Loose Watercolor Primrose

1. Introduction: Welcome back to Le's creative friend. In continuing with the birth flower series, today we're going to learn how to paint Primrose and watercolor to celebrate the February birthday. While researching this flower, it soon became apparent that there were dozens of variations, some with solid colors, others boasting 3.4 hued petals, some with fine lines sweeping through the petals, and others with such wild patterns, it would seem they were alien. Although I love something about each one, I have selected three for us to explore and study, which will have you very well acquainted with this flower by the end of the course and ready to continue exploring possibilities should you wish to. Our early practice will begin our time together by looking at a few reference images to stir inspiration and take a close look at flower shape and petal posture. You'll see in this class that I'm really going to emphasize keeping things simple. Our strokes and details will be thoughtful and intentional, and we'll rely on gestural approach to keep our hands loose. The Primrose is a dainty flower that can become large and shapeless without careful vigilance. We'll spend a bit of time doing drills to build muscle memory until the movements feel swift and natural. Next we'll explore shape, and we'll visit the pinwheel flower to help us understand the basic structure. And then I'll show you a few small additions that can really add value and interest to the flowers. We'll move on to color creation. And the biggest challenge, which is a good challenge, we'll be creating a variety of color combinations at various ratios that will allow us to achieve great range within the petals. I'll talk you through this mixing process and show you exactly what your paint puddle should look like for ultimate success. The rest assured that because we're using a lovely palette of colors, the work will be beautiful with only very little effort. Still, I will encourage you to take your skill a bit further by taking the necessary time to create ratios that deliver exceptional results. We're finally ready for our class project. We're going to use the knowledge gained from our time and study and application. We'll take on our biggest challenge, yet, creating my favorite primrose of them all, the blue zebra Primrose. Most importantly, we are going to have fun and enjoy the process of creating something beautiful. The skill level is geared towards intermediate students, however, beginners who have experience using multiple brushes at a time and have a maintained solid understanding of proper ratios will find success. With that in mind, let's begin. 2. Supplies: Let's briefly take a moment to discuss the supplies that we'll be using to complete this class. Starting with our Canson 140 pound cold press paper. You can also substitute this with any other fine R papers such as Legion or Windsor and Newton, or Arches. Then we're going to have a variety of brushes. I would love for you to have duplicates just because we are going to be covering some loading or pre loading of the brushes. It's nice to have these extra brushes off to the sides loaded. That way when we use the wet into wet technique, they're already ready for us, we don't have to mix. These will be used for pre mixing. I also have this little brush in here that is not mandatory, it's optional. We're going to use this as a detail brush. It's a size four cats tongue from the Princeton heritage series. But honestly, if you have a size two or four in a round, it will do essentially the same thing. Please don't feel pressured or obligated to go out and buy a new brush, It is not needed. But beyond that we're going to be using our number six rounds in the heritage series and then I'm also going to be using a couple number six filberts from the velvet touch series. If you have duplicates, that's fantastic. We're going to be using a variety of paints today because we're really going to be focusing on colors in this class. We're going to start with our Daniel Smith. We have Bordeaux rich green gold and Hanse yellow, deep. Then from the binary blue brand, we have the Naples yellow carbon black fiance blue and pyroal orange. The orange is not necessary at all where we could always mix a red and yellow together to get the same effect. It's a detail and not something that is, again, just absolutely mandatory for the class. If you don't have an orange. No stress about that, a red and yellow will do in a pinch. Beyond that, if you are substituting colors, I would love for you to have a blue and pink that are clean in so many words, meaning I want you to be able to make a purple. That's true. Some of the blues just don't give the same effect when mixed with a pink and vice versa. A Prussian blue would work nicely. And ultramarine blue is great, just something that's not already a mix. We don't want to use indigo. We want a true blue then for your pink, if you wanted to use, let's see, a Versino violet. We've used that before in classes. And then we've also use a Quinacrodone magenta. That would work lovely too. Again, there are definitely options here for substituting. I just want to make sure I'm setting you up for success by starting with good colors. All right, beyond that, just have a palette and a cup of water, some paper towels, and we're ready to begin. All right, let's head into the next lesson. 3. Discussing The Pinwheel Flower: Some of you will recognize this book that I published a couple years ago titled Botanical Watercolor Painting for Beginners. And I wanted to break it out for just a moment, because the flower that we're going to be studying today, the Primrose is essentially a glorified pinwheel flower. The pinwheel flower is one of the simplest and easiest flowers that I teach. It covers the basic concepts of an open face flower and a sideways flower, using flowers that consist of three petals, four petals, and five petals. And it can go up and up, even towards creating something as complex as a daisy. But it sets the framework and the foundation upon which we basically build a flower. I wanted to just bring you into this book for just a moment. I start with teaching how to create a center, to give your eye, basically something to focus on and to build around. That can be a really nice tip and strategy. If you struggle to create a flower that feels even in balance, then I walk you through all of the different water ratios, water to paint ratios, and then show you the difference between a controlled approach then a gestural approach. It's very similar to what I teach here. You will find this material in the loose floral elements class that I teach, but I just wanted to mention it here as well. If it continues to be something that you struggle with, you feel like you might benefit from just having a little bit of extra and detailed instruction about this flower, then it might be a great asset for you. Then we're going to be basically moving into something that looks like this, the Plumeria, where we're going to use multiple gradients of colors, wet and wet, creating clusters of the flower, using different water ratios to create value within the bouquet or within the painting. Anyway, it might be a resource that you find a value. But I wanted to just bring you in, because this essentially is what we will be doing today with the Primrose 4. Practicing the Evening Primrose: Now before we begin painting, I would love to take a few moments to look at a couple reference images. We do this typically before most classes, and I just want to briefly emphasize that this part of the process is really about stirring your inspiration, about getting you excited about the flower and building a connection. I never want you to feel as though what we see in nature is what is expected on paper because it just does not translate the same. Even botanical painters will tell you. They'll look at their work and they'll see all the flaws, all the areas where they just didn't quite hit the mark. It's one of the reasons I stepped away from that style of painting, so that I could feel just more free and more liberated and enjoy the process. And I really want you, above all, taking away education aside, I want you to enjoy the process. When we look at flowers, I really want you to note what is most special to you. What are the details that stand out to you? Those are the things that are going to resonate on paper and they're really going to translate to your audience. They'll be able to feel that it feels special to you. Essentially what you're doing is you're building a connection between you and your inspiration. Let's go ahead and do that. We're looking at the evening Primrose It's such a sweet flower and very simple. But as you saw with the snowdrops, even though the application might be simple, there still is area to go, I guess, wrong. When we try and crowd the flower with too many details and we overwhelm it. It really starts to weigh down that flower that speaks so simply in nature. Let's just take a look and bring out some of the things that just feel really special to us. I know in this flower just taking details that it is a four petaled flower, that these petals look like little hearts to me. We're going to take those observations and we're going to apply that on paper so that we can feel more confident when we really begin to let go and apply gestural style. But it's good to just write down or at least think to yourself, okay, this is what that flower looks like. I also note that they have a cup form. They make little almost like bowls, that will be something fun to play with. Just noting the structure and the shape of them. Then I really love these little lines sweeping through the petals. That's something that I'm going to want to lift out. And just make sure I take time to put into this flower. I'm not going to really focus so much on these stems. Although we can I have the color that we'll be using. I'm going to show you as I do with most classes, it's not just a typical straightforward, this is how you paint this flower. I'm never going to adopt that teaching style with you because there are so many ways to approach it, even within my own work that is highly stylized. I explore all the time and I want to come up with new ways of expressing old material. I want you to feel as though you can do the same constantly. If you're an artist and you're trying to create a small business for yourself, you'll be told to niche down and that. And that people being able to recognize your artwork is important. Yes, those things are important. But you never want to lose sight of the fact that you are an artist at heart. And that exploring and finding new ways to express yourself through what you paint is the end goal, or the ultimate goal for the creation process. Never feel you have to continue painting the exact same way for the rest of your life. Your work should continue to evolve as though you are able to take yourself to new heights within any industry, but especially with the artist industry. Okay, Taking away those details, that's what we're going to apply to our paper. But if there are things that you feel are special, please make a note of them and put it off to the side, and you can include those in your flowers too. As I was discussing before, we are going to take the pinwheel flower approach with this first flower. It's going to be the foundation upon which we build and add details and interest to our flower. But I really want to break it down, make it super simple and then we can build from that. You might find that you even like the most simplistic approach to the flower, Sometimes simple really is better. Let's go ahead and begin with our Naples yellow. We're going to be using our size six filbert brush. Go ahead and mix that paint to the proper water and paint ratio. That's cough syrup. You may need to reactivate the paint if it's been sitting for any length of time and then go ahead and create a broth puddle as well. Even if I don't end up using both puddles, I like to have them available just so that I can easily swoop in, load my brush, and then head back to the paper. Okay, adding a little bit of water. Let's begin with a very simple and straightforward open face, pinwheel flower. We're going to start by taking the side of the brush to create a point. Then we're going to gradually, as we move through the stroke, bring the brush to full belly. And then we're going to do the same thing on the other side. That's our first stroke. Do the same thing. I don't think I mentioned we're doing a four petal pinwheel flower. There's our second. Do it again one more time. Okay? I intentionally kept things very simple, almost to the point where they are boring. Every petal looks almost the same. Every it has the same water ratio, is almost the exact same size. This would be a very simple and straightforward pinwheel flower. We can tell that it has four petals, but beyond that, there's nothing really all that interesting about it. What would happen to make it more interesting would be to add in some details to the center that would really bring it to life, especially if we were working wet into wet, we would add some green and some yellow. Allow those colors to blend and then things would become a lot more interesting. But we can make things a bit more interesting on the front end too. Let's go ahead and do the pinwheel flower again. But this time we're going to make minor changes. For somewhat major differences, okay? Let's do the same thing, same stroke, this time I'm going to make this petal just a little bit smaller. Then I'm going to make this one come out to the side a little bit more, not coming straight up and down again. I'm going to go with a smaller petal on this side. Just looking at these two flowers next to each other. Immediately, my mind and my eye likes this flower much better because there's differences. There's variance with the petal. Although we use the same water ratio, it still is more interesting to me than this flower. Again, I just wanted to stress that there are ways to just manipulate your strokes and make these small changes to give yourself something more interesting on the front end. But we're going to also just study different postures of the flower to which will also bring a lot more interest in value to the painting. Let's say we wanted to do a version of this flower, but make the petals a little bit more complicated. As we noted earlier, they have a heart shape to them. Let's go ahead and do that this time. Let's draw a heart. The thing to be careful of, and you'll see, is that these petals can very quickly get big. We need to try and remember that this is somewhat of a dainty flower. We don't want to paint too big. I'm also going to show you how to do this with the round brush. Okay, now we have petals that have more of a heart shape to them. We can make some connections here if we want to just create a bridge. And then again, there would be a lot more interest happening. And we'll get to that part where we're adding colors in the middle to bring this to life. But we can see the evolution here. We have a very simple flower. We have one that's a little bit more interesting. And then we have one now that has a varied shape. And also playing again with the posture, not so straight up and down. These are just the steps as we get to something a bit more interesting. All right, let's try that again. But this time what we're going to do is we're going to create these petals, but we're going to create a wavy edge. You want to give yourself a little bit of room so that you can expand on the petal. Okay, now what we're going to do is we're going to take the edge of the brush and we're just going to brush up against it here to create some waves. Okay, now we have, you can tell it's getting bigger each time we increase the detail factor, the petals just inherently get bigger. It's something we have to watch. We can begin this process with doing much smaller petals and that can help. But most artists inclination is to just get bigger. And as you paint, it's something to be mindful of as you move forward. Okay, you can see the progression here. If we were to do that just one more time. Starting with petals that are a little bit smaller and then we can build upon those. We have something that's a little bit smaller. You can see starting with something small, but it's hard to wrap your mind around a petal that's essentially just a line. But the goal is to eventually get here. That's just a simple open face flower. Now let's move into more posture possibilities. Let's say we want to do this flower on its side. We would start with a line like this and a line like this just to indicate, okay, this is the petal that's going to be overlapping here, we saw those cup like flowers. Then we can begin to build the flower out by adding those petals. We have something that's pretty straightforward. We would again, add some details in here, some wet and to wet, but it's very simple. If we were to do this a little bit more gesturally, we would play with something more along these lines where it's not so controlled. Show you that one more time. This requires us to let go, to not be so slow, controlled with our movements, and just to open up and be a little more free, a little more flicky with our movements. Again, both approaches are lovely, but I wanted to give you just an idea and an example of which approach you can explore. If you like one or the other, then there are some that are completely closed. These would be buds. Just keeping it very simple, this would be a downward facing bud. Then if we wanted to have more of like that bowl shape that we were discussing earlier, we would want to create almost like a cup. We would do a line here. And then we would take our brush and just drag out this bottom petal. We would make it shallow. We don't want to extend this petal any further. We're going to lose that bowl shape. Then we'd come in with our brush and begin to create that cup shape. Okay, that gives you just a really clear idea of all the different possibilities, the structure, the shape, the positioning of the flower. This next lesson coming up, we're going to begin adding those key details. Working with wet into wet, and finding those little details that make the flower so special to us. 5. Adding Primrose Details: I just realized I neglected to mention the undersea green. I had pulled it off to the side to gather the pigment numbers for those of you who substitute your paint colors. And it got left over by my computer, so I apologize. We're going to be using the undersea green for those details in the middle. So make sure you have this color or something similar to be able to put into the center. All right, I'm going to put that on my palette here. We're also going to be switching to our round brush. We're going to be using both, but I want you to make sure you have a round brush available and we're going to go ahead and load that. You don't need to go too dark here. You can start with cough syrup consistency, you don't need to get to that really sticky mixture until a little bit later. Go ahead and nice cough syrup is great. Then go ahead and set that brush off to the side. We're going to play with a little wet and to wet here. Still using our Naples Yellow, our six filbert brush. Can I just be really honest with you guys because I feel like we're just sitting in my studio. We're painting together, we're having a session. This color Naples yellow, for whatever reason it wants to come out is nipples yellow. Every time if you hear me slip and start to giggle, you'll know what is happening. I promise my mind is not anywhere other than this class and this project and this painting, but that's what wants to come out. Okay, let's get back to the process. I'm mixing my paint off to the side using my Naples yellow. And let's go ahead and begin with our pinwheel flower. Really? You can use any of these approaches. I don't want you to feel like one of them is better than the other because they are not. We all feel drawn towards certain shapes in certain ways. I'm going to do it the way that I would paint this flower, but you can make those changes and do something different. Settled yesterday because I spent probably 3 hours just painting this flower, not really having any expectation, just wanting to explore it, see what happens. Giving myself that time and permission to just do it in a bunch of different ways, I came up with a blend of all of them to be honest, other than like the extremely simple version here, you'll see that when it comes out. All right. All right, so we have a flower that's on its side here and it's pretty wet. So I'm going to give it a moment. I'm actually going to do a different one or paint another one just so that while it's drying, I have one that's ready to go when I'm done just playing with different shapes and possibilities here depending on the paper that you're using. I neglected to mention that we're using the twothier side of this paper here. The water will absorb at a different rate. You just need to keep in mind what's happening. All right, So now I'm going to plug in that undersea green and watch it into my petals. If the paper is ready, it should look like this. It should happen somewhat similar to this way. If you looked at the reference image, it doesn't happen this way. The green is a lot more subtle, but I really liked the effect of the wet on wet. I'm giving you this option again. You can use it in a different way. If you want to use it as just a touch of color, you can do that more so like I did here. And then head back in with it really dark. And just create a detailed center there. You have these two different approaches. I would touch this again. You can even use your brush to sort of help it encourage it along. Again, neither of these are wrong or right. All right. Let's go ahead and do that. Again, kind of mirroring this one up here. Then we could be a little bit more reserved here, not quite as intensely wet into wet as we were here, but allow it to spread again, while this one's drying, we could add even more, that's when you would get to that sticky mixture. I'm really plugging it in right into my sticky paint here, allowing it to be at its darkest consistency. All right, and then let's do one that's more along the heart shaped. And I'm going to add it to this one so that we can start to get the feel of what it's going to look like as we build a cluster of these. Let's start with our little heart pedal here. Heart pedal here. Then let's do the same thing over here, another heart. The goal really is to use all of these, so that each flower has a moment and doesn't begin to feel stationary and stiff. Okay, now we're going to do the same thing, but this time we're going to use our other round brush, so it's still another six. And we're going to load it with the Hanza yellow deep for a different effect. Okay, Really get that cough syrup consistency. Rotate those bristles and then set that brush off to the side. We're going to do the stems that I showed you in that reference image where they're lifting out of the center of the flower. Okay, my flower is getting a little big here. A little bigger than I would like, but we're going to just work with it. We're going to go full open faced here. This is more like a three petaled. Again, I like to just make slight differences. Some of them will be four petals, some of them will be five, some of them will be three. Okay, now we can plug in a little bit of the Hansa Yellow, Deep. Do the same thing, just a touch of it is good. And then we can encourage it along. I'm going to do the same thing, and I'm going to let that dry for a little bit because we're going to add some darker details in a moment. I'm just going to continue to create these, let's try one in this direction. I'm just going to be real subtle with it. Try different ways you see, like I really leaned into the color over here. Let's even make that petal a little bit more golden because you might end up loving that. Again, when we put these in a cluster, a flower that looks like this and this next to each other, it's going to look so great. Versus if we would just continue to paint it like this, you would be, you feel bored. You want variation, You want subtle nuances and differences within your painting. Exploration is key. Okay, I'm going to go ahead and paint just a couple more so that I can really show you a couple examples of how to add details in a beautiful way. Let's go ahead and I'm going to just do like a but over here, keeping it very simple. Maybe another one up here using mostly are just our snow drop structure here. We can get a little bit more complicated with it. However, when you do that, again, the petals get big and they can be bogged down with details. Just keep in mind maybe one more over here just to give it some length. Okay, we have a few different ways that we've approached this. Let's go ahead and take our round brush dip into that Hansi yellow and we're going to create some really delicate stems. The way that we saw coming out of that actually, you know what, I'm going to let that dry for a little bit. I was just going to plug in right away. But let's go ahead and let that dry, and that will make sure that we have a wet on dry. I don't want to rush it and I don't really want to get out my hair dryer either. Let's just pause on that. What we're going to do is we're going to break out a bit of our carbon black. And then we're going to mix that. Bring it down here, and then we're going to add a touch of the Naples yellow to create an earthy brown. It's a really interesting color, these two together. It's a little bit green, it's a little bit yellow, a little bit gray. But I really, I liked the hue that it made it complimented the petal because we're using a color that's already within the flower. Okay. So you want to have it somewhere between broth and cough syrup. It doesn't need to be one or the other, somewhere in the middle. Then we're going to use our brush to plug in some of those really lovely sweeping lines that we saw in our reference image. Let's go ahead and do that here pretty dry. To do that, we're going to make sure that we're coming on top of the brush. We're really applying light pressure here. If we get too heavy, the strokes are going to end up starting to look chunky. I'm going to blot off just a little bit because it's a little bit dark, although I do like a dramatic vein. And I'm going to start rotating my paper just to get the best angle possible. We're going to be doing a Primrose in a little while here that is just so unique and so striking and this will set us up for that. All right? I really love the veins that came out here. It's a little bit of a lighter consistency and a little bit thinner. This one's a little bit chunky, but again, chunky next to thin looks really great because again, it's just bringing in interest to the flower. Let's do the same thing over here. I wanted to note here because this is not so severe, this wet into wet action. The strokes are going to be a little bit more pronounced, which is nice. Try and keep them light and loose. They don't need to be just a line through your petals. Just something playful is fantastic. You don't need to do them through every pedal, if you don't want to, you can leave some that are just natural there. You have that approach where we're just doing the wet into wet with the green and then we're putting in that light veining, you could even go lighter if you wanted to, for something that's not quite so severe, then what you could do again is plug in the undersea green, even darker in the center here. That's a possibility. Okay, let's go ahead and take that number six brush loaded with the Honda yellow. And we're going to add those stems into these flowers over here. These are going to be a little bit different because they are not stems, stamen coming out of the center. The one thing you do want to keep in mind is in what direction are the stamen pointing? You could have stamen that are just shooting up like a fountain. You could have some that are all pointing in the same direction. But you do want to give your flower some positional identity. So that it feels like you know what's happening. Just take a look and see here. I feel like the stain would be best suited. Coming up from this direction, here's a variety of the whole fountain effect, where they're coming out in different directions. Then we could just play with details. And there if we wanted to, then if we wanted to take it one step further, we could plug in a little bit of undersea green just to add one more layer of interest. You don't have to is just an option. Okay. So there you have it. Lots of different ways to approach it using different postures and structures. Let's go ahead and move into the next lesson. 6. Painting the Violet Primrose: If you follow me on Instagram or you've known me for any length of time, you will likely know that I have two daughters, Hazel and Violet. You may also know that the other February birth flower is a violet. I wanted to honor her name and just in general and create a violet. Primrose. This one actually called Primrose blue, but it has more of a purple tone to it. We're really going to lean into this really lovely purple and we're going to create several washes. This is where we're really going to get more intense into the color mixing process and play with paint to water ratios. You can see how beautiful the effect is when there are some deep purples in here, along the edges right within here. And then it's coupled with these flowers that are very pale, just a very light lavender. That's something we're going to play with as we cluster and put these together. We're also going to add a little touch of blue into the edges here in there just to intersperse, to create a different effect. I practiced this yesterday and it turned out so beautifully. So I want to just share lots of different options as we did with the Evening Primrose. If you like, you can go ahead and take a snapshot of this picture. I do usually pin these to my Pinterest Skillshare page, or I think it's labeled Skillshare classes. It's workshops or classes, something to that effect. But it's a public board and you can see the flowers that we have explored and studied in past classes. Take a look at that. I'll put a few of these on there as well, just so that you have them at your disposal. All right, You're going to want to make sure you either have a different palette or you've cleared away the palette that you were using to create some room because we're going to need quite a bit of room to explore these purple mixtures. Go ahead and put your Bordeaux and your fiance blue if you are in fact using those colors on the palette. And then you are going to make sure your brushes are clean and clear. You don't want to have any of that yellow or green remaining on the bristles because it will affect the color. All right, let's go shift this up just a bit and start building some of our mixtures. I love this Bordeaux. It immediately is just such a luxurious color. Takes very little agitating and pull out a nice amount, then let's pull it out a little bit further. Then let's go ahead and add a touch of blue. Create a nice purple here. If you do not love purple, you can always tone this down with a bit of raw umber sepia or burnt umber Van **** brown. And get something that's a little bit more earth tone. I'm going to plug in just a little bit more blue to it, really deep in it here. And then also expand over here. I want lots of different mixtures. We have more of a cough syrup mixture, broth here, then I'm going to add a bit of blue here. I'm really going to go blue here. Then I'm also going to add a touch of the carbon black to it, careful because that color will quickly dominate. But again, just toning it down, moving it away from grape juice. Again, brown works lovely too, but I have the carbon black on our palette. Rather than adding a new color, I'm going to just use what we have, adding a bit more blue. Take your time here. Don't feel like you have to rush this process. Find a color that you love. I explore purples and blues. In the Color Guide series, I believe it's titled, the Midnight series, There's just so many lovely purples and blues to explore. Make sure you find one that you love. All right. I have a nice color here. I'm going to bring out one more time. Then I'm going to rinse off my brush because I want something that's super pale. Because I want to be able to create those really light flowers that I love, that violet color. Then I also want a mixture that has more blue in it. So I'm going to take some blue and a bit of the purple here. And then plug in a bit of the lamp black, me the carbon black. I have a bit more blue in it. I like having lots of options on my palette. It's only going to benefit. We're going to gear things up here now that we understand the structure and posture and really play with color, potential and possibility. Okay, I have a cough syrup mixture of this mulberry purple here and then a broth version. And then I have a cough syrup and a broth mixture of this, more of an egg plant purple. And then I have one that's leaning more towards blue to add just a touch more of the carbon black. I really love an earthy blue. We're also going to be using the Naples yellow. Go ahead and have that color cleared away. If there was any of the carbon black left over from when we were mixing it. Go ahead and lift that out because we want that to be true to color. I'm going to load my number six brush. Just put that off to the side for a bit. What I'm going to do is I'm going to show you a couple different ways as always, to approach this flower. Leaving space in the middle, not leaving space in the middle. And the different effects of the bleeding so that you can see there's just so many different ways to do it and to find one that suits you in your style. I always encourage you find your voice within this teaching. I never want you to feel like it's got to look exactly like what I'm doing. Really, just have fun, enjoy this process and lean in. All right. I'm going to get out my number six Filbert brush. I'm going to begin with that really pale wash. It's almost going to be 90% water and 10% paint because what I want to happen here is for the bleeding effect to really take shape, we're going to start with a flower that doesn't have an open center, meaning I'm not leaving any white space in the center. And then we're going to plug in that naples yellow while it's still wet and allow it to spread. Then we're going to do the same thing, but we're going to make sure we do have a white center and you'll see the differences. Just one note before I begin. Make sure that you have quite a bit of that water on your brush because what's going to happen as you've seen when we study wet into wet technique. If the petals are not wet enough, then when we go to add that second color, the color doesn't move, it does spread into the wet media. That if you are more on the beginner side, it may take a little bit more practice, trial and error, before you really are able to time it and get it to achieve the result that you want. I can already tell that needs more water, so I'm going to add a little bit more water to it because I really want to make sure that the colors spread. Okay, So I'm just creating the general shape here. And then I'm going to close in the center. All right, Now with my six brush, I'm going to touch the center and just allow the colors to move a bit. Now with my other six brush, I'm going to plug into that blue and the carbon black mixture and I'm going to touch the edges. How pretty is that right now? By starting with that super pale wash and making sure that it's nice and light, that effect is all the more grand and special, can encourage it along if it needs it. And you can continue to have the same effect pouring in from the tips of the flower. One of my most favorite approaches, you can keep one petal really nice and light, and then really play with the dark on other petals. Now if you want something that's a little bit more of a subtle, you can wait until the media is dry, I'll show you, we'll create another one. Okay, so we're just going to give that a minute so it's not so wet and this is more like a three petal or more on its side. And I'm going to do another one, but this time I'm going to leave an open space. Okay. So this is a bit more dry now. It's not going to, it might even be too dry. This one's taking it a bit more. I will encourage that color along just by activating it again with a bit of water. As nice of an effect, to be honest. It looks much better when you do it and time it well. But that would achieve more of like the subtle and dramatic result of just having the tips of it a different color. There we go. It takes a little trial and error. It also takes paying attention to, I was busy over here with this flower and then I'm not watching. It's a matter of seconds, it really, but you can always reactivate. Like I said, it doesn't look as good in my opinion. But if you do it gently and slowly and take your time with it and it doesn't feel rushed or forced, the it can turn out well. Let's just take a moment and look at these two different flowers. This is something that I would do in the same bouquet. I would paint one that looks like that, just with a touch of the white peeking through. And then I would have a couple that look like this next to each other. Rather than having just that same flower repeated over and over and over again, even in different postures and shapes, I would want to make sure that I have other flowers that are doing different things. We've studied the two different approaches with the bleeding effect, using the wet into wet, and then also not having an open center and having that yellow just seep into the petals. Let's do that again, but let's have an open center. This is probably to dry now, but I'll reactivate it, darkening it a little bit here, but we'll do it a couple of times. Okay, So just making sure I'm taking my time and rewetting the whole media and then plug in with a little bit of the blue and then using my naples yellow, encouraging it along here, we can have that yellow really spread into the petal. Be super playful, or we can just keep it real close to the center here. It's up to you what you like. We can continue to add that color and darken the edges. Get something a bit more violet. It's nice to have some petals that look soft like that. We're going to do something even different as we move forward and have a little bit more of that mulberry color peeking through within the same flower. That's what the open center. What you could do from that point on is you could add a little bit of the Hanze yellow deep or you could use the undersea green or you could do both. Lots of options there. I'm going to take my little size for cats, tongue brush, and I'm just going to pop in a little bit of the Hanza yellow just to show you what that would look like. Very pretty. It would look even prettier if the yellow was spread a bit more. But again, it's a small flower, so you can only do so much and have so many moments within the flower. The bigger the flower, the more expressive you can get with those details. But I really love just the simple look of this one and even that one, we can later on when things are dry, a little wet on dry and just create a moment here. Then you could pop in a little bit of the undersea green to the middle here. To the middle there. It's entirely up to you. I like the little white space in the middle. I think just being able to bring in light to the flower is always a good thing. That would probably be my choice if I had to pick one. All right, we're going to pause here because the video is getting a little bit long, and then we're going to continue exploring this flower using more colors. 7. Clustering the Primrose: Okay, let's continue to explore here. Again, you can do a mixture of hearts, a mixture of gestural. And you can add more petals here. So like this is a five petal, I'm going to quickly pop in my Naples yellow. And then I'm going to, this time, use my mulberry. It's a bit more pink. You can see it's really dominating that petal. Then what I can do is plug in a little bit of that egg plant purple on the other side. These are very similar to pansies. I'm not sure if we're going to be visiting the pansy yet. I don't even know if that's a birth flower. I just taking it one month at a time here. But they are very similar to pansies. This is probably my favorite look of them all, where we have multiple colors happening within the same flower. I really love this mulberry color with this muted purple black color, with a touch of that naples yellow. We can add in a bit of the honza. Again, this whole process, this is why I labeled this class intermediate. It takes time to load the brushes to make sure that the media is going to accept the paint. If you're struggling here, I always want to make sure I mentioned to those who it's not coming swiftly or easily. That's totally and completely normal. It takes time to just find these movements before they become super comfortable and you become confident with each one. We're going to do drills here where we just run through this process again and again in order to get you to that point where you feel that way. There we have just a plug of the Hansa. All right, let's go ahead and do that again. And let's just continue to play with different color possibilities. Let's start with that. We'll show you here just so you can see. Let's play with this color here but make it broth. We'll work in reverse here, a little dark. I'm going to soften it just a bit. The next stroke, I just shaping it then. Now let's go ahead and add that egg plant purple. Again, having that brush pre loaded really helps. You can leave it like that. You can add a touch over here, add a little bit of that pink purple, the mulberry. You can join these petals here, that there's truly a merge. Then let's pop in that Naples. While it's still wet, you might need to rinse off your brush. If the brush immediately turns purple, that's very normal, just rinse off if you start to see that color get muddy and then head in again. That combination of where a couple petals are, the really light, faint color mixed with the concentrated color is probably my favorite. But I really also love the look of this one where just the edges of the petals are intense and then the center is a lot more subtle. That perfect balance between delicate but dramatic. All right, using my little cats tongue to plug in a bit of that honza. And let's go ahead and just keep exploring. I'm going to add some clusters here, adding in hansa, excuse me, the Naples. We can leave that as is and continue building. I'm going to touch against this petal so that they blend together and then I'm going to plug in a bit of that. Bordeaux mixed with the fiance blue, that pinky purple, and then pop in that Naples. And now let's move back towards that really soft color. Let's use a soft Bordeau this time, Broth consistency. And let's do one more over here. I'm gonna make this one super light. Encourage it along a bit. And then come in with the pinky purple over here, brushing up against the edge, then we can just touch the edges of these using my other Filbert brush. Encourage it a bit and bring in that Naples to the center. This is probably a bit too dry now, but maybe not. I'm looking at it over here and it's still glistening. We can use our for brush to just give it a little encouragement there and then leave those petals. Just like that, you begin to see how beautiful these flowers will start to look when clustered together. Let's do a couple more, but let's do that blue mixture. I'm going to pop in to my palette and I'm going to mix up. I'll show you here a little bit of the blue and a little bit of the pink, but really trying to leave it towards blue with a touch of the carbon black. All right. Going to make sure it's at broth consistency, a little bit darker than I would like it, so I'm going to add a bit of water to it. Popping in that Maples, you can also alternate between having the petals completely touching where the yellow is just seeping directly from the middle. Or if you like the look of having a bit of white in there, then you can obviously stick to that. Okay? Now plugging into my purple mixture, darken the edges here. Go ahead and do that a couple more times using that same finance blue and Bordeaux mixture. You can really use the toe of the brush to create some crisp outlines if you like that look, you can keep them soft or you can drag the toe of the brush along the outside of the wet media to create something that's a lot more crisp. Going back to my blue here, lost it here with the purple, so I'm going to bring back some blue. And then I'm adding just a bit of the carbon black to it too. So I have a couple different versions. I'm going to soften that off with a little bit of water. Eventually, what you're going to want to start doing here is adding just petals. Because the way that the Primrose settle into each other, not every flower is going to have this open face. I wanted to do this in drill form with you, so that you really just get the movements down like petal, petal, petal, petal. Adding the naples yellow into the center, touching the outside of the petals with that darker consistency. And just drill that home so that when you go to create a bouquet of these starts to feel natural. I'm going to show you that now. Just adding a few petals to the outside to show that these flowers are nestled underneath the other flowers. That would just be something like that, where it's tucked under. We have a nice little heart shape here, and then we could plug in one over here. You could always have a little bit of yellow spreading. But just the illusion that there are some flowers that are happening in the undergrowth is really key to bringing dimension and just comprehension to the piece. If you just have like a line of open face flowers here, it's going to be hard to understand. Okay, What's really happening here are the growing out of a bush, is there stems that are hiding? Because these don't say, forget me not, which is very similar in structure. They have those dainty stems to help give it that positional identity. You can see by having a palette that's just full of different options. Here, you can plug in any of these colors, using them interchangeably to create something super lovely. Later on, you can add the Hansa yellow deep if you like, or you can just do it on some of them. I always encourage a mixture of both. You could begin to intersperse some of the evening Primrose into it as well, if you wanted to make a bouquet. The last thing we're going to do in the next segment is we're going to cover Primrose leaves. And then we're going to move into our class project, which is the blue zebra primrose. That is so beautiful. I'm absolutely thrilled to take on this flower with you. 8. Painting the Primrose Leaves: If I am being completely honest with you, I'm not in love with the primrose leaf. It looks a bit like lettuce to me. It is so incredibly detailed, I don't even really love it in nature. Which means when I go to try and approach it on paper, it's not going to look as good as I would like it to look, just because usually nature is the inspiration is the goal. It's the most lovely that flower can be. Then on paper and grasp that beauty and trap it with paint and paper. Obviously, it's never a copy, but we can get close, but when I look at this leaf, I just think cabbage lettuce. But we're going to try and approach it in a way that does feel lovely. A bit more delicate, not quite so hardy. I'm going to show you a couple of different possibilities, options. Again, inject a bit of my own style, bring a bit more of the gestural approach to the page. And be able to give this really beautiful, dainty flower a leaf that suits it. If you are a purist and you want to just paint this leaf as you see it Exactly. Please, by all means feel comfortable to do that. But I'm going to pick and choose some of the details and not attempt to capture every little ridge and bump. All right? So I'm going to put that off to the side. Let's go ahead and create a new mixture. Again, you will need to make sure that your brushes are rinsed. You will want to, possibly if your water cup has grown muddy or if it's hinging on the side of brown or purple or pink, then you might want to rinse that out so that it doesn't mix with our greens. Then once you have done that, we can go ahead and begin to create our green mixture. We're going to do that, we're going to combine. I also want to clear away some of the space on your palette. I'm going to plug in some undersea green here and some rich green gold that's going to give us a really pretty earthy green. Go ahead and mix that to cough syrup, and then we will gradually lighten it to broth. I'm going to add a little bit more of the under sen sea green because I can tell I'm going to run out of it shortly just looking at this palette. It's so complimentary. You can see just these colors together are going to make such a beautiful flower. I love when the palette becomes the art. Okay, again, there's so many different ways that you can mix up paint so that it hinges on one color or the other. You can add more of the green gold and get more of that gold color, or you can use the majority of the undersea green. With just a touch of the green gold, you can create a couple different mixtures. See which one you like. And then you can always calm things down, mute it with a bit of the carbon black, or you could bring in a burnt umber. Or if you don't love this green, you can always change it up. All right, then let's go ahead and bring it towards the middle here. I'm going to be attempting to capture just the general shape of the leaf itself, but not exactly. I did note that there were little ridges, there was a vein, and then there were tons of details within the leaf highlighting each little area. Let's go ahead and break out a practice piece of paper. Okay, using my number six round brush. And we're going to do this with the filbert so you can see the difference. I'm going to go ahead and just capture the general shape using broth consistency. We imagine this sprouting out, there's a cluster of flowers here. And then I'm going to take the brush and I'm just going to create some ridges along the side. I'm going to do the same thing. Sometimes they're very pointy and they're angled up and then other times they're just on their side. I'm going to make that just a little bit bigger, okay? And then I'm going to let that dry for a little bit. Let's go ahead and do it with a Filbert brush to see what that would look like. An epiphany is just a brush away. I always say that I'm always so surprised when it happens because it's sometimes a different brush is all it took. Okay. Just dragging the side of the brush along the edges. I think essentially, we could probably do something that's more similar to that. Yeah, with the round brush. So let's go ahead and continue, Try that one more time. Just creating that compound initially, just to create the shape. Then then we have some leaves that are just a little bit smaller, a little bit more round too. Let's go ahead and create a little bit more of a round leaf, and then you can plug in some of those ridges. So I'm giving these leaves a chance to dry so that we can go in and add the details. But let's go ahead and do a wet. And to wet using two different mixtures. I'm going to allow those to dry off to the side here. And let's go ahead and use this space over here to do the same thing. I'm going to add a bit more of the green gold to my broth mixture because I want there to be a difference between the two colors. This is going to be in broth consistency with a touch more green gold. This pile is going to be a ser consistency using a bit more of the undersea green, you can use two round brushes. You can have your six brush loaded with this mixture. I'm really agitating those bristles and then set it off to the side. And then your other six brush loaded with the broth consistency. I am going to add just a bit more of both because I'm losing some of it here. Let's go ahead and create a few more leaves. If you like the filbert better, you can use that. I'm a little bit more comfortable with my six brush with the leaves. Okay. Now, while things are wet, let's plug in the cough syrup mixture right along the outside, almost the same way that we did with the primrose. And then I'm going to also take the toe of the brush and run a vein. I went a little further out here than I meant to. I'm going to do that one more time, creating a vein. And then I'm also going to begin to create some of those veins we see coming out to the side. Okay, let's go ahead and do that again, that whole process. One stroke, two strokes, coming along the side here, creating some of those sharp ridges. And then taking our brush loaded with the Cough sy consistency, rolling my brush through the mixture again, and then adding those lines for the veins. I'm going to come back to this leaf and plug in again nice vein down the middle. And I'm going to wait a little bit and allow that to dry. Okay, let's create a leaf that's a bit more round, creating the shape here. And just giving it a bit of a ridge here. Some leaves you can really make that pronounced, and then others you can keep it more subtle. Then I'm going to pop in a bit more of the undersea green because I am running through it and bring it through the center here. Remember that the lighter you go, the more of the dramatic result. We had one here that was medium. This one was a little bit darker. And this one we have is our lightest. Adding another stroke into the center here. Still working, wet into wet. You can see it's a lot of coming back, waiting till things are dry, and then coming back again and again, letting the color spread, and then coming back again and again. This I wouldn't consider this gestural approach. This is definitely more of a controlled process. You can do it gesturally. It just is a little bit more of a looser feel. But I think these leaves better suit the Primrose When we add them to our final class project, it'll all come together beautifully. Okay. I think our leaves over here are probably dry enough that we can head in and add those details. Okay, I'm going to do the same thing, picking up my six brush with the Daniel Smith undersea Green. I'm going to plug a vein in just like that. Then I'm going to get my filbert brush ready and just put it off to the side adding in those veins. And then my filbert brush, I'm not putting any paint on it, so it's just moistened. I'm just going to begin to touch the outside of that stroke that I made. I'm just noting those details that I saw where there was areas of light and areas of dark. And I'm blending in and I'm going to add a bit more of that undersea green. Again, using my brush. That's just moist blending the colors, but making sure I'm leaving some of the initial ground color, which is just that very light, light green. This is the first approach that we allowed to dry. That would be the wet on dry. We're allowing it to fully dry. Before we add those details, let's go ahead and do that again, running a vein through the middle and then pulling some veins through. They don't need to be perfect because we're going to end up blending them anyway. And then using your brush that has just water on it, begin gently touching the underside of the vein. I want to work quickly here so that things don't dry too stiff. Then again, plugging in those veins. While things are nice and wet, you can take this process as far as you want to take it. You can continue to add the cough syrup consistency, really darkening the veins, or you can leave it like that. If you wanted to make it even darker, you could head back in just like that and add in some darker spots. That Primrose leaf is so detailed that you wouldn't be veering too far off the truth if you were to continue adding. You'll just need to time everything so that the media is wet but not so wet that things begin to run. Or then you end up with something that's a bit more like this, which is great, but obviously you want to achieve what it is that you're hoping to achieve. The other way to do that would be to do this would be to take your Filbert brush and begin working those veins up just like this. This would be more of a gestural approach. It's loose, it's light, and it's just not too overwhelming with the details. Same thing on this side, taking your Filbert brush and running those veins through the center. You could wait till things are a little bit more dry or while wet. Take the toe of your round and dip it in here to the center. Okay? And then coming back here, we have our beautiful wet into wet. And the only thing I would add here would be to add the veins and leave the rest as is. Because the leaf is speaking for itself with all of those beautiful colors. You may need to even wait longer. I'm not going to get a super crisp vein here because I can tell that it's still wet. A, you can always take your brush if you want to just soften things a little bit again, the underside, then it's not such a severe vein. A couple of different options for you there. I really love both leaves, they each have their own little feel to it. You can continue to take the brush while things are wet and just play with it. See what happens. See which leaf you like best, possibly a combination of all of them. You could, even with a leaf like that, your brush. And do just a simple vein and then leave it like that. Try all of these different ways where it's feeling more bushy and you're coming back again and again adding in that consistency. Or you can try wet and to wet completely and then allow that to dry just a bit and then head back in with those veins using that really dark wash of the undersea green. And then a leaf possibly where it's a little bit lighter and adding in a touch while it's wet. But then coming in after waiting for it to dry a bit and adding some lighter veins. You can see these veins are much darker. I think it would look a little bit too dramatic if we were to do the same thing here. A lighter vein. You can even play with doing more veins using the toe of your brush. And get really vein here and just begin to fill the leaf with lots of veins. So many options love these leaves. They're beautiful without feeling too incredibly overwhelmed. Okay, that concludes the study exploration process. And we're going to be applying everything that we have learned to create a different version of the Primrose, the blue zebra, which is so beautiful. You're going to love it. All right, I'll see you in the next lesson. 9. Class Project Part 1: Amid research for this class as I was exploring, different flower options are so many, I could not resist incorporating this one. It's just so beautiful. While I think that this detailed petal will always work better in nature because nature is the true inspiration, I think that we can do it justice on paper. I'm excited to do it. I hope you are too. We're going to have a lot of fun with those stripes and with these bright colors. Primary with the yellows and blues. Not my typical jam. If you have followed my work for a while, I tend to lean much more towards earthy pellets and vintage hues. But I thought this flower was too striking not to include. There's a couple different ways that we're going to explore it. Here we have these really light petals. We're going to use some of the theory from our violet Primrose where we create that base color that's very light. And then lean in to those details and do some really beautiful veining here with those streaks and stripes. We'll also be using our Hanza yellow deep, which is basically that color right there with a touch of the pyal orange coming through the center of the flower. Again, you have the option here to leave a white space in the middle of the flower. Or you can completely close it in, make that naples yellow. And then extend the Hanz yellow from that circle. Again, you have the option there. I do tend to think that leaving a little bit of white space just brings more interest and value to the flower. But you, as the artist can decide, okay, let's go ahead and put that away. For now, we're just looking for inspiration. No need to feel like you have to capture every single vein and stroke. That is definitely not our goal here, but let's go ahead and mix up our color. We are going to use that finance blue. Then we're going to add a touch of carbon black just to mute it slightly so it's not so super primary blue. That's a little bit too much, that's going to be gray, that's what I was saying. It quickly can dominate the flower. As you can see, I've turned it almost completely black. Let's add back in a bit more of the blue. There we go. And then let's bring that out and really load it down with some water to get a nice light blue adding water. Okay, our palette is ready. Let's go ahead and set that off to the side. We're going to begin, as we did with previous lessons, with the pinwheel structure. And we're going to work at the middle of the page so that we can build out from here. Because we're going to be building like a cluster the way that you might see them in nature. Something that you might want to end up doing later on is painting them in a pot or possibly like coming out of the ground like we did with the snowdrops where we create a base with the leaves and then the flowers are resting on top of it. You can always pull from other class projects and bring that theory and application into different class projects. Okay, let's go ahead and begin here. Rinsing off just a bit, I really want some light petals here so that those streaks shine. Okay, so a little bit of combination of both. Let's go ahead and continue. We're going to create several flowers here. Oh, if you like, you can pop in a little bit of the honza. There's not a whole lot when we see in real life, but again, we can take liberties here. If you want to plug in a little bit into some of the flowers, you don't have to do it for all of them. It could be beautiful. I'm going to opt for both. Playing with size is also going to be your benefit here. Do some flowers that are just a little bit smaller, and then also flowers that are peeking out from behind the larger flowers, leaving some white space in between the petals too, can also help create that look. Things are going to look very, very simple and boring initially, but that's because we are going to be adding a lot of flare to these petals once they are dry. Well, that wasn't supposed to happen. Let's go ahead and turn that into a petal. We'll turn it into a nice little bud there. We're going to want to begin plugging in some buds anyway. So let's go ahead and do that. It's going to feel a little bit like there is no reward or payoff because you're just doing the same thing over and over again. But it will pay off our patience and persistence. We want to be mindful of the cluster that we're creating, taking care to shape it in such a way that feels as though the flowers are resting and nestled. Adding petals here and there, we'll help with that. To fill in the gaps, I'm going to add just a few more buds and petals until I have something that looks slightly lopsided. I want to have things coming up at different angles that way. When I go to plug in the leaves, it doesn't feel like it's just this round shape, but really giving it movement and play and balance. I'm going to finish off with a couple of buds and then we'll be done and ready to add in those beautiful veining details. Okay, I'm going to pause here, I'm going to allow the media to, you can take a look at what you have. If you want to add in a bit more yellow while things are wet, you can do that. And then let's meet back here when things are, like I said, completely dry. 10. Class Project Part II: I went ahead and pre mixed the color that we're going to be using for the veins. It's a mixture of that finance blue and carbon black at the very sticky. Beyond cough syrup consistency, it's taking it just one step further. Eliminating a little bit more of the water instead of an 80, 20, it's more like a 9010. You also want to make sure that you're using your most pointy round brush because you're going to want fine lines and details for this flower. You don't want your lines to get super chunky and having as much control as possible over that veining is really going to be a benefit. We're also going to work from left to right just because I am right handed. But if you find that left to right, if you're working left handed, then you can do it that way too. This will help alleviate any smudging that might take place. All right? Just checking that everything is in fact dry. Okay, The trick with the fainting here, and if you need to look at your reference image again, I'm going to pin that to my Pentraskill share board for you to look at. You can, but I found that trying to mirror exactly what I saw wasn't all that gratifying. I like just a glance at it and then intuitively I can see what's happening here on the paper and plug in those details as wanted. Bringing you in just a bit closer so you can really see what I'm doing. I just could not resist these beautiful zebra stripes. They're just stunning. What you can do is do a few chunky stripes and then you can do some thin on other petals and that's really going to give that look of interest. Another thing that we're going to visit after this is outlining the petal. Some of you will love it and some of you will think it's too much. I'll show you what it looks like so that you can make that choice based on what you like. The one thing to keep in mind that I do suggest is continuing to give you a sort of positional identity. If your petals are going this way, you want your veins to go that way as well. Varying between thick and thin lines is going to be your friend because it's going to make each one feel very different. You can tell like this one feels incredibly different from this one. Not only because it's more of an open face, but because we have a darker petal here and darker lines in some cases, I'm kind of doing these long oval shapes. I'm going to go ahead now and time lapse the rest of this video because it will continue to get long and it is quite repetitive. I've shown you enough in real time that you can see the application process. You can tell that there's a difference between some thick and thin strokes where we're adding these ovals and then where we're really using the toe of the brush to bring in those sweeping delicate lines. Let's go ahead and time lapse this and then we will meet back at real time to add some of those center details along with the leaves. Okay, bringing you back to real time to finish off this last flower, because I want to show you an option to outline the petals if you like that look. I think I prefer the un outlined petal, but let's just do one so you can see. If we were to add some details into here, we could then take the outside of the toe of the brush along the outside of the petal and finish it with some gestural outlining. It's definitely a look and it can bring in some drama and some interest to your flowers, But I think if it was to become repetitive upon all of the flowers, it would begin to feel too much. That's my own personal recommendation. You do not have to abide by that. You can go your own way. But that was my experience when exploring this flower. That brings us to the conclusion of the adding the details to the petals. We're going to head in now with a little bit of the Hansa deep. Go ahead and mix the Hanza deep to cough syrup. Might want to use your other six brush because the one that you were just using is going to be loaded with the blue and the black. Or if you're just using one brush, you can rinse that off. Now taking our Hanza, we're going to just add a little bit of a darker stroke here towards the center. We don't have to do it on all of them, but it is the way the way that we saw it in our reference image. We will attempt to be inspired by that and add it here and there. Just taking the toe of the brush along the, inside the center of that flower. Once things are dry, we'll go ahead and add a little bit of that. Pyal orange too, but it's still pretty wet. Okay. I like the mixture of yellows against the open space where there's nothing in. I feel like it's very well balanced and interesting without feeling crowded. Go ahead. We can use that same fresh and we're going to mix up our greens again. If you still have that palette, those colors that you were using, then you can bring that back out. If you need to clear some space on your palette. If you can, go ahead and do that now, murder. Okay, so you can see I now have my greens mixed up. I have my pile that's more at a broth consistency with a bit more of the green gold in the ratio, so like a 60, 40 with the green gold being the majority. And then a Cough sy, consistency of mostly, just the undersea green, I'd say 90% undersea green and then 10% green gold. I'm using two brushes. I have them both loaded with the different consistencies and colors. I've decided I'm going to do the wet into wet leaves just so that I don't have to allow anything to dry. And I think I liked the look of them just a bit better than when I waited for everything to fully dry. Okay, The way to plug in leaves to a cluster like this, where there's not a whole lot of stems. Whereas we could add stems if we wanted to. If we wanted to just take this flower in a whole different direction, we absolutely could do that. However, if we're wanting to paint it true to nature, the flowers don't grow. They would on like a forget me not, where there's really long dainty stems. Let's go ahead and add some leaves where we can create movement and play. So beginning with that compound stroke. And now we can go ahead with our other brush that's loaded with the cough syrup consistency. I'm going to just encourage the bleed just a little bit more here on. All those things will start to settle. I am just going to sweep out a bit of the color along the edge using my filber brush. Just giving my leaf just a little bit more body and movement. I'm going to wait until things are a bit more dry to plug in that middle vein and now I'm going to add some leaves on this sign. I'm going to do a leaf that's just a bit more round, doesn't have quite the same point to it, and then put my paper back around. This is drying a little bit faster than those leaves over there. Use my filbert brush to encourage things along here. I'm going to sweep out a bit of the color here too, because it's looking a little bit too intense for my taste. I like the look, and I think it'll look really pretty with one leaf, but I don't want it to look. So copy and repeat. So I'm just going to move out a little bit of the colors. Okay. That way I have one side that's just a smidgeon lighter than the other. That's easily achieved by taking your filbert and just sweeping through the leaf, lifting out the color, and then wiping the excess paint on a paper towel. I'm going to add some playful stems. Even though it's not exactly the way that we would find it in nature, I'm really trying to make this whole piece feel aesthetic and because it's not coming out of any vessel in particular, or necessarily the ground, but more of like a cluster, I feel like it needs just a little bit of length and elegance. That's where I'm going to take the toe of my brush and add some really beautiful sweeping lines, really playing with the movement. Here we have this cluster that's kind of coming up and off to the side. And I want these lines to be going in the opposite direction. I'm going to connect the buds and add a stem just where little petals are floating away, connecting those petals. Nothing too detailed, adding in a little bit of texture and depth to show where the stem might be originating from. Not going to include, like I said, any long stems here, because that's just not how they're shown, but definitely putting my own spin on this flower. Now let's go ahead and add some veins to our leaves. Mixing that undersea green to the cough syrup I'm going to plug in my veins. Just adding some really light, loose, gestural strokes. I don't feel like I need anything that's too incredibly heavy or detailed. Because we have the flower that's so detailed, it's coming along so beautifully. I love the way it's all blending and matching, and balance, and aesthetic. You can even opt to not have any veins in some of the leaves. If you feel like it doesn't need it, please take liberties here. I really feel like lightening this side of the leaf was the right call because it allows for a deeper vein. All right, so the last thing we have to do here is to add that touch of piral orne to the center. So let's go ahead and do that now. I'm going to use my little cat's tongue size four and I'm going to plug in just a little bit of detail to the center of these flowers. Again, these colors are typically not my jam at all, but it is spring time, at least in real time. It's spring time and I am leaning into these playful colors. If you don't have this cat's tongue size two or four round would be just fine, just taking one final look. Oops, I just noticed that I forgot to attach a butt over here, so I'm going to do that. Pulling you out a little bit so that you can see the entire piece. A little bit more. There, there we go. Now you can see the whole thing. It came together so beautifully. I love the choices that I took. I hope you love the choices that you took too. Because again, this is your painting piece. If you don't love it, you can try it. Again, making different choices along the way. I really love these leaves, but it would be fun for sure to see what the other leaves would look like, nestled up against these flowers. Anyhow, this was such a great flower to study. I hope you enjoyed your time today. Thank you so much for being here. Please please tag me in your creations on Instagram and upload your class project here. If you care to leave a review, I would be so grateful. Have a wonderful week, my friend.