Loose Watercolor Florals for Beginners: Quick Techniques & DIY Cards

1. Introduction Quick and Easy Loose Floral Exercises: Hello, there. My name is Kelly Chasse. Welcome to Lose floral painting. We're going to be doing some quick and easy practice techniques to guide you into painting loose florals. I'm an artist with over 15 years of experience, and my work has traveled all over the world. But my passion is helping those that really want to learn how to paint or just want to have some fun with watercolor. In this class, I wanted to dive into the world of loose expressive florals with you. This is going to be perfect for both beginners and experienced artists that are just looking to loosen up a little bit in their style. Over the years, I have struggled with painting florals, and I've learned some really simple and fun techniques I think that will help you build your confidence and help with the flow with your watercolor practice pieces. Whether you're getting started with lose florals or you just want to explore some new exercises to add to your creative routine, I think this class is going to be for you. Together, we're going to explore how to create some beautiful, loose floral shapes really without that pressure of perfectionism. We've got some practice exercises in here like gestural strokes, some blind contour drawing, and we're going to be doing just some quick florals. So you can combine these techniques to help you design some unique floral cards or make some projects like bookmarks, things like that with this technique. And I think by the end of this class, you're going to have a set of practical skills that you can use any time to help you loosen up your painting style. So grab your brushes, your watercolors, and let's get started. 2. Materials: Hello and welcome to the course. Let's talk about materials really quick. Now, I'm not big in buying tons of supplies that you don't need or will never use. But if you are a creative person, an artist, that's I don't know why I'm even saying this. Because I know we still buy things because we want to try it. You're just beginning watercolors, don't go out and buy a bunch of stuff. Use the basic stuff. If you decide later on, you want to try some new tools or you're feeling comfortable and maybe the tools that you're currently using. This brush, it's a little oval wash brush, Robert Simmons, and my little cotton kit with a little detail brush that comes with a cotton kit from Windsor Newton. It's like a $25 kit. I mean, that's really all you need to get started. So don't feel like you have to get all of these materials. I did that for five years when I first started painting. That's all I used was two brushes basically and the little watercolor kit. Don't feel like you have to go out and buy tons of stuff. However, I will share with you some of my very favorites and things that I've been using for florals. If you want to do some different things because I'm using some different materials for this course. But if you want to try those different things, feel free to do it. If you don't have them, you can incorporate other things. Taking a look at a few things that we've got here. The basic thing you're going to want is two cups of water, one for clean, one for dirty or something like this. I have my little brush tub. So I can actually lean my brushes in here if I want to. I've got one side for clean, one side for dirty, for watercolor paper. If you are again new and you want to do something inexpensively, the Strathmore watercolor cards are wonderful. You get 100 cards. They come with envelopes. I just cut them in half. This is what they look like. I just cut that seam right down the middle and I've got two perfectly good five by seven. Again, great size for practice, and also it fits a standard eight by ten mat or frame. So if you and you want to frame it up? You could frame it in a standard eight by ten matt and frame, and again, this is the five by seven if it's perfectly in there. If you wanted to do something smaller, you could get a smaller frame. Get a little five by seven mat with a four by six opening and do something like that with a smaller little five by seven frame. It works with both. I'm going to be using some watercolor paper, some larger sizes. If you want to get a little bit bigger, you can do that. This is a full sheet, which is normally a 22 by 30, and I just basically fold it in half, fold it in half again, and I get a couple of really good size paintings this way. This is 140 pound C press arches paper, F arches, if you say it, the correct way. For paints, I'm going to be using mostly in this course, the Rosa Gallery. I had this little kit for the longest time. It's got some beautiful colors in here for florals. You can see it's nice and messy. One, two, three, four, five, six, 889 to 11, 12, right? 444 12 paints. All the basics you need, your cools and your warm yellows, red, and two blues, two browns, two greens. I mean, you don't need anything else, even the white. You can use the white in the kit. If you are using other kids, you just want to make sure you don't add a lot of water to your white. This white happens to be very opaque and it works really well, but it still shows up. So white and some kids don't show up really well, even if you're using it as thick paint. I do use doct Martin's bleed proof white or also guash for the white. If you need to find something that's a little bit more. Opaque and it's going to show up in your watercolor paintings. I also just bought this lovely kit. Thanks to my patrons. This is the Rosa Gallery botanical Kit. Again, it's messy. I've been using it, and you have, I think it's 28 colors. Well, this one really has everything. You can mix a lot of those colors by using this kit. You don't have to go out and buy a really large kit, but this is a great kit. Again, very vibrant. But use whatever you have for watercolors. Just find some of your colors. We're going to play around with colors anyway so you can see what colors that you like with your particular kit. Again, don't feel like you have to go out and buy something special for that. But these are wonderful. I really like these paints. Then this is the b Doc Martin's bleed proof white. Again, this is great. It's very opaque. It will really pop and stand out on your paper. Even if you've overworked your painting a little bit, I've used this to lighten it up or give some splatters. So this is a great thing to have. If you don't have that, you can get whitewash in a tube. It's very similar to this. I used to always use Windsor Newton whitewash, but this is my go to. I really like it because it's got the cap, it doesn't dry out and it's already a little bit of a liquid, so I don't have to add much for water to it, so it just works really easy. This has been my new thing that I've been really enjoying. Also be using a black sharpie. We're going to be doing this with some one line drawing and we're also going to be adding some details for our cards with a sharpie. I like the fine tip only because I can get a lot more smaller details with that, but if you've got a larger sharpie, that's okay. Again. Options. Then you could also use colored pencils, Dirwin pencils. We're going to do a little bit of that in there, but again, not necessary for the course. For brushes, I'm using a little bit more fun brushes this time in this course. I love my dagger brush. This is one of my very favorite ones. I've done a couple of videos on that. This is the quarter inch. This is one of my go to ones. If you haven't tried a dagger brush, I highly recommend it's super fun. It does take some practice, but it's fun. And then we have the number two, a wash brush. Again, this one holds a lot of water, and it does come to a nice tip when it's wet. But again, it holds a lot of water and it's very soft, so you can do a lot of pushing, smushing, pulling. You're again, we're going to kind of practice with our brushes and whatever you have for brush, you're just going to get comfortable with it. I also can get a little confusing. This is a number two, depending on who makes your brushes, the wash brushes usually are size a little bit different. Then we also have, I don't use this one much, but square brushes. Flat brush. I call it square, but it's a flat wash. 3. Exercises we will cover: Today, we're going to practice more. We're going to loosen up and we're going to work on our hand eye coordination skills. Are you ready for this? These skills are going to help you with your brushwork. They're going to help loosen up. They're also going to teach you various ways that you can loosen up, as well as this really helps you develop your own unique style because you can see how your brain works. Fun. First we're going to do is some gesture drawing and we are going to do something that looks like a flower, we're going to look at flowers. We're going to just maybe think about how we see them in our heads. Maybe not necessarily how they are, but how we see them. We're going to do this with paint. We're going to actually paint in little shapes, and we're going to practice our floral shapes, and you can use any colors that you'd like. For the next lesson, we're going to do some blind drawing. Line contour drawing. You can either blindfold yourself, you can close your eyes and we're going to attempt to draw something without actually looking at it or looking at our paper. This is so much fun. It's very challenging, but fun. That's going to really help you with your hand eye coordination. It's also going to give you that spontaneity for your brush strokes, even though we'll be using a pencil or a pen for this one. It's also going to help you embrace your natural rhythm. Again, how you see or interpret things. For the next lesson, we're going to do a one line drawn. That is similar in the respect that you're going to have your spontaneity, but you're going to be able to see what you're doing. The only trick is, it's one line. We're going to do one continuous line, so it's going to get messy and it's so good for us because especially if you're perfectionist and you want everything every line perfect. It's going to really help you loosen up. With the loose florals, that is one of the big key things that you need to take away from this. We want to lose control, we want to play more, and we want to just enjoy the experience rather than being really controlled. One thing I want you to keep in mind while you're doing this. You want to work quickly. You want to be decisive. You don't want to go back in and constantly rework things while you're trying to do this looser version or looser style. You want to make sure that you're going to take breaks, step away. And you want to practice these things over and over again. Just doing something one time is not going to give you the results that you want. You're going to need to work on these things over and over to develop your skills because you can't expect working with something for 15 minutes to practice practice practice. One other thing I wanted to talk about is experiment with your different materials or your different brushes, maybe even different paper. Different paints, different amounts of water. Really experiment. Use this whole day to experiment with different things. Again, don't worry about the outcome. We are just practicing at this. All of these lessons together today are really going to help you open your eyes, help you with your hand eye coordination, as I said, and just loosen you up. If you're ready, let's get started. 4. Gesture Exercise : Uh The first thing we're going to do here is just do some exercises for practicing some gestural painting. We're going to do some blind contour drawing, and then some continuous line drawing. Let's start out with some gestures. What I want you to do is just set yourself a timer for a short period of time, maybe like 5 minutes. I want you to start creating some gestural shapes of flowers and focus on capturing just that shape, the overall shape and the movement of the flowers, really loosely and very expressive brush strokes. A fun thing to try is maybe some different types of brushes or different size brushes while you do that. I'm going to go ahead and just set a timer here. I might try all four of these brushes just to see the difference, and we're going to set a quick five minute timer and see how this goes. I'm going to start with my large brushes the number four, and it's a nice, big fluffy brush, and I'm going to just add some water to my paints here. Let's just do some nice purple. Get nice and wet. I'd like to start lighter when I'm doing this. 5 minutes, starting now. Okay. Here we go. We're going to do some short brush strokes, rolling things around. Again, just getting that loose shape blob per se, add a little water to it. Bring that out. That's a pretty little shape. Again, big flower, big brush. Let's try using a nice oval wash brush. Remember, I'm just getting the shape down. This is very loose, just seeing how these brushes are going to work. Creating some blobby shapes. We can turn those into something, maybe. That's oval. Let's try a square. Now, I haven't even tried this. Let's go ahead and get this one a shot. See what we can get for again for a nice loose. Now I'm using doing a scrubbing motion with this one. That's cute. It's almost like a little Johnny jump up. Maybe a little twist. I don't know. I could have some edges along the bottom. If I want. It's go a little darker or maybe a different color. That gives a nice edge. Again, very loose. That's the square. I have practiced quite a bit with this one. This is my little dagger brush. Let me grab a little bit more paint. Again, this one is my favorite one. This one really makes me be super loose with my paintings. You can see I've got a lot of jagged edges on this one. If I add a little water to it. Again, this is what I practice with. This is what I'm going to feel most comfortable with. But you can see this one had a lot of water. I've got some little drying on the edges here. This one actually was pretty fun having the square brush with that. Those are very loose interpretations. Let's go ahead with another one. Again, you can see I'm just doing a little scribbly motion. I don't know if I can do that same shape. You'll find some brushes are more conducive to a certain shape. This definitely is a little bit more rounded. I love that twirl shape that I can get with that. Again, very loose. Practice a bunch of these shapes and see what you're going to get with it. I would continue maybe with some smaller ones. Go back again to my little brush here. Let's get with the bigger one. My yellow is somewhat dirty. You can see I've got some of that purple in there. But again, we're practicing, it's okay. Try this one again, the oval wash. Now, this was a brush that I used for my first five years of painting. This one I find it a little bit harder to be loose with. I can try to get those little petals, maybe more conducive to something a little bit more like this shape. I would like star shape or little branches. A try different shapes with these. See what is going to happen with it. This is all part of the thon. I could probably do a nice, a nice little star shape with just using the flat part of this brush. This could be maybe more of a shape that you would get for hydrangia. Again, you're getting a different shapes with this. I think this would be good too for for more of a rose shape. Look at that. In adding a little bit of water to that to lighten it up. Again, Practice and play for a good 5 minutes. My timer is just about up. You can see that that was pretty quick. Can you even go back in maybe and add some centers to these or some other petals. Again, I'm just playing at this point. It's okay. Don't feel like you have to have everything perfect. This is where you're going to see. That you will start to loosen up a little bit because it doesn't really matter. And just play again, loose, no pressure. 5 minutes is up. I went quick, didn't it? You could fill these pages a couple of times. That's what I want you to do. This is going to get you loose. This is great practice for you to explore and see what your brushes are going to do. See what your paints are going to do, no details with this whatsoever. 5. Blind Contour Exercise: For this next exercise, we're just going to You can use a pencil, a marker, whatever you have. Let's go. Actually I'm going to go with something a little bit larger so you can see a little bit better. I've got my black Sharpie. I'm just going to show you how you can do some blind con drawing for your flowers, and you can go ahead and fils in with color if you want to again, a very loose way of doing it. You're going to draw the outline of a flower without looking at your paper. You can either use a blindfold, you can close your eyes. Whatever you need to do is cheat. This exercise is going to really help you develop your hand and eye coordination, and it's going to encourage more intuitive marking or mark making for your flowers. You can either look at something if you want to look at a flower, or you can just look at the screen and have some different flowers up on your screen, or you can just go by memory. I'm going to go by memory. I'm going to just do a few daisies. I'm going to close my eyes. I'm on my paper, feel around for the paper, and I'm just going to do a little daisy. I know it has a center What did I do? Well, that's pretty good. My center is a little off and that's okay. Let's Let's try I'm going to make this one up. I don't know what this is going to be. This is just going to be some little petals. I don't know. It's not really a dahlia, but maybe it's got somewhat of a center. I'm not looking at stem. Leaf. Let's see how I did. Oh. But I mean how cute is that in a really messy way if you were to fill this in and paint and do a bunch of these different shapes everywhere. Let's try another one. I'm going to go over here to the center of off center of the paper. Let's see. I'm thinking. I'm just trying to picture a flower. Let's attempt an iris. I can remember. I had some rises blooming in the back yard. I know I've got I've got two maybe a third one in the middle, like this bearded thing. I don't know if this is going to look right or not. Hey, not bad. I was a little off from my leaf. But that doesn't look too bad. It's a scary looking ris. But again, gestural drawing can be very freeing, very fun, and it gives you that real looseness to your paintings. Go ahead and just try some flowers. I, a tulip would be really easy. Let's just do a tulip over here. I'm going to start with thats a bulbs shape? Let's just do one that's opened. I don't know. That's a point there. I don't know if this is going to work, but again, we've got that loose leaf shape. My leaf shape was not good. Bring that back in. But again, look, you can go from that and then look at it and see how close you are to this tulip I could begin to fill it in. If I'm painting this, you're not going to see most of these lines anyway. Again, it gives you that real loose feel as you're doing some of your work. Then if you want to go back through, you can go back through. Now this isn't watercolor paper, but just to give you an idea again because we're practicing. I want to add just a little color to this. I can fill some of this in. Just again, very loose. That one's iris, so let's make that purple. A little purple shape. Again, loose. You don't have to fill it in real heavily. A daisies white. Let's just do a little bit of a little bit of yellow, maybe. It's dirty yellow because I still have some purple in there. A little yellow. Then for our tulip. I had white tulips is what I've had and I had some a white and a pink ones. Let's just do go a little pink. G a little green in here. Again, it's a d. That's all. Again, just loose be another little one over here. You could fill some of those in. You could get really colorful with that. You could go with a couple of different shades in there if you want. It's all about being loose, being fun, and just having a good time with it. I almost to see this as maybe a black eyed. Maybe a little.in the middle. Of, I could fix that dot because it was really a offered there when I drew it in. But again, super fun to do, go ahead and just fill up your sheet. Again, practicing, just being loose and do some blind drawing and see what little shapes you can come up with. You can fix them if you want to. Add a little bit more to them. I did a color on this one. You can just really have fun with it. Use a pencil, use a watercolor pencil if you want. Anything that you have, again, just to practice and give yourself some exercises on how to really loosen up. 6. One Line Drawing Exercise: Okay. So we've gone to the blind contour drawing. Let's do a continuous line drawing. This one is even more challenging. We're just going to take one line where you draw that contour of a flower shape and one continuous line. This is about lifting your pencil, your marker, your watercolor paper, I mean, watercolor pencil. Or if you want to just do it with a brush, you can actually do one continuous line with a brush and watercolors. This exercise is going to encourage you to be really loose and fluid and uninterrupted with your brush strokes. Again, we are doing this loosely. Let's see if we can do this one we can actually look, but you're just going to do one continuous drawing, one line. I'm going to do a rose. I've got my rose shape. Again, I'm working within that foundation of one continuous line. We have a rose shape there. Let's try maybe a upright one or a rose bud. Again, same line. We, cute. I could probably could have continued on that a little bit more. Let's do one more. And a nice little fold in there. You see that as a little rose? You can do, like the whole petal there. Let's try that. I mean, the whole leaf shape. So we've got one continues. Again, remember we're loose. We don't care what this looks like, but it's off, it's okay. Little bud, come back up on that same line. Maybe another pedal here. Maybe we bring another butt up here. Down another again. Again, I'm just going one continuous line. I'm going to get that shape and this one is a little off right here, but again, that's all right. We've got a nice little bouquet that's really loose in there. Let's try another one. Again, with a pedal shape. It's okay. A little off, gain down. Little petal. That's not what I want to say. I want to say a leaf. Let's try and see if we can get one over here. I don't know if that is really much of a rose shape, but that's all right. Come back down. Remember, it's all about that practice. It's okay if it's not correct. Look at that. How cute is that? Again, one line practice, you could try your daisies. Again, that shape. B. Still going with that one line. I'm doing this quickly. We could even get the center in there. When I here. You could follow those lines back down too. But you're still doing that one continuous shape. Again, how cute is that? It's again, very, very loose floral, a little bit different loose floral than painting it in, but it's another way to practice. Again, you can take your one line drawings and you can fill those in with color as well. Practice those, have fun with it. I hope that these exercises really help you practice that loosening up and being a little bit more quick with your gestural shapes and focus on capturing again, just the overall movement of a flower with that really loose look. Don't get too bogged down in the details. It doesn't have to be perfect. Do these over and over again. Go back, watch this again, try it again. Try different size markers, different size pencils. You could do it with colored pencils again. You could do it with different colored markers. You can do it anything. You can even grab a calligraphy pen if you want and try it with that. So just have fun with it. That's the key, get loose with it. 7. Key Watercolor Techniques to practice: The first technique we want to talk about is wet on wet technique. This involves just applying wet paint to a wet surface and it's going to allow the colors to blend and bled together more organically. We're going to start by wetting our paper with a clean brush. I'm using a number eight round Kolinski, and sometimes when you're using those bigger brushes, it just helps us become a little bit looser with some of our paintings. Use what you have. I'm going to tap off some of the bit excess water. Remember that the paints are going to flow wherever your water is. We've got our nice little tulp here. Let's just do a a shape of a little petal. It's really hard to see. I'm going to add just a tint color to that. I can't even I hold it up. I can see that. See that where it's glistening a little bit. I'm going to go ahead and just put just a little bit of color in here so you can see this a little bit better. Hopefully you can see that. We've got the wet in here. We've got some clean water. Then we're going to go ahead and add a little bit of color to this. What it's going to do is going to create a very soft. Let's do some vibrant pink pes. Beautiful magenta color. As you have wet that surface, you're going to paint directly into this and see how you get that nice burst of color and that nice diffused look or softer edges. That's going to really create some of our best, best expressive looks for our watercolors. You can see how if I come up to the edge here where this is dry, I'm going to get a nice curst edge. You can see on this side, it's very, very loose. This is where it's wet, this is where it's a little dry. I can tip and tilt. And it just makes a beautiful soft petal. Look at that, isn't that gorgeous. Maybe on the edge here, we've got a nice sharp edge. Again, where it's wet, we have a nice soft edge. Soft edges and hard edges are going to be a big portion of your loose florals as well. Now this really comes into effect when you're working with paintings that have lots of layers in them or paintings that can be a little bit more tight because you can see I've got a nice tight sharp edge on it, and some places are going to want that, some places we're not going to want that. Another technique you can do is a wet on to dry and contrary to the wet and to wet technique, the wet on dry technique is going to involve implying paint onto a dry surface. This technique allows for more control over the placement and really the intensity that you're going to use for paint, but it can still be used to achieve those lose effects too. To paint loosely wet on dry, we're going to apply a bold gestural stroke, loaded brush here, and we're going to let the paint flow and mingle onto the dry paper. We're going to avoid overworking this paint because it can really result in stiff, more unnatural. Look. Very loaded brush with a lot of color. We'll just try this other shape. Again, if we want it to be a little bit more loose. But you can see we've got wet paint in here. I'm not going over that a bunch. You can see where some of the paint might be a little heavier, a little thicker. You can do a little push and pull here if we wanted to add another color to this. Again, tip and tilt. This is a great way to mix a few colors. You can see where it's drying a little bit here and I don't want to go back into this area. I want to just let the paints dry naturally like that. This part was first wet onto dry. The paper being dry, the paints being wet. Was this was just clear water, and you can see where you get a lot more softer technique. This is a much brighter pigment. This is a much lighter pigment. We can make that a little bit darker, but it's going to be lighter wherever that clean water was. The third technique, we're going to look at dry brushing. This is going to involve using a brush with very water, very little paint. We're going to create some texture in detail on the surface of the paper. And to paint loosely with dry brush, you're going to load just your brush with a small amount of paint and lightly drag it across the dry paper. I'm going to sop up most of that water. This is a pretty dry brush at this point. We're going to put just a little bit of paint on here. I'm going to try to do a pedal form, lightly drag that paint across the paper. Let's do a little bit more. It's going to create those broken regular marks on our paper. What that's going to do is add some visual interest to your artwork. You want to use the dry brushing technique sparingly. In that way, it'll trait that more spontaneous. You don't want to overwork this. I use this technique a lot with my water colors for painting like water, sparkle on water, any texture that I might need in something. You could do this maybe in the leaves. You can still do it in the petals, but you don't want to overdo the dry brush technique. The key to all of these is to really just try to work loosely. I'm going to add again clean water, a little bit of color to it so you can see it with a nice shape. You see how quickly, I popped it in there, go in with some color. Again, this is clean water. Well, it's supposed to be clean, water, dropping in, look at the burst that that creates. You can see I'm not going to overwork that too much. I'm just going to let the paints do their thing. Maybe create another petal over here. This one I've already got color in. This is the wet on dry. Again, if I want to pop in a little bit more color into this one. I can do that. You can see where I can move this. I want to feather this into this petal. This is going to bleed up into this one because it's wet as well. You've got to be really careful, but that one didn't have a whole lot of water. You can see it's barely moving there it is. If I lean this up a little bit, you can see it's grabbing some of that paint. You're going to want to practice. Practice how much water you're using, how much pigment you're using, and just start creating some of these little shapes and petal shape that you want. Remember, your brush is going to have different amounts of water depending on if it's a natural hair brush. You can see how fast this is drying today. If it's a natural hair brush, depending on the size of your brush. If you have a really large brush, it's going to hold more water. You really need to practice with your materials, your supplies. You can see this one here is still wet. You can see you have a little bit of gloss on there. You don't have to always go quite so dark. Let's just do another petal here, maybe two petals. These are meeting together. And let's drop in that water, wet into wet. You can see it's going to both petals now. Maybe I have a darker value under here. And this is just rising up. Look at that. You can really have a lot of fun with this, practice and play. Try to work quickly, B decisive with you do. Trust your instincts with this and let the paint guide your brush. You don't want perfection in this. We're trying to avoid striving for that perfection. You want to take breaks, step back, assess your work as you're working on each petal. Experiment. Maybe with some tools as just a glass dip pen, and you could practice trying to add a little texture in here. You can see that this petal on the tulip has got a little bit of a darker value in here, so I can create some texture in that wet and to wet. Let's try this one. This one has started to dry a little bit. Again, test it out. I can get some texture in here where this is still wet. This is dry. We can add a little on this one. When you're following the shape of the pedal and make sure that your lines are following that contour as well. Some of these are quite dry. If you can create shape by just using something like a pen or calligraphy pen, play around. There's all kinds of little tools you can even use a pencil. You can use the back of your paintbrush sometimes and you can get some texture that way. It's really fun to experiment. L et's see here if I can do a little dry brush here. Again, some little texture. We can go ahead. I'm going to dry this really quick and let's just do a little dry brush on this one. I'm all dry. I'm going to Grab a bit of this red maybe not the best color combo, but again, trying out things, you never know what you're going to get. You might like it, you might not. Going to tap off any excess because I want that dry brush on here and I'm just going to create a little texture. That looks like one of those tulips, maybe that hasn't even opened yet. A nice closed. Let's put a little stem on there. Oops. Again, that's dry brush. Look at that. I don't have a lot of water on there. Me a little bit more water. We have a little tulip. Maybe we have another one coming up here or this could be a a leaf. Practice some of that. That is wet and to wet. Let's add another darker value in here. Look at that. Again, you can get more colors in there and just have fun experiment with it. Let's do another green on this one. Maybe you can add a little yellow to it. Drop it in there. Again, let it mix. This one is looking at dark. Let's throw some yellow in there. Again, just practicing and playing. I actually like to do blues and browns with a lot of mine. That was really blue. I'm not picking up much of that browns on the side there. Let's get a little bit more of that. Putting a little bit of blue in here. Again, just being super loose with it and experimenting with some of the colors as well. You can still do their dry brush in here. You can still do some a little bit of textures. Practice your wet into wet, practice your wet on dry techniques and your dry brushing techniques. Just get comfortable with that. We're going to be using that in some of the flowers that we'll be doing later on in the class. 8. Watercolor Pencil - Rapid Petal Play : To dive into some quick exercise again within 5 minutes, and I practiced on these flowers that my son gave me for my birthday. So we're going to capture the shapes and the essence of these blooms in a rapid drawing. And this exercise is all about loosening up, letting go of your perfectionism. I'm going to drive that into our heads. So grab either your sketchbook, watercolor pencils, and watercolor paper, and we are going to do a fleeting capture of these in a very swift manner. And then I'm going to fill some of them in with some color. Little bouquet here of just sordid flowers. I'm not sure. What they're called. My son picked these up for my birthday, is that sweet? You can see there's a lot of different shapes to these. The challenge on some of them are on their way out too. The challenge is to try to draw some of these. Again, within a five minute time frame and see how many you can create within that short period of time. That was a fun little one. I'm going to use for this one some colored pencils. We've got some really interesting shapes in the leaves for this one. I'm going to actually take that one stem off. Oh, no. Look at that. I've already got something on there. Maybe having the flowers facing different directions to challenge yourself as well. Let's just start off. Again. Give another sheet, Ho. We've got this direction and this direction or this direction. I mean, you can have it in different directions just to practice. So I'm going to grab. I've got a purple. I guess that's kind of a purple with a yellow center. I'm going to start my time Alexa. Set five minute time. We've started 5 minutes. I'm going to practice these little shapes. This one is upright. We've got some green here. I'm just going to do all in the purple. We've got this one. I start off with this round shape here, and it's almost like an oval. These are coming up. They're going to be shorter. As we come ad, these are going to get longer. Again, it's about practicing it, It's okay if it's not correct. Let's try it again. Again, I'm getting looser. Some of that greenery in here. And Let's try it now without using that shape. I know they're shorter here and then this is getting longer here because it's at an angle. We've got some petals coming inward on that one. I go a little bit better on that one. Let's try it again. Again, this is that fan shape. This is the back side of it. There's your fan, and you're just going to fill that in with those petals with that shape. I got a leaf on that one. Continuing, let's try that those petals in the center. I know we've got some petals outward. That's pretty good. Let's turn. Let's see if I hold it my hand upright. What can I get now? Instead of it being outward, the center is here and these are going to be almost equal as I come around this one. I even have some petals facing inward a bit on that. I got the center on that one. And that is not a perfect center. Cute Even can do the back side of it. What's that look like? I have the petals now going down and they're sh over here. There's that stem. Again, probably be better if I have some green in there. But you can see the difference being out and up versus down. Let's turn this one this way. Let's challenges. I can barely see that little circle. Let bring this over here a little bit more. You can see there's a half circle in there. You're not seeing most of that. You are seeing these petals here, and these coming up and around. That one's a little bit harder, isn't it? Stems coming that way. It's really interesting if you find that it's a little easier to do your little circle to get that shape in there a little bit better, feel free to use that. Again, I don't have much here because this is the part that's coming down. That is a pretty good challenge on that one. This one really is pretty much the same thing except for it's more closed in the inside, and that one is white. I did that one and might do that one with a nice light green. That's the time. That's the 5 minutes just practicing those. Let's try as two another 5 minutes down here and practice. Maybe this one just because it's a little bit different shape. F. 9. Progressive Sketching Exercise: It would be fun to do something like this one too, and that one is completely closed up. What about. Again, that would be really the same thing. Except for, you would have everything going upright and then you've got that little bell shape going on with that one. I would have had time if I didn't do so many of those. I should have cleaned that. Let's do a five minute timer for this one. Alexa, five minute timer. We have some really cool leaf patterns with this one. I've got this round shape. There's one tucked in behind. There's one here. This is the underneath. There's one over here. We've got our stem. Stem there. This one is coming out like this. We've got the main stem. These are I don't know, little spikes again. These are all coming up and inward. This one is coming off to the side a little bit. This one is curling around. Shorter here on the edge, and then getting a little longer here. I also wanted to do a little shape of those leaves. Then we have one coming out here on the stem. These are funky shaped leaves. It's a weird one, huh? Let's bring it. It's not really that pretty if I look at it straight up and down. Let's turn it hard to do, isn't it? Let's go back to this one. I'm going to draw this way. Again, we've got 5 minutes just playing. I'm going to move this over a little bit more. Again, we've got this little shape here, which is that little bell shape and the stem, little tiny leaf there. Then we have car petals coming out. Some of those you can't even see because these are in front of it, right? I tucked in there on the back side. We've got this one that's folded over. Again, you just want that lose shape. This pedal is big up in the front there. Really loose shape. Let's see this one. Oops. Let's try to go this way with this one. Maybe go upright. I want to put it here so we can do it this way. Again, you don't really see much of that center.'s switch to a yellow, yellow one that way we can just fill it in. It actually is green here. That green shape. Then we have again, almost this bell or an oval oval shape. That's hard to see with the yellow, isn't it? We've got this bolus shape in the center. Then are a little bit smaller. We get a little bit bigger. And you have some that are coming right forward here, which you can't really see. Some of those are hidden in the back. Let's just pretend we had a stem still. This has a similar leaf to the other one that we had done. That's not quite right, but that's okay. Again, we're filling it in. It's all right. Let's turn it this way so we can see it looking at us. K. I don't see any of the green, so I'm just going to go with the yellow, the yellow is hard to see. But we have this gathering in the center. Then we have again, our an shape. We've got some hidden ones in there. These have multiple layers. We have our outer petal. And then we would have our inner petal. But again, we're trying to be still somewhat loose, when we're drawing these, you're going to be a little tighter than if you are going to be painting them. 5 minutes is up again. Let's just go ahead and fill these in. Playing on that loose mode, I'm just going to add some water to this, and that is pretty much it because we have the ink pencils on here, so you can see when you add water to those, it just activates them. Again, we can keep it pretty loose just by doing this, leaving in some white space. Going to get some of this green going here. Filling that in. You see as you go over and if you continue to work some of those lines, you can meet them a little bit, but again, we are practicing. These are going to be green. This is supposed to be white. That's okay. And just filling in those shapes and you can see how the shapes just right out. Look at that. A n g, a shape. You don't have to stay within the lines. And very loose. We've got some darks and some lights in there. Let's go back up to these purple ones. Now that did have a yellow center. And we do have some green. We can just do the edges of these. Again. Remember, fill in those cute that is. Let's see if we can get some of this covered or our little circle. I could go in with a little bit more darker pigment if I want to cover some of that up with my watercolor. I can get a little loose. You can see I go some nice little edges on that, want a nice little burst. It's really fun to mix and match and play with these. Let's got a green in here. That's a dark, but that's. This was supposed to be white. But that's all. T. You can see how just creating some of those little shapes really make it nice and loose for you without having too much pressure, let's go ahead and fill this in. Let me add a little yellow to those. Keeping it nice and loose. You can see I'm just not being really defined on all of those individual petals. Keeping it nice and loose. Let's go with a little bit yellow in here. That was kind of green, wasn't it? This was upright. So to get the green in there. Little stems. Really yellow on this one. Again, we can take some darker values if we want. This was more of a purple, wasn't it? A pinky purple shade that we had there. If I want to deepen that a little bit, I can. Again, you get a little bit of that dark and light. You get some of those colors that are pk. You've got those lighter values in there, darker values. And again, it's a great way to loosen up. These were kind of curled at towards me, weren't they? Okay. So again, just a really quick way to practice. Some of these. Practice. Again, whatever you have for flowers, try to get the shape down by drawing it in first. Then you can always do the colored pencils, or you could do watercolor pencils, intense pencils. Whatever you have on hand, you can just use regular pencil and just do a light wash first with watercolors. There's a lot of different options for that. But the key is is just to practice those shapes and turn the flowers in different directions and practice how how to create those flowers in different ways so that we can incorporate that into our paintings and get a little bit more a little bit more variety, so everything is going in the same direction. 10. Thoughts about painting loose florals: Want to talk about the benefits of being able to paint loosely. Embracing a loose paint style offers numerous benefits, both creatively and emotionally for us artists of all levels. In this segment, we're just going to explore some advantages of paint loosely and how it really fosters some artistic growth and personal fulfillment. So the first thing I want to talk about is that creative freedom and expression. Painting loosely allows you to break free of constraints and let you embrace a more intuitive, spontaneous approach to your work. And by relinquishing control, which was really hard for me to do and embracing that imperfection, these artists can really tap into that creativity more freely, and it results in artworks that feel more authentic and more expressive. And loose paintings really encourage those bold brush strokes, squiggly lines and movements, which can lead to some really dynamic looks in your florals. And you can see some of these, they start out basically as little blobs of color, and by layering them, they come to life. It's just the best thing and so much fun. That regard, artistic experimentation and discovery is what I found while I was painting these loose flowers, going from trying to do something very realistic to doing this loose style really provided a ground for experimentation and discovery for me. And I think as artists, I think we should encourage each other to explore those new techniques. We are always learning. We're always trying new mediums, and I think we need to do that without fear of failure or judgment because in order to get better at anything, we need to fail at it. So in spirit of experimentation and growth and innovation, I'm going to push you outside your comfort zone, and I want you to expand your horizons, and we're going to do this through trial and error. This painting here was one of my very first ones, and I thought I would share it with you just so you could see where I started in this journey. And I really was able to develop my own unique style with this and really share my voice. And I encourage you to do the same thing. I encourage you to really just explore and go into this with just like that childlike wide eyed look when you're creating stuff, try not to as you're painting it, just look like a flower, because we all need to start somewhere, and we all need to grow and experiment and fail along the way. Emotional release, hinting loosely can also be deeply therapeutic experience. Channeling those emotions, and those experiences onto your paper really gives us that release and just gives us solos in the act of creating something from nothing. Any act of painting becomes a form really of self expression, and it can be in a very emotional process allowing you to connect with some of your innermost thoughts and feelings, and in a sense, painting loosely just becomes not a creative endeavor, but it also is a way for you to form a real personal exploration and have a lot of growth. L et's talk about personal insights. As an artist who has embraced the loose painting style, I can attest that this was transformative in allowing me that freedom and spontaneity. I've always been a very detailed artist with watercolors. I learned from my mom. She is self taught. And before, I really painted along with her with watercolors. I did acrylics a long long time ago and oils. And I look back at some of my older work, and I just find it so emotional. It was a lot of bold strokes, and I was not doing detailed work whatsoever. So I kind of discovered myself again using these techniques, and I gained a deeper understanding of myself as an artist. So the process of paying loosely has brought me really so much joy and fulfillment, and it just reminded me of the inherent beauty of that imperfection and the freedom that you've got from letting go of your expectations. 11. Practice and Spontaneity : So we have done a little bit of practicing. We've tried to loosen up. We've done some exercises that hopefully have released some of that extra pressure that we put on ourselves. And now we're just going to just practice some shapes. We're going to let go of that perfection while we're doing this, and we're just going to play. So let's just let's unpack this a little bit as we paint along. The first thing I want to talk to you about is embracing confidence and just trusting your intuition. Trusting your instincts, painting some of these crazy colors, taking risks, and experimenting with new styles, new techniques, and really allowing yourself to be creative and just flourish without any fear or judgment as you're doing this. So I started out with this one. I put in a couple of lines. I'm using the brush sideways, using some clean water, and just spreading things around. Now, I'm not sure at the beginning if this even looks like a flower, but you know what? It's amazing how it starts to develop. Especially if you think about it so much. I say that all the time, but it's really part of it. If you're like, I'm not really sure, then just move on to another one. I was unsure about that when I had one of those petals is really large. I'm going with a different color and I'm just making some lines, making some marks, and I'm taking those marks, and I'm just spreading them out using some clean water. I'm seeing what it's going to do, seeing where the paint is going to move and making these very random shaped petals because petals are not always perfect. As they spread out like this, they really fan out and make these really organic shapes. You want to practice that spontaneity and let go of that perfectionism. You want to allow that paint to really just know freely on the paper. Focus on capturing more of the essence of your subject, your flowers with more loose and just more gestural brush strokes, and it doesn't have to be perfect. You're just going with the flow on this, when embracing the unpredictability of what they're doing on the paper. You are going to have blobs and those blobs will turn into flowers before your eyes. So this one again, again, practicing some other colors. I added a little bit of orange to the yellow to see what that was going to do, going in with the pinks. This is, I think this is the magenta magenta rose. Again, I'm just practicing that shape and they're not all going to be going the same direction. You might find that when you first start that everything is going in the same direction, and you want to start to realize that I need to change the shape of these flowers. It can't be all going the same way. Play with your brush strokes, play with the colors, spread things out, see what it's going to do. You can see I'm using a a mid size brush for this one. I'm using large paper. I'm not using my smaller Strathmore watercolor cards. This is actually arches paper and it's a large 11 by 14 sheet. So some of these are a little bit larger, some are going to be smaller. Here I'm practicing a row shape. I'm giving myself a lot of space. I'm going to do some layering. I don't care if I go over on top of these if I mess up the colors. It's okay. The shape of the rose. I'm just again playing with that shape. Leaving some white space in there. It's basically an oval shape, and I've got those little lines reaching out, going darker in the middle. The white areas look like the top of the flower or where the light is going to be hitting it. Again, I notice I'm still leaning everything towards the left at this point. I didn't notice it while I was painting it. I will tell you that. It's more like when I look back at it, and I noticed that everything was going the same direction. I think halfway through, I did start as I'm filling in some of the white space, I start to realize it. Here I'm changing up that shape a little bit more. This one is not quite leaning to the left as much as the other ones. I'm going to lift a little bit here, just taking some clean water and lifting up some of that paint. Again, I don't want everything dark. I want some lights and some darks in there. If you're using the same color, we had practiced a little bit of that wet in to wet, we practice a bit of that wet and to dry. I'm doing a little of that here, spreading some of that out even with some of the paint that I've already laid down, just adding a little water to it and spreading that out. Again, I want to hit those darker areas for the center of those flowers. Not sure what type of flower they are and it doesn't matter. You're going to experiment and explore. You want to push those boundaries, try some new techniques, try new mediums, try new styles. You're going to embrace that exploration and discovery knowing that each one that you do is going to bring you a little closer to finding that perfect spot for you. I'm trying some other colors again, orange. Orange with pink, a little bit of blue. We'll try it in this one too. As you grab your paper, try it out. Look at that beautiful bloom that this one has. This one doesn't have as much. That one was more wet. This one was more dry. You can see that different things will happen depending on how wet, how dry it is. I've got some dry brush here that I can see happening. Go back and forth on that. I can clean it up a little bit. But again, a little bit of it looks neat. It looks interesting. It changes it up a little bit. I'm going to continue to move this along. I'm still making those rose shapes, and adding just some lines and some shapes in there. Once I have that shape in there, you can add some water to it and just blend that out. Now you do want a brush will hold a little bit of water. You don't want to work with a really tiny brush. You want to have something that's got a nice belly on it. We can really spread some of that pain out. This one I'm going. This is just the top of that flower on the other side, so I don't want to go really big on that one. We're only seeing a portion of that for that direction. We need a little bit more darker values again. Let's have a little darker to here. A some shadow areas. Til playing with color, you can see, I'm like, let's try this. Let's try that. There is no wrong. Granted, you don't want to turn it to mud, you want to try to keep away from the brown. That experiment. Let's see what you like. Mak notes, even. The key to this is really just letting go of that perfectionism. You want to embrace it as part of the beauty of your art and if you have mistakes along the way, that is great because you need those mistakes to learn and you need to look at them as opportunities for learning and growth. I can't say it enough embrace that spontaneity of what watercolor actually is. I'm going to play a little bit more here and share the live portion of this with you so you can see how I am thinking through this and how I'm just really having a good time. Playing with it. Say loose, stay flexible. You want to have a plan for your artwork, but you want to really remain open to the spot. I have a plan for this one. I know I'm going to make them into card, again, I wasn't really worried. I can cut and paste what I want out of this painting, so you can always utilize it, even if you're using it as practice. You're just going to allow that pain to evolve really organically. You really can respond to the flow of the pain, maybe the energy of the moment, and just be willing to change directions and try new techniques and practice and if inspiration strikes, just go with it. Keep painting. The only way you're going to get there is by practice and persistence and recognize that Mastering this loose painting style really is going to take you time and lots of practice. So feel free to do a few of these papers. Now, you can choose any size watercolor paper you want. If you want to start smaller, feel free to do that. But the big ones are really fun because you can cut them up, and we're going to do that for the final project. But go through this a couple of times, practice it, watch us again, and just kind of practice your own little style for your florals, find out what you like, find out the colors you like, and the shapes that you like. 12. Color Fun Mixing on the paper: So I did want to share this with you. This was actually one of the very first paintings that I did, and I did record it live. And I thought that, you know, I would just share this with you because I decided to make some cards out of this one, and it was all part of my process, my, you know, learning the shapes, learning color, seeing what things are going to do together. So for this one, I'm doing a row shape here, and I've seen little S curves or C curves that people have done for roses. But it's just about leaving a little bit of space. I have this one turned more oval, and I'm trying it in a couple of different places here. I'm just skipping around. I'm just leaving some white space, and then I'm going to go in and add a few darker values in there. So you can see the first rows that I had done that with, I put in some nice blues in there. And I'm not thinking about the composition at this point. I am just practicing different shaped flowers. And some of these I'm going into, while they're still wet, like this one here, I'm going to go in with a little bit darker value again, just to make it pop because it's going to be very flat. If you don't add some darker values to these florals, it's just going to be too soft, and you're not going to get that dimension in your flowers. And even though they're loose, by adding darker values to them, it just again, makes some pop off the page. So this one again, is it all blue. I've got a few darker blues in there, but now I'm adding a little bit of purple to that. And this is still wet. So you can see how everything's kind of moving. It's actually not purple. It's more of a I think that's a yellow ochre or gold quacal gold. That's what that one was. So I mean, I'm mixing color, what's quinacal gold going to do over this beautiful blue? You know, I'm thinking I'm going to get some type of green, right? Because you've got golds and blues. You're going to make some type of green, and it was a very dark shade. So it's just about experimenting and playing with the colors. Without any pressure. That's the great thing about this. I just want you to take the time to explore shapes. And if the flower is not perfect, that's okay. You are learning at this point. Let's add a few leaves in here. So I've got a little bit of that quinacinon gold and a little bit of brown in there. If you don't have Quin gold, you could use, you could get a yellow Ochre, add a little blue to it, add a little brown to it. Again, experiment with those different colored greens. I find that the best type of green are the ones that you mix yourself. So if you're just grabbing regular sap green, it's going to again look a little bit more flat. By adding some browns or some blues to those colors, you're going to get a much richer tone and a much prettier more interesting color. So you can see the sap green over here and the right that I had done. It didn't have much other colors in there. Here's another one. So even if you put that in there, I'm going to add a little bit of brown to that. Just a couple of little taps. Playing with a color. What's that going to do? We've got some nice dark green. I don't often rinse my brush. You'll notice I'm just scooping up the green, scooping up the blues, yellows. It doesn't matter. It's just know about playing around. And this is how you're going to learn about your colors, what they're going to do, what you like, what you don't like. So I'm adding a a little bit darker value here. So I've got some lights and some darks going on. And that's the key is where there's light, there's dark, where there's dark, there's light, and having that mixture is what's going to make your paintings look so much more pretty. R prettier. So I'm kind of pausing here and like, Okay, where do I have another spot that I can place a flower. I'm starting to fill up a lot of that white space at this point. So I may have to layer some more. Again, I'm not worried about composition at this point. I am just practicing the flowers, trying to figure out what I can do, where I can put it. So I did let that dry and took a break, took a step back here. And then I'm going to go back in and we're going to play around a little bit more. This is pretty, but it's very basic. There's no structure to this at all. This is a bunch of flowers. You can see this one is very, very light. I want to pop in a little bit darker color. Again, I'm just there's no particular shape. I'm making some little marks angular marks facing outwards. If you're looking at a petal, it might be bent over. It could be you know, reaching for the sunlight. It could be in any direction. So you're just going to pop in a little bit of clean water against those little marks that you've made, and it makes this beautiful bloom. So you get that darker in the center. And because you're adding water to it, it's going to get lighter usually at the tips or in the center there. So I'm going back in again. I'm trying to play around with the colors. I want to see what these things are going to do with one another. Now you'll notice here, I'm adding paint or water to something that has already dried, so we're going to get a nice layer with this one. Keep in mind, if your paints are always wet, you can tend to get a little muddied. So if you find it that's happening with some of your flowers, go ahead and dry them and then go back over and do what I'm doing now by adding the color on top of it. You can still get those beautiful tones, but they just don't all turn to mud. You can see I can actually blend out some of that nice soft pink around this one, making some more transparent petals. The lighter they are, the more transparent it looks. Going in with a little bit darker yellow here. And then I go, Okay, well, what's the yellow going to look like in this one? What will the yellow look like in this one? Most center flowers either have a really dark center or a very light center with some little dots in there. So again, I'm experimenting with the dots and little marks like little stamens in there. And you can see already, it's starting to look a bit more cohesive. I've got more color going on here, more depth going on here. I'm going to do a little bit more on this one. I like the yellow. It's nice and bright, and it works with a little bit of gouache or a little bit of bleed proof white to really pop out some of those centers. If I feel it needs just a little bit of brightness. So this is a really light flower, so let's add a little dark to that one. My be a little dark to this one. So I get a nice shadow in here. Again, I'm not thinking about every little mark or stroke that I'm making. This is more intuitive. I, going to do? What's that going to do? Let's add a little this. Add a little of that. Put it here. And this is part of part of that learning. And again, guess what? It's just a practice piece. We're just learning how to make the shapes. We're learning how to mi some colors that we like. So there is no pressure with this. You can play if they're not perfect. I've said this before. It's all right. D. You can see I had a little bit too much color in there. I just tapped off a little bit of that excess. I didn't want it to drip. And again I'm making some little marks. Having fun with it. Let's add a little darker into the petal. I'm pushing that outward. It looks like that petal is bending. This one's lifting up. You can see they just come to life. They get more and more darker values and lighter values, more color, and they start to pop and look more realistic or more three D. I don't like the center of that one. That was still wet. I'm just going to tap that, lift it out, and I'm going to try something different. Tap off a little Xs. I'm going to let that dry a little bit. I've got some orange in here, too. I like the orange. I want to see what that's going to do. I had to start popping it in here and there. Maybe even at that orange in the row shape. Now, try to blend that one. You can see that that's already dry, so that didn't work. Timing this is important, so I'm just going to add some more orange to it, and now I can take that and move that down. We need a little bit more water there. There we go. I did dry this and now I'm going to go back in and just try to fill in some more of that white space. Now normally, you want to make sure that you've got plenty of white space in your paintings, and if you're planning something out, that's much easier to do. When you are doing things more intuitive, you're not really sure where your white space is going to be, but just always keep that in the back of your mind. You do want a little bit of that white space to pop out. You don't want to cover up everything, especially with your florals, you want to be able to have some space in there, especially for this one, we're going to cut it out. So we're going to make some cards out of this. And having a little bit of white space in there. We'll really make those colors pop a little bit more. So I'm going to tuck them in here here and there and continue to play. So I just started with this one, so I know I need to add, again, some other darker colors to that because it's very flat. 13. Adding Details and Layers: I'm going to go on with some pink. I really like that pink look. I think better. Pink and Peaches, oranges, I don't know if we can doctor this one up and save it. Let's say. A little better. I will make that blue around it some more green. The yellow one, I think I need to balance that one out a little bit. Let's put a yellow one up here. In the corn. Maybe we need another one here. So one is looking a little green. This one looks a off as well. Before I do that, let's go with some red in this one and a touch of it. And soften it. I'm going to switch now to some green or browns maybe some blues. Create a few more flowers or What do you call them? Ps. That's not what you call them. Leaves. Blue. A little too transparent. There you go. Okay. Some of those I definitely don't like. I need more curve, more looseness. I was too tight. I think I don't know where that one is. I so probably have a flower in there somewhere. It's a. A. I'm just like randomly popping in the leaves everywhere. Again a little overboard. We'll see what we can do to doctor it up a bit. What to do with this one. Let's go a bit blue green. I trying to capture that a little everywhere. Little dry brush, maybe. I don't know. So stems, smaller leaves, that's what it needs. You can see where this one is not a quick quick one. Again, it's a little bit bigger painting, co. I've definitely over a of it. Let's try another one here. So I'll do it too. Too dark. Let's see what a little light will do to that. A play time. All right, do something. Which may again make it a little bit more cohesive. Then I'm going to do a little bit of peat splatter. And maybe a little white splitter. All right. Let's try it and make some final decisions. 14. Project: Creating A Card from a practice pieces: Now it's time to turn my practice pieces into something fun and more practical. I just finished creating this beautiful card using some of my practice pieces, and I'd love to see what you would come up with. For your project, I'm going to have you take one of your favorite full oral practice pieces and transform it into something special, a card, small framed artwork, any creative project you like. And don't be afraid to experiment and make it your own. There's a lot of those I. They're very still transparent, but a couple of them that I used the guash. You can see where it got more opaque. So you lose that translucent quality here, this one as well. I mean not bad, but these are so much prettier when you can see the paper through them a few of the other ones. A little muddy. This one, it was a great experiment. I tried lots of different colors. I can see what colors I probably would work with, which I really like the peach colors, and maybe reds together along with the green, the green, blue, rusty color. Some of these are a little too dark. Some of them a little too muddied. Again, learn by experimenting, but all in all, not bad. I think I could always crop some of these paintings too or crop some of the flowers that I like. Great one for cutting out maybe for adding to some cards. Let's just take a look at some of the areas like I like this. I think that's. That's p. I might leave that one out. I would probably leave these out. But that's not bad. I I cropped it maybe right here, so I've got some of that light transparency. This one's not too bad. Maybe here. There's still a lot of possibilities with this one. Let's go ahead and pull a tape off. I think I'm going to actually cut this one up and we will make some cards with this. The cards that I'm going to be using are the Strathmore watercolor card. Pull that one in half, and now we need to pick out a couple little areas that I would like to try. I don't want to cut it up too badly. I might be able to get a couple of different ones. I know what I don't like is this one, but if I can cut that off the edge of something that might work. Let's just go ahead and cut it right down the middle. I want to cut it down the middle, cut it down the middle this way. I can do the card upright and do a little square. Let's do it that way. I want to cut it right about here. I don't need to do too much. Look at that. I like that one. Let's go a little bit more. Those can be done. L at home, I have my ruler for the decled edge. I love the decled edge look, but I think I'm going to do is just crop. So I don't have the outer edge of that. And I think that's going to fit in there really well. Another thing I could do. I don't have the deckled edge but I can fold it. Goodness. That's a pretty one. Back and forth, and then I can spare it. That way, I can get that raw edge on there if I want it. That's really pretty. Look at that. Also it could leave you some space to w right around the edges if you want. Always thinking. That's obviously a little large for that. This way, I'm not even sure how this flower goes. I painted it this way. Let's go ahead and trim that out. I think that's going to fit like that. If I do it, right about here. Come down a little closer for you. And again, a little back and forth. That's why it doesn't have to be perfect. I tear it sly. Didn't get the edge really well. I can see where it is. Coming in closer. There so nice loess. Let's go ahead and tear it here. This is 140 pound press, so it's really easy to tear. This way it doesn't have to be perfect either. The edge don't match up. Decisions. If I do that, I have to cut off a little bit of this. Let's do that. I feel like you like that. Okay. That's what I'm going to go with. And room down the bottom or I can write some encouraging words. I'm just using double sided sticky tape for this. A little in the middle. I'm going to peel it off. That's really challenging to figure out, isn't it? I think I'm going to go this way. Okay. Decisions made. I'm thinking of some positive words. Let's see here. Okay. I just traced it in here. I use I'm horrible at writing, so I just used my little ruler and did a pencil, some funky little letters. Because I am not the best writer, and I'm just going to go ahead and trace those. I'm going to speed this up just a little bit for you. I just want you to know you don't have to be the best writer. I did this large, small, funky little way that I was writing, and then I just added some little thoughts to the top of it, spread the words out. It doesn't have to be perfect, like I said, I'm a great writer. This was really fun for me just to get messy and loose. That's cute. Let's see. I feel like I need something around the edges. I don't know what. I'm not much of a crafter. I might be able to tell that. But this is cute. Let's see. I feel like I need to I don't know. I start pen and ink, I have a tendency to do a little more. I don't know why that is, but I feel like it ties it in together a little bit more. Whether it does or not? I don't know. Let me try not to go overboard with it because that's usually where it gets me. That's just a little. Needs it. That wants it, but it's got it. Way. Cute way to do just a little card with some of the excess scraps of tests or things that you don't care for. That's a good way to repurpose it, and I'll be sending this out to somebody, I'm sure. 15. Conclusion: So, I had a lot of fun with this larger piece that I did. And again, as a whole, it wasn't the perfect painting. But when you're trying, you know, for the first time, some of these loose watercolors, it's just about playing. So that's what I want you to do. Don't worry about it. For your project, we are going to have you create a set of inspirational el cards. From the paintings that you've done today. So you're going to transform that practice exercise or exercises into a beautiful set of personalized floral cards. This project allows you to apply those loose floral techniques learned in the course while really getting to unleash your creativity in the designing of some unique inspirational cards. Start by practicing the loose floral techniques from the course, including the tural shapes, maybe even the blind contour drawing, and the quick five minute florals. Grab some of your own flowers that you might have in your house or in your garden and practice those. So you're going to select then your favorite florals from all of these practice sessions. Just pick a few of your favorites, maybe the shape or the composition that you liked in certain areas of your practice sessions. And then you're going to design your cards. You're going to use your chosen florals to design a set of cards. I like to use the five by seven, the watercolor cards from Strathmore. Feel free to experiment with layouts, add inspirational phrases. Let your floral designs just kind of shine as the focal point. And then I want you to finalize and share your cards once they're complete. You're going to upload them here in the project gallery and include just a brief note on the techniques that you used and what you thought about it, and maybe even how you came up with your personalized designs or wording. And if you're not a card person and you just want to make a piece of art and you want to matt it, don't feel like you have to make a card with this. You can still do the same thing without turning it into a card great to frame up and hang on your wall. Maybe you have some type of support message or just some positive messages that you can hang up, something cute for maybe a nursery. Or for someone's birthday, you know, it could be anything. So don't limit yourself to just the cards. I just want to see what you come up with. I'm so excited to see what you guys make and create. So thank you so much for joining me in this little project, and I am excited to see yours. And if you are interested in painting more florals, I would love to have you join my membership over at www.kellychassisfineart.com, where we do monthly challenges. We have live paint parties, and we are just having a lot of fun painting flowers, and we would love to have you.