Loose Watercolor Carnation

1. Intro: Hello creative friend, and welcome back to class. I am so glad you are joining me here today. We are at the beginning of a brand new year is January. If you are joining me in real time, if not, no big deal. But as I was sitting down and planning out workshops for the year, I thought something that might be fun for us would be to cover birth flowers. That's exactly what we are going to do beginning with January. I have to admit, when I saw that, carnation was the first flower up. Additionally, snowdrops, which we may cover as well. Time permitting, I was not all that excited. It's a flower that I tend to overlook when I see it in grocery stores or just in bouquets in general. It's never been my favorite. But I'm so glad I persisted, because when I went to the store to pick up these in real life, which is something I truly enjoy being able to teach with a real life reference, I looked closer, I saw that this is truly an amazing little flower, and in fact, they behave a lot like peonies, just on a smaller scale. I think if you are not already warmed up to them, as I was not, initially, you are going to be won over by this humble bloom. We're going to tackle loose watercolor, carnations and gestural form, which simply means that we are not going to look to paint every single detail and stroke for stroke for petal. But sit down in a future lesson, just coming up here in a few minutes, notice and marvel and pick out those details that feel most special to us, that we feel most compelled to paint, because that's where the most joy is. It should be noted that this class is definitely geared for intermediate students. Some prior knowledge and experience with watercolor is definitely recommended. If you are finding yourself on the beginning end of watercolor, I suggest that you have to look at my come flowers class, my tulips class. Both of those cover the foundation of watercolor things as simple as water ratios and wet. And to wet, all of these principles that we're going to be examining and learning on a higher level. In this class, we're really going to look at this flower and composition. How to cluster these flowers together, how to paint them in multiple colors. We're going to make up a vintage palette. In addition to this beautiful, bright, cheery color. We're also going to bring a new brush into our class. I'll talk more on that when we're in supplies, but I'm so excited to bring a new brush into just our toolbox. Other than that, I'm just truly looking forward to having you explore this flower on a deeper level if you haven't already. This is what you can expect to paint. As we move forward, we're going to look at a few different colors of these carnations. And then at the very end, for our class project, we're going to put it all together in a beautiful bouquet. Although I still wouldn't say that this is necessarily a focal flower. It becomes more focal and lends itself as a filler flowers when the colors and the shapes are all mixed together. I think you're going to have a lot of fun with this class. I'm so excited, I'm ready to dive in. I hope you are too. Let's get started. 2. Class Supplies : Okay, let's dive into supplies. If you, by chance, are able to go to a grocer or Trader Joe's or whatever it is nearby and pick up some live references, that would be amazing. You can see I have carnations here. There weren't a ton of colors to choose from. There was some really light yellow ones and some striped candy cane looking carnations that I thought would have been great for December, but not so much for January. And then I saw these pink carnations, which I thought we really special. We're going to take a closer look at these and look at all the details and structure when we head into that portion of this class. But for now, if you are able to, that would be fantastic, because we're going to go through a couple different colors. I picked these because I do love the color. However, when it's translated to paper, it can be a little intense, which we will talk about. Yes, carnations. If not, then if you want to pop on your ipad and maybe bring up just a few reference photos just to have off to the side. I always love that If you've taken my classes then you know that I just love to have a source to glance at and then come back and intuitively work here on the page. Anyway, that's our live study then. As far as paints, I happen to have this liquid water color from. Let's make art. I'm not sure if you are familiar with this company, but they hired me to create a box a couple of years ago and I was gifted this color. And it's not a color I would typically use. As you can see, it's highly pigmented and very saturated and quite intense. If you take a look over in the lower left hand corner of the screen, you'll notice that down here is this color swatch, just pure as it is, but when held up to the carnation, it's a perfect match there as shadows that are making the flowers just look slightly darker in my studio. Just because I'm actually filming in the morning, almost afternoon, but winter light, you guys probably understand anyway, that color was perfect for this class. If you happen to have access to this color or you want to purchase just this one little vial of liquid water color, that would be awesome, if not a big problem. I swatched out a supplementary color that we can both add to the palette and then use just as our replacement for that orchid color. We're going to use ver Zeno violet. Then if you know me, you know that I love vintage tones and I always tone down the colors. I don't really gravitate towards intense bright pinks or reds unless it's Christmas to do that, I always pop in a bit of sepia or burnt umber. That's exactly what we're going to do. We're going to mix these two colors here together to make this swash that you see, which is just a little bit more ma, a little bit more of a earthy pink. But we'll still get those beautiful results. We're really going to play with color because we're focusing on this flower, not necessarily a bunch of different flowers. I'm basically going to show you carnation six ways thing. And I'm really excited because there are so many different ways to approach it. And I feel like each one is beautiful. And it comes down to what you feel represents what you're attracted to and what feels most like you. I have pages of these carnations and I'm like, oh, that one's really pretty. Oh, but I really like that one. Oh, but I love how it's light here and then a bit of dark here with dark in the center. And then, oh, but I love this the way that the stripes are coming through on the outer petals. I'm going to show you all of these different ways and let you, the artist decide, um, which one you really gravitate towards most. And then we're going to put a bouquet together at the end using different colors and different styles, jumping ahead of myself a bit. Anyway, those are two colors. We're also going to be, as I mentioned, playing with some different colors. I'd love for you to have a lamp black, or a Janes black, or even a Pains gray. And then I'm going to be using quinacrodoned, some rich green, gold, undersea green for the leaves and foliage. If you have those, that would be great if you also have some white Gh. Throw that in there because I'm going to show you something fun to do with white guash as well. Okay, Other than that, we're using Canson, 140 pound cold press. We're going to use the more textured side. As I mentioned in previous classes, there are two sides. To watercolor paper, you're going to use the side that has more texture. Then for our brush, we are going to use this really dainty, lovely, it's a Princeton, it's an eight flat. I've never used a flat. This was actually my first time really tinkering with it. Typically, I use large flats to paint the background, so lay the ground and then I'll paint over it. But I've never used it for a flower. I thought, you know what, it's a new year. Let's try a new brush. I have a size eight here. If you don't have this exact same brush, please don't feel like you have to go out and buy it. But if you have something similar, that would be great. I also have a larger flat here, which is ironically or strangely a size eight as well. You can see here that these are clearly not the same size. Brush sizes are very strange, but this is called a bright, it's similar to a flat, but it's not quite the same. This is an eighth and a five eighth length. This is from the Umbria collection and then this is from the Kolinsky Sable. You can have a little research, take a little time to figure out if you want to add these brushes to your toolbox. If not a huge deal, But I would love for you to have a bright or a flat on hand, this will be the main focal brush. But I'm going to show you how basically to do the same thing, a larger scale. For those of you who like to paint big. Then of course our tried and true trusted Princeton velvet. Touch sine six round my favorite brush, so very versatile. We could do this whole flower with this one brush too, but we've done that in other classes. We're shaking it up a bit. Have a palette salad plate off to the side, some paper towels, a water cup. Just a note, I'm planning to mention it when we're moving it in progress, but when we switch to foliage, make sure you rinse out this cup because it's going to turn very pink, especially if you're using the orchid. 3. Talking Process and Familiarity: Okay, taking you back in time just a bit here. This was my preliminary page of experimental carnations. As you can see, there's a lot going on. I wasn't really sure how I wanted to approach this flower. I tried a bunch of different things, figured out what I loved, then tweaked things as I went along, and then filled up some pages along the way with more polished florals such as those shown here. But it all starts here with this figuring this out. I'm going to continue on with this page and do a little bit more here, and then we're going to fill up another page. As you can see, this is a carnation that quickly went awry when I did not add or leave enough white space between the petals. I'm going to talk to you a lot about how deceivingly easy this flower appears when you see something like this. Maybe it doesn't look deceivingly easy to you, but to me I'm like, oh, it's a carnation. A carnation, it's so simple. It's sweet. It's like a daisy. It's not a daisy, it's nothing like a daisy. It's a lot more intricate with a whole lot of details. There is going to be a temptation, and I usually mention this when I'm teaching to overwork this flower to death. Because as we are going to take a moment here to really look at all of the stunning details, there's so many areas where the petals are ribboning, where they're folding over. You can see the beautiful markings where the darker is flooding through the outer petals. The light, there's the potential to do so beautiful things with this flower. Just marveling and studying it. But when we try and translate nature's intricacy to paper, often what happens is the flower just becomes quickly overwhelmed and overworked. Because we're just trying to do too much. The idea is to look, to notice, to study. And then intuitively, once we really have a handle and feel comfortable approaching the page, come back and paint a going for it. That's my approach. This is not a botanical class where we're going to just be looking at every little ribbon and curl trying to get every stripe within the petal. We're just going to notice and choose details that benefit the overall flower. Just a heads up it to me anyway. A deceivingly easy flower to paint. It took a while for me to figure out, okay, I need to simplify this because it's going to become too much. I just wanted to take you here. Obviously, this flower went bad right away. But this was one of my first flowers, and I just used the orchid straight out of the bottle. I want to bring you behind the scenes and say, this is what this flower looks like using no other color, using one consistency. Our broth consistency here. If you are not familiar with water consistencies, please definitely go take a look at prior classes because it's absolutely essential to have command and understanding of consistencies for this class. This is an intermediate class. There will definitely be some prior knowledge necessary to complete, to have success at what we're going to do here today. This is that one color, just straight. I loved this flower. Initially I thought like this is the one. And then I moved on because I'm never satisfied just leaving it as is. And I did something a little different here where I did the dark and then I did some lighter petals on the outside here, I really went light to see what I could do. Then taking my brush, The thing about this brush wih is really neat, is the bristles. They have this forked edge to them when you run them through the petals. Depending on whether they're wet or dry, we're going to do both. Because I want to show you, like I said, every way to, to understand how to approach this. We'll leave some beautiful texture behind and we'll leave some gestural marks behind as well. That's what I did experimenting here. The next area I went over to, I can't remember exactly what, but I think I went here. Again, this was a sideways looking at. I believe this one was just looking straight down on it. Then over here, I turned one of them sideways. Because I really wanted to figure out all what's the best angle, because here's the thing. I don't force myself to paint exactly what I see if it ends up. I painting something straight on, looking at it and there's no stem visible. You can see it's just the flower head, there's no stem. This is going to look like a floating flower on paper. What I'm essentially going to do later down the road, once I've assembled everything, is I'm going to figure out, okay, where might a stem possibly be. If I were to imagine this was more on its side than just coming straight up and down. I would take my brush and I would give some structure and give some delicacy to the stem here so that it doesn't look like a floating flower. This was an actual side flower. I would really put in some of this base here that we see really plug in right there, stem and then bring it down. Then over here I really went wild and I let everything dry. Because that's going to be a really important component as we work forward to is, are we leaving things wet and then adding in, are we letting things completely dry? Every single decision and choice you make is going to affect the next step. If you look closely here, something really beautiful happened. One of my favorites of all the flowers. When I took this brush after painting really light here, the media was still wet and I took just a slightly different water to paint. Consistency, ran the brush through this petal here and created a really beautiful bleed. And if you know what I mean, those of you who work wet and to wet there is something really magical that happens when you just time it perfect. It really doesn't happen for me all that often, but it's, the media is not over wet and it's not quite dry. And that color just floods through it, leaving behind just a beautiful streak. It looks exactly like the flower without really even trying. It's just effortless. But I want it to be known that that's just not the case for even professional artists. I do have a little bit more understanding as to what to look for and what to strive for. But it doesn't happen for me every time I, as you move along, extra extra grace and patience with yourself as we explore this flower and allow yourself to come up with different variations and different approaches to exploring it. I don't want you to feel like, oh well, it doesn't look exactly like that. That's okay. Lean into that and see if you can turn it into something you do love. But I'm going to show you so much. I believe I said here, I let everything dry. Then I went over with that really intense orchid here, adding in some dark stripes. Because if you look closely at the flower, you'll see that these outer petals are light and then the dark floods through here. However, if you're not careful quickly, that flower becomes super overworked. This is heading in that direction. This is a whole style, this is I'm not even sure if I'm pronouncing it correctly, but Chinois. I have a friend, Diane. She's on Instagram, if you guys are familiar with her work, who is like a Chinois wizard, and she makes her own silk paper and it's just her style is so beautiful and it gravitates towards that. But in terms of water color, someone might look at that and just be like, wow, they didn't know when to stop. But it is so subjective. I don't want to say like, oh yeah, this was so overworked. Clearly something wrong happened here. We can all agree and look at and go, wow, okay, this one missed the mark. But you take ten people, five may absolutely adore this and think, yes, that's the way it should look. And then the other five are going to say the complete opposite. Keep in mind it's so subjective, it comes down to what you love and what you feel is beautiful. Okay, that was a bit of a spiel, but I feel like I'd be remiss in not bringing you behind the scenes and walking you through each experiment. As I went along, I feel like so much is missed in classes. I hear from students so often that they take classes. And it's just the teacher just jumps right into, okay, then we take our brush and we do a little here. And there's just no context for how we got there. I hope you don't feel as though I'm taking up too much of your time here. I'm just trying to be extra generous with my experience and with my process. I just so much want for you to succeed. That is all that we are going to actually jump into painting. You probably thought it was never coming. We were just going to talk all day, which would be fun. But let's go ahead and actually start painting some things. All right? I'm going to put these little cuts off to the side here. If you haven't already, go ahead and get your palette out. We're going to mix up some color here. I'm just for the sake of keeping things very simple, just use this color, which is the orchid. You can see it's highly pigmented, it's going to come out very intense. And then I'm going to dilute it just a bit. Then we're just going to experiment with brush technique and just brush appearance, like what can we expect basically from this brush? Then we will move forward with the rest of how to actually assemble the flower itself along here, I'd like for you to just do some drills. We're not even going to look at the carnation. I just want you to just get familiar with this brush. If you are not already, go ahead and dip into your paint. You want a consistency that's right around in between broth and cough syrup is okay. But just make sure you have enough water on your brush, because if not, you're going to get that dry stroke, which is super lovely. If that's in fact what you are aiming for, let's go ahead and just start experimenting with strokes. Now you're going to notice when you come full belly, you're going to get those wide strokes. But the magic really happens when you come right on top of the brush here and you start angling out and using the bristles. Be careful here, because the strokes can very quickly get chunky. And the idea is to alternate with both chunkier and heavier strokes. And then those light, delicate aspects, which we note on the edge here of the petals, those beautiful forking, ruffled edges. All right, if we were to just go full belly here, this is the stroke we're going to get. You can see there's a little bit of a ruffled edge here. If I were to dry it off a bit, you'd see we're really going to get that brush texture popping through depending on how much paint to water is loaded on your brush. Different results may vary. I feel like they always say that in like cooking shows and I'm like, yeah, they do vary. It's so specific to exactly what it is you're doing. A pinch of salt can change the whole recipe. And same thing goes for painting. Anyway, these are our full belly strokes. If we were to keep going along the way here, just creating like a little arch. Really just want you getting familiar with the brush itself. Now let's go ahead and come on the side here. Let's take our brush and really do some light, delicate strokes here. You can chunk it up at first, but then I really want you to take the corner, the edge of that brush and ruffle. Even a drill of just doing this, really just grazing the paper, the lighter, the better. Because this is going to show you control. This is going to show you pressure. This is going to educate you so much just knowing the distance between brush and paper, it's going to make it so much easier. When it comes time to actually put all of this theory into practice, try and make some fine lines. Then obviously you can go much bigger. If I were to do a little bit of both, I might start with a stroke like this and then fine, fine, because you're trying to essentially create something like this. Not all of these petals are going to have that appearance as we note and move along. We're going to pick out and choose the details we want to highlight. But for the most part, that's what we're working with, come from all different angles. Really get comfortable with moving your wrist around. Then I notice that when I do strokes this way, they're not as strong, but it's something that I practice. I want to make sure that I can do it if you might want to come this way, even though it might feel a little bit awkward that way, you're not having to completely turn your paper around each time I work with the angle that's most comfortable to you, because this is most comfortable to me. I might turn my paper around, but I also want to be able in the moment, especially when time matters, because we're working with wet media, be sure to just get familiar with all different ways of moving this brush around. I'm so excited, I can't keep myself from actually painting a flower. I always want to just like turn it into something. I force myself. You're just experimenting. You're just getting to know it. Don't rush ahead. Don't rush the process. I'm not going to go too much more into this because you can see what it is that I'm doing. We're going to actually go into structure of the carnation In the next video. I would love for you to possibly take a piece of paper and just fill it up. Doing these drills where you're just coming really on the edge here, getting comfortable with the pressure, and then doing some full belly strokes and ruffling up the edges. The idea here too is to paint small. We have a big brush off to the side that we will likely get to. It always depends on how much meat I give you. I tend to pack my glasses full of information, but I'm hoping to get to that as well. But I just want you to try and keep in mind, okay, keep it, keep it tidy. Keep it delicate. These flowers quickly, get out of control. They just grow large right before your eyes, especially when you get lost in it. You can see if you're trying to actually scale a carnation. If you were to put this in a bouquet, say with like peonies, the ponies are going to be huge. You don't want your carnations to be so huge that they rival the pony. You want to be able to take this delicate filler flower because it's not a focal flower. If you're familiar with the terms that I share in my book, it's something we would add to a bouquet. Certainly, you could assemble a bunch of carnations together and make a bouquet out of it, but it's just not that striking immediate. Your eyes gravitate towards it. Keep that in mind as you're working along and just do those drills. Then when you start to feel comfortable, then maybe start looking at a flower and taking a couple tips from your drill session and going, okay, not an intricate flower because we're going to do that together, we're going to look and notice, and study. But just okay, this is how I might put together a flower. Keep it super loose. Give yourself lots of grace to just experiment with it and not get too hung up on what it actually looks like. Just get comfortable with moving the brush in different ways. Angles and positions, and pressure. It's a lot to think about. I don't want you feel stress and pressure to make a beautiful flower. I really want you, if you can, to take at least ten, 15 minutes and just get familiar with the brush. If it's not a brush, you're not familiar. 4. Notice and Marvel : I feel like this video is one that could very easily be skipped over, but I definitely encourage you to just spend a couple moments here with me as we take this important step in the process, which is what I call notice and marvel. Anytime I am painting a new flower, I like to just give myself a little bit of time to really look at it, whether it be in person or something like a pin I've saved on pent. Just get quiet. It sounds a little odd, maybe a little hippy, but I just try and see this flower for what it is, and notice its beauty and do a little ooh, it sounds really kooky, but it helps to make me feel more connected to what it is that I'm painting, if that makes sense to actually form like an attachment to the flower and not paint it from this cold and aloof place, but really lean into beauty of it like this is beautiful. This is something that just happens in nature all by itself. Well, with quite a bit of help, but nothing that we do. As you're looking at this flower, I just invite you to just notice the beautiful way that the petals coil and the sweet ruffling on the edge of the petals. Just take a moment to figure out what areas are your o, and maybe even make a note or two. What do you love most about this flower? What are you drawn to? What is most important to you in bringing out and putting on paper? Just make a couple notes off to the side for this one. There's these dainty, cute little stamen coming out that I don't see because they're tucked inside on the other flowers. That might be something like, oh, I could definitely lift that out and make a little dainty aspect here. Just look at it from all angles. I really love the way this petal is just so generous and it's just in folding over. Anyway, it's an important part of the process and I hope you will just take a moment. I also love the way the color just ribbons through the petals here is just going to be a really fun thing to do with our water color. All right, let's put those off to the side. As I mentioned before, the orchid color is quite intense. I'm going to end up calming it down. But just for the sake of what we're doing, I'm going to use it the way that it is straight out of the tube, just to give you an idea of what to expect as we move forward. Go ahead and take your palette out, and then if you're using this color, put a couple drops here. If you are not using this color, then you are simply going to mix the versinoviolet and the burnt umber together. And I would like you to create both a cough syrup consistency and a broth. Again, if you're not familiar with these terms, definitely go back to a previous class on the beginning side of things so that this is all very clear and understandable to you. There's so much to cover that I'm not going to cover the basics so that we can actually get into the meat of what it is we're doing. Okay, put your palette off to the side here. Go ahead and dip your brush into the water, and then just begin to mix it into the paint. Really saturate the bristles by rotating the brush back and forth. Then let's go ahead and pick up one of our carnations. And just notice together again, I'm not going to feel like I have to pull out every detail and I'm going to rotate things as I move. I want to come from this angle where I'm painting it in this direction. I'm going to try and highlight these two areas here where I see like an infinity sign. If you see that with me, then things are sprouting out very rounded here in the middle, almost like a rose. To do that, I'm going to use the side of my brush, using those delicate strokes that we practiced in the previous video. You're just going to see and note how I'm choosing to omit a lot of the details in order to overall benefit the flower itself. All right? I'm going to start right about here to give myself some room. I'm going to begin by plugging in a little bit of dark for here, and then I'm going to do the same thing on the other side. Then I'm just going to start working my way around using the side of my brush, just noticing little gaps in the petals. Giving myself permission to stray a little bit. As I move things around, I'm going to blot off a little bit. I'm going to do one belly stroke, come up on the side for some ribboning, then I'm going to rinse off my brush. I want to get off some of that paint and I'm going to complete the flower just twisting and turning. I want to make sure that I'm working while this is wet, so that I get that beautiful bleed of the colors merging together. Coming up for the petal that you see on top here. And working my way around, grabbing a little bit more paint, then I'm going to make sure I have some nice generous petals here. And then on the side, using that brush to ribbon things. Going to do the same thing up here. Again, I'm going to take a moment and just look what I have. Because sometimes I'll tend to work a little bit fast because I want to make sure I capture all those details while things are wet, make sure the bleeds are happening, and then I rush into the next part. I'm taking a moment because I can now pause for a moment. I'm going to take a little bit of that cough syrup consistency and I'm just going to plug it in right here where the media is still wet just to create some further bleeds. Then I'm going to blot off again, lots of blotting off because I'm using this one brush and not loading different consistencies on two brushes. There's going to be a lot of blotting off and reloading. If you want to use two brushes, you can. That way you have a Cough strip consistency on one brush and then a broth consistency that would help you. But you do have to pick up and put down brushes or if you're like me, tuck them in your mouth, which I cannot do because I'm talking. All right, then I'm going to come down and I'm going to complete this really generous petal here. To do that, I'm going to come out here, make sure I don't miss that opportunity to add some really pretty ruffles. The decision I'm making here is to not try and capture every single one of these ruffles, but use some soft rounding to the petal. And then letting there just be moments of ruffling if that makes sense. You can see if we're look straight down on it, it doesn't look exactly like it. But we have enough similarity here to give us an idea of, okay, we're coming at this angle, we're looking down on it, maybe a little bit to the side. As the viewer can understand what's happening here is where I might stray a little bit and intuitively say, you know what? This doesn't feel complete to me, although all you can see here is that petal and then a gap here. I like the idea of plugging in some more petals over here, some more dainty petals. I'm going to do that just for the sake of doing it, because I feel like it would serve the flower. So I'm going to pick up a little bit of that broth consistency and I'm going to be super careful to blot off so that my brush is not soaking. This is the part my friends that is super important. If I plug in my petals here and my bristles are stopping or even like extra moist, it's just not going to have the effect that I want. I really would love for you to try and begin to get a command and control for how much water is loaded. I mean by the degree, not just like three different consistencies but even just the finer consistencies in between. That only comes from practicing and just being ultra familiar with noticing your brush and figuring out, okay, I can see that it's on the verge of dripping, it's extra moist, or it's just a little bit shy of getting dry. It can be hard to note those details, but they become such a benefit when working like this. Okay, I'm going to take the side of my brush. I'm just going to add a petal there. Not a huge difference. You can see it's not on my flower here, but I love it. I feel like it rounds off the flower and just serves the whole flower overall. I could do the same thing over here, but then if I make that choice, and this is where I feel like as a teacher, I can add context if I make that choice to come over here, now I'm expanding that flower. I'm losing the size because I'm going to make it over large. That's what I mean when I say try and paint small. It can be hard to do. Painting big is easier because you just give yourself full range of the page. But in order to really capture this flower, try and stay in control of size here. So I'm not going to make that decision over there. Even though I could plug in some really, really dainty strokes, I'm just going to not do it just to keep the size here. Okay, that was a lot and that was only just one color and one approach. This is basic structure of a carnation using one pigment. You can see it did some really beautiful things. Let's just recap there. We started with that cough consistency in the middle, then we blotted off and we plugged in some lighter petals along the side. Then we took a moment and a breather to load up the brush. Again, plug in some more dark right here to create this bleed. Then we have this generous petal here that helps to soften off the flower as a whole. We added in some more texture and shaping over here on the right hand side, it's a lot, but overall you can see that by not having a single color and shapes that look too identical, we create something that looks very unique and very close to what we do find in nature. I hope that makes sense. I'm probably not going to be that elaborate as we move forward just for the sake of time. But I wanted to break it down to make sure you really understand the thinking behind the decisions that are made. All right, let's plug into the next video where we're going to do this whole thing with a different flower using a different approach. 5. Carnations With A Vintage Palette: Back in our palette. Let's go ahead and add a little bit of the burnt umber to the palette. I have some over here, but I'm going to plug in a little bit right there so you can see it. Like I mentioned before, this color is not so much my jam. I think it looks really beautiful. It's just so striking. And it looks so similar to the flower. I wish you could see exactly how close it looks. This looks so much lighter than this on the video, but because I'm just drawn to a more vintage and earthy palette, I just can't help myself. And I need to tone it down a bit. We're going to take this color. You might need to reapply your drops, or you might need to make sure that your Zeno violet and burnt umber are mixed thoroughly. What you're going to do here, if you're doing Verzenoviolet and burnt umber, you're just going to make sure that you have a really heavy mixture of both the paint I wanted a cough syrup consistency so that it's nice and thick and unctuous. All right, let's load that in. Do we have a nice mixture here? Take your time. I'm going to add a little bit more because it's starting to get a little more brown than I like. I don't want to lose the pink. I just don't want it screaming at me. That's what I feel like when I look at that color. It's just going, hey, look at me All right. Okay, Let's do the same thing with a different flower using the muted color. Like I said, carnation six ways, it might even be more when I get done here, Let's go for this really sweet little dainty flower off to the side. This is a bud that's beginning to unfold. Let's take a moment. I'm noticing it. I see that there is a generous center here where it's just very dark with a little bit of ribboning throughout. And then the petals get gradually lighter as we extend and expand. I'm just going to notice, I'm going to marvel. And I'm going to intuitively make strokes based on how I feel about how the flowers going. Because a lot of that is okay. Well, that didn't turn out the way I planned. Now what do I do and going off of what's happening on the page. All right. So I'm going to plug in, give myself a little bit of space here so I'm not right up against this flower. And I'm also going to come up a little bit to give it some height. That's something that is a super important part of composition. You can see that all the flowers here is the same flower we're going to do now are at different heights. That really helps to build in the aesthetic of the overall bouquet. Okay? All right. Just taking a breather because I can, and maybe one more here then I'm going to go ahead and blot off, or just wipe it on the palette, save that paint, and then merge down to broth consistency and begin to expand that. I'm noticing the petal up here. I'm going to start up here first with some sweet ruffling and then work my way down a little bit. I have to paint small here to not come above this peak. I'm going to expand it a little bit so that I have a little bit of room to move around. I'm going to blot off one more time. Now I didn't time that bleed completely perfectly. It's still going to work and you're going to see it's going to just flow into here. But because I'm going slowly, I'm not going to get that perfect effect that I got when I was talking before about how that bleed just works exquisitely. Again, being super mindful of how much water I have on my brush. Okay. Taking a breather, looking to see size discrepancy here. I'm right about at the size in real life here. And I don't want to go too much bigger than that. Because I'm really trying to challenge myself to paint small, even though the tendency is to really be generous with the petals here. You can see if I were to come up on the side here, which we'll do in a moment, it's a whole different flower. But I'm really trying to notice and study and see what's happening in the center here. And then I'll plug a stem in later to get more of flow and structure, all right? I don't want to overcrowd it too much, but I also feel like it could probably benefit from a little ribboning down here. I'm going to add just a tiny bit more blotting off and adding some really fine ruffles. I don't want to crowd this flower too much just because then I'm going to lose that sense of flow. Then I'm also going to come in here and just add a touch of paint to create a connection here between that petal. All right, let's do the same thing, but let's go on the side now. Okay, same thing. I'm going to start with broth this time because the cough syrup really is mostly for the middle of the flower. Let's go ahead and plug this one right in the middle. It's simpler, but you also have to make clear choices if that makes sense. There's only so many strokes that are necessary to paint this flower on its side. However, the choices that you make are very important to overall structure of the flower, in layman's term, make your strokes count again, I'm taking liberties here, then I'm going to leave that open. Then I would plug in the base here and then run that stem all the way through. Super simple, but again, making your strokes count and making sure that you have the proper amount of water is going to be essential. Now what we could do is take a little bit of the coughs or consistency while things are still wet, gently run here on the bottom, then that's going to flow right up through the base. Later on working wet into wet, you could also add the green in. Then the green is going to run from the green to the dark, to the light, which is super pretty. I definitely encourage further experimentation. Okay, that's a look at using the vintage palette. You're doing the dainty flower and then the side flower here that gives you an idea of what it would look like with a different color. Now we're going to use the same palette, but we're going to do a few different things with the flower itself. 6. Wet into Wet Technique: If you look at the title of this video, it is wet into wet stripes, which is exactly what it says. We're going to create the flower and while the media is still wet, we're going to head in with the Cough cert consistency and add a little bit of the details working with the wet media versus letting things completely dry. It's a completely different effect and I think it's going to be a fun just option and approach for you as you feel your way through this flower. Let's go ahead and start as before. I'm not going to pick up a flower this time just because we've been doing a lot of noticing and studying. You can, if you like, but I'm just going to intuitively go at it now. I'm going to start right here. I'm going to do a pretty generous flower, but I'm also going to make sure not to enlargen it so big that I lose the dainty nature of it. Turn the paper slightly here. I'm imagining this flower coming on its side here. I feel like this is probably a good place to rinse off, blot off, and pick up a little bit of water, rinse blot, and keep moving forward again, rinsing off here. I'm going to try and go light on these outer petals. Too much water. So I'm going to dry off here and touch it very lightly to this petal. This is going to be the timing that I'm going to have to get right. I need this media wet enough to accept what I'm going to do next. Taking a little bit of paint, picking up the coughs consistency, and plugging it back in. You can see it's a little bit dry over here already. Even just a few seconds. Again, it's pretty dry over here too. We had initially, it happened for us over here, but it already started to dry by the time I got around to there. I'm just going to add a little bit more delicate ruffling here and then darken this media just a little bit so that it feels like a true connection between this base petal and the petal extending here. But you want there to be enough white so that you can really see the difference in color here. Really small differences. Not something that someone might say, oh, I see exactly what you did here and then you changed it up when you moved to this flower. The beauties in the details, I just want you to decide what it is that you love and what feels like most beautiful to you all. Just looking at this flower, I don't want to get over large, but I also feel like I can expand the a little bit using that side of the brush and really get some fun texture here by not overworking the center. Because if I were to really truly look at the center of this flower at the center, I'm coming more from the side angle. And then painting this down here below. You can see there's so much happening in the center here, but if I try and capture all of that, it's going to end up getting really complicated. Again, it's so important to know what you're drawn to, point those things out as you move forward so that you don't get lost in the details all. Let's see, just playing with it now, I like it the way it is, so I'm just going to leave that there. And then let's do it again. Just doing a different flower. Okay. I'm starting with that mixture of the umber and the orchid not quite dark enough. I'm going to just pick up a little bit more paint. There we go. I'm just going to take a quick little gander at it. Okay, that's a good spot to blot off. And I'm going to allow these petals to touch now, because if you don't let any of your flowers touch, then it's going to start to look very unnatural, just because a bouquet doesn't sit perfectly, coming on the side here. And again, going to get generous here with this petal coming up behind here. Grab that Cough ser, consistency and plug in and adding a little bit more Cough consistency right here just to create a connection. Then I'm looking at this flower thinking to myself, it just needs a little bit more of a delicate component. So I'm going to add some really light petals on this side. As things dry, you'll notice how they shift and change looking at them. That's probably my least favorite flower, but when it comes together, going to look really beautiful. Because we have flowers that are going. We've talked about this, a bouquet structure before. We want flowers that are of all sizes and scales and angles. It's extremely important when we assemble and put it all together. Just looking at what I have here, I'm just going to start playing with it a little bit just because I don't like it. Anyway, I might as well just see what I can do with it. Pick up a little bit more paint. I like what's happening there and there. Okay. I like it a little bit more now. Okay. That is that wet into wet stripe effect. That was what I was going for when I created this flower right here, you can see that we have some striping and then here it was dry. Now we're going to look at the same approach, but we're going to let the flower completely dry and then add the stripes in so you can see what that looks like together. 7. Dry on Wet Technique: For this approach, it is best to go light first. You can always add in more color because that's going to be the style that we take with this next flower. Like I said, it has that Chinois look to it. And you're going to want to build up to the final result and not over saturate the flower prior to those details. Let's make sure we're working with broth consistency. I'm going to blot off over here on the side, make sure that I have a nice broth pink. I'm actually going to add a little bit of the burnt umber to it too. Not too. I just want to get it a just a different color, just a slightly different color to give you a different feel for this flower. We're going to head into using different mixtures of colors in the next series of videos, and this will be a precursor to that. Okay, again, I have this really pretty pink now. It looks closer to that than it is, it's much lighter here on my palette. But I'm going to even lighten it up a little bit here. All right, so again, just heading in this time, I think I'm going to plug in a flower right here. Just noticing, coming right up here at the top then nice generous petal because I'm not doing wet into wet. I'm going to close the gap here a little bit. The marks that I make, I would normally want to leave that white space. I've been neglectful of talking about the importance of white space because I've been covering so many other things. But it is absolutely essential that there is white space between. Obviously you can see that as I'm moving. I'm being careful not to omit that part of the flow. I'm not really worried here about things drying because all of the details I'm going to add are going to happen as soon as everything's dry. Not a big deal. I can just move at my leisure, which is nice, wet and to wet can invoke a little bit of stress sometimes. All right, making some minor edits here. As I move this flower along, just looking at it, noticing do I have a similar shape? The same shape. Can something be added to overall serve the flower? Really playing with fun brush strokes here. Okay, that's mostly dry. However, it could probably use a little bit more drying. I'm going to do that off camera real quick and then I'm going to come back and plug in those stripes. So you can see once more how much paint you load onto your brush is going to be very important. It's not a ratio that I can give you, because it's just something that you can feel as you load the brush, blot it off, rinse it a little bit, reload it. People ask a lot about my process. There are some things that cannot necessarily be explained or described. Certainly learned, but it's hard to relay that part of what it is that happens next. Because it really comes down to feeling my way through it. The best, the best way I can say it is that I'm looking at my brush and I'm just noticing how much moisture is on it. I know what I've done on the palette, which is to run the brush through the paint and then blot off on my paper towel, and then reload with a mostly dry brush in order to add a little bit of moisture back into the brush. It sounds a lot more complicated than it is, but it's just a matter of me feeling my way through. Okay. How much paint is going to be on here each time you do this? And I encourage you to paint each approach that we're looking at several times, you're going to get slightly different results, which is the beauty of it. In fact, I was just off screen just taking a moment to look at just our little cluster here and just notice how beautiful everything looks because it's not uniform. We have this intense flower, which is very pretty. And then we have these more supplementary flowers that just a little bit more calm down but still just equally beautiful. All of those choices that were made lend to the overall entrant of the flowers itself themselves. All right. Again, just plugging in here on the side. What we're going to do here is just add in those strokes that those markings that we see along the flower here as they extend downward towards the center of the flower. Now here's a tip. If you're not feeling like you're able to master this technique with this brush, like if it's still feeling too clunky to you, you can very easily get them or similar results using your round brush and plug those stripes in that way, just taking it and running it down. The benefit of this brush is that you get the beautiful texture of the spacing between the bristles. This brush naturally wants to have bristles that separate, especially the drier the brush is if and when you can get the right dose basically, of paint to pressure you, get a beautiful result. I encourage you to try it and there's always other options if it's not working out the way that you like it. All right. Another tip is sometimes I'll do a stroke on my palette just to see how much paint I have. So I'll just run it along and say, oh yeah, that looks to me that's ready to be applied. You can take your palette, run the brush on the palette, or even on a scratch piece of paper. Now, this is a smooth surface, so I have to take that into consideration versus a watercolor paper which has texture to it, so it's going to soak up more moisture. All things to just keep in mind. All right? And I'm just going to begin to plug them in this way and then blot off and get that texture. And again, and you're wanting to angle everything back to center, adding in those little gestural details that make it special. You can keep playing with it and poking at it until you feel like it's completely finished to you or you can just leave it as is. I would suggest, again, painting at least like four or five of these flowers completely dry and then trying different ratios of water and paint. You can even get the stripes a lot lighter than this because we painted so light. You can do this flower and then take the brush with even less paint on it and get something that's a little bit more subtle. This is that very intense like it's striking. You would notice. It's not going to be that flower that your eye glances over. It's that focal, it has the focal ness to it. For example, yesterday when I was shopping for the carnations, there had candy cane striped carnations that looked very similar to this, with red and white, and they were beautiful. But if you look at this pink, the stripings markings in this, you don't even notice them until you're really looking up close and seeing them So many different ways and approaches you can take with the flower. And I encourage you to try them all because they all have something beautiful to lend. All right, we're going to put this one off to the side and we're going to experiment with a few different colors. I'm going to show you how to do carnations and white and then also a really beautiful coral color. 8. Carnations in White: If you haven't already, you're going to want to clear some space on your palette or use different palette completely as we do not want to get any pink into this color mixture. I'm going to do a little bit of a better job here just getting the rest of that pink off. This will give me enough space to mix up that color. And then also rinse out your water cap if it needs changing, which likely does after all of that pink. Then we are going to take the same brush and make a little bit of a water puddle here. And then dip into your burnt umber. And swirl that around a bit, and then dip into your lamp. Black. Carbon black. I thought that's what it was. Okay, this is carbon black that I'm using. But again, a lamp black would work just fine. Even a pain's gray even though it'll have a hint of blue in it would work too. I don't want you to feel like you have to go out and buy all brand new supplies. Just have slightly different results. All right. Putting a little bit of that carbon black in. I've taught white watercolors in a previous class. If you are curious about how I make white watercolor ratios, you can definitely look into that class then if you're not already familiar, I say it with every single class, check out my watercolor vintage guides, especially if you love whites. There's a series called the Enchants series where I give you 25 mixtures for making white. It's been such an asset to the creative community. It's my most purchased resource of all. It gives you just the understanding and the groundwork for creating that particular series, which is the enchanted series for whites. And then I also go through every other color in the spectrum. I do one on golds and yellows and oranges and greens. And then I do blues and purples. I do pinks and reds. And it's just such a great benefit to have that as you're working. Okay. You can see I have a really nice little earthy gray here. Now what I'm going to do is rinse off my brush completely and begin a new pile. And bring a little bit of that paint into the pile. Now I have the broth version of this white and we're ready. All right, so I'm going to pick up my flower just then head in. The main difference you're going to note here as I begin to paint is that we're not going to have the same bleeding effects, everything else, all the same rules still apply. I'm noticing where those dark pockets are. I'm just being mindful of where the petals are stretching and arching and ruffling from, but we're not going to have those tremendous bleeds the way we did now. This is going to be the darkest part of the flower. Then I'm going to rinse off one more time, add a little bit more water so that it's an even lighter version of this color. But it's not going to be so light that it creates this dramatic difference. I wanted you to see what it would look like just being slightly more subtle. I love white water color. It is just so ethereal. But it can be a little tricky getting the right mixture and then also just knowing how to use it. We're going to do this a couple times. This is going to be the example where things are a little bit darker and drier in the middle. And then we have some petals extending where it doesn't all blend and bleed together. And then I'm going to do one where it's just all the same consistency. What we can do here is play with the white space a little bit more than we can and use that to act as light part of the flower. And we can take the brush and run it through to create some stripes and use that white to act as part of the petal. I'm just going to add a little bit more ruffling here. A little bit more here. I like the way that's looking. Let's do the same thing. I'm going to start with that darkest color. And I'm just going to keep working my way through. It can see it's quite a bit darker, but I don't mind. This has more of a gray feel to it, whereas the other one has a little bit more of a pink, pinkish white. I cover that in my guide as well. I'll talk about how just changing the consistency slightly really alters the whole effect on their own. They aren't all that striking if I'm just looking at them and being honest is more of a delicate flower, but when added to a cluster of the pink, it's going to end up looking really beautiful. Which is what we're going to do at the end. You're going to see how these colors just completely complement and just look so lovely together. All right, just finishing off a few details that I see. Then what we could do at that point too, is we can take our round brush loaded up with a little bit of that mixture if we wanted to pull out that pretty little white stain in there. Obviously we don't use the white. We'd have to use the paper and then create shadows around it. If we wanted to use white, I tend to create those details using color instead of using the white of the paper. And you can pull out just a little bit of a detail there, just the indication of something happening in the middle. You can do the same thing over here, just the indication that something was happening here towards the middle. It's a very gestural approach, just not really looking too closely at what's happening and overall just adding a small detail to hint and indicate. All right, so let's do a bud, just so we round off this little white cluster here, we'll do a couple buds. Again, your choices, count here, careful of your strokes. Just take your time just looking again at my flower, giving it a little bit of structure by swooping out that petal to the side there. Then let's do a really small bud right up here. This one will imagine coming right out of this little enclosure here. And we're going to go through and add stems. And just fill in the gaps that we left before we head into the final lesson together. Let's see, Maybe I'm just taking a moment to see what I have. Maybe one more small one right over here. Use a little bit of a lighter mixture just to break up what's happening. Go. All right. I love that little white cluster. We'll head back in. All makes sense when we add some green to it, but for now, we're going to just pull this sheet over to the side and do our last color before we add in those beautiful green details. 9. Carnations in Coral: Okay. Off to the side here. I have combined three colors. I'm going to show you exactly which ones those are. That is the Quinacridone red, the rich green gold, and the Verzino violet. If you don't have the violet, you can add a touch of that orchid in there and that's going to create a really beautiful coral pink. Go ahead and mix up two different ratios. Have your cough syrup on one side and then your broth on the other side, just so that you can quickly load as needed. Then let's go ahead and again, plug in here to start with the cough syrup. I'm just going to start to notice where those gaps are moving a little bit quicker now as I would while painting, just for me, I try not to overthink it. Sometimes slowing down is necessary and sometimes it's just fear. Okay, I like that I'm going to add maybe one more stroke and then blot off and begin adding those outer petals and continuing to work my way around. I'm going to blot off one more time, really taking advantage of all the different ratios to create a flower that has a lot of interest to it. I don't want to lose the shape. I'm remembering to paint small and then I'm going to plug in a little bit of color right there, just so you can see like what's happening right there, creating the same sort of situation here. Okay? And I have right to it. Okay. Same thing, lighter colors. I'm going to allow some blending to happen here. I'm going to turn my paper just a little bit as these two flowers merge together, quickly adding a touch of color down below the same thing we did with the pinks. And adding a little bit of color right in here to indicate that something dark there is happening at the center. And continuing along and rinsing off, picking up that broth consistency, I'm going to allow these flowers to begin to touch. Not really using these as a reference so much right now. Intuitively carving out this flower, tucking it underneath this one over here. And then just plugging a little bit more color in here while the media is still wet. And the same over here, adding a little bit more, picking up a tiny bit of that Verzinoviolet can see it's going to modify it slightly so that we have some pinker petals here which are really pretty and running that through. Let's go ahead and do one more using that color, The coral plus the verzenoviolet to finish her off here. Okay, it's kind of on its side there, rinsing off. I need a little bit of more paint. You can see just by adding a little bit of color to this cluster of flowers, it begins to become so much more interesting and just joyful to look at. I try not to do that right away because it just advances the technique a little bit. I wanted to show you just what that coral would look like using different consistencies. And then as you get more comfortable building that flower, then you can add more colors into it and it just becomes so fascinating. We're going to do more of that. When we put the bouquet together, they'll definitely be some booing and awe moments. All right. That's that we have covered three different colors, more like four. And we've studied several approaches. I feel like this is a great foundation for us to now take what we've learned and move it into application and building a bouquet. But obviously, first before that, we're going to figure out our greens, our green palette and how to put it all together. Join me for our last segment. 10. Stems and Gestural Lines: If it's been a bit of time since you last looked at these flowers, I invite you to do the same thing, just so you can get reacquainted with how this all spreads out appears in real life before you approach the page, if you want to practice this technique off to the side rather than just directly plugging it into your flowers, you absolutely can. However, I'm not going to do that only because this is more intermediate material. I've covered that in previous classes about practicing it off to the side and then plugging it. I feel like you're going to be prepared for this. We're going to use a mixture of the Daniel Smith under Sea Green and the rich green gold. That way we can blend those two colors together to make just a pretty palette. Now what I see here, and that I'm going to modify a little bit is that this obviously leads straight in to these petals. That's something that I'm not going to do. I never do that with my flowers unless I'm doing wet into wet. Because if you try and plug this in all the way up to the petals, it's going to start looking a little disjointed and a little bit sloppy. It depends on exactly what's happening with the specific flower, but I just noticed as a whole, if you try and lead this, this base right up to the petal, it loses its delicacy. What I find instead is lead it up and then leave a little bit of white space in between the base and the petal. That'll make sense as you see what I'm doing if it doesn't already. All right, I'm going to mix together a little bit of my undersea green, my rich green gold to create a really pretty color. I'll show you once I have it all mixed up on my colt here. All right, there we go. You can see this palette is very well loved. This is my greens and Browns palette. I love to let them all mixed together for my classes. I like to start with a fresh palette so that you can see how we get there. But this is what my palettes look like. In real life, I hardly ever clean them unless I'm working on a commission where I need to build a specific color palette. It's so freeing and liberating to just let all these colors merge together. Okay, Again, picking up the flower, noticing and marveling, and figuring out where can I plug in these details to best serve the overall bouquet or flower. I'm going to start here at the top and I'm going to use my round brush. If I haven't mentioned that already, we're using our round number six. I'm just going to plug in right here. And I'm going to leave that for just a moment and let it dry because I can see there's a little pool of water there and I don't want to mess with that. This I'm going to leave as well because I'm going to be plugging in a stem down here because you cannot see the base. Same thing here. I'm going to gesture that there's something happening, leaving a little bit of white space, going to come this way. This is where I'm really going to come down and back up, leaving a little bit of white space, a little bit of an angle here so that it's not quite perfect. Same thing here, come up, and then down a little bit of white space. Same thing here, leading it up a little bit farther just to give some variation. Now I'm going to go ahead and plug in the stems. I'm going to start here at the top to lead it all the way through. Same thing here, bringing it back to center, imagining that this is the direction that it's going. This one next, again, just taking note. I'm going to be adding more details here. You'll see here in just a moment. Now what I want to do is add these special little details here at the bottom. But I'm not going to overwork them. I'm just going to gesture. I'm just going to indicate that something is happening. Hope I forgot to stem here. There we go. I'm just going to indicate that something is happening. Let's come up here. Same thing here. Just a sweet little marking. This is where you're giving the volume to this bouquet. You're really allowing it to shine. Now what I feel could be put here to really serve the overall flower is a leaf coming out and over. I'm going to be mindful of my hands, I take this and I'm just going to come up. This to me, feels like it might happen in nature where things are colliding and overlapping. But I also have to be careful so as not to distort the overall feeling. Feeling a little bit of a gap. Just going to come up and fill this area in. Same thing, coming down here, again, working my way around, taking liberties here, adding in leaves, adding in details. Being very gestural with my strokes, using the tip of the brush. I could see over here. I'm kind of looking at this one now. I'm going to darken up this side here. Same thing over here, just adding a little bit of a darker element here, filling in those gaps. Then stepping back, pausing, seeing, okay. Where does it feel like there's anything missing? Where does things need to be balanced? This is all feeling very balanced to me. I love the shape of it. I love the big gap here, the way that you would find in nature. I love how these are all clustered together and how different each one is. To me, this is like the epitome of a really well balanced, super interesting bouquet. I'm going to add a couple bigger leaves here to the same strokes, just going to, I got a little bit of interest and do the same thing on the other side, balancing it out there, you have it. Obviously, I omitted this, obviously lost its head here, so I'm not going to add that in there. But I'm using the overall shape and flow of things to inspire me. And then intuitively moving along. If you're not familiar with intuitive painting, I definitely encourage you to look into it. Because it's so to not feel as though everything has to be exactly as you see it. And it gives you that permission that I feel we artists need to take liberties and just keep moving forward. I'm going to stop there on this one. And then let's go ahead and do the same thing for our beautiful carnations here. You might need to wake up your palette again by adding a little bit more of that undersea green and the rich ring gold together. We're going to do this a little bit more in elaborate detail. When we put the bouquet together, I'm going to let things dry a little bit and then add a bit more color. But I just want you to feel as though you're capable and prepared and ready to go into that final lesson. All right, let's do the same thing one more time. To turn the paper so you can see it. Making sure things are dry with the white. We can go up a little bit, which is a big perk of using white is we can collide and come on top of it because it's not going to clash or leave that wonky feel. Give yourself permission to come into the base of that flower. Be mindful as you're working, Okay, so if this is your paper, you're wanting to move things around and eventually come back to center. You don't want your bouquet spread out this way. You don't want so many stems going in so many different directions that it becomes dizzying. You want to anchor your flowers? Okay. I'm always thinking, where is this deriving from? Where is that point from which everything is extending? I'm thinking right around here. I don't want things so middled that it looks very linear and that it looks stiff. I want to deviate a little bit to the right and put that arrangement together in the most natural way possible. I'm also trying to make these look a little different. Make sure I am being extra delicate here. Apologize for the shaking screen. I wanted to make sure we were focused in on that, adding a little bit of those details right now as I work my way down to avoid later on dipping my finger or my palm and paint. It might help you to practice some of these fine strokes off to the side. I've taught so many classes on this brush and how to use it and the delicacy of it. So I'm not going to go into that now. But it might be a benefit to you to do that. All right. Again, just taking a moment to pause, figuring out where is everything coming from, where is it going, and then filling in the volume. I'm going to turn my paper back around and come back to center or slightly off center. Adding in some of those stems, they don't necessarily have to lead to anything yet. And then again, working my way. I like the bigger stems coupled with the delicate stems, makes it feel real to me. Again, mixing up just a little bit of the Daniel Smith undersea green. I'm going to come up here, head into that red a little bit up and then down. Things are starting to look a little linear over here. I will finish off over there in a moment, but I'm going to continue working in this direction first, giving things flow and movement. Now remember, not everything has to lead to something, but you want to give at least the impression that things are lining up and then plugging in those sweet little details. Coming back to this side, I'm going to add some leaves over here. Those are just those longer strokes really bending the brush, being mindful of angles, and I'm going to fill in here so that it doesn't feel empty. But I do like this vacuous space here. If you wanted to, you could pull these stems on top of the flower. I don't usually recommend it because it just doesn't end up working. But it's something that you could do and just layer them on top. Okay. This is pretty good. I like where this is at because we're going to head into a final bouquet cluster. I'm just going to leave it like this for now. Now I might go in with a darker color and then embellish some of these sides here, like I did in that previous video. But we're going to do that when we put the bouquet together. I'll show you the mechanics of doing that as we move forward. Okay, I'm excited. Let's head into our workshop video. 11. Class Project Part 1: Welcome to the class project portion of the workshop. I'm so glad you made it this far and I am really looking forward to putting everything that we learned today into practice. I've turned on a little bit of classical music so we can just relax and lean in. Because I did not show you this while we were learning the structure and whatnot. I'm going to use this brush, this is the size eight bright brush in the umbra collection to do some of the carnation. So you can see how using this brush, which is significantly larger, produces similar results, just bigger petals. So it could be a brush that you enjoy using for a flower such as your roses or peonies. If we really love this class, I may even another class using this bigger brush because I typically only use rounds and filberts for flowers. But using this square brush has been really fun. I'm going to show you how to do that. And then we're also going to put a little white quash into our painting. And just to do something a little different than what we've already done and create a beautiful bouquet together. Let's go ahead and begin. I'm going to mostly be painting intuitively here and not looking too heavily at my reference flowers over here. But I will have them nearby off to decide if I get stuck and feel like, okay, I need a little bit of fresh inspiration. Other than that, I have turned my paper portraits file just to accommodate the bouquet nature of things. But you are welcome to keep your landscape if you like. It would just be a little bit of a shorter stemmed bouquet. All right, let's go ahead and head in here. I'm going to begin at the top of the page and I'm going to start with some anchor flowers, just to hold the paper, or excuse me, hold the bouquet together and begin to situate the flowers into a bouquet. I'm going to do another flower here just because I'm working a little bit faster now so I can do a couple of the centers and not really worry so much about things drying. Okay, I'm a block off here being mindful to paint small, especially now that I've turned the page portrait style. We don't have quite as much room to work with just kind of standing back for a moment like I always do, checking to see how the shape and the structure is coming along. I'm going to add a little bit more. Go a little bit up here. I'm going to start with a slightly softer metal just to kind of break up what's going on. I don't want flowers that are too similar. Okay, pausing here for a moment just to give you an idea of my thoughts behind the composition. I'm angling flowers up here towards the top left in the attempt to create the peak of the bouquet. So the highest portion. And then I'm going to gradually fill in the rest of the areas. Before I bring everything down into a stem or into several stems, I'm gonna do one more small carnation and I'm going to kind of use this one as inspiration. Adding a bit of color in here to the bottom. Okay, Now I'm going to be using this size eight in the bright and I'm going to use that coral mixture that we mixed up earlier. I'm going to reload my brush here adding the quad red in the rich green gold, and then adding a hit of pink to it as well. Wow, this classical song was very intense. I felt like I should be painting to a time lapse, Al right, with the bigger brush, you just have to be mindful that the full belly strokes that you make are going to be larger. But you can do this by using the sides of the brush that will make sure that your strokes are just a little bit more slender and not quite as chunky. I'm going to turn my patient slightly here and I'm going to use this flower as inspiration on a little bit like a rose, but it's going to start to look more like a carnation here in just a moment, I am going to do another one right over here, just so that I can benefit from not having to blot off the brush. So you can see I'm just using the side of the brush rather than the full belly. But you'll see in a moment when I blot off that, there will be more opportunities to use that belly too. Creating some buds, trying to make those strokes really count, especially when they're on the side like that. And now I'm going to blot off and load the brush up with just a little bit of water. So you can see that stroke was full belly and I twist it to the side here. Same thing, twisted. It's such a fun brush to play with. I've enjoyed this process immensely. I never thought square brushes would be all that amenable to florals, but it creates a whole different look and feel that has been so fun. Not quite getting the same ruffling effect that I get from the flat brush because it is a different style, it's a bright, it's not technically supposed to be used for this technique. I'm not going to let that stop me. These bristles are a lot smoother, they stick together. They're going to be a textured, but I feel like overall, it's going to lend a lot to the bouquet because we will use the flat for our white carnations as well. We'll bring back that ruff feel. I'm going to create those ruffles just using the side of the brush here. Do that here too. While things are still wet, a little bit of paint dip in here just so I don't miss my opportunity. Blotting off a little bit. I'm going to come down for a nice really round petal with some ruffling. I'm going to allow these petals to touch just to bring a little bit of a natural flow into the bouquet, and creating a connection here. All right, I'm going to do one more and I'm going to allow this to be a little bit of a bigger carnation just to create a little bit of variation here we have quite a few on the side, so I'm really going to look into the middle here. It's kind of been flattened over the last couple of hours teaching, but I can still kind of see what's happening. I'm going to create a nice generous petal here and soften off a little bit so that I have just mostly water on my brush and create some of those ruffles. And then I'm going to add in paints for wet and wet so that we can form a connection. We have slightly bigger carnation here, which I really think helps to fill out the bouquet and benefits the overall scale of things. The volume. Okay. I'm liking where it's at so far. I'm just going to take a pause briefly and then I'll head in with the white. But I want to make sure everything's looking and lining up the way that I like. I love what's happening up here with the bleeds and these dark areas that are happening over here. Things are starting to look slightly uniform with the dark center. So I'm going to plug in a few details just to break it up a little bit, I'm going to use flipping back to my bright, my flat brush. I'm going to plug in some strokes just as we did in the videos. Things are not quite as dry as I would like them to be, but it's going to create a different result that I still love. Again, we're getting that beautiful texture from the flat. Do the same thing up here, making sure I'm lining those stripes to lead back towards the center. Really being delicate with the brush a little wet and to wet here with the stripes just to create something a little different using a little bit of all the approaches. Now I have something that's just feeling a little bit more interesting to me. Everything's looking exactly the same. I'm going to do one more area right through here. 12. Class Project Part 2: Okay, just to break things up a little bit, I'm going to not do exactly the same white that we did before. I'm going to add a little bit of white guash into the painting. Now you can see I've added it here off to the side and I'm just going to begin to wet it and then plug it into this green gold and quinacrdone red mixture. I have for something that's like a light peach, I'm just going to mix it thoroughly and I'm going to begin to do the same technique, but this time I'm also going to use my bright brush and have the cough sort consistency on there. So I'm going to load up with the, either Verzenoviolet and the burnt umber or it's the orchid and the burnt umber, and I'm going to pup in a carnation right here. And then I'm going to add my white Gh to it, or excuse me, my mixture with the white Gh. And begin adding those ruffle edges, bringing more interest into the bouquet. We're bringing those beautiful ruffles out. I'm going to do the same thing up here, but I'm going to start with the outer petals and I'm going to start making that my coonans are on the smaller side, just as we're leaning up over here on the top left. The mixture we made a little earlier with the red and the green gold, it makes more of a coral. This would be more on the peach. Your side of the coral again, they all are super conducive to each other. You can use them interchangeably. You can use them as we did here, with the dark in the middle and then the peach on the outside. It's the same technique, it's just using two different colors. Now, the thing with bouquet structure that you always need to be mindful of is not running up too close to either side, the right or the left side of the page. I'm being careful not to get too close to this left margin over here, but giving myself ample room so that when I head in with the greens, then I'm not going to run into problems with things crunching or bunching into each other. And we need to turn the page just a little bit and create a carnation that's sort of leaning here off to the side to fill in this vacuous space while making sure that there's some just beautiful breathing room over here. I'm going to keep rotating my paper just to get the best angle. I'm going to make this carnation just slightly bigger. Again, just to fill in some of that room, using the beautiful bristles to really embellish and highlight the ruffles on the edge of the carnations. I turned around just because I see what I have and head back in a bit like this one. It's verging on pony territory because it's starting to get large. I'm just going to finish it up here, popping in just a little bit, tiny bit of the pink, to give it an indication that something's going on here in the center and playing again with those ruffles. Okay, I'm liking where everything's at. I'm going to fill in just a slight bit over here, a little bit of peach, just to help balance out the overall bouquet. Playing again, just with the angles, making sure everything's lining up, not too close to the edge in my mind. I'm just thinking, okay, would this benefit the overall bouquet or should I stop here, fill in with leaves, and then keep moving forward? Because you can't go back, can always go forward. Think one more bud, right over here, right? I like where we're at. I'm going to pause here. It can always, like I said, add in later. But I really like the shape and the flow of the flowers and now it's just a matter of putting it all together with leaves. I'm going to use the same mixture as before. That's the Daniel Smith undersea green along with the rich green gold. If you need to, you might add a little bit of it to your palette. We are, as I mentioned before, going to darken up some of those areas with some gestural strokes. After we've laid down the initial color. Again, our strokes not leading completely into the base of the flower. You can in some areas, go up and over, but as you can see here, when we have it in real life, it's tucking up and under this flower, we don't want to lead completely into it. Be careful of your hands because things might still be wet. You can add details as you go along or you can opt to fill those in a little bit later. Just make sure you're angling things in the proper direction. The idea is to give everything a really nice flow, not painting too stiff, and everything in the exact same direction. 13. Class Project Part 3: Adding volume as I go along filling in the space. I want these carnations to feel very full and very fluffy as they are when they are gathered in a bouquet. Overlapping in certain areas is okay. But just be mindful as you're doing that, that things don't become wonky and off centered. Adding in a little bit of balance, Just continuing to bring the stem down. Figuring out where things would be leading from, and then bringing it back to center. I'm just taking a moment to reload my brush, making sure I'm bringing everything back. I'm going to add in some filler foliage here at the bottom so that all the stems aren't lining up completely, but still looking as though they are all meant to be gathered together. I'm going to add some bigger leaves here, give them some direction. Bringing them up through the flowers is going to really help add a little bit of dimension to coming both in front of and behind the flowers. Making sure that everything is leading back where it's supposed to be. Now, just filling in where areas feel just a little bit too sparse. Again, with carnations, this can be tough to do because they are filler flowers. To make a bouquet of carnations is just a little bit trickier, but we make our way through it, adding a little bit of extra greenery, nothing too bulky. The carnation really won't benefit from something where the leaves are so thick unless there's another flower to support it. Okay, This is where I'm going to dip into the undersea green. And I'm really going to soak up the color with my brush so that it's darker and more concentrated than the original color. You see I'm leaning in right about here. It's nice and dark. And I'm just going to start giving some areas shadows, nothing too intense. Just a couple little areas where I feel as though there could be some dimension right here at the base would be nice. Things are still wet, so you may want to, after the fact, go in with your brush when things are a little bit drier, making this feel wild, almost like a Valentine's Day bouquet. If there was such a thing. Obviously there's such a thing. If you're anything like me, you're going to the grocery store and it's two weeks after Christmas. And you're wondering how is it already Valentine's Day around here? All right. Just taking one last moment to look and see if anything is feeling off or just not balanced, I'm going to add a couple more little embellishments right over here just to lift this area of the painting to the highest peak. I'm just overall how wild it looks, how full it looks. I really especially love just the dimension and the areas where it just feels as though things are very complex without being overworked and overwhelmed. Overall, I love this carnations. Again, not my favorite flower and not something I would necessarily put in a bouquet. But I actually am looking forward to adding this flower to more of my pieces in the future. I hope that you, I hope you warmed up to it as I did if you weren't already. Thank you so much for joining me here today and I look forward to another class in the near future. Have a great week.