Transcripts
1. Intro: Hi, my name is Colby and I'm a self-taught watercolor
artist here today to talk to you all about
loose watercolor florals. If you've ever looked
at a wreath or a bouquet painting like this
one and thought to yourself, man, that is so beautiful. I wish that I could paint that, but just had no idea how, this class is for you. Now, I want to start with
little disclaimer to say that this class is about
loose watercolor florals, meaning we're going to
learn how to paint loose, more abstract representations
of florals as opposed to photograph-like
very realistic florals. One of the reasons I like to use watercolor when I paint
loose florals is because watercolor is by nature
chaotic and you have to lean into the chaos in order to achieve really stunning
beautiful results. The mixture of watercolor
and these loose, more abstract florals, I think, is a great combination
and a perfect place for beginners to learn how to paint beautiful
springtime floral pieces. Also as a disclaimer, I want you to know that
florals and I have not always had the tightest
of relationships. If you've taken any
of my other classes, you know that I lean
a lot more toward wilderness landscape scenes
when I paint with watercolor, and florals, for some reason, it took a long time for
them to click with me. Even when I learned
how to paint them, it took me a while
to figure out how to analyze exactly what I was painting and how
to break it down. But over the past few months, I have been working really
hard to break down some of the beginner techniques of these loose watercolor florals. That helped me understand
how to do them better. Now that I figured that
out and cracked that code, I want to share those
secrets with you. In this class today, we're going to be talking about a few different
brushstrokes that I use in order to build florals, to create the florals as the building blocks
of these flowers. We're going to learn how
to paint a wreath just like this one by
creating a rose, a poppy, and cherry blossoms. Those are the three main florals we're going be focusing on, but the strokes
that we talk about, you can use to create lots
of different florals. Then we're also going to be
talking about how to paint leaves because leaves have been my nemesis for a long time, and I really want to break them down
so that you don't have to have the
love-hate relationship with them that I do. Before this intro
video gets too long, if painting a wreath
like this one sounds like something that
you would like to do, and if learning my
techniques for breaking down basic loose florals is something that
sounds interesting, then I hope you
enjoy this class and I cannot wait to see what you
come up with. See you soon.
2. Materials: Before we get started
diving into the techniques, let's go over all of the materials that we're
going to use today. If you've taken
any of my classes, a lot of these materials
will probably look the same. But for those of
you who haven't, I am going to take
you through some of my very most favorite
painting materials to use for any project, including loose
watercolor florals, which we're doing today. First up, let's talk
about paint brushes. When I'm painting loose
watercolor florals, I like to have basically
three different sizes on hand when I'm doing
typically sized paintings. Typically size for me would be either a small
painting or a painting that's maybe 9by12 inches. I like to have my large brush be a set around round
in shape size 10. Then I like to have
a medium brush round in shape size 6, and a detail brush size 0. You'll see all of these are
different color handles. They're all Princeton brand, but they are different series. I just wanted to
showcase all of them because I enjoy all of them. The first, my number 10 is the Princeton Velvetouch Series. All of these brushes are
synthetic sable hair, which means that no animals were harmed in the process
of making these. I actually prefer
synthetic sable hair to real sable hair because
I think it's a lot easier to control water, which is one of the most important thing
with watercolors. I prefer synthetic. This is Princeton Velvetouch. You can recognize it by
the dark red handle, it's also very soft to touch. The second is a series you've
probably heard before. It's a favorite of a
lot of artists I know, is the Princeton
Heritage Series. It's more bright red handle. I really like this series, especially the smaller size, round size number 2 for
watercolor lettering. Then the next is
Princeton Neptune. This series, the bristles
act a little bit more like real sable hair than the other two
series brushes do. But it is synthetic. I like all these for
different reasons. But I will use all of
these brushes for floral, so I'm going to use those today. Again, that's round paintbrush, size 10, size 6, and size 0. [NOISE] Next step,
let's talk about paint. I have some professional
watercolor paint here. These are two of the
top-notch brands, Winsor & Newton
and Daniel Smith. You can use whatever
colors you want. The nice thing about florals
is that they come in all beautiful colors all
across the spectrum. Today I'm mostly going to be using this Winsor red deep from Winsor & Newton and a combination of sap green and hookers green from
Winsor & Newton, as well as a little bit of Daniel Smith lamp black
for some detail work. But as you can see, this is my palette. I have lots of different colors and I do
lots of mixing on my palette. The way that I get
the paint on here is by having these tubes and squeezing the paint and letting it dry for
maybe a few days, maybe a week, and then
it's good to use. I have a combination of Winsor
& Newton, Daniel Smith, and a couple of other different
brands on this palette. But for today, the florals that we're
going to be using are mostly going to be different
shades of this Winsor red. I might add in some yellow, but we'll see. That's the paint. Next up, we have the
palette for mixing, but I'd also like to have these, some separate mixing plate. This is a porcelain
mixing plate. This is a plastic
travel palette. The difference between
porcelain and plastic really is how well you can clean it, how easily you can
clean the palette. The plastic palettes
tend to stain. Once they have dried
paint on them, they don't clean up very easily. Whereas porcelain is this
really smooth material that is great for mixing, but also is excellent
for washing afterward. I like to have an
extra mixing palette on hand just in case. Next up is paper. I always like to have both practice paper and professional paper for
the final project. The practice paper that I'm
going to be using today is the studio watercolor
series from Fabriano. As you can see it's cold press. I always like cold press
because of the texture. It's a 140 pounds. I always use at least 140
pound watercolor paper so that the paper can hold
up water really well. It's student grade because it's made up of lots of
different materials. It's only 25 percent cotton. As opposed to this is professional grade
watercolor paper. This is a Blick Premier
watercolor block. Professional grade
watercolor paper is made of 100 percent cotton. That's the one main difference between the two different
kinds of paper. Because my professional
paper is also 140 pounds, but it's made of 100
percent cotton instead of just a smaller percentage. But this is more expensive. [LAUGHTER] That's why I love to have student grade
paper on hand when I do practice and then I'll use professional for
the final project, and today that is going to
be a loose floral wreath. A few other things that I use for basically every
watercolor project, I like to have a
couple of Q-tips on hand to mop up any excess water. Here's my paper towel that I use in-between strokes and
then a cup of clean water. I usually like to have
two cups of clean water, one that can get dirty and
one that will stay clean. I'd recommend you have all
of those on hand and I think that about sums it up. Without further ado, gather all of the materials that you're going to use
for this class. You don't have to use
the ones I've laid out. You can use any
painting materials to create something beautiful. I just thought it'd
be helpful for you to know what I'm using today. Let's head on to
the first module.
3. Warming Up: Before we get started
learning specific techniques for brushstrokes for
our petals and leaves, we're going to just do
a warm-up and practice putting pressure and
using water on our brush. The first thing I
want you to notice is when I'm using my dried
palette like this, I just dipped my paintbrush in water and I have
a bit of a drip, so I'm going to put some
of that water in here because I want this paint
to be really liquidy. Some of these paints I
have like little wells, and if I put water
inside this little well that's surrounded by all of this dense pigment
then I know that my paint is still going
to be fairly pigmented. But the more water that I have, [NOISE] the easier it's
going to glide on the paper. If I just put a tiny
little bit of pressure, I can see that the paint
is very pigmented, there's a lot of
water on here as opposed to if I put a
lot of pressure on here, the full pressure, then the paint doesn't
go nearly as far. I have to go over it
again in order to get that really pigmented,
watery look. Now with loose
watercolor florals, we really want the
paint to be wet, and we want it to be wet enough to blend with
its surroundings. Knowing the difference
between the pressures, if you only put a little bit
of pressure versus when you put a lot of pressure,
is really important. One thing I would
do to warm up is, test how much water you're
going to put in your paint. First of all, and what
that does to the paint, is the more water that you
put on your paintbrush and in the little well of paint that you're
pouring from your palette, the easier you're going to get a nice solid stroke
with a lot of pressure. That's one thing
I would practice. I would also practice
what pressure does to the value of the color. The value of a color is the lightness or
darkness of a color, and in watercolor, the way to make a color lighter or
darker is by adding water. The more water you add, the lighter it's going to be, and the less water you have, the more pigmented
it's going to be. That's something
that I would test out so that you can get a handle on it before we
actually start painting florals. The key consistency here is for us to get to
a place where we can use a lot of pressure but still maintain
some of this wetness here. Because the wetness is
what's going to blend all the colors together
and create some of those nice abstract blends that make loose watercolor
florals really beautiful. Along with color
and what pressure does with color, in general, we just want to see how we can move our
paintbrush around. Let me explain what I mean. When we paint petals and
where I'm going to show you how in the next video, we need to figure
out how to maneuver our paintbrush to create some natural kinds
of looking shapes. That means moving the
paintbrush and also utilizing pressure in one stroke to make it look a
little more natural. I'm going to go more in
detail, what I mean, regarding petals in
the next videos, but what I want you to
do to practice now, is to go from using a
little bit of pressure, to a lot of pressure, to a little bit of
pressure, like this. As you can see that already
looks like a long leaf. This is a technique
that we're going to use as we talk about leaves in one of
the upcoming videos. But just as a warm-up, this is what I want you to do. I want you to do in straight
lines and going from, thin to thick, to thin again. If you find that as you do it, you run out of paint, then that means you need to
add a little bit more water. Because if you run out of paint, that's okay but you
probably will have to go back in and fill it in after, if you want it to be
completely filled in. But I will say, as we go along and we
form these flowers, sometimes it's okay to have
some of these white spaces. White spaces are actually really important for loose
watercolor florals, which we're going to talk
about in future videos. It's straight like you're practicing a long
leaf, and then also, I want you to practice moving your paintbrush around
in a circle like this. It doesn't have to be a perfect
circle but I want you to practice moving it in like a
round shape in one stroke, so the way that I'm doing that. We're going to practice
this, even more, when we practice petals
because I'm going to show you how to form a
petal this way. The reason I'm doing that is because to make a
flower look natural, we want to try to do it in one stroke as
much as possible, but then we can go in and
add whatever we need after. That's another drill that is good to practice for
loose watercolor florals, is to practice moving
your brush in a circle. You start at the bottom and then you don't have very much pressure
at the bottom, and then as you move upward, notice how I'm pushing on my paintbrush and flipping it
around with more pressure, and then I bring it back down. We're going to go over
that technique, even more, when we learn different
petal shapes. But these are just some drills that I want you to practice. You can do all kinds of shapes with these pressure drills. The point is to get comfortable using
different amounts of pressure on the same stroke. You can go on squiggly
lines like I'm doing now, and go to thin at some point, or I keep doing straight lines. I just want you to practice
going from thick to thin, to thick to thin, all in one stroke, so that when we
paint the petals, it will come a little
bit easier for you. That about sums it up for Loose Watercolor Florals Part 1 for Warm Ups for
painting these flowers. Without further ado, keep practicing these warm-ups if you're painting along with me, if you're not, that's okay too. The next video we're going
to delve right into petals, brushstrokes to make petals. The next three
videos are all about petals and then there's going
to be one about leaves, and then we're
going to move on to actually shaping some flowers. Let's full steam ahead.
4. Techniques: Petals, Part 1: Now that you have warmed up and are ready for
the next challenge, let's talk about the
first brushstroke that I use to create petals. First I'm just going to quickly explain the reason
[LAUGHTER] I'm breaking these down by strokes and by
petals is because flowers, I know this might seem self-explanatory
or really obvious, but it wasn't for me [LAUGHTER]. I had to break this down into really bite-size
chunks in order to make sense of [LAUGHTER]
loose watercolor florals. That's what I'm doing for you. All flowers, every
intricate flower is made up of smaller little petals. Especially when
you paint flowers, they come in all different
shapes and sizes. In order to make them
look really natural, even though we're doing loose, loose meaning abstract, like a loose representation
of a flower, not like the most realistic in terms of
shading and what not. Even though we're doing loose, we're still making
shapes basically. We're using basic shapes, sometimes even blobs [LAUGHTER], shapes that look like blobs, and putting them together
in strategic ways so that they look like a loose
representation of a flower. The first stroke that I use very often is the tear drop stroke. The tear drop
stroke riffs off of the pressure exercises that I had you do in the last video. As you can see, I've drawn
a little diagram here, where I start the stroke off. This petal is made
up of two strokes, I lift my paintbrush
up two times. The first I lift it up
and then I start here, small and thin, and I wrap around
my paintbrush and using a lot of pressure to create a nice thick
wash up here, and then I go thin and
again and come to a point. Then at the end, there's a little bit of
white space in here, so I use a very little
amount of pressure here again to start in the
middle and fill in that space. I'm going to show you exactly
what I mean right now. You can paint along
with me or just watch, either is good for me. I am starting very small, very little pressure right here. I'm moving my paintbrush up
and around using a lot of pressure to make an
upside down tear drop or rain drop and then ending
in the middle like that. But you see how there's
still this white space. I don't want to fill it up all the way and make it
look exactly like a tear drop because that's not
how flowers actually look. They look ragged in the center, because this is going to be
the center of the flower. I'm going to start
with a small amount of pressure again, I'm just move my paintbrush around either in
that same stroke or in a bigger wash to
fill in that space. Now, if the previous
stroke that I did dried, which it looks like mine has, then I can either leave it and have these paint lines
right here or I can just go in with my
paintbrush and fill in these lines and maybe add a little bit of
imperfection along the way. Now I have this petal using
the tear drop stroke. One important thing
to note about the tear drop stroke is that
it's really going to be tempting when you form your flowers using
this stroke to make very perfect tear drops that
look like that every time. Wild flowers like that
look nice [LAUGHTER]. They're not the most
realistic because flowers and nature are
actually a little jagged. Some of the petals are ripped, sometimes they're not
shaped perfectly, just like everything in nature, they have a little bit
of wildness to them, a little bit of chaos to them. That's not perfect and that's beautiful in
that imperfection. I really love watercolor in
general and painting nature because imperfection is
just par for the course. I would not stress too much about making a
perfect tear drop. In fact, I think it looks even better when it's not perfect. Sometimes if I make something that's a little too perfect, then I'll go in after and add just a little bit of
character to it like that. That is the tear drop stroke. Now, I want you to practice. I want you to
[LAUGHTER] practice it in lots of different, not lots of different ways,
but just keep practicing. See there's a half formed
tear drop stroke which where it stops further
up than where it starts. That's totally okay too, that's definitely something
that you've seen in nature. One thing that you might
notice as you're doing this is if you are trying to
do the tear drop stroke, I was trying to demonstrate something you didn't
work that time, you're trying to do
the tear drop stroke , I don't have enough paint. You find that you are
getting streaky at the top, that's because you don't have
enough paint or you don't really see because your paint doesn't have enough water in it. In order to make
it work, you don't get those streaks at the top. You really want to make
sure that your paint has a lot of water
in it so that you can put pressure on and still have the paint move
around on the paper. That said, sometimes
having those streaks, some of those streaks just
adds some character to it, just looks like there might be some tears or holes
in the petal, so it's up to you if that is something
that you want to stick with, and if you do, I am all for it. But, that's the
tear drop stroke. Go ahead and practice
that stroke, and when you're ready
we will move on to the second stroke of the three petals
strokes I'm going to talk about in this course. Get practicing and I will see
you in just a few minutes.
5. Techniques: Petals, Part 2: You've had some time to
practice the teardrop stroke, and now we're going
to move on to the second stroke that I use very often when I paint
watercolor florals, and I have called it
the crescent stroke. I didn't do a
diagram for this one because it's exactly
what it sounds like. Basically, you could start from the top
or from the bottom, but you start with
very little pressure, and then you move, and once you get to the middle, you have more pressure, and then once you
get to the top, you leave off pressure. Basically, you're forming a little misshapen
crescent like that. I'm going to demonstrate
that for you one more time, this time from the top in case you decide you want to
start from the top. You start with a little
bit of pressure, and then you put a lot of pressure as you
move to the middle, and then towards the bottom, you have just a little
bit of pressure again. With the crescent stroke, usually you put
together a lot of these strokes to form
bunches of petals. This is a stroke that I
use to create lots of different petals for lots
of different flowers. I use it all the time. This is actually one of my
favorite ways to warm-up too. I just didn't include it specifically in the
[LAUGHTER] warm-up video because I gave its own video. Again, you can do
that from the bottom, or you can do it from the top. The key here is we don't want it to look
exactly like a moon. Even when I try, it's
a little uneven, which is perfect because we
want it to have character. We want all of the
petals that we paint to not be perfect, to have a little jagged places. You can try it from
the other way too, because I use crescent strokes in multiple different ways. When you're practicing this, maybe practice having the
petal jut out on both sides. There's that side, and then the other side, and maybe from the
top like that, or from the bottom like that. I want you to practice
all different angles, so that you can get a feel
for how best to do it. Now, you'll notice that when I'm painting
strokes like this, when I'm trying specifically to put different amounts
of pressure on my strokes, I want to have a lot of
control over my paintbrush. I'm not painting
it very close like super close to the
brush like this, but I'm not holding it at the
very far end of the handle. I'm holding it more
towards the middle where the middle of the handle
lands on my hand, and then depending on
how you hold pencils, [LAUGHTER] I usually, have the most control
when I rest the handle on my ring finger and use both my pointer and my middle
fingers to hold the brush. In case, you're
wondering about grip, that's how I usually do it. That is the crescent stroke. Not too much to it, but it's important to practice so that your hand
can gain muscle memory, so when you're putting all
of these things together, you don't even have to
think much about it. This can also be a
fun abstract warm-up to paint these petals
on top of each other. I just think it's
fun to paint petals. [LAUGHTER] That's
the crescent stroke. Your task is to practice the crescent stroke with
whatever paintbrush you have, and then when you're ready, we'll move on to the final stroke that we're
going to learn in this class. Definitely not the final stroke that all flowers are made of, [LAUGHTER] but we're
just focusing on these three strokes in this
beginner's florals class. The next one is the
final petal stroke, and then we're going
to move on to leaves, and then we're going to get into the real juicy
stuff. See you soon.
6. Techniques: Petals, Part3: You've practiced the
crescent stroke, you've practiced the
teardrop stroke, and now we're going
to practice what I like to call the fan stroke. I'm going to show you exactly what that looks like right now. The fan stroke is a stroke
that I like to use when I'm creating more thinner
crankly petals, I guess, that look like
they're fanning out like that. The flower that most comes
to mind for me right now is a poppy and actually
poppies are flowers that we're going to learn how
to paint in this class, one of the three
flowers we're going to learn how to
paint in this class. We want to use this
stroke anytime a flower, it looks like it has petals, but the petals are
folded in on each other, and when you look at
them, they're very, I don't know if foldy
[LAUGHTER] is the right word, but that they fan out and it's all one thing as opposed to lots of little
petals put together. You watched me do it and I'm going to talk about
what I'm doing. First, I call it the fan stroke because I started in the middle, I use a lot of pressure
basically the whole time. I start on one side and then
I fan my paintbrush out, moving the handle a little bit, but mostly keeping the brush towards the middle
because we don't want it to look like I'm just painting a
swatch like that. We want it to still
have some petal shape, even if that means adding
more shapes to it after. In order to maintain
its petal shape, the petals have to be
pointing toward the middle. All petals on all flower
stem from the middle. The middle of a
flower technically is called the ovary
of the flower, so all of the petals are going to be pointed toward
the middle in some way. That's the key difference
between like if I just painted a stroke like that with my paintbrush
versus this fan stroke where I have my paintbrush pointed so that the tip of the
brush starts toward the middle with the outward
end pointing outward. Then you can either leave your brush on the paper
and fan it out like that. It's trickier to get
the paint to move exactly the way that you want it to even when it's really wet. I like a combination of both, where you're moving
the paintbrush or a little bit but mostly
leaving it toward the center. Then like this one, it looks like it might need
a little bit more shape. I can go in after and make sure there's
still some spaces. Just add some loose
imperfect lines that meet in the middle so it looks
obvious that this is a petal that's meeting in the middle.
Does that make sense? [LAUGHTER] This is
the fan stroke. You can use the fans stroke
for flowers like poppies, like I just said, or you can even use it for
just little smaller petals, similar to the teardrop petal, but maybe that don't
have as round of a shape on the outside as
the teardrop pedal does. Let me show you what I mean. If I had a petal like that, if my petal is more not quite as rounded on the edge and maybe a little bit more flat or had some
more texture like, I could use my fans
stroke to imitate that. But for a petal like that, you can also just
move your brush and create that texture, but we'll talk about that as we continue
on in the course. The fan stroke is mostly to
create these broad shapes. We're going to use all three of the strokes
that we use for the petals, we're going to use
all three of them in at least some of the flowers that we are
going to be painting today. I have the fans stroke
right here then I have the teardrop stroke and the
crescent stroke over here. We're going to learn
how to paint a rose and we're going to learn
how to paint a poppy, and we're going to learn how
to paint a cherry blossom. We're going to use all of
those strokes, let me do it. Especially for the cherry
blossom and the poppy, we're not only
going to learn how to paint from an outward
facing perspective, but also from a side
perspective to add some diversity in our wreath, and then we're going to
put them altogether. Practice the fan stroke. I'm going to demonstrate
one more time just because I know it's
really helpful to see. I'm starting in the middle with my paintbrush pointing outward
and I'm just moving it. I don't want a
perfect fan shape, but then I'm bringing it
back towards the middle. Like that. Then I'll show you how we put
all of those things together in order to create flowers with
different perspectives. Practice these strokes,
practice the fan stroke. In the next video,
we're going to go over the strokes
that we're going to use for leaves and then
we're going to put it all together and learn how to
paint these three flowers. I absolutely cannot wait to
continue doing this with you. Painting florals is one
of my favorite things. Let's move on ahead.
7. Techniques: Leaves: Before we move forward and forming the three
different flowers that we're going to paint today, let's spend just a couple of minutes talking about leaves. Lead the strokes that we need
to create leaves are very similar to the strokes that
we use to create floral. I'm going to pick up some
green, I'm going to show you. Basically, we're
putting together two crisis strokes in order
to make a basic leaf. Now, I am going to say there are lots of
different leaves that you can paint and using lots of different
kinds of pressure. But for this basic leaf that you'll find in just about any bouquet or any wreath, these are the steps
you need to do it. First, I'm going to paint a little stem using
very little pressure, and then I'm going to
paint a crescent stroke on one side and remember a
crescent stroke starts very thin and then it goes very
thick towards the middle, and then it gets
very thin again. Now the thin when it
comes to painting leaves, maintaining the points, especially at the top of
the leaf is very important, and maintaining the
white space between the stem and the two
crescent strokes is also very important so that we can keep the shape of and leave a space for where
the stem is supposed to be. First, I painted the stem and
then I painted one side of the leaf and now I'm going to do another crescent
stroke on the other side, but I'm going to start and
use the tip of my paintbrush to get a very light point. I'm going to leave that
space white and then I'm going to do my stroke
again on the other side. This one didn't have quite as much shape to it
on the other side, but that's okay
because it just means this leaf is pointing
a little bit that way. Like I've mentioned with everything else
that we've painted, we don't necessarily
want to have the leaf that's perfectly
even on both sides, but that can look
cool sometimes. But from the most part, we want leaves that have a
little bit of imperfection. Those are the basic steps. When I just painted that one, I painted both sides before I painted this
stem and that's okay. But the most important
thing, and I say this, and you should know, leaves
have been like my nemesis. [LAUGHTER] When I learned how to paint loose watercolor florals mostly because I would either try to paint them
only like this, do you remember the warm-up
stroke that we used where you start thin and then you go thick and then you
go thin again? I will try to paint
all of my leaves only like that and
they ended up looking flat or I would paint my leaves just like that and leave huge amounts
of space in-between. I'm just showing you all
the ways that I felt like I was unhappy
with my leaves or I would start at the top
and then go to the bottom and that didn't always work out for me the way
that I wanted to either. Usually, it's because
I would be leaving too much space or I would leave a stem like
this in the middle. Those look cool, I know a lot of artists who form
leaves like this. You do you, but these aren't the leaves that I was
really going for. Notice how this one is
pretty symmetrical. I found that I didn't want my leaves to look flattened,
symmetrical like that. I really wanted them
to have a shape. When you paint the leaves and you paint the
crescent strokes, you just want to make sure that you are giving your leaves, your strokes, a little bit
of movement when you're painting them so that
when you're done, it looks like they're
bending in the wind or it looks like
they're imperfect, which is how leaves
normally look. When we put our leaves altogether on the wreath
that we're going to create where I'm going to
talk more about shape and how to maintain movement in the same direction so that it looks realistic, but it also just looks
really beautiful and wild with how the leaves are
falling into each other. I'm going to paint a few
more while I'm talking. Painting leaves is
a great warm-up if you're ever looking
just in general, even if you're not
painting florals, sometimes I like to get out my Paint Brush and just paint
a whole bunch of leaves. Notice how I always
start when I paint these leaves from the
stem and go up for me, that's just the best way
that I know how to get the right point at
the top that I want and to get the right
shape that I want. I'll show you when
we paint our wreath, sometimes that means moving the paper around so that I can start at the stem
instead of having to start at the tip of the leaf. You'll also notice for
a lot of these leaves, I'm painting a bigger
crescent stroke on one side and then the smaller one is just
filling in at the bottom. Not all of your leaves
[LAUGHTER] have to be like that. You can make full ones and
still have them look natural. See if I can show you, I'm using my size
six brush right now so that's why I'm not
getting as much paint but this is probably the
brush I would use when we paint leaves for the wreath. I can have leaves that are a little more
full on both sides, that is totally fine
and it works out. But sometimes I have to get do a little more strokes in order to get what I want and then other times when I do, it has these awkward shapes jagged at the end and that
might look real enough, but I like to have the point be a little smaller and
less and more settle. Those are the basic leaves. One note I am going to say, sometimes it's okay if
you want your leaves to not have so much a point at the end or not just like
one point if you want your leaves to be a little
more jagged like that. Sometimes leaves are
jagged at the ends too, and sometimes they're jagged
all the way around like mint leaves have
little jagged edges. There are thousands of
different types of leaves, as I'm sure you know
and in future classes I intend to do studies on all
different kinds of leaves. But for this basic intro
to loose florals class, this pretty basic structure of a leaf is what I'm going
to be focusing on. Those are leaves, that's
how you paint them, and once again, just
super quick recap. I painted the stem and then I did two crescent strokes on
either side of the stem, making sure to leave this
thin line of white space just to maintain the illusion that there is a little
bit of a vein there. I would practice this, I love practice now, I used to hate practicing leaves
because they didn't come naturally to me at all. But the more I practice, the more naturally they came, and knowing this style really
helped me where I always start from the stem and
go upward to a point. Practice your leaves,
practice your pedal strokes, and then when we come back, we're going to learn
how to paint a rose. Hope you're excited because
I am. See you soon.
8. Tutorial: Rose : Welcome to our first
floral tutorial. In this tutorial, we're going to practice how to paint
loose watercolor roses. Now, you have practiced
all of the brushstrokes that I talked about at the
beginning of the course, which are the crescent stroke, leaves, teardrops stroke,
and the fan stroke. You should have
practiced all of these. For the rose, we're going to use only
the crescent stroke mostly in order to form
our loose watercolor rose. Now, remember that the
basic concept behind loose watercolor florals
is that instead of using shading or fine detail work to create the shape
of our flower. We are going to
creatively navigate white space and use
our brushstrokes to leave white space
in the place where normally in a more detailed
fine art painting, you would see [NOISE]
overlapping petals. Without further ado, the basic structure of a rose
using the crescent stroke, we're going to do a rose that's blooming outward like we have
a bird's-eye view of it, is using the crescent stroke
in multiple different sizes, starting very small,
and getting bigger. I'm going to show you
exactly how that works. Keep in mind there are so many different ways to
paint a loose watercolor rose. This is just the main
way that I paint them. [LAUGHTER] If you see other people painting them
different ways, awesome, you should totally
try, but this is my technique, my version. First, we're going to paint in the middle just a tiny
little crescent and I'm just going to
put a little line to have the very center of that crescent have a
little bit of white space. That's my first
layer, if you will. Now, using my paintbrush, I'm going to continue using the crescent stroke to
add layers to my rose. I'm just moving around the flower knowing that
this is the center. I'm leaving some white space because I want there
to be some overlap. We can either have the
rose be facing this way. I'll just show
it to you this way. If you want to face
slightly this way, then I want this to be open and I'm just going to keep painting around the
edges like that. That's a rose that's facing this way where we get
a side perspective. Now if we want to
paint a rose head on, instead of having
the petals be facing a certain direction we would have more petals
surrounding the middle area. I'll paint one of those now. Again, I'm painting
a little crescent. Then using the crescent stroke, I'm going to paint
around the center, and I'm going to leave
some white space in between these strokes here. I'm just eyeballing it where
I want the strokes to go, making sure to leave some
space so it's not all red, and knowing that some of my strokes are going to overlap and dry on
top of each other. I'm just eyeballing this using the crescent stroke
all the way around the middle here in order to form the petals around the rows. I always get asked this
question, when do I stop? The answer is, whenever you
feel like you should stop. I feel like that's a
good stopping point. Let's look at these two
flowers and assess. First, I've noticed that
some of my petals have dried, while some
of them are wet, and I might be left with some
awkward dry spots that I don't really want that
don't look super natural, so I'm going to go over
them with my paintbrush again just to eliminate
those dry spots. Now I'm going to evaluate
these two roses [NOISE]. Some key points on
these roses are first, I always make sure that some of the petals have this
point at the end, that I can always see this
point at the end so it looks like I'm looking
at the top ridge of a petal or like I can see an
edge of the petal basically, if I have this pointed out, especially when
you see roses that are unfolded like that. You can see the ridges
of some and so leaving at least a couple that
have a point at the end like that as opposed to these
ones mostly the point of my crescent blended in with
other petals is pretty key. Another really key thing is leaving some white space in
between some of the petals. I think one of the
biggest issues that I see with loose florals
in general is people starting to paint this and going like this and then ending up with something that
looks more like this. That's just a big blob. That's totally cool. This is exactly how
my watercolor roses came out when I first started
painting them and honestly, if you painted something like that and painted
some leaves around it, here I'll show you, if you left something like that and still painted some
leaves around it, people would be able to
tell that it's a flower. I want you to take off a lot of the pressure
that you've been telling yourself because one of the biggest complaints or struggles that I hear from people when they
paint roses is well, I just can't figure
out how to make them not look like blobs. I'm here to tell you
mostly they're going to look like blobs [LAUGHTER]
and that's okay, but the way to make
it look a little bit less like a blob and a
little bit more like you were being more intentional about the white space
that you're using, is to make sure to leave little bits of white space
around the petals of these crescent strokes
so that you can still see the formation
of some of the petals. When it comes to loose
florals in general, regardless of what
flower you paint, where you leave white space in between the
petals is probably the most important thing that will differentiate
between flowers, and that will help your
flowers feel a little bit less like big blobs and a
little bit more like flowers. Some takeaways from how to paint a rose before I move on, it's a whole bunch of crescent
strokes put together, just going around in a circle. If you want the shape
of the flower to maintain its structure, if you want to maintain the
structure of the flower without coming up
with some blob, then that means you need
to leave more white space. You need to leave thin layers of white space so that you can see the general
structure of the petals, but another takeaway is that
if it looks like a blob, that's okay [LAUGHTER] because loose watercolor
florals are supposed to be abstract and people are really going to understand
what you're trying to do as long as you have the basic structure of the
shape that you're going for. All people need to
know when they look at watercolor florals is
that they're bright and colorful and have some nature-like irregular shape and then once you add leaves, they're definitely going
to be able to tell exactly what it is [NOISE]. Last thing before
I move on really quick is when you
are painting roses, a technique that I like
to do sometimes is not to use pigment for
all of my strokes. Maybe I'll have some
pretty dense pigment for those first
couple of strokes, but then while it's still wet, I'm going to wash off my brush, and just use water to blend
in the color together. You have to do it while
the pigment is still wet. Some of mine is not working as well as I wanted it
to. That's okay. The basic idea is that if you paint and use water while
the pigment is still wet, then you can create a natural
gradient in the flower. That can look really
beautiful and really cool. Keep that in mind [NOISE]
because it's going to come in very helpful when we
practice our last flower, the cherry blossom
of this class, [NOISE] but I wanted
to show you what it looked like with the rose also. As you can see, this rose is a little bit more abstract
than any of these two. It's a little bit more
blobby like this one, but I still think
it's beautiful, and I really love
how it turned out. [NOISE] Let yourself
off the hook with if you just are so
annoyed at painting blobs. If you really don't want them
to look like this anymore, then take some time
to intentionally practice leaving in
the white space, and the more you practice it, the more your hands will
remember to leave in that space. That is the tutorial on roses. Practice all you want and let's move on
to the next video, which is about poppies. I'm so excited. Can't
wait to see you there.
9. Tutorial: Poppy: We have practiced our
strokes and our leaves. We learned how to paint roses. Now, we are going to
learn how to paint poppies from two
different perspectives. The very first thing you need to know about painting poppies is the main stroke we're going to use is the fan
stroke for poppies. We're going to use
the fan stroke. Then, we're going to use a
hybrid of the crescent stroke and the fan stroke to
create our poppy effect. First, I'm going
to show you what a poppy would look
like from the side, as if you are looking at it
as if it were standing on a stem and you are looking at it from its side as
opposed to straight on. I'm taking my number 10
brush, you can use number 6. I'm using number 10, and I'm going to paint a fan stroke. I'm starting from the
middle and I want an uneven edge right here and I want it to come back towards
the middle, like this. But, I'm still going to leave some white space right here. I did that fan stroke. That's how I built that poppy. Now, this is almost like
the inside of the flower, like we're looking at a
poppy as its popping out of the field and this is the
inside of the flower. The ovary is right here. This is the inside of the petal. Now, we're going to form
the outside edge of the opposite petal using a hybrid crescent
and fan stroke. What I'm going to do
is, underneath here, I'm going to start underneath
this petal right here, and I'm going to just
close this gap in between. I don't want this to stay
exactly like an edge. I want it to come to a
little bit of a point, so I'm just going to
manually paint in right here because this is where
the stem is going to be. But the most important
thing is that I am basically putting an edge to cover up part of
the middle white space here. But I'm leaving some white space because this is where the center of the poppy is going to be. Because the poppy, we are looking at it from a
side point of view, instead of how poppies have little black tendrils
popping out, technically, those are called
the stamen of the flower. The center of the
flowers, the ovary, the little wispy tendrils popping out are
called the stamen. Since we're looking
at it from the side, we're not going to
see a big center. The tendrils going out in a
fan or in a circle around. We're going to see
them popping out from behind this flower. I'm going to wait for
that to dry a little bit before I paint in those details. But, just know, that the final step to painting the side perspective poppy is to draw in the black stamen
popping out from the center. This is the side
view of a poppy, and this is the side view of lots of different flowers too. Poppies aren't the only ones
that have those really thin, flaky, I don't know
what flaky is. I keep trying to come
up with adjectives that describe these petals,
but it's tricky. Thin and folded petals that go in a circle
around each other, poppies aren't the only
ones and [inaudible] are another one that
come to mind for me. But, in my mind
they're the easiest to demonstrate for this
beginner's class. That's this side
view of the poppy. Now, the center
view of the poppy, or like the bird's
eye view I guess, is a combination of the fan stroke and
the teardrop stroke, in that, we're going to paint multiple versions
of the fan stroke just basically
around in a circle. I'll show you what
I mean by that. I'm going to start
with the top petal. I'm painting a fan stroke. I want to go out a little
bit more like this. Then, I'm going
back to the center, similar to how we do in the teardrop stroke and I'm filling in parts of the center. Because this is a view of
the flower from head-on, we are going to paint
in the center after. Now, I am going to turn
my paper and paint another fan stroke and
do the same thing. I've used my paintbrush
to fill in some lines. I'm going to turn my paper
and do another fan stroke. I'm making all of these uneven, I don't want them
to be the same. But, I'm using my paintbrush
after to fill in the lines. This one I'm going to bring
out a little bit more. Then, my last one like this, using my paintbrush
to fill in the lines. The key here is, we want the petals
to be very wavy. We don't want them to
be in a perfect circle. We want them to have texture and so it's okay that
it looks like some of the petal behind this dried before I had a chance to paint the one on top of it
and it's just staying there. But I'm digging
that layered look, so I'm going to keep it there. We want the watercolor
to have texture, so it looks like the
petal is moving. Then, we're going to paint
in the stamen in black, in just a second. These are the two
views of the poppies. If you don't want to
turn your paper around, then instead of doing a fan
stroke all the way around, you can do a combination of the fan stroke and
a teardrop stroke. Let me show you
what I mean. First, I'm going to start off with
this fan stroke that I did, and bringing this
towards the center Now, instead of
turning the paper, I'm going to start in the middle and do a teardrop stroke, but make it way less
teardrop shaped, make it more fan-shaped, and just fill in the spaces where I see
they need to be filled. I don't have quite enough
paint. That's okay. I'm starting in the center, and filling in the
spaces as I go along. But I'm moving my brush in
the same way that I would a teardrop stroke just with
more movement, more texture. It's a lot more shaped
like the fan stroke unless shaped a lot less
like the teardrop stroke, but it's the same basic
movement of my paintbrush. Maybe fill in just a
little bit of that. I can achieve this
open faced poppy with both of those methods, either using the fan
stroke all the way around, or using a modified version of the teardrop stroke and not
moving my paper at all. Now that we have painted an open faced poppy
and a sideways poppy, now bear in mind, this sideways
poppy you can have it be facing up or you can have it
be facing this to the side. I'm going to show you just really quickly how it
would look to the side. You can either for this, if it's easier to
turn your paper and pretend to be painting
it like it's facing up. Or you can keep it for an extra challenge
and see if you can mimic this fan stroke at a
different angle like that. That's the bigger
petal from the inside. Then the smaller petal
is just going to come and meet it like that. When you paint poppies from the side like this,
you can honestly, you can either have
the inside pedal be the big one and the outside
one to be the small one. See see how this inside petal, that's going to be the inside
where this is the center. The ratio should
be about 1/3-2/3. You can have this
be the bigger one, and this be the smaller one. Or alternatively, you can have the inside petal be the smaller one and the bottom
petal be the bigger one. Either way, it's
going to be a poppy. With poppies, especially I think of all the
flowers that I paint, they look the most like blobs when I do them the
way that I do them. If you need it in another
pep talk as to how it's okay if you just feel like
you're painting blobs when you're painting
florals, Here you go. The thing that makes them
look less like blobs and more like florals when it
comes to poppies like this, is when you add in the details. Now, I'm going to
show you how to do that with my black
paint over here. I'm picking up my detail brush, that's my Size 0 brush. It looks like this
poppy is mostly dry, this little area over
here, and that's okay. I'm first going to
paint a lot of dots. The number 1 thing
to remember about painting these details on
the side poppies is that these dots do not go below this ridge because this petal is the petal that's like you're looking at
the outside of it, it's shielding you from
the ovary of the flower. We try as much as possible
not to get the dots outside or onto that
petal right there. That's the ovary of the flower. Now, we're going to paint
some of the stamen. The way that I
like to do that is by painting some dots
on top around it, and then painting the
the little stems; very thin, very wispy. There you go. That is a poppy. That's how you paint in
the details of the poppy. Now, if you wanted to
add in more details to show shading on
the actual petals, one thing you could also
do with the zero brushes, pick up the same red pigment
but on your zero brush, and just add in some
veins, some lines. You don't want to make them
super parallel or the same. They should all be
going toward the ovary, towards the center
of the flower as you paint these veins on here. Just like this. With loose florals, it's not super necessary because people are going to know know you are
trying to paint. It's just going to add in a little bit of detail
if you really want. Then I would do it again on top, making sure that they all are pointing towards the center. Just sometimes you can see little veins on
poppies in some flowers, so adding them just adds a little bit
more detail than not. It's not too tricky. But again, not necessary with these
loose watercolor florals. When you paint
something like this, people are going to
know what it looks like mostly because of the
center that you've added. So that is how you add in the details for
the side view of the poppy. You would do the
exact same thing on these ones with the stamen going up this way or the
stamen pointing out this way. Now, I'm going to
show you how to paint the details for this
open faced poppy. I'm going to paint, instead of painting
lots of little dots, I don't want a perfect circle. I'm going to do a little a blobby misshapen
circle for the center. But I do want it to be
like a circle of black. Then I'm still leaving some
of that whitespace in there. Now I'm going to go around, and I'm going to just dot
really quickly in a circle around the center of the ovary in black
that I just painted. I don't have any particular
rhyme or reason, I'm just going in
basically a circle. I like to do the dots first, and then I'm going
to add in the lines, and they're all going to be
pointing toward the center. As you can see, I'm
not really worried about matching line per
line and dot per dot. I just painted a lot of dots, and now I'm painting
a lot of lines. That's how I like to make loose florals feel loose
and feel the most abstract. That is how you do it. That is how you paint
the center of a poppy. If you want, you can
do the same thing. If you want to add in just that extra little bit of detail, you could do the same
thing that we did up here where you add in just some extra lines to be like some
veins of the flower, and to add in some detail. But not necessary again. You can even try to
make these veins of the flower differentiate
between the petals. That can be pretty fun looking, and it's not too hard
of detailing to add in. I'm not worried about really about where the
petals are going. I'm mostly worried that
they're not straight. I don't want them
to be straight. I want them to be
a little curvy. I don't really have a particular
rhyme or reason to them, but that's totally
optional and up to you. So that is the poppy. Your task now is to practice both of these perspectives into practice adding
in the black. Remember you can't add in the black until after
the flower has dried. If you do, I'll show you what it looks like if you add it
while it's still wet. It's just going to be like
the wet-on-wet technique. It's going to blend in
all over and you're not going to get that
sharp detailed look. So you want to wait for them to dry first and then
add in the detail. But that is how you
paint a loose poppy. Now, we are going to
learn how to paint a loose watercolor
cherry blossom. So stay tuned, and get excited.
10. Tutorial: Cherry Blossom: Last but not least, we're going to practice
the teardrop stroke. Notice in the other strokes
on the other flowers we used the fan stroke
and the crescent stroke. Now we're going to practice our teardrop stroke to
paint cherry blossoms. The teardrop stroke
is mostly going to be for open-faced cherry blossoms. Then we're also going to be
using modified versions of the fan stroke to
paint side versions. For cherry blossoms. The method that I do again, is just one way to
paint cherry blossoms. Remember back to when
we painted the rose and I talked about how
it was for this flower, I only put paint when I did these initial strokes and
then I did water right?. The water diluted the paint to make it lighter at the end, changing its color value. We're going to use
the same technique to paint cherry blossom. So, step one, I'm using my size 6 brush here
because also remember that cherry blossoms are
usually smaller of a flower than
poppies or roses, they're probably less
than half the size. I would say maybe a
third of the size. I would typically use a 6
brush unless you want to make a cherry blossom that's larger than it's supposed to
be, but that's up to you. I'm picking up a lot of pigment. You'll see in my well, I have some spots where
there's a lot of water, and then other spots
where it's just pigment. Right now, I just want to
pick up a lot of pigment, some very dense pigments, so I can get a very
rich dark color value of this Winsor red. First, I'm taking
that pigment and I'm painting a bunch of dots just
in the middle, like this. Now, I'm washing off all
the pigment from my brush. It's all washed off
and using just water, while the pigment is still wet, you have to make sure the
pigment is still wet. But I dip my brush in the water, but I also got off with some of the water
on my paper towel. I don't want tons of
water on my paintbrush, I want some nice in-between
amount of water. While the pigment is still wet I'm starting in the middle. I'm doing my teardrops stroke so that the paint now I brought, I washed off my brush
and I'm going to go back and add in more water. To finish off that stroke. I use water to form
that stroke so that those still wet paint
over here can make this really cool
gradient on the petal. Cherry blossoms are very delicate and their coloring
especially can be very delicate where sometimes they're more pink and sometimes they're more white and sometimes they're
somewhere in the middle. I put it in a little bit
too much pigment there, so I'm just going to mop it up a little
witch with a Q-tip. Cherry blossoms are
a little bit tricky. This is probably the
trickiest flower we're going to paint today. The roses and the poppies
are a little easier I think. Basically, cherry blossoms
have five petals. So we're going to do
that all the way around. We want to remember
as much as possible, not to make it perfectly even. Because say it with me, Nature is wild, Nature is crazy. Not everything in Nature
looks exactly even. We're going to
keep that in mind. Some of the petals can
be smaller than others. So basically I'm forming
this teardrop stroke first and then I'm going back in
and filling in the center. I'm doing this only with
water because I want the stuff in the middle
to fill out the petals. Now, some of this water
has puddled a little bit. I don't want that. We don't
like petals over here. I'm just going to mop
up a little bit of this water to contain
more of the paint. But I still want this
to be a little bit wet and I'm going to show
you why in just a second. I'm mopping up some
of this water. It's still a little bit wet
and that's what I want. Now I'm going to take
my brush and pick up, again some very heavy pigment, not tons of water because we already have
tons of water on here, but some very heavy pigment. I'm just going to dot this center of this
flower like this. Because we want
the very center of the cherry blossom
to be very dark red, and then the outer edges
of the cherry blossom, that's what we want to gradually
be a little bit pinker. Because the petals
should still be wet. The more paint we've
added towards the center, it should gradually
create a gradient. We moped up some of the water, so it's not moving quite
as much as I expected, but here we go. Now it's moving. I'm going to paint another one that hopefully it doesn't take as much manual [LAUGHTER] going back and
forth as this one. Essentially we want to create a gradient which is going
from one color to the next, pretty seamlessly, from very dark red to very,
very light pink. You'll notice that I didn't
use any pink at all. I'm just using this
Winsor red and then adding water
to make it a very light wash to make the value
very light on the outside. Okay? So we need to
wait for that to dry. Because after it's dry
is when we're going to add in all of the details
to this cherry blossom. While we're waiting
for that to dry, I'm going to show you the side perspective of the
cherry blossom. Now, for the side perspective, it starts off pretty similarly. We're going to pick up
some heavy pigment here. We're not going
to make as big of a circle as we did last time. Just a few little
dots right there, of that heavy, heavy pigment. Now I'm going to
with just water. I washed off my brush
and I just have water. Instead of starting
in the middle, I'm going to start
my fan stroke, a very small fan stroke, and then bring it down
to the middle like this. The reason I'm not
starting in the middle is because if I started where the pigment was it would
probably all turn red. So an alternate way
to do this is to start with a very light
color value of red. The way that you do that, I'll show you on my
mixing palette over here, is by picking up some
of this red and putting it over here and then
adding tons of water to it. We wanted the color value to be so light pink that it's
almost see-through. I'll show you what it looks
like if I did it that way. Here's my fan stroke. It works that way too. I definitely wanted to come
towards the middle like that. If you did it that way
where you started off with this very light value, then after is when you
would pick up some of this red and just dot it. So it blends pretty seamlessly
right here, like that. Notice how this paint
isn't really blending in. It's just kind of sitting
there and that's because I have too much water. So instead of blending
onto the paper, the paint is just sitting
on top of the water. So I'm going to
mop up the excess. Then with my detail brush, just kind of move
the existing water around because I know
there's still a bunch on here and blend
it in right here. Cherry blossoms again
take a little bit more in detail work than the other
flowers that we did. This is probably
going to be one of the most challenging
ones that we do. Not all of your cherry blossoms have to look perfect again. That's just the top
part of the flower. The bottom part, we're going to form
it very similarly to how we formed the poppies. That's just with a
crescent stroke. We're going to come
and we're going to meet these sides right here. Now, the biggest difference is, it's okay if some of this
pigment spills on over here. But we want this petal mostly
to be a pretty light color. You can add some more pink
color around the edges. But for the most part we want this petal to stay pretty light, so we want most of the
gradient pigment to go on this inside petal as opposed to this outside petal of
the cherry blossom. That's how you finish up the basic structure of
a sideways cherry blossom. Now I'm going to
demonstrate it to you again as we
finish up this one. I'm doing the crescent
stroke to just form the base petal of
this cherry blossom. It looks like some of
this pigment escaped me. I'm going to put a
little bit more over here on the top petal,
not the bottom one. Important to note that as
opposed to with the poppy, where sometimes poppies look like they have one big petal, we know that cherry blossoms
have multiple petals. But the effect, the illusion when you're
looking at it from the side is that it is one
big petal that's just cradled around
the center right here. That's how you do the sides. Now we're going to add in the details that
will really make these blossoms look
even more like cherry blossoms
than they do now. If you're looking at
these blobs and thinking, I just can't do it, I'm here to remind
you once again, these are loose
watercolors florals, they're not supposed
to look perfect. Just because they don't
look exactly like the pictures doesn't mean
they aren't beautiful. I personally really love the loose watercolor
style effect for florals, especially for cherry blossoms. Mostly this is dried, the middle is still a little
bit wet and that's okay. But I'm taking my
detailer brush and picking up very pigmented red, mostly the pigment,
not tons of water. Then I'm just going to put in more little dots
in the center. If it's completely dry, then these dots you should
mostly be able to see. My center is still a little
bit wet so it's hard to see. But if you're doing this while it's dry, you
should be able to see them. Let's take a look
at the poppy again. As opposed to the poppy
where the stamen is like, there are tons and they're pointing
everywhere all around, the stamen on cherry
blossom really only has 2-5 stamen tops and they're
pointed every which way. Knowing that instead of
painting the tops first, the dots first, I'm going to paint the little tendrils first. I'm using very
little pressure to create these wispy tendrils and I don't want them straight. I want them to have a little
bit of a curve to them. I would only paint
maybe seven max, probably even less
than that normally. But some of them can go outside
of the petals like that. Then once you've painted these
light tendril-like stamen, then you can put the
little dots on top. I forget what the
little dots are called. They're part of the stamen. Finish off this cherry blossom with these little
dots. There you go. That's how you paint a loose
watercolor cherry blossom, the open phased kind. Now, the closed phase, these are still
drying a little bit. But I think I can
work with this one. You're just going to be very
similar to the poppy again, the side view of the
poppy except less stamen. I'm going to paint
some dots right here. Careful not to get on
this outside petal. Then I'm going to paint just a few little tendrils and my paper is still wet so they should normally
be thinner like that. But once I've painted
the tendrils, it's going to be the same
where I add the dots on top. There you go. That's
how you paint the details from the cherry
blossom on the side view. Cherry blossoms, as you can
tell from this tutorial, take a little bit
more detail work, a little bit more practice
with the wet-on-wet technique and creating
color values. If you find them to be more frustrating than the
rose or the poppy, totally understand and
I am expecting that. It's okay if you decide you need a little bit more
practice on these or if you paint your
rock watercolor wreath, which is our final project, that you are not sure
if you want to include the cherry blossoms just
yet, that's totally okay. But I like to have something
that challenges you. If you found this
method to be just a little bit challenging, it's okay to skip
the first step of the dots and similar
to these ones, to start out with a
really low color value. It's also okay if you don't
have as much gradient, like if mostly they're just pink and you just
are painting a bunch of teardrops like this. Another thing that's okay, if you can't fit in five petals, if you're painting and you
painted your petals so big that you can only really
do four, guess what? Nobody is going to care. Nobody is going to look at
your flower and say to you, that is clearly not a
cherry blossom because you only painted four petals. No one's going to notice. It's okay if things like that just don't work out exactly the way
that you intended. Your next steps from here. Even though this one is slightly more pink than this one up here and it's all the
same color, that's okay. While it's still wet, I'm going to still add in
some of this contrast. The contrast is really what
matters a whole lot more than making the outer
rims super light. It's making sure
that the center is darker than the outside edges. Then once that's dry, you'll be able to add in
these tendrils and it will still look like a
beautiful cherry blossom. Takeaways from the cherry
blossom working backward. The most important
distinguishing factor of the cherry blossom that will differentiate
this blossom from other flowers or
blossoms is that we want the middle to be very pigmented red and as long as the middle is more red than
the outside, then we're good. We also need to wait for this to dry in order to paint
these tendrils. There are less stamen on cherry blossoms than there
are on poppies, say. For cherry blossoms depending on which perspective you use, we're using all three of
the strokes that we used. The teardrop stroke,
the crescent stroke, and the fan stroke in all of these different
perspectives. Your task should you choose
to accept it is to practice these cherry blossoms to see if you feel comfortable enough and want to use
them in the wreath. Again, if you don't,
that's totally fine. If as we get to the wreath, you decide you only want to do one flower, also totally fine. I'm going to be
using all of them. If you paint along with me, you'll be painting all of the flowers that
we just painted, but it is your project and I cannot wait to see
what you come up with. Practice these cherry blossoms, practice the other flowers
to your heart's content. I would definitely
practice them a few times before starting
on the wreath. But then let's move on to the next video and the
next few videos as we wrap up this class
are going to be the different layers as we create our loose
watercolor wreaths. I cannot wait to see you
there. See you soon.
11. Final Project: Layer 1: We have spent a lot of time practicing our florals
and the brushstrokes, and how to paint
cherry blossoms, and how to paint poppies, and how to paint roses. Now, we're going to put it all together along with the
practice of our leaves, and we're going to create
a loose watercolor wreath. One thing with loose
watercolor wreaths is that the more you practice, the faster you'll get at them. That's important to note. Another thing is when you
can do it more quickly, then sometimes magical things can happen where your flowers start to blend in together and can create some
cool color combos. But if you can't do it very
fast for now, that's okay. But basically, if you want
to paint along with me, I'm going to paint
a wreath using my professional watercolor
block this time, and we're going to put it all
together with this wreath. To start with, I usually
take a bowl of some sort and with a very light pencil, I will just trace this bowl. I'm doing it very light because I don't want
the pencil to show up and it doesn't even
have to really be exactly a circle or
even the full circle, because this is just
some basic guidelines to keep my florals in the
same general shapes. In this video, I'm going to
paint the florals first. Then in the next
video, I'm going to finish up by
painting in the leaves. I have done a basic
circle for my flowers, and now I'm just going
to start painting. I know that I know how to paint poppies and I know
how to paint roses, and I know how to paint
the cherry blossom. With wreaths, one
thing important to note is usually biggest
flowers go first. Also important to note, you don't have to go
exactly in a circle; you can start with some big flowers all over and then with
the smaller flowers, just dot them in the middle. I know that roses
and poppies can be all different
shapes and sizes, but cherry blossoms are small, so I'm going to put
in my cherry blossoms last and paint my roses
in poppies first. I'm going to start up here with a little watercolor rose, and I am making sure to leave, some white spaces around
here with this rose. You see I'm not exactly staying centered on the
line that I drew, I'm mostly using it as
a basic guideline here. With my roses, I kind of go so fast that I don't always pay attention
to tons of the details. But as long as I've left
some white spaces around for some of the petals,
then that should be good. I might just add a little
bit more red around the center to add a
little bit texture there. While I'm on a rose role, I'm going to pick
another side of the wreath and
paint another rose. This way I'm going to have
the center facing over here, and I'm just going to
paint my rose using my crescent strokes, sometimes using
water, sometimes not. This rose might be a
little less open facing in a more side perspective
as we can see over here. We're making sure to leave some of the petals pointed outward, because that is what helps us know that this is a side perspective and that we can see the edges
of these petals. This rose is not
perfect, no roses are. I'm going to leave that
rose the way that it is. There's one rose. Now, I'm going to
paint another rose. I'm going to paint
this one really light, I'm not going to start
with very dark pigment. I'm going to paint this
one pretty light and I'm going to paint it over here. I took off most of the pigment. Now I'm just painting around with my crescent strokes, using the tip of my
brush to make sure some of these points stay points because that's the way that we can tell the shape of
these petals on the rose. Sounds a little bit light. Now, I'm going to take
more pigment and just dot the center so that it blooms
outward a little like that. Those are some roses, now I'm going to
paint some poppies. I'm going to paint one up here. This one's like a side view. I'm going to paint some
poppies like this, and paint the bottom like this. Perfect. Now, I'm going
to paint another poppy, maybe facing this way, and just paint this
bottom part over here. We're going to do the
details a little bit later. I'm going to do an
open-faced poppy right here. I'm breaking my own rules
and making sure to leave this middle part jaggedy so I can paint in
the details later. But, the most important
is that the petals around it are loose. I'm going to paint another
open puppy maybe over here, maybe this open
poppy is going to overlap this rose a little bit. That's okay. It's dried a little so it probably won't
blend that well, but I don't need it to. I'm just going to
have it overlap just a little and
paint in the center. Now, I'm going to
paint some parts of some cherry blossoms. Now that I have some
of these poppies, well, I have two, I like to do in threes, so I might paint
another poppy later. As you can see, I don't
always have a plan. When I paint these wreaths, I just go for it. I've painted these poppies, and now I'm going to paint
some cherry blossoms. I'm changing brushes
to my size 6 brush. Because I know the
cherry blossoms are smaller and come in more clumps, I'm going to put a clump of cherry blossoms along this
long edge right here. Sometimes if you do like smaller flowers along
edges of wreaths, that can create diversity
too so that's a bonus. I'm going to paint
these one at a time. One thing that's
tempting to do with cherry blossoms is
to put all the dots down first and then try to
paint five flowers at a time. That's not usually
advisable because the dots will dry before
you have a chance to paint and so the pigment doesn't move
when you add in the water. I'm going to do these one at a time and I'm going to
show you how I'm going to do some of them this traditional way
that I taught you, and other ones I'm going
to do where I skipped the dots and just try to paint using different
color values. Again, notice how my petals here are vastly different sizes. This looks like an oddly shaped cherry
blossom, but that's okay. There's tiny bit more water here than I want so I'm
just going to mop up a little and then pick
up some dense pigment and make sure that I have that contrast
in the middle there. Now I'm going to paint a smaller cherry
blossom right here. That one only has four, and another small cherry
blossom right here. That one only has four, but no one cares because no one is watching or
really paying attention. For this one, I'm going to
do these two teardrop ones, but then instead of doing
an outward facing one, I'm going to use a crescent
stroke to make it look like it's a side facing one. Then for another one over here, I'm just going to do
one teardrop stroke because that's
going to be a bud. Instead of a full flower, it's just going to be
a cherry blossom bud. Now I'm going to do
another flower over here. When I add in the details, these are going to
look really cool. Next, I'm going to go through all these cherry blossoms
that I drew the fast way and just add in the
red so that they still have that contrast
that we were talking about. Add in the red. Some of these have a little
bit more water than I was hoping for so I'm just
going to mop up the places. Again, I can tell because the paint's not
moving on the paper. It's just sitting on
top of the water. Not what we want, but
sometimes inevitable. Again, I'm going to just add in. It's very red in the center. That is one batch
of cherry blossoms, and then in maybe
these two spaces, I'm going to add in some
more cherry blossoms. Probably the quick way again. Here's cherry blossom
that has four petals. Another cherry blossom that is blending in with
the other one. We're going to say that one's
like a little bit of a bud. Sometimes painting
florals really is just painting blobs,
like here I am. I have some space to fill. I'm just going to
put some blobs down, and it's going to look
like a flower because it's next to a whole
bunch of other flowers. Here are the cherry blossoms. Now I'm just going
to put a couple of cherry blossoms elsewhere, right there, maybe a
little bud up here, and maybe some right here. But I want to make sure to leave some space around here
because we're going to add in the leaves at some
point in the next video, so you want to leave some white space to make
room for the leaves. Very important to note. There are some of
my cherry blossoms. I'm going to make sure
that I have added enough contrast and paint to some of these because
not all of them have it. Just add in some paint on this, some here, some here. I am not even really caring
where this is going. I just know the
steps that I need. If you want to be a lot more deliberate with your wreaths, you should definitely
do that and go for it. But with my wreaths, in order for them to be loose, I need to be loose. The way that I get loose is by taking off the big
responsibility that I feel to make these
things look perfect and just do the basic structure
of things that I know. That is our very first layer. We've put down all of
the basic florals, and in the next step
we're going to add in leaves and details and
that will be done. Finish up your wreath by putting down the
florals where you want to. In the next video, if you're painting
along with me, we're going to wrap
up this wreath by adding the leaves where
they're supposed to go, and by putting in all of the details of the
flowers when they're dry. Without further ado,
let's full steam ahead.
12. Final Project: Layer 2: Welcome back. So our wreath is dry, and now we are going to paint in the details and the leaves, and that's how we're
going to finish. First things first, I pulled out my eraser
before I started this and I just erased
what was left of the line, the pencil line I could
see of the wreath, because now we know the
basic shape of the circle, we don't need the
pencil anymore. If you can erase as much of the pencil before you start
painting on it as possible, that's good because once you have paint on top
of pencil marks, it can be tricky to erase if you have
lots of paint on it. So I erased that, and now we're going to, first, before we paint in the details, we're going to paint
in the leaves. For this wreath, I'm going to go pretty
simple and mostly just do basic leaves all
the way around. One, two things to keep in mind. One, I don't want all the leaves to look
exactly the same, I want them to have
different movement, I want them to be imperfect, but I do want them, at least in clumps, to basically be going
in the same direction. Before I start painting on here, let me show you what
I mean by that. I don't want a leaf that
is going in this direction next to a leaf that
is going in like. That can look okay sometimes, but in general, I want leaves that are going
in the same direction. We want when you're
creating wreaths, you want them to be not
opposite directions, you want them to look like
there's movement to it. Sometimes you can add in some to add in diversity once you
have the basic structure of the movement of your leaves
and you can add in a few more that are going
[inaudible] everywhere. But for right now, I want to add in leaves that are mostly going in
the same direction. Another thing to remember with leaves that was really
hard with me that I struggled with is they do
not have to be perfect. They don't have to
be placed perfectly, you don't have to know exactly
where you sourced them. That was one thing that
always bothered me or that hindered me when I
started painting leaves was. But there's no like they're just floating in
mid air. That's okay. If you paint leaves next to
each other on this wreath, as long as it's there
next to these flowers, nobody is going to question
why a leaf is where it is. I'm sure we'll
keep talking about that as I start painting these. You just want to start
wherever you see a need. I'm going to start
painting over here, and I think I'm going
to have my leaves basically going this way, and then once I'm done
painting those leaves, then I'm going to paint the more like [inaudible]. There are some leaves, I'm just like painting them in bunches at this point and
some of them are pointed, some of them aren't as pointed
at the top, that's okay. I want some of them to
go outward this way, but I also want some
of them to go inward toward the center of the wreath. Notice how with a lot of
these leaves, I'm not like, here's the stem of
where the leaf is, I'm just painting them and
they're floating in space. But because they're in
this general direction of where my flowers
are, it's okay. I'm also not being too cautious about placement just in general or about, I mean, the more
you paint leaves, the better you're going to feel about the shape
and doing them faster, so that's important to note too. Once we get to the
cherry blossom, some of these leaves
we want to be smaller, and I'm going to move my, you don't have to
move your paper, but I'm going to move mine. I'm just looking to see where
their are spaces and again, you can leave whitespace
later and I'm going to show you how to fill in to it. You can continue
adding in greenery without having them be
specifically leaves. We're just adding leaves
all the way around, starting in one
spot and moving on. The bigger the
flower you get to, the bigger the leaves, so these roses are
probably going to have some pretty big
leaves surrounding them. Again, notice how I'm
starting from the stem and painting it
outward from the stem. I try not to start at the top of the leaf
just because I feel like it's easier to get the shape and the exact movement that you want by not doing it that way. I'm moving my paper
around so that my leaves stay in the general direction
that I want them to. All of them paint
facing this way. They don't all have to
be exactly like that, but we want them to
like they're falling in the same basic
direction, is the goal. I'm using sap green
for reference. When using red, I like to use sap green
because it has a little bit more yellow in it than Hooker's green does, just for reference. I do that because
of color theory, because red and green are technically
complimentary colors and so if you use a very true
green with a very true red, they're going to
watch each other out and not be as vibrant
as you want them to be. If you use a very true red, but then use a more yellowish
green with the red, then it's going to help these colors pop
out a little bit more. I am planning to have a class on color theory coming
out this summer. But for now that's
just a little tidbit. I'm going to keep
painting these leaves all the way around, starting from the stem, and filling in this white
spaces that I know that I have. That's basically what our
job is with these leaves, is filling in the white spaces. I wouldn't worry too
much about if the leaves overlap or if the leaves
overlap some flowers, that's okay or if there's still white spaces after you have
the leaves, that's okay too. We're going to go in and a
few minutes after we have these basic leaves around and add in a few more
really easy greenery tricks that help I fill in
those whitespaces, so don't worry about it. Notice how also my leaves are just all over the place
in terms of shape. I've said this a lot but, they do not have to be
perfect, these are loose. You're going for a loose
watercolor here and so perfect is the opposite of
what we're shooting for. The nice thing about
practice is that if you find you'd actually did paint something that you wish you would've done a
little differently, then you can note and analyze why you don't like it and try to do
differently next time. I'm looking at some
of these leaves and I think maybe next
time I try this, I'm going to do
the composition a little differently and that is exactly what you're
supposed to do as an artist, so good job. A lot of these
leaves are lots of different shapes,
different sizes, and that's also exactly what you're supposed
to be doing, because then it looks real. Real wreaths look wild
and crazy I think, and also I am not
perfect at this. I am self-taught and I just thought that showing
you and talking through my process
for this would be helpful knowing that I've taught myself these things too, and knowing that I'm not
perfect and I still paint them, even though I'm not always completely satisfied with
everything that I do. I'm just going to paint a few in here to go along
with these blossoms. Now that we've
painted some leaves like all the way around, I'm going to put some on top. I'm going to go through and add in a little bit more foliage, just like a second layer, and sometimes that
can be another leaf, maybe I'll do another one right here on top of this
one that's a little darker just to add
in some layers. But other times it can just
be like a line like that. If they're little
tendrils poking out. Just to make them wispy
with the top pointed, is my biggest advice for that, if you're trying to draw
lines going every which way. I would make them
a little angled sometimes and have them be pointed out like they're
just little stems or stocks that are coming
out of the wreath. I'm adding in some lines here. I'm still going in the basic
direction that I was before, where it's all pointed this way. Some of these lines I'm
turning into just darker leaves to add in some depth and layering, the more layers you have I think the cooler
paintings like this look, if you have a few
different layers of leaves that are on
top of each other, I think it can look really cool, especially because a lot of wreaths actually look like that. I'm just about done. This video is getting
a little long and so I think I'm going to
wait for the next video. I'm going to do one more
video where I add in the details and
then we'll be done. That is how you add
in leaves on wreaths. You go around and fill
in the white spaces, and just add in green anywhere you think it's
going to add some depth. I'm going to wrap this
up and then I will see you on the next
video as we finish this wreath by adding in
the details of the flowers. I will see you soon.
13. Final Project: Layer 3: Our layer is dry, we have our layer
of leaves here. Now the very last step is to add in the details where
we need them to be. Roses don't need anymore
detailing we're good on those, but we need to add
black on the poppies and red on the cherry blossoms. First, I'm going
to start with some of these open faced
poppies here. Then I'm just going to add in the details around here
in case you forgot. Open faced poppies. We paint the ovary first, the center first, and then we paint the dots
for the stamen. Make sure the stamen
are all pointing in this general direction
toward the center. That's the first one. We have one more open faced
poppy so I'm going to paint the center black and then I'm going to paint some
dots around for the stamen. I'm using my zero detailer brush and I'm not caring much about matching lines exactly
to dots because having it be loose and irregular
makes it look cooler I think. Those are the open
faced poppies. Now, for the side perspectives, we're going to add in the
ovary here and then add in the stamen up top like that. One more the ovary
in the center like this and the stamen. I'm going quickly, but you do not have to go
as quickly as I'm going. I often go quickly
and often regret it, so if you want to go
at a slower pace, you should definitely go for it. It looks like those
are all the poppies. [NOISE] Now we're going
to do the same thing for the cherry blossoms
this time with the red. I picked up very
highly pigmented red. I'm just going to
go clump by clump. It looks like this one
has an open faced flower here and I'm going to add in some of the stamen because I did the dots in
the middle and I'm doing the tendrils on top. Note how I'm not
putting in the lines. Those very subtle lines that I talked about while we
are learning how to paint these flowers
that you can do, if you decide you want to
add to that detailing. I'm not doing that with
line so up to you, but it's not
something I'm doing. I'm just loosely painting
in these details. If you want to make them
look very detailed, like very careful
then go more slowly. But if you are looking for more of a
loose abstract feel like a lot of my
floral wreaths are, then you should go for it. This is what I say, and
throw caution to the wind. [LAUGHTER] I'm not
your typical artist when it comes [LAUGHTER]
to watercolor painting, I think that there are a lot of benefits from
taking your time. That's true. Sometimes I do
take my time when I really want the painting
to look just so. But for these loose
watercolor florals, if I spend too
much time on them, I end up honestly
with the result that is not quite what
I was hoping for. Knowing that I have to let
myself go when I paint these and take all the
burden of perfection away and just to lean in to the loose look that
we're creating here. Not all of these have
the same amount of stamen and that's
exactly what we want. We want diversity, we want them to look
different from each other, which is what diversity is. One thing that I would do
differently looking at this is maybe slowdown
on the lines. I like really thin wispy
lines for the stamen. If you find that
yours are very thick, it might be because
you're going too fast and putting too
much thickness on there. Just something to note. But we're just about
done. Just a few more. [NOISE] These guys over here. Well, that does it for me. [NOISE] Here is
my floral wreath. The final project of this beginner's
watercolor floral class. I hope you had a great time. I hope you love your wreath, and I would love to see all
of your final projects. We're going to talk about
this more in the recap, in the final video
of this class. But really quick, the way that I can see these and the other
people can see them, the best is if you post them
in the project gallery. Make sure to post
your final project in the project gallery so that I can give you some love and other students can give
you some love also. If you do post in
the project gallery, it's more likely that
other people will see this class so I would really
love it if you did that. If you decide you just have
to share it with the world, I encourage you to share this
on Instagram and tag me. My handle is this writing desk. I would love to show
you some love that way to the final and one of the most important ways
is to leave a review. If you loved this class and you just want to tell
everybody about it, then I would love it
if you left a review. I'm going to go
over all of these again in the recap video, but I just wanted to mention them and to thank you once more for joining
me for this class. I'm in love with my wreath
and I hope that you are too. I will see you in the recap and hopefully again
soon. See you soon.
14. Recap: Congratulations. Hopefully, if you are
watching this recap video, that means you have painted along with me throughout
this whole course. You've learned all of the
strokes that we practiced, the teardrop stroke, the fan stroke, the
crescent stroke. You've practiced your leaves and you've learned how to
paint these three flowers, the rose, the poppy, and cherry blossoms
and have come up with a wreath that looks
a little something like this that you can be really proud of to hang up in
your house or give away, or design a card with or any other awesome thing that you can do with a floral design. If you really loved what you came up with and
just want to share it, I encourage you to post your final projects to
the projects gallery. That way, myself and all of
the other students who take this class can cheer you on and give you some
helpful tips and comments. You can also leave
your final project with any questions, or post any questions on
the discussion board. I will be checking those discussion
boards and I'm so happy to answer any
of those questions. I would love all of my classes in this
class in particular to be an engaged community that
you can come back to with any questions about the material specifically in this
class that you may have. If you also want to share your piece outside of Skillshare on Instagram,
please tag me. My handle is thiswritingdesk. I would love to share some
love on Instagram for you if you tag me there, is a chance that you could be featured in my
Instagram stories. About once every week or two, I pull a bunch of people's final
projects that tagged me and I post them on my
stories as a feature. I would love for one of
those features to be you. Those are some of the
ways that you can share and that I would love
to see your project. Last thing, if you
loved this class or if you feel like other people would really benefit from this class, the best thing that you can do in order to help
more people see this class and to support this class is to leave a review. It only takes a minute. I know that sometimes other
things get in the way, that's totally okay, but if you're looking
for ways to support me as a teacher
and as an artist, specifically on Skillshare, leaving a review is by far the best thing
that you can do. If that sounds something
that you want to do, please feel free to do that. If you have any other
comments or questions, please feel free to again post them on the
discussion board or post them in your
project gallery. I will be checking and
going through all of that. Thank you again
for joining me for this class and I hope
to see you next time.
Kolbie Blume, Artist
