motion to add some leaves and I add a stem with just the tip of my brush, very thin. Notice how sweet and delicate it feels because of the contrast of loose shapes plus a super thin and careful stem. I also vary the size of the leaves and add little dots to make it more dreamy. The delicate style also thrives in keeping it simple by leaving more white space around the flowers and shapes. If we overdo it with the delicate style, it doesn't feel as delicate. It's good to keep your bouquet smaller with this style. Next, I went in with a darker color to define some parts, and the wet on wet effect made it even more dreamy. But notice how I try not to overdo it, which requires me to hold back a lot with adding things. That's probably my biggest weakness is overdoing it. We can finish here, very simple and dreamy. This next example is of a flower cluster. I'm using the tip of my brush to make tiny flower shapes with four or five petals. Notice how I vary their sizes and don't do each one exactly the same. So they all look like they're facing different directions and they just feel more organic. You can vary the shapes of the petals and the size of the petals as well. I also use the paint on my brush until it's very light because the more you paint with your brush, the less paint you have on your brush and the lighter it gets. But then I just pick up some more. Again, it's dark and then goes lighter. This adds a nice variation value as I paint my flowers, and this makes it feel more dimensional. I add even more tinier, tinier flowers all around. This really helps to get that delicate feeling. Notice how the shape is again, a long triangle. A lot of flowers look like this. I know this from study, adding delicate stems here and there, adds the delicate style. This time I did lose doodly leaves by doing ragged the outlines and it looked pretty good together. Always mix styles. Again, little dots add to the dreaminess. For this next example, we're going to do some bell-shaped flowers with two longer strokes that just flare out on each side. Again, I'm being more neat to make it feel delicate and use the most paint at the top and let my brush gradually have less paint on the bottom for a subtle gradient. It's going from dark to light. This just adds dimension, and then I add little stems around each flower and tiny ones in-between some part and I connected all at the bottom. I add leaves with the same color, but I use more water and less paint for a lighter look. Again, varying value helps make things look more delicate and dimensional. It also makes more contrast and whatever's darker stands out more to us. So the leaves are more in the background and the florals are standing out. You can always add more detail than this, but let me show you what happens when you do. When I do it here, it changes the look and it becomes less delicate and more whimsical. This is just a differentiation of style, and I usually do add too much detail. But I just want you to know how to make it look more dainty if you like. Simple is usually better for the delicate style, but you can still be loose and whimsical. It's up to you what you prefer to do the most, just have fun with it. Now let's talk about one of my favorite styles, the loose style. 9. The Loose Style: The loose style incorporates what we did when we practiced using quick brushstrokes. We want that texture, we want that whimsy, we want that speed. It gives our paintings and aliveness. We're letting go of control. This is what we use when we do the loose style. We want character, we want fun. Let me show you what I mean. Here I'm doing a quick rose shape by just making quick strokes around a center point. Always plan where your center point is before you paint it and that will make it easier to make a flower shape. Next, I quickly add in the center, and again with quick and loose strokes. I try to make them all random, even though the strokes themselves are similar, the leaves are also done in the same way. Notice the fun textures we get and these are just longer strokes. If you want to do this style, the only way is to practice being loose and getting to know your brush. It's also important to let go of results. It really is trial and error and sometimes when you paint like this, it looks like garbage. Other times it looks amazing, it's just fun and practice. When painting your flowers, you can also start with the middle part first, like I did here, with the loose center and notice how I left some of the white of the page in it to make it more whimsical and then I painted in loose petals all around and I tried to keep the shapes similar, but they're all still a little different. I varied how light or dark my paint was by using either more water or more paint in different parts. Also notice how when my petals touch the center, there was some bleed. Wet on wet looks amazing for the loose look, and I rarely wait for my layers to dry when I paint like this. Another thing you can do is do an initial loose layer and then go back in with finer detail that's still semi loose but more clean like I did here, with the simple lines for definition and a fun leaf pattern. This makes a nice contrast of looseness and neatness and I think it makes it look more professional, and this is combining the delicate style with the loose style. Now I think, personally, the best style is when you combine all three and other styles and just play. These aren't written in stone and can do whatever you like, but if you're drawn to one more than another, just develop that one. Usually the kind of art you admire the most is what you want to create the most. I've been admiring very loose paintings lately, and that's what I want to make. With this last example I'm going to combine all three styles. I'm being quick and loose with the initial shapes of the flowers and then I'm adding in doodly outlines which I'm also being loose with and to make it delicate, I'm going to add some stems that are very neat and cute and tiny. I think this one turned out so cute. This is what happens when you try to do all three. I also went back to the last flower and added more dainty and delicate details to play with the styles even more. I love to use all three styles together in my work, but it's okay if you're drawn to one more than another, just do you, play and discover what you enjoy doing the most and it's okay if your favorite style isn't even here, maybe you have to discover it for yourself, but this class is just for fun, so don't worry about all that. Now let's quickly go over leaf ideas. 10. Leaves: Now let's paint some leaves. My biggest advice is to use rounded lines, not perfectly straight ones, and to use the tip of your brush first and then the body, and then the tip again. I already showed you a little bit of this in the previous brush play lesson, but let's look at it more in detail. Here I'm using my favorite brush, a round brush, but this works for many brushes. I highly recommend you learn how to do this and master it because they will truly help you with your leaves. If you paint with just the tip of your brush, barely touching the page, you get your thinnest line. Then if you press down a little bit, it thickens. If you continue to press down a little bit more, it gets even thicker. If we press down a lot, you get the thickest stroke you can make. If you lift off your brush slowly, it tapers to been thinner and thinner until it's a thin tip again. We're just varying the pressure that we put on the brush, slowly easing in and out. First practice doing this movement by making straight leaves. Once you get good at it, move on to curvy ones. All you going to do is the same movement and then curve your brush slightly as you do it for curved leaves. Look how much more alive these feel. This just takes some practice, so don't feel overwhelmed and just try it. If you want a thicker more rounded leaf, you can just do two brushstrokes close together with them mirroring each other or you can just use the body of the brush in a circular way. You can leave some white space in the middle of your leaves for added interest or not do it. Some people like it, some people don't, I personally love this look, practice doing this. But if you find this difficult or don't like this technique, you can always just paint only an outline of the shape that you like and then just fill it in quickly or you can just leave the outline for our doodling look. Let's see more ideas. Here's exactly what I just showed you, but if I move my hand very quickly, it looks more random and loose, and we also get some texture. I love painting quickly like this because I relinquish control but I get fun results in the process. You can also paint leaves around the stem. With this first one, it's implied that it's there instead of painting in the whole thing and the leaves are long and thin. The second one has it fully painted in. But again, I'm being loose and quick and the leaves are in clusters of three with stems coming out of the main one. Just by varying something small, it gives you a different look. Here's another quick example, this time I didn't start with the tip, but instead with a harder press and flicked the brush until just the tip was left and took it off the page. You probably noticed these are very similar to the strokes I did in the getting loose with your brush lesson. This one was also done quickly and loosely, and I have the all meet together but they are longer leaves. A lot of flowers have this. This one is more neat and is a cute little pattern. You can also just do outlines of leaves and alternate between outline and filled-in and be loose with it as well. I love doing this look as you'll see with a lot of my florals. You can also just do one kind of leaf and then another kind right next to it. Even dots that are green will look just like leaves. I tried to include more than one leaf and my compositions. This one was also super loose and quick. As you can see, I love the loose style for leaves and even though I use the side of my brush and just make clusters of leaves randomly touching, you can still read it as leaves and it makes it look pretty cool. This is just like when I showed you earlier, the random brush strokes that I use for the flowers look like flowers. There's really no wrong way to paint loose florals. Don't be shy, I'm playing with your brushes. I hope you're following along with me and if you are just filling your whole page with play. Whatever empty space you have to do something there. You can change up how you use your brush or the shapes of the leaves or how quickly or slowly paint. Everything you do, we'll learn from even things that don't look good, so just go for it. I showed more examples of leaf ideas in my other florals class. These were more neat and more based off of real flowers. If you like this painting more, this is more like a delicate style, go ahead and copy this page as well, you can pause it here. But if you'd like the loose style, I encourage you to also get out another blank page and do all of this again but this time making them up from your imagination. You can really play with leaves. Don't feel pressure to be perfect and just play with it. The more you practice it, like I said before, the faster you master it. That's it for leaves, have fun, don't overthink it, play and practice, and that's how you'll get better and find your style. Now let's talk phases. 11. Vases: Now let's talk vases. Now you don't have to do a vase at all, but if you want to do vases, they can be super cute. Make up a vase shape and paint in a thin oval for the water and then use plain water on your brush to soften the edges and make it look dimensional. Leave some white of the page for highlights too. We're being loose, none of this has to be perfect, be playful. You can also add in more colors, whatever you want. Here are a bunch of shape ideas, but these aren't all that exists. I encourage you to do whatever you like and use Google images if you need more ideas. There's many cool vases out there and many ideas for containers for your flowers, but you can use these ideas as a reference to start with, don't be afraid of using your imagination and getting creative with it either. There's no wrong answers. You can have the vase be someone's hand or head or whatever you like, do whatever you want to do. As you can see with these simple outlines, that's all you really need and can do with loose paintings. You can add fun patterns to them and do whatever you want. You can make them dimensional or flat. The biggest thing to decide is if you're vase is opaque or see-through, you can add stems inside it if it's see-through. Another thing to consider is if you want your flowers and leaves to hang out over the vase, if you do, you can paint them in first and then add the vase at the end to make it easier. Whether you painted first or last, don't overthink it. It's fine if lines overlap too. I think it looks super neat in loose paintings like these, especially with watercolors. Have fun and collect inspiration. Find ideas that inspire you and keep them for future paintings, whether you use a Pinterest board or have a sketchbook with small doodles. Now let's talk about building your visual vocabulary. 12. Building Your Visual Vocabulary: We are painting from imagination in this class and that is wonderful, but I do want you to be aware of how you can expand on your visual vocabulary too. A visual vocabulary is like a verbal one, but instead of knowing the definition of a word, you learn what something looks like and then that way you can recall it and make it your own on the page without having to look at a reference. It's built by studying a subject, in this case, flowers. If you study flowers by drawing or painting them from real life over and over again, you memorize how they look and then have more information that you can play with in the future. You can do this with any subject. For example, it's peony season and I had this gorgeous PD to study. I may not have done a perfect job in painting it here, but in sitting with it and just taking the time to observe it, I now have a better idea of what a peony looks like, the shape of it, the colors, the petals, the way the petals droop, and just the feel of it, and also how the leaves look. By practicing painting it loosely, I get better at painting it loosely for imagination. Your studies don't have to be realistic as long as you take some time with your subject and you try to observe. You can also just use a pencil and sketch out what you observe. Of course, setting from real life will give you the most benefit because you can see all the detail, but you can also use references on Google Images. Pay attention to the basic shapes that make up your flower and to the details. You can make these completely your own. There's nothing stopping you from having fun. If you have a hard time drawing, I have a class that teaches you how to draw anything by using basic shapes and that's what I want you to pay attention to the most with your flowers. Everything is made up of shapes, but especially flowers where the shapes repeat a lot. That's why you can just hint at something, it'll look like a flower. This is an example of a page of flower studies that I did and here's an example of how I play with that information. Because I have this visual vocabulary from hours and hours of studying flowers, I can make up my own fun and doodly flowers from imagination. These are very simple and whimsical. Feel free to copy any of these and use them in your future paintings. But the important thing is, I made these without any references. Having this ability and building your visual vocabulary works with any subject, not just flowers, but it takes much longer with people or animals, for example, since they are more complex. But with flowers, you can pick it up really quickly. They're so much simpler to paint and draw. I just want to encourage you to not be afraid to draw or paint any flowers that you like and to build your own visual vocabulary and confidence. But only if you feel led to, of course, you can just stay loose with it like we will in this class. I just want you to know that you had the creative liberty to learn these things and to play with them. It's not as hard as it seems. Of course, you can do it. Even if you're a beginner artist, you just need to practice. Now let's chat about filling our creative well by finding inspiration. 13. Finding Inspiration: I want you to think of yourself as a creative well and we can't always be pulling out stuff without putting anything back in. To feed your well, you want to look at art that you find inspiring. You want to go to the park, maybe a botanical garden nearby, not just for related stuff, it could be watching an inspiring enemy movie or reading a book that you enjoy. We're going to feed our creative soul and nurture it. But if you do want to paint loose florals, it's really good to have flowers that you can look at. Take pictures of them, analyze and study them, draw them like I just showed you. But just having flowers around you and just by looking at them, you're actually putting a lot of information in your subconscious mind that later on you'll unconsciously remember what they look like. Drawing them will give you more results, but even just observing will give you results. I also want you guys to collect inspiration from your favorite artist and have a huge arsenal of pieces that really inspire you. Maybe study your favorite ones. What techniques did the artists use? Did they use layering? What medium did they use? What colors? You can learn a lot from other artists, but it's important not to copy them. It's important to just do your own thing with the information that you gather. But the more information inspiration that you gather, the more it's in your subconscious, and when you're painting, it'll come out in new ways and things you wouldn't even think of normally. A lot of new ideas are actually reused old ideas just with a twist on them. Your style is that twist. Like I said before, you don't have to be aware of this, just observing other people's art and really enjoying it and just looking at it will give you more ideas for your subconscious to play with. I recommend starting a Pinterest board. It can be a secret one if you like, and just collect all the things that you think are beautiful. Maybe some flower shapes, maybe color schemes, anything that you find inspiring so that you don't get overwhelmed by the blank page and you just have more ideas to work with. Because we don't create from a void, we have to create from somewhere. Building your visual vocabulary by studying flowers is always the best, but also studying other artist's work and just seeing what makes it so beautiful to you is also the best. For me, I personally love very loose and whimsical work lately and that's the stuff that I find inspiring and I have a collection myself that I like to look at. But I don't copy anyone, and you shouldn't either. We're just studying it and just enjoying it. Now let's talk about a few tips for composition. Again, this is subconscious, you don't have to memorize it exactly. But learning this stuff will help you to remember what to do, and what not to do when you create your beautiful floral arrangements. 14. Composition Tips: I want you to keep in mind a couple of composition rules that will help you to paint loose florals that are pleasing to the eye. These rules or tips apply to any illustration but also don't feel pressure to memorize these or follow them to a T. Rules are meant to be broken and I break a couple of these from time to time. Actually, I break one of them a lot, [LAUGHTER] you'll see which one. But knowing the concepts and terms will help you to understand why something doesn't look right and how you can fix it and will better to help you to analyze your work in general. Knowing what makes things pleasing to look at helps you to make more pleasing things. If you're a planner then, yes, you can also plan with these, is up to you. But don't let that kill the joy of creating in the moment. Think of these as light guidelines set of rules. Our first concept is balance. When we have a painting that feels unbalanced it doesn't feel right. But this first one, there's way too much whitespace in the bottom-right corner and nowhere else. It almost feels like the painting could fall over or the vase could, just doesn't feel easy to look at. Also the flowers and details on the left side are much bigger. If I wanted to fix it I could make there be less flowers on the left side and some whitespace and maybe more on the right side towards the bottom. Since the vase is on the left we need to add less to that side and more to the opposite side. An easy fix for this is just to make your stuff more centered, which usually automatically makes everything feel balanced. Notice how I alternate the leaves on both sides to make it feel balanced too. But, of course, your vase can be on the left or right side, is just harder to make it feel balanced. If you do this you have to really plan more. The next rule is to keep it simple, silly. This just means if there's way too much detail in your art it will be hard to look at. Notice how busy the first one is but if I simplify what I was trying to portray I can still do similar things but it's just much easier to look at. This is the rule I personally break the most and have the most trouble with as you will see. I love to overwork things and I add too much detail and I have learned to pump the breaks more often. Even with me overworking it now, trust me, I am pumping the break, so yeah. [LAUGHTER] But knowing that I break this rule too much doesn't stop me from breaking it, I just like those results. But I try not to go too far. If you're like me and you just do too much, It's good to start practicing stopping yourself when you think it looks done. The next concept is scale. Notice how if I make all the flowers the same size, the piece feels a little bit flat and boring, but if I vary their size it feels more organic and alive. Varying the skills of your flowers and leaves is simple thing you can do to keep your florals more interesting. Next up is value. Just like scale, if you make everything the same value it will feel flat and not very interesting to look at. But if you vary how light or dark different areas are, it's much more fun to look at. If you're not sure what this means, just squint your eyes at your painting and then you can tell where the dark and light areas are and what feels unbalanced. I do this all the time. The last thing I want to touch on is curves. If you make your florals angular they won't feel very florally because flowers are rounded and organic. There's no strange shapes in them except for stems. It's almost always better to make them curvy. Notice how the sharp edges also feel like little knives to our eyes and almost threatening and how gentle and sweet the curved flowers are. This isn't written in stone, if you like sharp flowers, that's fine too. But the same concept does apply to leaf stems. I think when they're curved they look much more organic. That's it for composition. Not that bad. We're almost ready to start painting. But first, let me share a few more small tips. 15. Other Tips: First, let's talk color. I know this is something a lot of people struggle with and don't know how to use well, but not for the reasons they think. I do have a short class I teaches how to mix colors and a little bit of color theory in it if you want to dive deeper, but there are simple techniques you can be aware of and then you can use to make your colors more cohesive. No, I'm not talking about the color wheel, which I rarely use. The secret to making a harmonious color combinations lies in using less colors. If you pick two colors, you can make any two colors work together. Just try it. Try to pick two colors that don't look good together. It's pretty hard. If you pick three, again, you can pretty much make any three work pretty well together. Well, almost any. If you feel overwhelmed by picking your colors, you can always pick colors beforehand, like I did here. Notice how cute all of these three color combos are. Trying how to color combo on a scrap piece of paper will help you to decide what to use, and also just builds your color confidence. The more important thing than picking the right colors to me is picking the right values. If your whole piece is done with the same values, like I showed in the last lesson, it'll be very flat, so it's good to vary the value no matter what colors you choose. The same thing with neon colors. If all your colors are screaming at you, it can be hard on the eyes. It's good to just pick one neon color or maybe two and dilute it. But otherwise you are free to play and experiment with color, those are just my small tips. But I want you to play, especially in this class, we're just going to have fun. You never know what colors will look good together until you try it. Try new things I did in this class and some of the color combos weren't that great, but it was still fun and I like getting out of my box. I sometimes like to just paint with rainbow florals, and you can do so too, or you can just do black and white once if you want to avoid color altogether and just practice your values, or maybe make a monochrome one of pink and maybe just a little bit of green for stems. I don't know. Whatever floats your boat they're your paintings just to you. You can also make a Pinterest board filled with color combos that you like. If it's still hard for you to pick some colors out, there's tons of color combos out there that people have already made for you. The next topic is thumbnail sketching and painting. If you know what thumbnail sketching is, stick around for a second because I have a different take on it. A thumbnail sketch is something artists use to generate ideas and visualize them tiny, they also use it to evolve an idea until it feels right. If an idea looks good, tiny as a thumbnail sketch, it will look good bigger, you're getting the composition right. It also saves supplies and wasted time working on an idea that may not be so good. Isn't it better to find out if idea looks good before you make it big? I don't always use thumbnail sketches. In fact, I rarely do because I paint so loosely, but I want you to be aware of them because it really helps to pick a better idea, especially if you're starting out and you're just not sure what a good composition looks like. It's also a way to visualize something complex, like weird vase ideas. You can also test our color schemes if you want to. The next level of this is something that we're going to do in this class. I call it thumbnail painting. It's the same concept, but instead of sketching with a pencil, we're doing a miniature painting to see if it will look good, big, but because miniature paintings are so cute and they're complete paintings in of themselves. Here I did some floral theme paintings with gouache. Notice how I multitask and did many ideas at the same time. You can also do this. This is a great chance, not only tests out a composition, but also colors, schemes, and even play with mixed media supplies. Here I added ink and colored pencil to see what it will look like. I don't like every single thumbnail painting that I did, but in doing so many, I tried many different ideas and I can pick one or two that are my favorites to make bigger. That's exactly what we're doing for our final project. We're going to first paint tiny bouquets, and then we're going to pick one favorite or more if you like, and make it big. I also want to point out that sometimes even super tiny paintings can look great scanned in, and you can add detail and procreate if you like, or with mixed media and then scan it in. I sometimes paint so small and I scan it in. It looks like a big painting, just looks super loose. I love that effect. To me these are also tiny finished pieces, and the best part about painting so small is you can make a lot of them in a short period of time and get tons of practice time in, tons of experience in, and guess what, you won't care about results as much because you can just go make another one. They're so small, they takes a little time, only five minutes each or less, and you'll only get better as you do more. Also you can work out an idea a couple of times if you really like an idea, but you're not sure how you want to take it. Are you excited because I am? Let's start painting. 16. Tiny Quick Florals: It's time to finally paint, I hope the previous lesson got you excited for what we're going to do here because this is one of my favorite ways to paint. We're going to do a lot of tiny quick paintings. When you paint small, you don't focus on the details. You finish quickly and you get lots of practice time in and you get experience and level up your skills very fast. You're also not afraid to try lots of new things because you're using less supplies, less paper, and you don't put in that much time into it, so for this didn't turn out good, who cares? We're going for quantity over quality, so please don't care about results and just try. I know this sounds backwards, but especially when you're a beginner at something or even more advanced at it, the more you do something the better you get at it and if you just obsess over one painting, you're not learning as many skills as if you just make lots of them. With this exercise, we're just looking for one little painting that you like so that we can make a big version of it in the final project. You can do as many little paintings as you want, I'm personally going to do 14. Let me tell you the truth, I only liked half of the paintings that I did and I have over 10 years of experience, so don't be hard on yourself. Making lots of quick paintings like this is like sifting for gold. Sometimes we get fool's gold, but it's worth it to get that one special piece and who knows, maybe we'll find a diamond or two as well. Loose painting really is a lot about luck and trial and error, but even the fool's gold will teach us how to look for real gold in the future. We can learn and improve from every painting we make. Let's start, to do this you need small pieces of paper. If you have scrap paper, you can cut into tiny pieces. Scissors work just fine, but I have a paper cutter, so I'm going to use that for straighter edges. Another alternative, if you have washi tape is you can make little squares that you can paint in. By sectioning off small areas for you to paint with, whatever you do, just make sure your paintings are tiny and don't spend more than five minutes on one painting. If you find this hard, just use a timer on your phone to limit yourself and teach yourself how to paint faster. In fact, it's fun to maybe do a two-minute timer or one-minute timer just for those super quick doodle fun florals. Let's start. We're just putting together all the information that we learned in this class. I encourage you to watch this lesson and see how I do it and then try to do your own thing. It's okay to copy me but you'll get the most benefit from doing your own thing and practicing painting intuitively. That's what this class is all about, it's about playing, so just go for it and let go. Don't worry about results, enjoy the moment and do your own thing. I'm going to be using a size 4 round brush but you can get an even smaller one if you want it to be easier, but keep in mind the bigger your brushes the bigger your flower strokes can be, the broader they can be. But you don't want to use a brush that's too big for your tiny paper, so just do whatever feels right to you. I started off with a simple vase shape using wet on wet to make it softer on the inside. Then I added simple flower shapes using various colors, notice how I alternated the size and only used three colors for them. Then I added simple stems and leaves. This is usually the order I do these paintings in, vase first or last, and then flowers and then stems and leaves. But you'll see me do them in every order, this is probably the easiest one though. I also added some doodle flowers and then try to refine the vase more and make it more dimensional by adding darker colors and a shadow, but to be honest, I think it looked way better before I added this. Sometimes simpler is better especially with the delicate style. I finished it off with tiny details inside some of the flowers and leaves and this is one of my favorite paintings from all the ones I'll make. The second one is my least favorite painting. I think it's a huge mess and it was way too detailed and dark, and just didn't mesh well with the composition, and the leaves are just way too in your face and spiky feeling. One golden nugget of wisdom in this one is the cute little circle with dashes or rounded flowers, the little brown ones. I like how those turned out. If you make something ugly, just keep going and who cares and guess what, nobody ever has to see it and you probably still enjoyed making it, but try to look for that one little thing that looks good to you. The next piece is another favorite, I started with a stripe doodle vase, added roses, leaves and doodle flowers. I think I did so well on this one because the previous one was such a mess and the leaves were to prominence, so I learned not to make the leaves like that and make them so dark and look how cute and dreamy it was with the leaves being a light value. I also used colors that are my favorites and the composition in this one feels so balanced and I love how all the colors look together. Adding some darker details in the roses made them pop out more and I love this one, this is my favorite, I think. I also think varying the leaf and flower shapes is a huge strength of this piece. When you have a piece that you really like, analyze it, think, what went right? Then remember that for future paintings. Feel free to pause this class at anytime and copy any of these finished pieces if you want to learn from what I did, but also feel free to just be loosely inspired by it and do your own thing that's still inspired by it, or just do your own thing, all three are good learning tools. This next one, I tried to leave my comfort zone and do something a little different and more loose. I made a wide planter shaped and then I added doodle flower shapes and stems throughout and made this simple pattern. I'm not in love with the result, it just doesn't feel like my style completely and I think you looked better before I outlined the blue flowers, so again I have to practice not adding too much detail, but a golden nugget is the pot having light polka dots. I actually really liked the look of the pot, and overall it's not terrible piece. The next piece was inspired by a potted plant I loosely started with a brown pot and added some wispy stems, but I ended up painting over them with tons of flowers and wet on wet play. This is definitely a loose piece. I was very bold with this one and darkened the leaves and I like how it turned out. It's not really my style with the colors, but I tried to go out of my comfort zone and I think it's cute. This next one is the doodle style. I wanted to be more playful and childish and I think I succeeded. I really like how the pot and the pink flowers turned out. This is cute. I wanted to try that again and continue playing with this style and I thought it'd be fun to do one large flower in a tiny vase. It didn't turn out so well but I liked the dots in the background, there's my golden nugget and the pattern in the flowers is cute. As you can see, even paintings that I really don't like have something in them that is a value. I wanted to really play with looseness. I absolutely love how this painting looked when I started it, but I kept adding flowers and I just got a little too busy real quick. This is definitely a pattern for me. [LAUGHTER] Just another lesson for me not to overdo it, but hey, it's better to overdo it in expressing yourself than to be afraid to express herself, so it's okay with me. But I had a lot of fun being super loose and quick with my brush, so I tried the style again and learned from my mistake. Well, I overdid it again, but it turned out cute and I didn't do too bad. This is definitely more balanced than the last one. If you really like an idea and you want to develop it, you can keep doing painting similar to your previous one and just try the same style again until you get better at it. You will learn with every painting. I really had fun with being loose and quick with my brush and let the colors bleed. This is definitely the style am most drawn to, the very loose style, but I just need more practice in it. I added the checkered pattern table and I just loved that look, that's definitely a golden nugget right there. This next one I was more doodle and graphic and started off with a light layer of stems and added lots of light flowers. Then I went in and darkened some areas and added details and I think this looks so nice and balanced, I did a good job of playing with contrast, I also like the little curved leaf shapes I did. As you can see with this composition, you just want touches of darker areas here and there and not throughout the whole piece like I did with the first painting that I disliked. [LAUGHTER] So far, I did 10 mini paintings, I thought I was done but the next day I wanted to do more, so I did four more. There's no limit to how many of these you can do by the way, the more the better and the faster you'll improve. This time I was inspired by the peony and wildflower bouquet I had on my desk and the painting started out so cute, but then I just had to ruin it like I always do. [LAUGHTER] You know what I did, I overdid it. I added way too much detail on the flower petals, and in the background, and then to try to fix it I kept adding detail and I fixed it by darkening the outline, not really. [LAUGHTER] I added a druggie background with water, but I think it looked better without the background and lately it hasn't been my style to add backgrounds as much. I really need to learn how to keep it simple, silly, and maybe one day I will, I'll let you know, but it's okay, the result is still cute. By the way, if you want to incorporate the dreamy background look, you just do it by adding plain water to the background and pulling from the paint already on the page by reactivating it. This won't work with acrylic gouache, but normal gouache or watercolor will work just fine. You're just making the edges bleed. Make sure to use random brushstrokes of water so that it's not uniform and you can also add splatter to make it more fun by just tapping your brush on your finger. Onto the next one. I realize I rarely use the delicate style, so I gave it a go and try to keep my colors pastel to make it feel more dainty. I think this one turned out super cute and planning which flowers I'll paint helped to make it more believable because these are all based off of real flowers that I painted from memory. This one is definitely a favorite, but it's more safe than the other ones, I like to push boundaries. This next one is doodle and graphic again. Graphic and doodle style definitely tends to be more flat, but I really like how playful and fun it is. As you can see, I try not to overlap too many things and just keep them in their own areas. I try to be loose and flow with my strokes and I think this is super cute, if not a little busy like all my other pieces, but I like it. One of my favorite things and this one is the vase, it's just so cute. In this last example I want to try negative space, loose painting, I painted the silhouette of my flowers and the vase since I wanted to keep them white and then I just filled in the background with a dark color. I should have made the flowers bigger and maybe the vase smaller, but it turned out okay and it was a fun little exercise. I especially like the pattern in the vase and the circle flowers look like dandelions. That's it, 14 in total. I'll say I really like seven of them and I mostly dislike seven of them, so it's around half and half, which is pretty much my usual. I usually make one thing I like and one thing I don't like even when I do bigger paintings. But each painting taught me something about my strengths and weaknesses, and what works and what doesn't. The only failure you'll have an art is not trying. I encourage you to do as many as you want to and tell your inner critic to be quiet when you do these like I told you earlier, please do that. The more you do these the more they speed up your growth and confidence and you'll just have so much fun making them. Do this until you get at least one painting idea that you like, that you want to blow up. Even if you try lots of times because for the final project we're going to take that one tiny painting and make a bigger version of it. But we're not going to copy it exactly we're just going to be inspired by it, unless you do want to copy it. I'll show you two different examples, one with watercolor and one with gouache. I'm going to show you lots of tips and tricks for both mediums along the way. Pick a tiny painting and if you haven't made them yet, go ahead and make them and have fun, and let's jump in. 17. Final Project in Watercolor: It's time for the most fun part. All you got to do is pick one of your tiny paintings and make it big. You're not glued to your thumbnail painting and you can be as inspired by it as you want. Maybe you just like the way you did a certain thing, but want to change something else. You can do whatever you like. This first one that I picked was just for the looseness and the style. I wanted to convey the same feeling and I had a lot of fun painting it. But the second one is the one I want to make bigger. This is the one that one had the composition of and the colors, but I still want to keep it loose and whimsical. I'm being inspired by two paintings here but mostly one of them. You're not limited to being inspired by just one mini painting either, you could try to combine some. But if you really like two or three paintings, you can even try combining all of them. Whatever you want to do with your mini painting, it's up to you. You're not limited to being inspired by just one mini painting, just do whatever you feel like doing. In this lesson, I'll show you a watercolor example and then the next one, we use a different mini painting to show you a gouache example. Let's start. Put your mini painting or paintings where you can see them, grab a bigger piece of paper and let's paint. I chose to use the cat's tongue brush since I never use it and it seemed like a fun choice for florals. I started out by painting the stems and notice how I varied the thickness of each one and I made them cross randomly. This gives it a fun feel. I added more blues and greens into the wet paint to make it more interesting. Then I started on the florals and mimic the shapes and placement in the tiny painting. Notice how I added yellow inside to the pink to make it more interesting as well. Then I painted in the yellow flowers. I left a big one out since I didn't have space for it and added more to the left side to make it balanced. Then I mixed the grayish-blue color and added it in the same place as the mini painting, but also on the left to make it more balanced and to have the same floral on more than one place. Then I use the same color to add a simple vase that had a mason jar top to it because I love that look. Next, I took a light blue color and added more leaf shapes and stems with it. I would say my initial layer is complete and I was pretty faithful to my thumbnail mini painting. Now it's time to add more whimsy and details that I couldn't paint small. I add centers to the flowers, outlines to the petals and leaves, and little details and touches everywhere. Yes, I do usually overdo things but I don't let that hold me back from having fun and painting intuitively. I feel like overdoing is a part of my style at this point. I love to mix mediums and I didn't cover this much in this class but you can really use any medium on top of your dry watercolors. You can also add detail with just watercolor or gouache by just using a thin tip. But I wanted to use colored pencil because I love the texture that it makes and how easy it is to use. Just be sure your watercolor layer is dry first if you're going to be using other media on top. I use a darker blue color for some accents and definition and then some lighter colors to define edges and details. Then I use the white ballpoint pen to add sparkles everywhere by making little dots and varying their sizes. I usually use this at the end of my illustration. At this point, I was looking at the pink flowers and I realized that they felt a little bit too dark. Since you can't go lighter with watercolor, here is where the tube of white gouache comes in. I just take some white paint out and then I can use it to add highlights anywhere I like. You can also use acrylic paint instead. I use it to make a striped pattern inside the flower, and I love how it turned out. I also added highlights to the other flowers, some leaves, and the jar. You can see how useful this can be and how it brightens up the whole piece. Investing in just one tube of white gouache is a great investment for your watercolors. Now I also think the centers of the pink flowers are too dark, so I mix some yellow watercolor with the white gouache to make a pastel opaque watercolor color and I filled in the circles with it to lighten them and added more circles. This really made the centers pop. It definitely increase the contrast. You can do this with any color you like, you can always mix watercolor with gouache. I use this technique to fix mistakes or add detail. I thought I was finished here, but here's a super pro tip, before claiming something is finished or posting it on social media, walk away from it for a little while. It can just be a 15 minute break or looking at it the next day like I did here. The longer you're away from it, the better you'll be able to see if anything needs changing. When you stare at one thing for a while, your brain has a hard time processing it, so walking away is like a superpower with your art. The next day I looked to my pieces and there was a quite a bit of things I need to change and the day before I just couldn't put my finger on what they were. You see where this pink flower touches the yellow one? I did not like that. That really bothered me because the pink was way too strong. In fact, it was the most vibrant part of the whole piece and it's not supposed to be the focal point. It was the center of attention, that's what a focal point is. Also, it eclipse the yellow flower where they touched, it just looked awkward. To fix it, I use plain water to reactivate the place where there's too much pink and reactivate just means that I made the paint active again, I made it watery again. I can clean my brush and just pick up the excess water and paint with it or I can use a clean paper towel do the same thing and make the area lighter. If you have gouache, you can also just paint right over a mistake, especially if you mix the right color. I did so here by adding the premixed yellow paint from before and because the area was wet, it blend into it and it matched the rest of the piece better. Look how much better the painting looks with just this one detail fixed. I also think the yellow flower needed more definition. It was bland and just going to the background so I added more pink paint by outlining the centers and some petals and I'll do more in a second. The next thing that stood out to me is the greenish-blue flower clusters looked flat, so I just mixed the same color again, slightly darker and added a second layer loosely to the top. Then I went in with the pink colored pencil and added more details throughout the piece. I usually like to use one color to unite everything together. I use it to outline the yellow flower more and also put it in the vase. Even though pink doesn't make sense here, it looks good. Speaking of the vase, it looked a little flat, so I added more blue colored pencil to it as well to have more definition. The piece finally felt done to me. Here is the first day results scanned in, and here is the second day results. I could see where the painting could be improved much easier when I took time away from it. As you can see, it looks a lot better now. That's it for my watercolor finished piece. I hope you enjoyed watching my process and it was really fun to paint in play. As you can see, I was inspired by my small painting, but I wasn't glued to it, I did my own thing. But having that idea helped me to start somewhere and gave them the confidence to have a good composition. I can't wait to see what you do, but I'm going to show you one more example in gouache that turned out super fun. I encourage you to make as many big paintings as you like from your little ones and if you failed the first time you tried, you can always try again or try to fix mistakes, or just do it again and again until it's not a failure. I encourage you to make as many big paintings as you like from your little ones. In fact, keep all the little pieces that you like so that you can make them into big paintings in the future for those days when you don't know what to paint. If you fail the first time you try to make a big painting, you can always try to either fix your mistakes or just try again. There's lots of times that I try the same painting again and the second time I do way better because I learn from my mistakes from the first time. Don't be discouraged this happens to you and just go again. It's fun to paint anyway, you're not losing anything. Now, let's do this with gouache. 18. Final Project in Gouache: For my gouache painting, I chose this super mini cutie. I think it was my favorite one. I pick the same colors plus white. I'll also end up adding some black at the end. I just wanted to keep my mixing palette clean until then. I'll be painting in 100 pound black paper. I need to make sure when I'm painting that I always have thicker layers and it's not watered down so that it stays opaque and doesn't warp the paper with too much water. This is the first time we're using gouache thicker in this class. As you'll see, you can pretty much use all the techniques we learned so far, even with opaque paint. Which means you can also do a lot of these techniques with oil paints or acrylic paints. This time I will work with a limited color palette instead of having free rein. I'm going to copy the colors from my little mini sketch. I squeezed out a bit of each color and start painting. Right off the bud, I made the rows too big to follow the mini painting completely. I have to be more picky with the flowers I include. But like I said before, you don't have to follow your mini painting exactly. Just use it as a loose guideline. Notice how the wet on wet look still happens when the paint is thicker and it makes very beautiful bleeds that are different from working with thin paints like watercolor. They're both beautiful. I achieve this look and the roses by painting with a darker color and then mixing it with the white to make it lighter and then painting with the lighter one on top while the first layer was still wet. So wet on wet. I decided to move the big yellow flower to the left and edit another one on top and tiny wants too. I like having bigger flowers this time and then making smaller ones all around it. Varying the skill like this is super fun. Then I went in and added some loose leaves like always. I mix a light purple color and added some fun flower shapes with it as well. Loosely filled in the vase shape with white. I think it looks very cool when you do it like this because it's more messy. But if you're more neat, nothing's stopping you from working in layers with gouache. You can completely paint your vase first and then add the flowers on top after it dries. I added more details, outlines and little centers to my flowers and stripes in the vase. Then I added some white flowers on top for more contrast and some white and yellow loose florals on the right that are draping over. Then I painted slightly lighter leaves everywhere. You might be thinking what I was thinking. Yes, Nina, I've seen this behavior before, please pump the breaks and you're not wrong. [LAUGHTER] I am overdoing it. But the good thing about gouache is how easy it is to fix mistakes. I don't worry about it too much. I just kept adding and adding and adding and yeah, it happened. I overdid it. I was tempted to throw away the piece, but I chose to walk away instead and took a 20 minute coffee break. When I came back the way to fix it was obvious. Again, walking away is a superpower. The middle of the painting was far too busy with all the details, so I'm painted one more bigger rose right on top of everything to quiet it down and it worked. While waiting for that to dry, add a second layer of white to the vase to make it lighter and add a little center to the side flowers. To help balance the piece more I also made the vase taller. I brought it all the way down to the bottom of the page by expanding it. Then I went back into the rows and finished it like I did with the others to make it blend in. When you have a limited color palette, it's easier to use the same colors again, if you need to. I kept refining little things, mostly added highlights everywhere. Here's a very cool technique that you can use, whether you paint on black or white paper. Just take the color of your page and make sure it's super opaque so it looks like the page. In this case it's black and paint in tiny lines all around to make it look more messy as if the page is showing through cracks of where it didn't connect colors. This adds to the loose and messy look. I love how it looks. It also adds more contrast. We're tricking our eyes. I added the black randomly but try not to overdo it, which I definitely can. But like I said before, if you overdo it, it's okay because you can just paint over things with gouache. I was done. I love how this turned out and I really had a moment of doubt here. But I'm glad that the piece was saved and all it took was walking away and layering. This is one of the reasons I've been obsessed with gouache lately. If you've never used it and want to give it a try, I have a class that teaches the basics. If you come from a watercolor background, there also just great to use together. I absolutely adore the bouquet that I made here. It's very different from my other pieces and I had fun getting out of my comfort zone and trying to be loose. Notice how the final illustration is similar to the mini painting, but I did my own thing too. Don't be glued to your mini painting or you can lessen the creativity and spontaneity of painting in the moment and being loose. Or you can copy it exactly too, it really is up to you and your style of doing things. Now, it is your turn. Go ahead and make your own bigger piece or pieces. If for whatever reason you have to try two times or three, that's okay. It's part of the learning process and you'll learn what not to do and what looks better every time, even if it's subconscious and you'll get better and better results with time. But I believe in you, I think you can do this. Just give it a go, have fun, quiet your inner critic and play. That's it, it's time to finish off the class. 19. Parting Advice & Goodbye!: My friend deserve a huge pat on the back because you just finished this class and that's awesome. That's amazing. I really hope you painted along with me as we went through everything because the best way to learn is by doing. You got to put in the practice time to get good at something and just doing it one time is not going to give you much results. If you practice every day, you'll get the most results, but even once or twice a week or five-minute sessions every other day will give you results as long as you put the time in. For my parting advice, I just want to tell you that there are gold nuggets of wisdom in every single piece you make and it's up to you to find them. Find something that stands out to you that you think is beautiful and then you'll have that in your subconscious mind that you can use again and you'll learn what techniques work well and what don't. Especially if you make an ugly piece, think, what did I do wrong here? But not in a critical voice, not the inner critic voice, in a constructive voice. Think of it as if you're the parent and you're telling your child how they can improve, you wouldn't be mean to them, you would just help them. We need to learn how to make the voice in our head sound more like a best friend instead of an enemy. If you really like what you made and you're not too shy to share it or even if you don't like what you made, but you want to share it, go ahead and make a project in the project gallery. It is so much fun to share your creative journey with others. We can all learn a lot from each other. I personally have a ton of classes out there and I'd recommend my botanical doodling one or my loose florals one for something related to this class. You can also take one on color mixing with watercolor, or you can use it for other mediums. Or my watercolor basics class if you want to learn the basics and I also have a gouache basics class, if you want to learn those and I have tons of other classes on all kinds of fun mediums and techniques, including drawing, ink, and cuties. I love cuties. I also have a book on how to draw cute animals. If you guys want to stay in touch, you can follow me on my newsletter. That's probably where you'll find me the most. If you want to know about supplies that I use, I also have a section in my website that shows that. Thank you guys so much for taking this class with me. I really hope you enjoyed it and learned a lot. I'll see you guys in the next class. Take care and stay awesome and play. Have fun and just do your own thing. Bye.