Loose Watercolor Florals for Beginners: Let Go of Perfectionism in Art

1. Introduction: Hi friends. Do you love watercolor? But maybe you're trying to paint things perfectly. Do you feel afraid to waste supplies and possibly even make a disappointing painting? Then this class is for you. Hi, I'm Tammy K, and I am an artist. I'm an art teacher and also a mental health therapist based in Arizona. My biggest passion is painting loose florals with lots of color and lots of personality. So when I first got into watercolor, I noticed that when I sat down to paint, my body would get really anxious. I would tense up, my thoughts would be negative. The biggest thing was that I was afraid to waste the supplies that I had used my hard earned money to buy. Also, I was afraid of making something ugly. Maybe you can relate to this, I don't know. Well, I began teaching online and I soon noticed that most of my students also had problems letting go when they were painting with watercolor. We were all obsessed with this idea of perfectionism. That we need to do everything a certain way. And because of that, it was taking the joy away from our experience. So I combined my mental health experience with my painting experience to try to figure out ways to help calm the body, calm the brain, and allow us to let go, get rid of perfectionism and just play and enjoy the process. So in this class, we're going to learn about how to make loose watercolor florals in a way that helps you let go. But first we're going to start by asking the question of why we need to actually let go of perfectionism in the first place. And then we'll do a series of practice exercises to help you learn to let go. While you're painting, you'll learn how to loosen up with loose florals as you practice and focus on each brush stroke. We're going to learn how to breathe and relax our bodies as we're focusing on water control and paint consistency. We're also going to learn how to change our narrative and find joy as we play with floral and leaf shapes and complementary colors. And finally, we're going to learn how to put all these skills together to create a beautiful, playful and fun floral composition. So if you are a beginner water colorist, then this is a good class for you to cover the basics. But if you are also an experienced artist that may have lost the joy over time in your art, this is also a good class for you. By the end of this class, my hope for you is that you will have learned ways to find joy in that journey, in the process of creating art, not just in the end results. So let's get to it. 2. Your Project: Our final project is going to be a loose watercolor floral composition, where we build on the skills that we start to learn throughout the lessons in terms of the series of exercises we'll be doing to build up to our final project. The first one is going to be learning how to let go of expectations as we create an ugly painting. The second thing will be to work on deep breathing, which helps us relax as we talk about paint consistency and water control. Then we're going to be talking about how to relax our body tension as we start to play with brush strokes, floral shapes, leaf shapes. And then finally, we're going to be thinking about changing the narrative in our head as we paint one object in three different ways. When it comes to our final project details, we're going to start with choosing our reference photo, whether it's from a book or online, or maybe a picture that you took yourself. And then we're going to talk a little bit about composition as we think about our larger focal florals. After that, we're going to add details by putting in our filler florals in our composition to fill up those white spaces. Then after that, we want to start adding in our stems. We want to add in our centers to our florals and also our leaves to balance the whole composition out. Next, we're going to go ahead and start layering some more paint so that we can start building up our composition with texture and with shadow. And then the final piece for a final project is adding in some splatter. If you've never done that in a painting, it's really fun, really easy, and it makes it look magical. So there are basically two things I'll be looking for when I check out your final compositions that you upload to scale share. First of all, we're not judging this for good or bad. What we're doing is we're completing a project. And what I really want to know is what was your experience like? Did you enjoy the process? Were you able to let go of perfectionism? Let me know your story. When you upload a photo of your project, I want to hear it. So next we're going to be talking about the supplies that you will need for this project. 3. Supplies Needed: Today we're going to be talking about what supplies you'll need for this project, and also budget supplies as well. If you feel like you don't have a big budget, it doesn't matter. You can use what you have. The most important thing is that you're practicing and you're trying things out. So let's get to those supplies. When it comes to our supplies, there's so many things out there, but I just want to show you some of the simple options that you can. You could choose a palette that already comes with paint. This one has these little pans that you can actually pop out if you want to, just like that. And then you can replace these with other little pans or add paint back in if you wanted. But you don't have to worry about filling your palette. This one is a larger space. I love all the mixing area really makes it convenient. I keep my warm colors separate with my cools over on the other side just so that I'm not getting muddy colors. We'll talk more about that in a future segment. Another option is to grab either a palette like this, it's a ceramic one, and then fill tubes of paint in if you want. Or you could purchase a metal palette or something else, or plastic. But what's great about this is that it's much more affordable. I do believe you get more paint for the price, which is nice. Then when we talk about paper, we have this 100% watercolor paper that I usually use in the videos. This is a nine by 12 and you can use that for this project, but if you'd like to go more budget friendly, Canson is a pretty good paper source and you can get this on Amazon. Just easy to be able to paint in love that ring binder. If you want to go really budget friendly, I would go and pick up the inspired watercolor pad. And it's got 50 sheets. There's nothing in this one right now, and it's very affordable. So if you want to just practice and don't want to worry about wasting supplies, it's a good option for you. So then we've got brushes here. So there's all kinds of brushes you can get for me. What's really important is getting a brush that has a really nice tip. Nice point on the end. If I were to wet this with water here and then we're to re mold it, which is what I would do after I wash them. Has a nice point. The sizes that I like to use, I've got a number two round, number eight round, and a number 12 round. So we'll probably use this for our florals and our leaves today. I always make sure I have a paper towel for dab. If I dab into some paint or some water, and then I have too much liquid on my brush, I just want to dab it on my paper towel that I'm not dripping all over my paper. That's really handy for me. I have a black pen. This is a micron, it doesn't bleed if you put water color over the top, but you can use whatever black pen you have. Lastly, it's important to have some type of reference. For example, this is just the reference we're using today. But I do like to have a reference book and it just gives me inspiration and excitement for what I'm going to paint next. Of course, before we go on to the next thing, if I didn't mention water cups and what would I be doing here? I've got two options here for you guys to see. I used to paint with one glass and then I just upgraded to two. And here's why. If I were to do an example, what I like to do, some people will have one where once your paint brush is dirty, super dirty from painting, you will clean it off in there. And then once it's mostly clean, you'll dip into clean water and start painting. That's one way to do it, but I prefer to keep my warm colors and my cool colors separate. I also have this lovely duo here, which is great because I have so much water in here, so I'm never running out. So let's say we do our warms over here and then we do our cool colors over here. We've got those lovely colors here. We don't ever get this muddiness, but if we were to mix both of them together, so blue in there with the red. Now I've got purple, which is cool, but let's add in some orange too. And all of a sudden our water is starting to muddy up because we're mixing those warming cools. Just keeping them separate is a really helpful tip. So I hope you understand that whatever supplies you have, use those. If you have a budget to build up one really nice quality thing at a time, do that. When I started painting, I had zero budget, so don't let it stress you out. One of the most stressful things when it comes to art is sitting in front of a nice sized $3 piece of paper, being paralyzed because you don't want to waste the supplies or mess up. I don't want that for you. That's part of that perfectionism thing that we're trying to let go of. Just use what you've got and don't worry about it. So the next thing we're going to do is start to learn about why we need to let go of perfectionism in our art. 4. Why Let Go of Perfectionism?: Why do we need to let go of this perfectionism in our art? I want to share a few ideas with you that might resonate. First of all, perfectionism just sucks the joy out of creating. It has a special ability to keep you from liking any of the things you're creating. The second thing is that encourages body tension. If you are sitting there tense, your muscles are stressed, your body is not relaxed. You're not going to think clearly and you're not going to produce the art that you really love and enjoy. The third reason is perfectionism discourages you from trying again, if you keep feeling like you're failing in your art. Because every time you sit down to create the perfect piece, it doesn't come out the right way. You're going to feel upset, disappointed, like a failure. And finally, we often learn through perfectionism that we are not artistic, which is a message we might have been told by someone else. Don't believe those lies. Here are the reasons why letting go of perfectionism is going to help you in your art. When we let go, we experience a dopamine effect, where this happy hormone just goes into our brain and produces this effect of contentment and excitement. And it encourages us to continue to do the painting process in the future. Painting also helps to calm our brain and our body so that we can enjoy the experience, not having the tension, not having the frustration that we might have when our narrative is not in the right place. In the next video, we're going to warm up for our painting exercises with a small exercise that's gon, to help you let go of your unrealistic expectations. 5. Warm Up: Letting Go of Expectations: When I say we're going to make an ugly painting, some of you might be like, well that makes no sense. Why are we going to call art work ugly? So the idea behind this is that when you let go of all your expectations, it allows your brain to relax, slow down and say, whatever happens, happens, I accept the end result. And that's the first step of being able to just be and just enjoy the process. Also, using your non dominant hand, which is this hand for me, causes you to concentrate so much on just trying to move the brush and get it to do what you want. Then it's going to keep you from being stressed out in here about your end result and what you want things to look like. And that's why we're going to try making an ugly painting today. I am a left handed person. Never. So I'm going to use my left hand today. Was that confusing? I always use my right hand. I've only done this probably a couple of times painted with my left hand guys, it is challenging, but it's a really great way to let go of expectations because I guess I need to probably set this up a little bit differently. Let's have this go over here so I can do some dabbing. If you let go of what you think is going to happen, you can be okay with what does happen, okay for you if you want to do flowers like I am. If you want to do an abstract painting, you can do that as well. But the whole point is that you're not worried about the end results. You're just being there in the moment trying to just practice how's it going for you? Does it feel strange? Just be aware of those feelings and thoughts that are coming into your head. Like right now, my brain is trying to tell me that I need to do a good job. Because even though this is supposed to be an ugly painting, I still have this expectation of myself that it needs to somehow look good. This is just me being open with you guys and being aware of where my brain tries to hijack me. You can just think about how does it feel to create these marks on your paper. Does it feel foreign? Does it feel relaxing? You certainly don't need to copy what I'm doing, but just make up your own. At the end of this, at least for me, the couple of times I've done this, I felt very relaxed. And it surprised me because I didn't expect that. I expected more stress than anything. Check in with yourself, how are you feeling right now? Start reminding yourself that this is supposed to be fun and it should not be stressful for you. It's just making marks on paper. Just playing. We're trying to learn to let go and play, just like we did as kids. Just a few more marks. Just being aware of if you paint fast, it leaves less time for your brain to start hijacking and taking over with negative thoughts. I'm going to reach around here, I'm going to grab a final color, I think for my centers. And just stipple in the middle, that's it. Remind yourself, this is supposed to be fun. We're letting go and whatever happens happens. So I hope that this painting experience was a good one for you that helped you to let go of some of your negative expectations. And just enjoy the process creating this ugly painting and not worrying about the end results. So in the next video, we're goning to learn about how to use deep breathing to help us relax, as well as learn about water control and paint consistency in our paintings. 6. Deep Breathing: Water Control & Paint Consistency: As we begin to work on some of these watercolor exercises. Next, I want you to keep in mind these three points. First of all, when we are doing deep breathing to help relax it, calms our nervous system, which helps to calm down our muscles and create a really good experience where we can learn and grow. It also allows you to focus on your work and not the stressors around you or in your brain. The third thing that it just keeps you from stressing out so that your experience will be joyful, the process will be fun, and you can create more interesting art when you're doing your paint consistency, you want to write this at the top. Water on this side. As you have more water on this side, your paint is thinner. As you add more paint to it, it's obviously going to be thicker then it's weak. Tea, coffee, milk, cream and butter. I'm going to explain what this is. I'm going to use my number eight round brush. Let's see how we're doing. Just a little bit of pigment on there. Still we are going to grab are blue, so I'm going to grab this one here. Now what I want to do is to create a consistency that is really light. It's just barely tinted. Has a little bit of paint. That's our weak tea. It's the lightest amount that we could ever have. This is what I'm looking for here. It's very transparent. It moves a lot because there's a lot of liquid. We're going to paint this in our weak tea area here. Just make a nice rectangular shape. You can see the transparency is there. I would use this or coffee for basic wash, probably mostly this one. Just a bit of paint and you can see through it to the paper there. All right. The next one is we're going to do some coffee. I'm going to take a little bit more paint, we just add to it until we have a consistency that we want. Of course, we're going to see a lot more pigment. It's going to be a lot darker. I would say that this one is probably about a coffee. It's a little bit thicker than your weak tea. And it's a little bit darker, but it's still really thin. And I would say you could use this for a basic wash. Look at how much vibrancy we're getting out of this already. That's amazing, just by adding a little bit in. These would be those basic washes of color. Maybe your sky, those first initial colors for your petals. Very transparent, really what water color is all about. Now we're going to make a consistency that is called milk. It still flows, but it's getting a lot thicker, a lot darker, and a lot more opaque. It's just taking some time to figure it out. This is starting, It still moves on my palette, not as much, but I would say this is a really good consistency for milk. We're going to go ahead and paint that in. That's the consistency where I would start to maybe utilize it for my second layer. If I'm making florals. After I've done that really light base wash, then I'm going to come back in with some more dark color. Either this or a cream is what I tend to use. Look at that beautiful color. Like I said, it still moves a little bit on your ballot, but not very much. Now, I need more water so I can grab some more paint. What we're going to do here, the cream is going to be very thick, but thin enough that we can spread it, if that makes sense. And cream is going to be my other choice for florals when I'm doing those really lovely shadows that we'll be doing later, and texture, I really want a thick paint, but I don't want it too thick, that it's not going to spread like butter is not going to spread very well. If we look at this, we're seeing it's really not moving on our palette. We've got some gorgeous bright color here. I'm excited to paint this on really gorgeous color. Very much more opaque than any of the others, obviously. Yeah, I can't really see through it too much. Still a bit. It is water color after all, but if I made it any thicker, it wouldn't spread butter is the last one. I'm going to just wet my brush a little bit more. I'm just going to dab around here. I'm really taking on as much paint as possible. I'm even going to dab some of that liquid off now that I can feel that really spreading. Let's try to paint with this, All right? So this is our butter. And you can see I'm getting a lot of dry brushing. The paint is skipping around here. Yes, it's a really hard job to try to cover all of this because it's just too thick to spread. Well, I would use this for, if I say I wanted some texture in a mountain. If I was doing a landscape, or in the ground, or on the actual hills themselves. But in general, I don't usually use butter. Now, this is the time where I want to encourage you just to breathe if you haven't been breathing through this practice, reminding you to keep breathing so that you keep calm and relax and you just let go. As you're painting with me today, I painted weak tea off on its own, just as an example of I can see how these look like. They're in the blue family. In the same family. But this one is so light. It almost looks like it's a light aqua color. And it's just interesting how a little bit extra pigment, all of a sudden bumps it into this matching family right here. The last thing we're doing is a value scale. We're taking what I would call cream once again, we're going to just make a mark on our paper with the thickest paint that we can paint with. Then all you're going to do is dip in the water, squeeze you off your brush, and make another mark. You can see already it's starting to lighten up a lot and just keep doing that. What we're doing is showing when you're trying to figure out water control and how much water use. Hopefully knowing these two scales will give you an idea of as you keep adding water. In this example, you keep getting lighter. Since we don't use white and water color, you can get a lighter value. Value is just a lightness and the darkness of a color. As you keep taking off paint and added water, you're going to get lighter and lighter until eventually you're going to have clear water. This water is pretty dark already. We're still going to have some type of pigment, but just as a practice to see how light can your colors go, it's a very interesting thing and it just gives a little insight into what you can do so that you can play with consistency and value in your paintings to make them interesting. So I hope that you enjoy doing the watercolor value scale as well as the paint consistency scale. I think that these exercises are really helpful and you're going to use them over and over when you're creating your art. So in the next video, you will be learning how to recognize body tension, being able to calm down and release it, as well as brat strokes and floral shapes. 7. Releasing Tension: Brush Strokes & Floral Shapes: As we are practicing brush strokes and we are going to look at different floral shapes, I want you to keep in mind the idea of body tension and be able to relax your body. When you have tension. Your shoulders might be tight, your neck, your stomach. I want you to think about just releasing that tension and experiencing calm so that you can move forward with your painting and not feel like there's all this anxiety stuck in your body. When we start to look at our brush and notice the movements that we're creating, it helps to keep our focus of the negative as well as allows us to naturally relax. And I'll encourage you through the exercise to check in with your body, to make sure you are relaxing so that you can experience this activity in a wonderful and healthy way. Well, I'm going to take this number 12 round brush and I'm just grabbing whatever's on my palette. There's a lot of watery paint. The classic flower, of course, where it'd be just swooping up like this, using the shape of the brush and then saving some space for the middle and you can just start stemming off from there. And then swooping, right? You can go from the outside to the inside or you can just do these really quick strokes. You can go from the inside to the outside. Just make a flower that's really fun and loose and easy. There's not a lot to that one. We grab some other colors. You can make a flower this color, right? Or you can add it in to something else and make a different color. Let's try some red. See what happens? A creamy red there. You can do some going like this, pressing down and lifting up, right? That's not too complicated. You could also do a C curve shape. There's a C curve and there's a C curve, and then you fill it in the middle, which could make up one of those classic flowers that has maybe five or six petals. Instead of using the shape of the brush, you are painting in that shape with the two C curves. And I'll do another one right here. We're reserving the middle so we can add in a nice middle later. Then I'll dip in the water, squeeze off some of that paint. As I'm doing this, I'm going to remember we're supposed to be practicing now, relaxing our body, which entails just noticing tension first. If you don't recognize the tension, then you don't know that it's there really, you can just ignore it. But just wonder why you're so stress. If you're holding tension in your shoulders or your neck, just go ahead and try to relax that. Right now, you stretch out your neck. Can even just do some little brush strokes here just to fill in those empty spaces a little bit. That's a way you can do a flower. You can even do like a side facing floral, which is you're not going to see the middle. You'll just see maybe two or three petals just like that. It's all just curving down to the base of this flower right here. As we are going to transition to a smaller brush number eight round and we're thinking about how we're going to do our leaves and I'm going to mix up some of our colors. We're going to think about relaxing whatever parts of our body upset or angry right now. Also, breathing is going to really help to relax those muscles. I've got this teal, it's a very watery mix, very light, and then I've got this sappy green color. If I grab some of red, I'm going to make more of a brownish green. Which is a fun, final alternative to have as we're relaxing our body, we're enjoying and we're letting go. We're just being, we can also paint these in certain ways. For example, we can use the belly of the brush just like I like to do this, I'm going to actually do it over here so my wrist isn't covering up what you can see. Then we're just going to press down the belly and then press, grab more paint. And you can even squeeze you off some of it so it's lighter. Then like a fern, we will take our number two that's using the shape of the brush to do the work for you, which I love to do. Then when you have a really nice thin brush, you can start to connect the stems. I feel like the one thing that keeps my leaves from looking realistic is just having a really thick, chunky stem. If I have a thin one like this, I'm starting to see more of that realistic look, if that's what you're going for. It doesn't really matter though. Let's do another one with this bigger brush and a different color. If I want it to be a little darker, I can grab that and change up the value a little bit, then take off some of that, creating a lighter value. Then right here, connecting all together, we've got some pretty little leaf combinations just using the belly of the brush, which to me, I love to use this. I love to use larger leaves too. And just make a nice combination. Going back to the number 12 and that sappy green, I'm going to do those C curve shapes. We're going to do a C curve shape and lift off slow. Let's try that again. Then we could do a little stem. Then you've got a leaf, take off some paint. We could try that again. Maybe at an angle we can do a wide curve, wide curve. If you lift off slow, you're going to have more of a pointing leaf fill in the center and a little bit of a stem. Now if you wanted, you could do a thinner one, you don't bow out as far, a little bit, maybe longer, just like that. Or you could just do on one side just pressing down the belly and then starting to lift up slowly. Now you have a different type of leaf. Now if you wanted to do a series of these larger leaves, which can be fun, we can just go ahead and do that on this side here, pressing down, curving out to the side, lifting up. Now this is such a relaxing exercise. I'm going to do several of these and then connect them with a stem. Sometimes I like to leave a little white space. I think that just makes it interesting. Pressing down the belly, lifting up leaves, can feel very challenging. And I think that they are until you get the proficiency like everything. But when you practice, you're going to start to understand with your muscle memory how exactly you need to make those marks and how you can experience some proficiency with that. It is really about practice, like pretty much everything. The other way I wanted to teach you real quick as I'm adding some red to this is just dragging your brush. Say you're adding a leaf somewhere and then you want to do a little scrubbing motion. You can do that. This is maybe one of my favorite ways to make a leaf. Then now you've got this really interesting mark, you're just scrubbing along. These are some thicker ones, taking off some paint. I might do one that's a little bit thinner. You can just add in some little marks, let it flow. I just have so much fun practicing your floral shapes and your leaves. So we finished up our brushstrokes, our floral shapes, and on to the next video, which is going to be talking about the negative narrative, the story in our head that affects how we feel and what we do. And if we can challenge that, we're also going to be able to loosen up and enjoy our painting experience. In this next video, we're also going to be talking about painting one object, three different ways. In this case, it's florals, so let's get to it. 8. Changing Your Narrative: One Object Three Different Ways: I want you guys to keep in mind this idea of the negative narrative and how it creeps in and it changes what we feel and what we do. Instead of having a negative mindset, think in your head, this is supposed to be fun. This is practice or one narrative that really speaks to you, that's going to help you to get your focus in the right place. Focusing on one or two things that you like about your painting can really help you to be in the right space. Because we're going to paint one object three times. It does help create a sense of proficiency and you feel like you're starting to understand how to paint that object. All right, so we're going to paint our three flowers with a number 12 round brush. I'm just going to dip into, let's do some purple. And I'm just going to mixing some stuff together. Whatever I have on here, I'd like it to be a little bit more reddish purple. Just adding a little bit of that in there. We're just going to do a simple loose flower. I might leave a little space in the middle for that center part. I like to dip and squeeze you off some of the water and just create some value difference here. First, some of these and then we're just arcing them around like that. When you do your florals and your petals, you can start from the middle and go out. Or you can go from the out, work your way in. It just depends on what kind of a look you want. I'm going to take off some of the paint, I'm just swooping in. But it doesn't matter how your flower looks, just needs to look unique to you. So there's our first one there. Rinsing that brush, I'm going to grab this lovely orangy red color. I love it. And that's going to go in the cool. I always forget sometimes. Where's my cool? Where's my warm? Or I just start dipping everywhere. Same thing, from pressing outward and then I like to swoop it. Swooping out, we can swoop in. This is just a curve shape, just like that, very simple dipping into the wrong one. It's okay, we're not looking for perfect. As you're doing this, be very aware of your narrative. What is the store in your head right now? Are you telling yourself this is fun? Are you telling yourself this is stressful? Are you worried because your flower doesn't look like my flower? Which, to that I would say it doesn't matter, but I understand. Sometimes it feels like it does matter to us and I get it. Let's do one more, let's do red. Same type of thing. We're doing this flower three different ways in the fact that we will be changing up how the final results are, the decorations, the details. All right, I'm going to dip in here reminding yourself, this is supposed to be fun. This is fun. With every brush stroke, you are getting better, okay? If you can remember that, you're going to be in a good space. A little petal right there. I've got my three florals here. Some of them are Walk, that's okay. But what we're going to do now is add in our stems. I've got a really skinny number two round brush. I'm dipping right into my green. For this one, we're just going to go straight down stem. It's okay if it bleeds here, we're letting go of what we want it to be and it may not be what we thought or we wanted, and that's okay. We're going to do a little stem right there and then press down at the belly. And we're doing, look at that. We got a nice dry brush. Look there. Another one here. Those are our leaves dipping in for more water, more paint. And we'll do another on this time we're starting from the outside in just pressing down to the belly and you don't get a really big mark. And then really thin, just to connect it, you've got your first floral. I'm going to grab some of this turquoise teal color and mix it in. I'm going to add more of a squiggly stem. This one is going to have a little bit thicker leaf. I'm going to press down, make a S curve shape, and then I'm going to press down the other side, make a S curve shape and lift off slowly. You'll get a nice point. Then you can leave some of that white space, which is really pretty. Let's do the same thing on this side. A nice little stem C curve shape, pressing down at the belly of the brush, lifting up slowly if you can, we'll do the other side the same way. Pressing, lifting up slowly, you can leave a little of that white space which I think looks pretty, the color looks pretty similar. I guess this one is a little bit more blue, but that's okay. We're going to take some red. Remember our complimentary colors. Mix it with a green. Now we have a very dark green color. So we're going to do this one this way, and then we're going to do some thicker leaves. I'm going to grab my who. Sometimes that happens, remind yourself it's okay. No worries. All right, it's a little stem. And then we're going to press down the belly for a very thick leaf, very light color. And let's do another one over here. Sea curve shape, a little bit of a point fill in that center, just like So Now as these are drying, I'm going to take my smaller brush, my detail brush. I'm going to clean out the paint. All right. Then we're going to take a darker color to complement this one. I'm just going to literally grab from this scrubbing around, getting some paint out. I'm going to start by adding in some little details, just little tiny brush strokes for that center. Then I'm going to just press the belly of the brush and bring some of those accents out. Right now, I'm using a very thick amount of paint, like a cream. Actually, it moves a little bit with my brush. It's not too thick like a butter where I can't spread it. But it's not to move the palette. That paint is not moving around, it's not a milk. What I like to do is just swoop in, maybe get some dry brush marks. Just start to accent this flow. Now I'm adding more water, so it's a little bit more like milk. I just want to create some lines. These are our shadows. Our texture on our flower. Now we're going from flat flat to fabulous flat. We have dimension. Now an interest if you want, you can do several colors. If you are sing lined, that can make it fun. But look at how pretty this floral is starting to look. Now that we've added in some more color, it just makes it fancy. All right? So that one is getting the three dimensional treatment, this one is not. But we're going to make the center pretty, so we're going to grab some black. So we're going to do some stippling for our center. Just these tiny little marks? Yeah. Okay. And I've got black off screen in a different palette. I can't fit all the colors I need in this one. Just the most vibrant and beautiful. And then we're just going to do some cute little lines, create a very fancy center for this one. The other one has the fancy markings on the petals, and this one has the fancy center. Just painting something three ways is going to create a sense of proficiency for you if you weren't really sure about the object you were painting. Now that you've almost done it three different times, you're going to start to see things differently and feel like maybe you've got this. This is something that's becoming easy for you. I'm just going to do some stipling for this one in the green just to make her look a little different, still fancy, without the little lines and the dots on the outside. Just a little stippling there for the center. Then for this last one, it is dry. So you're going to take your pen and we're going to start for this one making some little tiny lines. This is something, again, you're just going to intuitively do. Maybe it's like a little starburst, sunburst, whatever. Then we are going to start tracing some of those lines to create really fancy petals. If you're not painting fast, that's okay. If you're painting slower or really fast, it's okay. If you're not used to painting fast, just slow it down. If you need to pause or just watch and then try it again later, the practice is going to only help you feel better about your final products and the fact that you're just playing and enjoying and letting go. Because perfectionism is going to go away. It's got to. So I hope that painting the same object three ways was helpful. And then maybe you will learn some things even about your art style, what you appreciate, what you love. In the next video, we're going to talk a bit about finding joy in our artwork. Not just staying calm and having positive thoughts, but finding that excitement and that pleasure in our painting experience. And we're also gonna be talking about playing with vibrant colors. 9. Finding Joy: Complimentary Colors & Vibrancy: So today as we are painting with complimentary colors and color vibrancy, and I'm showing you some color mixing on how to keep your colors vibrant. I want you to keep in mind this idea of finding joy. And this is the part where we have arrived at the section where I most am excited. Because I want you guys to experience the happiness that comes from really letting go of that perfectionistic mindset and just enjoying the process no matter how things are resulting, no matter what comes out of that. So I'm really excited to get into some basic color mixing with you. Let's get into some exercises. Okay, so I wanted to talk to you guys a little bit about color color mixing, a little bit of color theory today. When we are thinking about our colors, we look at our palette. Typically, our colors are pretty vibrant and they just come in bright colors. And we get to mute them down, mix them together. But I want you guys just to keep in mind something that is really good to consider when you are mixing. We've got primary colors, red, yellow, and blue. I mean, who doesn't know that, right? When we mix different colors together, we get a secondary color. Red and yellow make an orange. And then we have red and blue make a violet or purple. We have blue and yellow make a green. We want to get even more into it. We can talk about tertiary colors, which means when you take your primary and the secondary that you've created, you mix those and you get red orange here over here. You take your primary and secondary over here, and you're going to get yellow, green, a primary and a secondary that you've created, blue violet. What happens if you were to mix together? Because there's so many combinations. What if you mixed red, yellow, and blue together? Let me show you what happens if you do that. So I'm just going to take a random red, I'm going to mix it here. Then I'm going to a random yellow. Grab some of that and mix that in. All of a sudden we've got a nice orange, right? That's great. Okay, we've got a nice little brick orange. What happens if we mix some blue in there? All of a sudden we create mud. Isn't that lovely? That might be a really pretty blue color if you wanted something like that. But all of a sudden, we've lost our vibrancy. We've lost that Paz. We've, these three colors that are gorgeous, red and blue, our yellow color. We've taken these beautiful, vibrant colors that are naturally bright. And all of a sudden we have created something that, well, it's not what we're looking for when it comes to vibrancy. And it might work in another realm. Or if you're trying to do a muted palette, that could be a pretty color but not that bright color that we're talking about. Now let's talk about complementary colors. Complementary colors are two colors that are opposite on the color wheel, it always includes a primary and a secondary. For example, red and green. Let's do that right now. Red is so gorgeous. We're thinking Christmas colors, right then we've got a green. When you put them next to each other, they absolutely look gorgeous. They pop and they work really well together. But if you were to then take a cleanih damp brush and you started to mix those together, all of a sudden you're going to get this really dark color in the middle because they are muting each other and they are creating a muddy color. Let's try the next pair. Let's go with blue. A little bit more water there. Blue, absolutely bright and gorgeous. Then we're going to go with the upset on the color wheel, which is orange. I'm going to grab some orange here and those look pretty nice together. This one's a little muted because I think there was a little blue on my brush plus my water. It's getting a little insane, but leanih brush, let's try to mix together. You're getting, again, a very muted color right there, all of a sudden. Let's go ahead and do that with this one right here too, You're seeing a very muted version of what we had before of two really brilliant colors. Let's do the last two. So we have purple right there, and then we have yellow trying that to taint the yellow. Yellow is very much changed or tainted, or affected by other colors. We'll add that right there. And then we are just going to rinse it as much as we can, dab it, and then try to mix these two together. And you're going to see once again that really dull muddish color. They're all similar, actually, when white, you want to mix complementary colors together with a complimentary color. Well, for example, if you want to just tone it down and do like a little bit of a muted color, for example, red. You've got a really bright red here. If I were to clean that up, then grab just a little bit of green. Let's just see if a little bit of green might do something interesting. I've added green to this red. Need a little bit more. You're seeing it's going to start to tone down just a little bit more like a burgundy color where it was really bright before and now all of a sudden that's a nice red if you're wanting to go for a darker color. This is the original here just a little bit, mutes it down, and creates a nice color that you can use in a different type of color palette. Let's try it with purple. We'll grab some purple here. Gorgeous color. We'll see how much we can actually see. Here's the original. Once your water gets dirty like this, it's hard to clean, clean your brushes. Then we're just going to take a little bit of yellow and see how that might change things. All right, let's just see that's muted. It's nice, still purple, but much more toned down, maybe for a different type of project that you might be working on. Let's do orange. I'm grabbing the orange here and see what changes as we add this really nice vibrant color. Let's add our strip of original here, then clean it. And then the complimentary color would be blue. Just a little bit of blue. Just to augment that orange tone it down. When I'm thinking of tone down colors like this, I'm thinking of a fall palette, for example, and how you want some of your colors just to be muted and less intense and less vibrant. That's a way that you can avoid some things that could take away that vibrancy. And sometimes you like a muted palette and sometimes that is your style and that's okay as well. So isn't that fun? Doing a little color mixing gives us a little bit more proficiency and more options. So we can kind of know what can we do with our colors to create even a muted palette versus a bright palette versus something somewhere in between. So next we're going to talk about reference photos and how to choose them, and I'm going to show you my favorite book, examples. 10. Choosing Your Reference Photo: Okay, so now we're going to talk a little bit about what I use for reference photos. And I have three floral reference books that I absolutely love. And I don't tend to copy the photo, although you could, as long as you give the original artist credit. But I like to use it as a way to help me build the composition, really takes the guesswork out of it and makes it so easy. So let's go thumb through a few of these and check them out. These are my three favorites, and I'm going to show you this one first. It's just so large and in charge. So one thing I love about it is that it helps me to paint really big. If I want to paint something really large, if I start with a small photo, I typically will paint it the size of that photo. So when I see this kind of, I mean it's way larger than life, but I find myself inspired to paint that big. And so you can grab a big piece of paper. The biggest one I have right now is a ten by 15, which is large for me, but it's so much fun. This book is vibrant. It has lots of single flowers, and it tells you about them as well as some gorgeous arrangements. And of course, I mark where I'd like to paint so that I get inspired for the next paint session. I love the next two a lot. So this is the first book, as far as I understand, that they created. And I love this because it gives you single flowers that you can paint, single types of flowers, and they're ordered in terms of color. So like reds, oranges, yellows, different groupings. And so you can not only pick your color, but then you can pick the type of flower that you feel like painting in that day. And it's just really nice to change up what you're painting. If you're like, I want to work on sweet peas, you can focus on sweet peas. I want to work on Forget Me Nots. And it's really nice to be able to focus on one single type and one color at a time. Then their other book is called The Flower Color Theory. I've got it all marked up and saving places that I want to paint. So these are all about bouquets and they're just really gorgeous. They're just not conventional. I love the asymmetry makes it very interesting. Lots of color, lots of texture, lots of variety in these bouquets. So this is another one that really inspires me when I want to paint. Of course, you can take your own reference photos if you want to, or you can print off a photo like I did here and just kind to go with whatever makes sense for you. Well, I hoped you enjoyed seeing some of my favorite books. And next we're going to start on a big project. We're going to work on the focal florals, our blooms for our composition today. As well as remind ourselves to deep breathe and relax. 11. Base Layer: Focal Florals: When you're first starting out with your composition, you're going to want to choose two or three focal florals that are large, that are going to take up a lot of the space in your composition. We also want to keep in mind this idea of rule of thirds. What that means is you will have on your paper, if you were to divide it up into two lines this way and two lines this way, you would have nine squares. That square in the direct middle is a place to avoid because if you put your focal point smackdb in the middle, it is stagnant, just sits there, it doesn't have the same interest. Then if you were to put something a little off centered and adding several in there in those odd numbers is just going to create more interest in your whole composition. I'm also going to be reminding you to just take a deep breath and relax throughout the painting just to start practicing that self care piece. All right, so I've got a spray bottle. As we're starting to work on our final project, we're just going to spray down our watercolor paints, get the nice and juicy, so we can begin painting. I'm going to start with my largest brush, which is a number 12 round, as we talked about before. Here's our reference photo that we'll be using today. I am not copying this and it's probably going to look a lot different then this photo. But what I want you guys to do is just make it your own and that's the whole point. And I've got a pencil. You don't have to do this. I just thought it might be nice to mark where we want our centers to be. I'm just going to reserve some space right there. And then maybe over here a bit for a balloon, and then for a third one, I'd probably place it about here. Then when we're doing our balloons, we're thinking about this space here, this space here, and this space here. We're not directly in the middle. And as we are beginning our composition, I want you to take a moment to breathe. I'm going to do it too, and keep breathing. We tend to hold our breath when we're anxious, reminding yourself that you are going to be relaxed with this experience. And so we just want to have a nice peaceful demeanor because we're letting go of perfect, right? I'm going to grab some pink. I'm just grabbing that, look at how vibrant that is. Because we're talking about mood and color and how color affects those moods. We're going to go bold. I'm not going to meet this down, at least not this one. I'm going to start pointing my brush towards the center of the flower, and I'm just going to pull out some petals, petal shapes and really nice thick petals. Like I said before, if you want, you can just start putting your petals this way from the outside to the inside dip, squeeze you off some of that paint. And we're going to start adding in some more petals that are just starting to float and arc around towards that top. I'm going to put one over here. Loose florals really do help you loosen up. And I think experience, I don't know, experience life a different way. It probably sounds a little funny, but hear me out when you're painting loose florals, you're just trying to keep your body loose. Breathing as I feel like I'm holding my breath. You're trying to be in that moment, creating these really pretty flowy petals. These brush strokes are not too difficult, I would say. I think anyone can do them. I'm just going to grab some of that butter paint that we've talked about, consistency, and just add in a little bit more pink as I see fit. They feel difficult because we don't always is wet and wet when you're taking wet paint and adding it into already wet paint or a puddle of water or water on your page. All right, let's go ahead and do a yellow. I want to make sure my brushes are really clean. I'm going to grab this is the cadmium, yellow and yellow. It doesn't really take much to get tainted. If I were to put some of the pink from here, it was on my brush already. It's going to start making orange pretty quickly. Also, you need a lot of it to have a really bold color. Okay, I've got a petal there now we're swishing this way. Just think about how relaxing it is, a dip squeegee to put these petals on the paper. If you're going to go from the outside in, you're going to notice more of a pointy petal. Versus if you start from the inside out, you might get more of a rounded look just depending on the brush that you're using. Take more paint off. What I'm trying to do is make sure that my petals are fairly touching. I don't want a lot of white space, and I want everything to be a nice tight bloom. And I'm going to grab some orange. I might want it to be peachy. So I do have a whole bunch of colors on my palette, which does really help me to kind of mix things together and create colors that are not on my palette already. Remember to breathe. Remember to relax through breathing. So I'm putting a petal on there. All right? That's a big one. Squeeze you off the side. Let's do another one here. I'm very aware of that. I'm trying not to be perfect here. Now, I do know that my brain is trying to, let's darken this up a little bit. My brain is trying really hard and saying, is everything even, does everything look right? We have now a darker orange, which is fun. You really have to fight that. Which we'll talk more about the narrative later. But for now, our job is just to relax and try to enjoy. I just swiped off some of that paint and I just wanted to extend my petals a little bit. I wanted them to be a little bit longer, so we're kind of in the middle. This one has this much space, This one has much. And we'll talk about adding in the fillers later to be able to balance out everything we On what right here. Okay, so we have our blooms, which has been our first part of our project. And we're going to start adding in the next pieces as we're formulating our loose florals. The next thing we're going to do is start adding in our filler florals, the little, tiny ones that start to complement and accent the larger florals. 12. Adding Filler Florals: For this section, we're going to painting some filler florals. And those are those tiny little florals that connect really nicely to the larger blooms. Just filling in the white space, especially if you have more than you need. We're also going to practice recognizing the body tension that we have so we can relax it and let it go. Now I'm going to take my number eight round brush and we're going to do those filler florals. I'm going to grab this kind of cobalt blue color here, which I really love as I'm mixing it up. I want you guys to think about body tension. Another way to relax your body. If you have any tension anywhere, just try to relax at your shoulders, your neck, and we're going to start stippling. What I want to do is to create a nice zig zag with our composition. I'm going to put some here, and then over here, and then over here we're just going to stipple little bits of blue florals, maybe agapanthus or something else, but these are to fill in that space. Now we're going to dip the brush, squeeze you off the side dab, and keep adding in a few more. Some people hold tension in their neck or in their stomach, or in their shoulders. And if you recognize that, go ahead and just give a nice deep breath and just like relax that part of your body because it is not helping us to let perfectionism go. We're just taking some cleanish water on a damp brush. So I just dab it on the paper towel and I like to spread out that color so we have some different values, lighter and darker pieces to this, we're going to do the same thing, grabbing some more of the blue paint and starting to stipple. Just putting in those little brush strokes of color. We will add some stems in between as well later. But as you can see, we're starting to zig zag through a little bit with the blue. Okay, one more round. And I'm going down here versus right here, because I want to leave space for some longer leaves and I do want that zig zag effect. I'd like to add in some smaller, just a side facing floral right here. Technically, maybe not a filler in the traditional sense of like these guys, but they're so much smaller, they're not your focals. And I just wanted to add a little bit because we are filling in the space, doing some little C curve shapes just to fill in some of that space. You could start with a line and then you can curve around C curve. As you can see, all those petals are starting to connect together. And then you can do a little bit of a stem here to connect everything as well. Later on in our next video, we are going to be a practicing, challenging our negative narratives that we've already learned about. And we're going to be painting our foliage, our middles for our flowers and our stems. 13. Foliage, Stems & Floral Centers: For this video, we're going to start connecting stems to our flowers. The little tiny stems that connect to each little bloom, and then the main stem as well as we're going to start adding in our foliage. I'm really excited about putting these pieces together for your greens. You could do like a sap green. I'm going to turn this around so you can see what I'm mixing up. I've got all kinds of things on my palette here. But if we have a sap green, we can do that. Of course, it's a little bit more yellow than a sap. That's okay. We could grab some more of that green over here, and then we can add in the complimentary color as we've already learned. Then all of a sudden we have a nice darker green sage green. Let's use this bright red here. If I start small and add it in, it looks pretty good. It's a lot. A little bit more red, can't hurt. Then we can take our teal, which I love. I'm not saying we're going to use all of these, but it's an option. You can take that, rinse your brush, and add in a red to tone that down. Now we have more of a lighter grayish green color. Again, with the reference photo, I'm using it very lightly, as you can see or roughly, but it's for composition. And then also just to spur ideas. For example, we have these larger fillers here and here. It's emulating that I want to add in some greens like this. Within that I still have my round brush. You could use a dagger if you wanted to. I'm just going to start adding in some scrubby marks just like that. Then I want to add in another one, right here for this. I'm just dragging out that shape. I know that I want it to hang down a bit in this corner. I'm just scrubbing that brush along and then we can add some more if we want to. What I want to do now is take my number two and connect those together with a lovely stem one right there as well. And then I might do another one. I think over here as you are painting, be aware of the narrative. That's what we're practicing now. What's the story, the thought in your head as you are painting? I'm going to add another one. Just another little guy floating around. And then I want to add something up here too, probably that same color. So, we're just going to still do that. Dabby, Abby Dab, are you thinking this is turning out Well, I like my painting. I feel so artistic today. Or might you be thinking, I don't like how this is turning out. This doesn't feel right, but I also want you to think about what it feels like when you think those thoughts. Okay. So now I want to change up the color a little bit. I'm going to grab this one, A dirty green, sage green. I'd like to add in some more brush stroke shapes. I'm just going to use the belly of the brush and press down like that and create a little fern situation. I'm going to put a few right here just to elongate this area and just to have some darker marks. And then going to do the same thing over here. Check in with yourself at this point, how are you feeling? What's the thought in your head about how this is turning out? You know, do you like what you see? It's important just to check in and be aware of that if you have any thoughts. All right, so now we're going to take our number two round brush, and there's not a lot of paint left. I'm going to grab some more. It doesn't really matter what color it is, but I'm going to add that red again just a little bit to tone it down. It's okay if it's more brown, it's all good. We're just going to take some small marks here and connect those together. 123, There's something so relaxing about doing the stems. I love it. The more wobbly and wonky they are, the better. Here we go. Then this guy right here and right there, and just connecting those, however that makes sense. All right, so it's starting to come together here. We don't want to forget about these guys, I'm just going to do a little V shape and all of a sudden those are connected quite nicely. I do want to add a little bit more stem to some of these leaves a little bit darker, even though we could do that later, But some of them that don't have a stem, we definitely want to add a little bit. I would like to add a little bit. Now for example, this guy, this one. I'm actually going to do a little V shape, which I think is pretty, just connect it under there. Easy, simple. I want to do this too. Since I'm doing this, I'm just going to do this for everybody. Then nobody will feel left out, everybody will feel good. All right. A little bit there. I'm going to grab some brown for attaching my tiny fillers to each other. I don't want to stress about it too much, I'm just going to make a stem that's coming out from kind of the base of where that flower would be. And I'll start kind of having a main stem that's really sketchy. Kind of like, you know, they're little sticks, right? Little sticks or stems. But I feel like they look like sticks because I'm using brown. So I'm having a good time. I hope you guys are as well. Always check in with your mental state, your narrative, and my stems are getting a lot fatter now, for whatever reason. But I'm okay with that. Our centers are the next thing we need to do. I'm going to grab some black paint here and I'm going to do that classic stipling like we did for our orange flower. Painted the same flower three times. Stipple, stipple. You're just making these gentle motions. Brush strokes, little dots. And I'm trying to cover up the white space too. You can keep that in mind if you want to do that. You can use whatever colors you want. Whatever makes sense. Then I'm just going to add in those, what I like to call eyelashes, the stamen parts of the flower. Just really bringing that center together. If you were to ask me what kind of flower this is, I wouldn't know. These little dots just randomly there, making the center fancy for this little flower. And stippling a little bit more because there's a lot of white there that I don't really want. I don't want to take away the whole white of the center. Just have a little bit there. And that's looking nice. All right, so for this guy, I want to do green. I'm going to grab that sap green color and I'm going to mix it with what I have on my palette. Just to tone it down a tad, we're going to do kind of a circle stipple. Stipple. Stippling is kind of my favorite, if I'm being honest. I love to do the stipple trick and making sure we have a nice wide center with this gorgeous yellow bloom. That's it for the centers of our florals. So I hope that you enjoyed painting our foliage and our stems and all those things that you were able to challenge your negative narrative if it creeped up in your painting. The next thing we're going to do in the next video is we're going to try to find joy in that process and remind ourselves of that as we're painting and as we're adding texture and shadows. 14. Adding Shadow & Texture: When we add in various shadows and textures, we are really bringing our painting to life. We've got the first layer down, but your painting is going to look pretty flat until you start adding in these details. So we're going to be using thicker consistencies of paint. And I tend to use smaller brushes as well. That really helps me to get those fine details in because we're not doing the second layer on all of the layers that we already placed. The idea is to accent to what we already have. I like to use either a milk or a cream consistency. What I have here is more cream. It's really thick, but it's spreadable and it's not going to move. Now, I won't always use that consistency. I can add more water and make it less thick. Just a little bit of marking, just to accent what is already there. I'm saying this is a little thick for me, so I'm just going to add water. Sometimes you just play by ear and figure out what makes sense. I'm just doing these little marks on the petals, Sometimes adding them on the ends, and sometimes bring it over here. I could take a clean, damp brush and I can spread it out a little bit, the whole point. And I'm going to grab some of this now and move it around a little bit. Maybe milk is a better way to go for this color. For this one I'm just doing little scrubby marks. Okay? What I'm hoping to do is create some dimension and shadow. But through asymmetry, I'm not trying to make everything match. Now, it's a pretty dark flower, so it doesn't really need a lot of accent. Here we have some petals that are darker and some that are lighter. But we're just adding in some flavor to this, making it more interesting. For the yellow one, I think what I want to do is add in a little bit of orange. And because yellow, if you add yellow to it, yellow like more concentrated, you're still not going to see it show up very much. Let's try this reddish orange as well, which kind of matches that. We're just going to have fun with it a few here. And then you can even do like just a little bit of blending out. Maybe one of the petals has some darker marks than the others. I'd just like to keep it random too. So nothing is matching too much, but there's a nice flow. It's artistic and fun. Just a little bit of paint. We're not being too picky about it and we're being very loose holding the brush quite loosely as well, just to get that effect. This is, of course, adding some shadows to create that lovely dimension for this piece. Because the leaves needed as well. I do need to put some stems in on these. So I'm just going to spread my green paint, create a little stem, the connecting point, and then the stem that comes off of that so that these are anchored. Nothing too complicated. Just quick brush strokes here. If you take a look and you feel like everything is great, we're going to go to one last thing. So the last part of our painting is going to be adding splatter. And if you don't know what that is, I'm going to show you how to do it. It's very simple. We're also going to be practicing completely letting go. 15. Letting Go with Splatter: Adding splatter to a painting is wonderful because it gives a sense of whimsy. When I'm doing florals and I do splatter, I tend to think of it as like little bits of pollen all around. The great thing about it is that we're practicing letting go, because with splatter you can't really control where it's going to end up. I'm going to take my number eight round brush, get a lot of water on there. I'm going to grab this orange, nice and watery mix. We're just going to simply tap our brush with the other finger and if it's too much splatter off first a little bit, just tap around the florals. You can twist and turn the brush so that it doesn't go in just like one straight line, but it moves around. Magic in the happening. Go guys, we're letting the paint go wherever it decides to go. To grab a little bit more, I like to tap with one finger too. Sometimes people like that. There you go. I hope you let go of all your fear, all your perfectionism, and all your worries today, at least in art. So friends, we have finally completed our whole composition. I hope this process was good for you, that you learned some basic skills, or was a refresher for you that you learned some interesting ways to create loose watercolor florals. But most importantly, that you learned to let go of perfectionism in your art. Now the next little section will be about how do we continue this process. Just a reminder or a summary of what to do when we're feeling stuck, and that perfectionism starts to creep into our brain again. N 16. How to Keep Going?: How do you keep going? Anxiety has a really funny way of just creeping in when it goes unchecked. That is something that we have to address and figure out ongoing, how to continue this journey of joy and just being. Here are some tips when you sit down to paint, kind of a summary of what we've just learned. The things that you can do to continue to let go of perfectionism in your art in a very simple way. First of all, check your narrative. What is the story in your head? What is your brain telling you about you as an artist or your creative abilities? Remind yourself, this is supposed to be fun and it's just practice with every brush joke. You're getting better. Number two is to breathe and just enjoy the process. Because if you don't, you will tense up. You will hate the process and it's going to discourage you from continuing to paint in the future. And the last thing is to observe two to three things that you enjoy about your painting. You may not like how it turned out in the end, but through that process, if anything, a color, the composition, the style with which you painted, you can find a few things that you like which will encourage you to keep painting and to keep enjoying and to keep letting go. 17. Final Thoughts: You've made it. I'm so proud of you for finishing this class and being able to learn how to let go and not worry about perfect. So some of the things we've learned in this class would be to change the narrative, to be able to find more joy in our painting experience. We've also learned self care strategies just to help us be more mindful and present. We've learned how to recognize body tension and use deep breathing just to relax our bodies. And finally, we've learned a series of watercolor techniques to layer and build on everything for our final floral composition. So what I hope for you is that you leave this experience feeling happier. Feeling lighter as you paint and you create your artwork. I also hope that you have learned ways to let go of your perfectionism and your anxiety, not only in art making, but also in other aspects of your life. And when we let go of this unrealistic expectation for ourselves, we let go of pain, we let go of frustration, and we allow joy to set in easier. So remember to upload your final project to the project gallery so we can all celebrate you and leave feedback. I also encourage you to share it on social media. And when you do tag me Tammy K Art, so that I can see it as well as other people can find the class a lot easier. Thank you so much for being here and for painting with me. Happy painting, happy mental health. And I'll see you soon in the next class.