Loose Watercolor Roses: Paint a Rose Step by Step

1. Intro: Hi, welcome to this course. I'm Gaby. And today I'm gonna teach you how to paint a loose watercolor rows. So I'm gonna start by teaching you how to paint a rosy step-by-step. Then I'm going to show you what are the most common beginner mistakes so you can avoid them. And we're going to finish this class by painting a lovely watercolor bouquet. I've created this course, especially with beginners in mind. So if you've never painted a rose before, that's the class for you. So what are you waiting for? Let's think some roses. 2. Supplies: Before we start painting, we need to make sure that we have all the supplies we're going to use. So we're going to need, of course, watercolor paints. And for this class, I am using my Sokura Koi set with 12 colors. This is a student grade paint, which is great for learning and practicing. Then you're gonna need watercolor paper. I am using this student graded paper by Canson. And your paper needs to be at least 300 grams or a 140 pounds. We're also going to need a round brush number six. And two jars of water. One is for a rinsing your brush, and the other one is clean water for mixing with your paints. And of course, we're also going to need a piece of paper towel to dry your brush. And masking tape. So this is everything we're going to use in this class. So grab your supplies, and let's start painting. 3. Painting a Rose Step by Step: In this first lesson, we're going to jump right into painting a rose. And I wanted you to paint this first rose along with me. Even if you've never painted one before, do your best to reproduce what I'm doing. And later on, I'm going to show you the most common beginner mistakes. And you're going to evaluate your painting and see which mistakes you've made. So you can avoid them When you paint your next roses. I'm going to load the brush with a very concentrated red because reds and pinks are my favorite colors for painting flowers in general. But feel free to use any color you want. Now I'm going to use the tip of the brush to paint two C-shaped lines curving towards each other. And this is going to be the center of our flower. So each petal that we add from the one curves towards this center, we're going to keep adding more 'C' shapes, more petals. And each time they're going to be a little bit larger and thicker. Now I'm going to dilute my paint a little by loading my brush with water. I'm not gonna rinse my brush. I'm just gonna load it with a bit more water to lighten up the pigment that it's already on the brush. And you can see that the petals are a bit lighter. With every new layer of petals I add from no on. I dilute my paint a little bit. You can see that sometimes I let the pedals touch and sometimes I leave some space between them. Don't be afraid of letting the pigments flow from one pedal to another. Remember these is the loose style. You aren't supposed to control every aspect of your painting in here. Now I'm going to dilute even more my paint. What they want is a gradient from dark to light, starting from the center. So the last layer of petals, the outer petals are almost white. This adds contrast to the rose, creating the illusion of depth and making your rose look much more interesting and eye-catching. Painting roses in a loose style is a lot about knowing when to stop. I think my rose looks big enough, so I better stop now. Otherwise it's gonna look weird And unnatural, we have a water puddle here. So I'm going to take a piece of paper towel to absorb the excess water. You can also use a dry brush, which we call a thirsty brush to absorb the excess water. So this is our rose You can see that the center is dark. And as the petals unfurl, they gets lighter and lighter. If your rose, looks nothing like mine. Don't worry. I've painted hundreds of roses until I was minimally satisfied with the results. And there are still things that I want to improve about my roses today. Watercolor is a journey, not a destination. In the next videos, I'm going to show you the most common beginner mistakes to avoid so you can improve your roses. 4. Most Common Beginner Mistakes: So now that you already know how to paint a rose step-by-step, In this video, we're going to see what are the most common beginner mistake so you can avoid them. The first beginner mistake, probably the most common one, is painting the entire rose with the same color value. So value is how light or how dark the color is. As I showed you in the previous video, we want a gradient from dark to light, starting from the center of the rose. You make this mistake when you haven't mastered the water to paint ratio yet. So you don't know exactly how much water to add to the mix to make the pink lighter enough. So instead of creating the dark to light gradient, we use the same concentrated red are almost the same red throughout the entire rose. The result is not bad. I kinda like this rose really, but this is not the look we're trying to achieve here. This rose looks very flat. So to add depth to our flower and make it look more interesting, we need a gradient. So every layer of petals are so either add more water to your brush to dilute the pigment already on it, or add more water to the paint on your palette. It works either way, just they loot your pigments throughout your painting. Why do you want is a very dark center and the last layer of petals needs to be almost white. If you'll notice you're making this mistake, don't overthink it. This improves with practice. You won't get a perfect gradient on your first roses, but do your best to create some kind of gradient. Ok? The second beginner mistake is living too much negative space between the petals. First, let's review what negative space is. Negative space is the space around and in between our painting. In this case, our rose, negative space is key to create a good composition. So this mistake happens when you're too afraid of letting the petals touch because you don't want your rose to beome a huge blob of paint. So you paint the petals very separate from each other, leaving a lot of negative space. And here rhos ends up looking as it has exploded and the paddles are being pulled away from the center. This can be a style on its own, a more geometric and controlled style. And with some practice, you can make this rules look very good. But you're here to learn the loose style. So keep this in mind when you paint your next roses. If one mistake is leaving too much negative space, another mistake is not leaving negative space enough. Let me show you. So I start with the center of the rose as always. And then as I add more paddles, I don't leave almost any space between them. So we can't actually distinguish the paddles. The roles ends up looking like a huge blob of paint on the paper. So we need to find a balance. Some paddles needs to touch, but we also need to leave some space between the paddles to distinguish them. Keep this in mind when painting your rows with time, you'll get the hang of it. Just pay attention to see if you're not making an if these mistakes and do your best to avoid them. The last common mistake is painting a symmetrical rows. I know you don't want your roles to have more paddles on one side than on the other. So you add petals symmetrically around the center of a rose. When you add one pedal in one side, you add one battle in another side to. This usually happens when we work with pairs of battles. The result is a very geometric and unnatural world's heroes shouldn't ever be this symmetrical. If we look at the real roles, we can see that there are a lot of paddles on every side of a rose. So we start with pairs of petals. But as I rose gets bigger and bigger, we can start adding layers with three or even four paddles. So we won't look vertically symmetrical. So now that you already know how to paint a rose and the most common mistakes to avoid, let's paint heroes bouquet. 5. Painting a Rose Bouquet: Now that you already know how to paint a rose, and the most common mistakes to avoid, let's make the full rose bouquet. I'm going to paint three roses, including their stems and leaves. If you prefer, you can lightely sketch with a pencil where you're going to place each rose before you start painting them. But keep in mind that you're not gonna be able to erase the pencil marks after you paint on top of them. I mixed Crimson Lake and Vermilion Hue from my Sakura Koi set to create this beautiful red. And now I'm going to paint my rose starting from its center. As you can see, my paint is super concentrated, I am using just enough water to allow the paint to flow on the paper. I keep adding more and more petals around the center. And now I'm going to dilute my paint a little to paint some slightly lighter petals. With every new layer of petals I add from now on, I dilute my paint a little bit. Don't forget to let some of the petals touch, but also leave some blank space between some of the petals too. Here we have a water puddle, so I quickly absorb it with a piece of paper towel. Now I'm going to paint my second rose. And for this one, I used more vermilion hue than crimson lake, just to have some color variation in this bouquet. When you add more roses, you have to imagine how big your rose is going to be to decide where you're going to paint the center. If you place the center of your second rose too close to the edges of your first rose, your second rose will be restricted in terms of size and can end up being deformed. So have this in mind when you're going to paint the next roses. You can add as many roses as you like to your bouquet. You can even add other flowers to make it look even more beautiful. But I decided to keep it simple and work with just roses so everyone can follow along. Don't be afraid of letting the roses touch, let the pigments flow from one rose to another. This makes your painting look more loose and organic. So now I'm going to paint my third and last rose, just like I painted the other two. So I'm just gonna, I speed up this one for you. This last layer of petals here ended up too transparent. So I'm going to add a bit more pigment to it. As long as the paint is still wet, you can keep working on it. Now that we've finished painting the three roses, we can paint to the stems and leaves. For this, I mixed viridian hue and the little bit of vermilion red. The red mutes or neutralizes the green a little. Now I'm gonna paint the stem. And for that, I'm going to imagine that the stem is coming off of the centre of the rose, because it actually is, it is coming from the center off the back of the rose. So pay a lot of attention to that to place your stem correctly. The stems don't need to be perfect and smooth because it's a plant and plants have little imperfections. I'm going to paint one stem for each rose. Now we're going to fill all this negative space with leaves. So with the tip of the brush, I paint the little stem of the leaf and then I press my brush against the paper and drag it to paint half of the leaf. And then I do the same to paint the other half. If you look at the leaves of a real rose you'll notice they're serrated. So I'm gonna use the tip of the brush to paint some serrated edges on the leaves. No need to overdo it, though. This is the loose style. One or two or maybe three are enough. I'm going to keep adding more leaves. And in some of them, I like to leave some blank space in the middle of the leaf. This is like a highlights as if the sun is a striking belief. I think this makes our painting looks very interesting. You can also make some of the elements on your painting overlap. other elements like I'm doing here with this leaf that I'm painting on top of this stems. This adds depth to our painting and make it look much more professional. So I think we have enough leaves now. Our painting's pretty much done. And I can't wait to see the roses you have painted. 6. Thank you: Congratulations, you've reached at the end of this class. Thank you so much for watching. If you enjoyed this class, please leave a review so I can keep improving my next classes. And don't forget to upload your project to your project section so I can see what you have created and give you feedback. So again, thank you so much for watching. See you later. Bye.