Loose Watercolor Snowdrops

1. Welcome To Class!: Hello creative friend, you are back. I'm so glad you're here. Thank you for joining me for another class today. If you joined me last month in January, you'll know that we created beautiful carnations together to celebrate the January birthday. We wanted to kick off those birth flower series and we are back at it today with the other January birth flower, which is the snowdrop. Such a beautiful flower. I am so excited, I had been wanting and hoping to be able to get this class ready and up for you in January. However, it is February 1, so I'm giving myself a little grace. It needed a few extra days just to put those finishing touches on it. But it is a great class. The very first thing we're going to do together is we're going to take a few moments to notice and marvel. We're going to look at some real pictures of snowdrops. We're going to immediately take out our pencil and put it to paper and we're going to draw what we see. Now I know a lot of the time people are so excited just to get to the watercolor portion of the class, however, I'm going to strongly recommend that you take a few moments to do this with me. It's really going to strengthen your skill. Also, when we move forward into the next lessons, you're going to be able to intuitively paint because you have spent that time on the page with a pencil. Your results are going to be ten fold. I encourage you, please take a few moments. I know you want to rush ahead and get to the fun part, but this is definitely an essential part of the process. With that foundation underneath our belt, we will break out our water colors and we will create some beautiful snowdrops together. We're going to learn all about snowdrop posture and structure. We're going to simplify this flower as we do in the majority of our classes and just keep it very straightforward. I'm going to show you gestural approach as I do in other classes. It's really going to benefit you and help you not to load this flower down with too many details because it can, and you'll see as we pull the practice pages out together that it can quickly become overwhelmed with too many details. We're really just going to learn all about the beauty, the daintiness, and the elegance of this flower. Then once we have completed those lessons, we are going to move in to the class project which is so exciting you guys, because it's been widely requested for months. A big part of my process, I use these beautiful washed colored backgrounds. That's exactly what we are going to do today. We're going to put these gorgeous snowdrops on a washed background. We're going to use some white quash. We are going to make a gorgeous painting, let me show you here together that is ready to gift display whatever you want to do with it. But it is so beautiful. This class is going to be suitable for beginners. However, as noted in the class description, I will need you to have some experience education, understanding water ratios and then also just being familiar with brush terminology. Um, and white mixes in general. If white watercolor is completely new to you, I'm going to suggest that you go visit my white watercolor class because it really lays the foundation for the lovely mix that we're going to be using today. I'll spend a little bit of time breaking down the mixtures and we'll talk about the ratio of paint to water. But I would say it's like a beginner plus class and then leading into intermediate level. Other than that, let's grab your supplies and let's get started. 2. Your Supply List: Let's take a few moments now to discuss the supplies that we'll need to complete our study and our class project. Beginning with our Canson 140 pound cold press paper. This is typically what we use in our workshops. It is a wonderful beginner paper, extremely budget friendly. I recommended if you are not using it and you are one of those people that feels pressure using their beautiful watercolor paper. But any paper similar in quality is going to be great. I'm also going to be using a piece of loose leaf, 140 pound, cold press legion paper. I'd like you to cut it into a square. Whatever paper it is that you use doesn't have to be legion. But if you could cut that into a square, we're going to be using it for our A class project. You can set that off to the side for now though. Then also in addition to our paper, we are going to need some brushes. Obviously, we're going to keep it really simple with this class, we're only going to be using two brushes today. Both are from the velvet touch series. Princeton brushes. We are going to use a filbert six and a round six. Then let's cover our paints. We are going to be using a combination of gas and Daniel Smith and then one my Mary Blue. I will list all of this in the class supplies, but just to cover real quickly for you here in case you're watching this. To plan a supply list, it's going to be our Daniel Smith, Burnt Umber. Daniel Smith, Rich green gold. Daniel Smith, undersea green. And then we're going to pop in some guash here. This is a moss green. If you don't have a guash, it is not imperative. I want to repeat that. If you can just mix up some olive green and in fact this rich green gold and the undersea green make an olive green, which we are going to use to complete our snow drops. This is just an extra ancillary color just to have on the palette to possibly add in just a little bit more range to our palette, since we are keeping it simple. Using just whites and greens for this project also would like you to have some black. I'm going to be using my Mary Blue carbon black. But you can use a lamp black. You can use a Pains gray. You can use Janes. Janes black, I believe it is. Any black will do then. We're also going to be needing our Windsor and Newton quash. This is the non negotiable. I definitely need you to have some white guash for this project because we're going to be using it to complete our class project. Okay, also we're going to be doing a little bit of sketching. I'd love for you to have an eraser. This is a really good one. This is a Faber Castell. It's not a needable, but it just works really well to not lift off the color and leave behind any pencil strokes. I'll list that in the supply list as well. Then any pencil, I'm going to use just a regular normal two. But I have drawing pencils to. If you have drawing pencils that you love, you can go ahead and include those two. You'll need a palette, obviously, a cup of water. This is just my practice sheet. We'll be using this as we, as we sketch, but we'll also be using my ipad. So if you have an ipad and you want to bring it alongside just to have a few reference images as we sketch. And then as we begin to practice our snowdrops, taking the theory that we learned and applying it, then you can do that as well. But really you can just follow along and watch me as I point out the shapes in the structure. All right, that covers it. Other than that, maybe grab yourself a cup of coffee or some tea. Let's get started. 3. Sketching Snowdrops: One note before we begin. While sketching, I would not say is imperative to this class or the success of this class. I will say that it will benefit you greatly. I'm talking to you. Those of you who do not love to sketch, feel like I cannot draw to save my life. Pictionary is the worst. Let me assure you that. We're just going to approach this gently and simply. It's really just to build in some muscle memory so that when we go to use our brushes on paper, the movements feel just fluid and natural. We're going to just take this really nice and easy. Anytime that I sketch a flower before I paint it, I can tell you that it's twice as good as it is if I were to just paint it, or it takes me an hour or so to really get the lay of the land and feel it. Anyway, that's my $0.02 I would love for you to join me for this portion of the class as we just flesh out a few of these lovely, lovely snowdrops. Let's go ahead and pick up our pencil. I'm just going to note what I see here. Just shape structure movement now with the snowdrop, because all of the petals really do this downward direction and there's not a whole lot of positioning going around. We're really going to need to be somewhat gestural and dynamic when we head in to add the leaves. But as I'll show you in my practice pages, I found that with this flower anyhow, less is more the more leaves. I tried to keep in mind of how full things look down here. It just began to look overwhelmed. It didn't look natural, it just looked crowded. Just keep in mind, I do encourage you to experiment and see how it goes for you, because my technique is going to look a little bit different than the way that you approach it. But I'm going to show you what I did, talk you through, choices I made, and allow you to basically make that decision for yourself, for what you like. But what I found that looked most aesthetic and most appealing was just keeping things simple. But what I do is take some liberties here. You'll notice when I paint, I'm going to do these snowdrops with a little bit more movement than maybe they are as shown just to give this painting eventually. Anyway, when we get into the class project, a little bit more dynamics then as you might want to go through and grab a few images of snowdrop, some of them are really closed like those shown here. We're definitely going to do some of those then you can note just the little details inside the centers of them. Then some do, Those are mostly just roots at this propeller, just like completely coming out like this with almost like wings. Or if you see like a lady bug lift off, they have this really funky little wing action that comes out to the side. We're going to do a bunch of different shapes so that we can just bring this flower to life. All right, I'm just going to draw what I see here. I'm going to start with the little cap at the base. I'm not going to pull out every single detail. It's just to gain an understanding and awareness of what's happening. I'm just going to indicate that something's happening in there. Then what I really love is a stem with some great flow and movement. I'm going to pull that back. It doesn't even need to connect, because what I'll end up doing is just adding a little bit of movement later on. These will be leaves. I'm not really even going to worry too much about that. I do see up here that it has this cute little tail that comes up. So I'm just going to plug that in there and leave it like that. Okay, I'm just repeating the process, looking at this snowdrop as I move along. Bring it down a little bit. Now what I'm drawing is not going to necessarily translate to painting so well, but it's giving me an idea of okay, where is the stem? How is it moving? This one really came, and in fact, I didn't get it quite right. I should have probably come up a little bit more to really give it that lovely arch there. There we go. We have a much nicer shape there where it comes up high and then comes down and we give it some really nice lines. Then with the snowdrops, we're going to be bundling, bunching them together. They all sprout from this general area. But if we were to be doing a pattern, so say you really loved the look of the snowdrop and wanted to do something graphic with it. We could do a cluster here. And then imagine that there was another cluster coming up and over this way. And add some snowdrops over here. I'll show you just a couple different ways to apply this theory. With this one we see another stem coming up. And moving towards the middle here. I'm just going to begin to plug in some snowdrops with different positions. This one's coming this way, which I really like. It's going to give us some play and some movement. We see a stem come back this way, coming through. Then I'm going to do a nice little propellers snowdrop here, just to show you what I mean, coming nice up for the arch. Bring it down a little bit and pulling it through. Again, this is just a sketch. It's not meant to completely line up, but just to give a general idea of the shape and movement. Now I don't, typically when I'm sketching, go in and add like the thickness of the stem, just because that's not going to apply to water color. Now when I create professional sketches for my clients or birth flower commissions, then I do add quite a bit more detail. This is just a paint sketch, It's not the same as a professional sketch. But if you wanted to just add a little bit more detail, you could come back in alongside the stem and just note some of the thicknesses here within the stem. But I don't recommend it or say it's necessary for what we're achieving here. Now I'm going to do a snowdrop, that essentially isn't what you might find in nature, but it's just going to bring a little bit of life to the painting. I'm going to start with the stem and come way out, and then pull it back through here. Add that little cap. This one's coming out quite a bit more than what you might find in a normal bunch where they all just come up straight and then they umbrella down. Now say we were to want to make some pattern, we could come over here, if this is how we would want to line them up, say we were planning to put this on fabric or gift wrap. Then imagine this is where one cluster would go, and then this is how I'd want to line up the next cluster. And then, let's see, do a nice closed, oops, come pre a nice closed snowdrop. We could even do a couple of those, really, utilizing the shape and movement. That's what I mean when I say you don't have to draw exactly what you see. There's room for you to add liberties there. You could imagine that this cluster is doing something like this. And then this one is doing this. We see the leaves down here, They're pretty thin. But like I said, and I'm going to show you here in just a moment. I found that when I tried to accommodate this in just a gestural loose way to me, it began to feel more overwhelmed than aesthetic, I'm going to show you. But before then, if I were to try and tackle some of this fullness, the volume that I see down here at the base of the snow drops, Then I would basically just take my pencil and begin to plug in some leaves with pencil. It does look quite a bit more lovely. It just doesn't have the same effect. But you can see that the more I add, the more overwhelmed this area starts to get. I have to be very intentional about what it is that I add. And they do spring out and then curve backwards. If I were to do the same thing over here, again, I'm just doing some loose shapes. If you do not know how to draw a leaf, you can be as simple or as detailed as you like. I tend to move quickly. Sketching could be a whole class. It's not one that I teach, but I'm sure there's several here on skill share. But if you were to just go through the fluid motions of it, it starts with something thin, then you come out and then you tip, and then you go thin, and then you come back. That would be like a very detailed leaf. But what I'm doing is just taking my pencil and just doing a general shape of it. It's just a swoop, noting that it starts thin, gets a little thick somewhere, and then tapers off. You can run that through your mind with some drills. And then you're obviously trying to add some movement to it. If you were to do a leaf that's like straight up, it doesn't quite have the movement in the flow. You're wanting to angle as you move along. Having in some thickness there and some movement. Okay, that's just the general shape of these snowdrops. We have a lot of different kinds. I'm just going to note them here off to the side, so that we have things organized. And then I will show you my practice pages so we can take a look and discuss not necessarily what went wrong, but just what happened. Okay, our closed snowdrop would look like this. We start with a little cap here. It has a little bit of a jelly bean shape. If you were to just sever it at the tip of one side, then you can even do both sides first just to get that feel of it. Then you're just again, like a big jelly bean and then you're going to come up and just split down the middle. What you can do here is you can split it completely down the middle or to give it a little bit more interest, you can do heavy on one side and then light on the other side. You see how that looks just a little bit more dynamic versus just doing something like this. Even if I were to like 0.1 side, it just doesn't have the same beauty as this one where it's just coming out a little bit more and has a wider cut there. Okay. That's closed. And then we can do full, actually we'll just say open. Okay. So we're coming out a little bit more here. We can add a little bit of center there. We'll go through centers in just a moment for me on my end. It's just a little tiny squiggle. It's not something that I'm taking a whole lot of time to flesh out. Okay, I'm going to erase that because it's starting to look a little bit funky and too big for that cap. We need to give it a little bit more of a neck here to the cap. There we go. Okay, And then we have a little middle happening here. And then this little squiggle right here just to indicate the middle here. We have fully closed, and then we have one that's I would call open or partially open. And then we have the helicopter snow drop or the bug wings, whatever you want to call it. But I basically see like propellers coming out. Sometimes I draw over my lines like if I don't like it but I can still see what I'm aiming for, then I'll just draw over the lines here, giving it a little bit of shape and body here. I would say even more. It can be fully like this. It really is dependent on what it is you see and how you want to tackle it. You can do closed, partially open, open, and then really aim for that wide angle snow drop. Just having a sense of how they can appear in nature and being able to use these together within the same cluster is going to bring so much dynamic to the painting. You can see we have one that's really wide here, one that's mostly closed and then open a little open a little bit more wider. It just really does benefit the overall painting to be able to note the different shapes. Okay, that's just a way to keep it simple for that middle. I'm really just taking, and I'm going to do the same thing with my brush. Just taking my pencil and just doing like a little squiggle. It's not even anything that I could compare a shape or a letter to. If anything, it could be maybe a sideways three. If it were to be facing up or an E. Just little squiggles there. You can practice that with your pencil and then practice it with your brush. But it's just a quick little gestural note indicating that something's happening there. Okay. And then with the stems, you really want to know how they come up in this beautiful arch, and then you pull them down. If you wanted to give your stems a little bit more movement, then you could come out to the side here and just pull it off to the side. Because essentially what we're going to do is we're just going to add in some leaves here that'll bring in the body. But when you see, when we go to our class project, we're going to be bundling it all together here. Just practice if you like for a few moments, just a few different angles. Let's do one coming through. There we go. We're imagining that's coming up and down this bud is on top of. We have one that's coming up and hooking, one that's more of a drastic angle. One that really does have like that candy cane type feel. And then one that disappears here behind the petals. And then we can do this one just another direction, bring it through here. Okay? That should give you a good sense of just the shape, and the movement, and the flow, and how to approach it. We're obviously going to do all of this with a paint brush as well. And then because this little video is getting a bit long, I'm going to stop it here and then I'll show you my progress pages as we begin to lay paint down on the paper in the next slide. 4. Practice Painting/White Mix: Okay, let me take you back in time a little bit and show you where we started from so you can see what I mean when I say that. As I began to add volume and bulk to the snowdrops, things just began to look crowded and overwhelmed. It's not necessarily a bad thing if this is the goal that you have for your snowdrops. But as I just continued to experiment, I just, like I said, found that less is more. I feel like taking you through the choices I made might save you a little bit of time. And that's always my goal with these classes, is to educate you on the choices I made. Not just how to achieve this, but what happened when I did this. And I feel like students find that to be of value. Let me just talk you through that for just a moment. Here. You can see that I started off with stems and everything looked lovely and delicate. And then as I began to try tackle and plug in some of those leaves, painting them exactly as I saw them, it just didn't look good. I'm an intuitive painter. This is not my area where I paint what I see. I used to study botanicals and I feel like I got as far as I could get, but it didn't sing for me. And I just moved away and began gravitating towards loose florals in general. Then I began to add a little bit of texture, so I would have a bit of paint on my brush without a lot of moisture. And I began to plug in some dry strokes as you see here. Layering dry strokes on top of the initial, just normal strokes here. I also plugged in some darker detail lines along the stem, which we may end up doing. When I walk you through the details portion, things worked fine here with the little detail in the middle, that little spot of green gold. But all in all, it just did not work for me. You can see here that I played with allowing the snowdrops to fully dry before adding the stems to them. And then I began to explore wet and wet, allowing that bit of green to flood and pool into the snow drops. Then same here. I began to experiment with like a little vignette creating a grassy area and then coming out with more gestural strokes here. Which I feel like that would work if there were more of them. But just as one, it started to look a little bit funky. What would work in using this style is what we're going to do for our class project where we're going to put a background down and then we're going to layer the snowdrops on top of it. Something like this would essentially work if we were to have a different approach. I also began to add some structural lines into the snowdrops, which we're also going to do in the detailed section. This may be something that you love or it may just feel like overkill to you. Again, I'm all about giving you options and different approaches and then allowing you to make the decision that's best for you. But again, down here, this less is more thing. I really love the light strokes and then just a few little structural lines here, plugging those in. At the end when things were dry, I really loved the look of the wet into wet, even allowing the stems at times to run into the petals and create that flood there. I really loved the general shape of these two clusters together, separating, having a little bit of separation here. Some breathing room, so to speak. So we're going to play with that. But this really was just all about exploring what could happen, how I could approach it, and then deciding what I liked best. I also flipped the paper over and did the snowdrops on the smoother side of the paper and did not like it at all. You may end up liking it and it's something you can experiment with. But I did not love that the snowdrops fell flat for me. They didn't really pull the structure, Excuse me, the texture wasn't there. And I feel like for a flower, as simple as the snowdrop, there needs to be some sort of foundational texture to really give them their moment to shine. Okay, that's basically what happened, and then how we arrived here with this page of lovely snow drops. I really played with positioning here, with structure, with flow, bending the snowdrops in a way that you would not find them in. Nature really played with the wet into wet, allowing the green to flood in and to take over the white in some cases. And then also being more subtle with it, it's really those little nuances that makes such a big difference. I cannot emphasize that enough as a professional artist. Little tiny choices that you make. Where I went from a full cap up here, like really taking my time to paint out the cap until I changed it to more of just a gestural indication that there was some attachment there that these really began to sing for me. You'll see in some cases, I did add a bit more of a cap as we did when we were sketching, but when it came time to paint them, I found that almost like the squiggle I use for the center here in the middle of the snowdrops, it really began to benefit just the overall aesthetic of the piece. Then like I showed you before, I'm just using an upside down three to do a nice little squiggle in here. Then I added a few leaves post application, no wet into wet here. But just added a few leaves, thought they were okay, liked them a little bit. We'll do that more in our class project, but just for the sake of loose art, I really loved them as is. You're going to see that this is a pretty simple and just straightforward class. There's not a whole lot of bells and whistles when we're not tackling a pony or a poppy, where there's just lots of layers and things. It's a very straightforward flower and I felt that to benefit it the most, we really needed to keep things simple, which can be a challenge for me. I love details and I love adding interest to paintings. And it took me four pages before I was like, okay, no, you really need to pull back. Just let the flower and the fun little shapes of it speak for themselves. Where I really just wanted to add layers and add depth and add more colors. It just didn't work. That's my experience. You might find that there's a different experience. But anyway, there we are. Let's go ahead, break out a fresh piece of paper. Grab your Filbert brush. We're just going to tackle the structure of the snow drop. We're going to practice the heads just as they are. Then we'll add in some stems when they're dry. And then we'll do some wet into wet as well. Okay, let's pull our palette over here. I'm going to mix up a bit of the burnt umber and the carbon black. You're going to pull that into your palette, add some water. Then we want something that's just like an earthy, grayish color. Then you're going to pull that color out one more time to lighten it a bit. You can pull in a little bit more color if you need it. Adding a bit more brown, touch bit, a touch of a bit more, adding water till I have a really nice light consistency here. This would be a 70% water, 30% paint ratio. 5. Learning Snowdrop Structure: I'm going to take you through a little bit of my process here, which might be a little more unconventional. I do talk about arranging the page so that it's most comfortable for you as you paint. I'm big on that. It doesn't really work. When I'm filming time lapses and reels, I need to keep the paper nice and still so people can see what's happening. But when you're just private in your studio or at home, you really should feel free to just move your pad paper all around just to get that best angle that makes you feel most comfortable. I found that snowdrops are not a flower that I feel comfortable painting with the paper like this. I found that I needed to turn things upside down before I really felt comfortable with the movements. But I'm going to show you what I'm doing with the Filbert brush. Just straight on. If I were to be taking my brush and I'm just going to turn it on its side so that it's not the full belly but it's on the side. We have one side of the snowdrop, then we have the other side of the snowdrop. Very simple dual stroke. Now that's just a very straightforward snowdrop, if we were to break it down the middle. Let's go ahead and do that one more time. We're just adding a little bit of a line here just for an elegant sweep coming out and then finishing it off here. If I were to do things upside down, I'm not going to move the paper, but I'm going to approach this flower as though I'm painting it, wanting it to come this way. Then I would start at the other end, the very end of the petal, and come back this way and do the same thing on the other side. I feel like I begin to feel a little bit more confident with the stroke now. You might not see a whole lot of difference there, but it feels different to me. I'm going to encourage you, just as you're painting along, to move the page however it feels best to you. I'm going to do a couple like this couple with a three petal. Now, I'm not going to try and get all of the petals that are in the snowdrop. In fact, some are hidden behind on the other side, and you would only see a little bit of it peaking up. We're just aiming at a general shape and structure. Let's do a nice wide one here. Then we'll take the brush. Then we would imagine that there's a little cap here. We could add another little petal just to really show that things are nice and wide. And then we're imagining that we're bringing this stem up and then hooking it down this way I'm visualizing, that's how I'm working. Now if you don't like that, if you don't like working upside down, if it's just too much for your brain and too confusing, we can definitely do things just the standard way. If I were to continue in this vein, then I would come out and come out, if you wanted to do a snowdrop that was really just a bud, then you would just take one stroke, then just finish it off here. We can definitely add some of these in when we do our final project. They look lovely mixed into the full blooms here. Okay, I'm doing like a full belly stroke for that wide one and then coming along the side of the brush, full belly and then a side stroke for that bud. Then let's do one that's coming nice and some of those snow drops look just very linear. I try and add, it's just innate for me to add a lot of flow and movement. But the snow drop really just wants to stay very linear. Very straight up and down. I'm trying to respect the integrity of that flower while also adding my own liberties. Okay, that's it. Like I said, this is a very simple and straightforward flower. There's not a whole lot of fuss and muss here. It's just a matter of figuring out what you like, what looks good. Also, finding your proper color value is something that I cover in great length. In other classes, I try not to repeat too much material for those who have been following me since day one, So that we're not tackling or revisiting the same principles we've already learned. If value to color is something that is a little confusing, especially in white water colors. I have a whole class on white water colors. You may want to take a peek at that before coming in and feeling confident with the whites. I did like a very quick demonstration on my palette, but I really break it down and go through every little facet of finding the right color value when working with white and a whole lot of different mixtures as well. If you're not already familiar with my color guide series, it is a huge asset. My enchanted series, which covers white blends of water color is probably one of my most well loved of all the resources. So have a look there too. Okay, That's basically that. In a nutshell, you can decide whether or not you like the upside down method. We're going to be popping in some stems here in just a moment to get an idea of how it all looks together. But first, let's imagine that we're doing a cluster way. When we do go go to plug in the stems, we have a little bit more of a shape to work with. Okay, looking at, I have my reference sheet here. You can have an ipad brought up, anything that you feel inspired by. I'm just going to note and take from the snowdrops. I see that some really do like overlap each other and they come on top of each other. I'm going to note that as I move along that I'm going to come up here in the middle, look for those white spaces in between. Again, I don't love this angle of painting. I would, if I were painting the way I wanted to paint, turn it upside down, just like this. And you may find this is like eye opening and revelational for you, especially with these strokes. And then begin to plug in some nice little ones here. And then maybe one more off to the side here. Nice little propeller shape there. Okay, I have a nice little cluster here. I'm going to be imagining that. I'm going to be bringing the stems back here to center and then adding some leaves. I'm going to let that dry for just a moment and do one more cluster over here. And then we're going to do some wet into wet in the next video. But just for practice sake, let's go ahead and do that one more time. Really playing with movement here. Okay, I want you to shape these petals as though they're coming from different angles. Imagine and visualize. Okay, here's the little cap coming up and then that candy cane hook coming through. It may even get lost behind this petal. And then bringing it through, you can do something different. You can say it's coming up here and it maybe it's swooping down this way. That's why it's so nice to have a little bit of a reference image in front of you because you can look at all of the different ways to approach it. We go do a cute little bud right on top of there. I'm going to have some overlapping each other. And then let's have one more right there. I think I like the idea of one more over here too, just to kind of give it a little bit more movement. And then let's have one really kind of coming down here that, okay. All right, so while this is drawing, we're going to mi up our greens. Let's go ahead and do that. Grab your number six round brush. Let's bring out your undersea green, we're going to do a Roth consistency. Really mix in those greens, then grab a little bit of your green gold as well. Not too much green gold in this mixture because you're going to use, and see like I added too much there. You're going to use that green gold for the center and you want there to be some differentation between the color. There we go. That's a beautiful, beautiful, olive green. This is my favorite olive green mixture. I use it all the time. All right. What I was saying before about adding a cap to my snowdrops, I was really taking my time. I'll do it on the practice one here. And adding a cap here, say I was doing it like that, like it's too structural or too botanical like that, but it really is like I'm taking time to flesh out a little tip here. And it doesn't look bad. And I wouldn't say that you would be steered wrong if you were to do it that way. But what I really liked, and this is just my own personal preference, was taking the brush and just brushing it up against the snow drop. I don't know for me that just saying a lot more, it looked more delicate. The snow drop is such a delicate bloom that it just worked for me. Anyway, you can try this approach and this will dry a little bit lighter and you can also blot off some of that color, decrease the value in that mixture you're using, and come in a little lighter. There you go. That's the same theory, but now we're doing it lighter. I like that much better when I went into dark here. It just didn't, like I said, seeing for me. So even though we mixed our palette to what I would call like a broth consistency here, it's like a 50, 50 paint to water ratio, Decreasing the value even more to like a 70, 30, you'll get that really beautiful light mixture. All right, I'm just adding a few little stems now this is on dry, we're going to do wet in the next slide, just up and down. Just gestural lines. Just something as simple as like this. You can practice that off to the side. It's going to be a pressure thing. If you're not good with pressure yet and you tend to really just come down hard on your brushes, you may want to practice this off to the side where you're just gently stroking the page. Line, line, line, very light. Same thing with our little squiggle that we're going to add in, a sweet little squiggle upside down. Three again, those things that take 2 seconds, but really do need to be mastered before you have a tremendous amount of success with whatever it is you're painting. They're worth investing that time in. Okay, I do the same thing over here, just so we have a couple different clusters to work with. You can even do a mixture of the cap theory and then just the lines. Okay, for stems, let's go ahead and use that light mixture. Now the best thing that you can do here is visualize where you want these stems to go. If I'm wanting them to come in the middle, that means I need to lead them back. If I were to have these stems over here and this ones over here, what we're going to get is more of a triangular feel here. And we don't want that. We want something that's bunched here towards the middle because that's how the snow drops are shaped. Let's go ahead and do that. We're going to come up and hook around and pull your stem through again. This is something that looks easy, but we'll take some practice. Imagine where you want that stem coming from and then pull it through. Now it's okay if some of your stems are coming wider and they're not all coming exactly to the same point. I encourage that. But what I don't want is things coming out too triangular. Okay. Don't feel like everything has to be lined up to exactly like every single stem meets exactly where it should at the cap. Again, we're just trying to tackle the general structure. Okay, that would be like a little, we're going to do the same thing over here, but then we're going to add some wet into wet and leaves in the next segment. All right, just practicing again. Let's do one where it's getting lost behind that stroke was a little bit thick but that's okay. Again, it's going to be a pressure thing. I'm not really going to do too much for that. I'm just going to allow that stem to speak for this one as well. Even though this stem was leading to here, this one could be coming down from here too. And the same thing here, this one could be right here. It really isn't something that needs to be perfect ingestal. And we have this one. And then let's, just for fun, I'm going to draw a stem. Then let's go ahead and use that filber brush. And I'm going to not touch it because I don't want to show you wet and to wet yet until we've covered this in depth. To give our up and down motion of that snow drop. To give it a little bit of playfulness, we can add structure in a shape like that. Now I'm going to get a little wet and wet there, prematurely. As you can see how beautiful that looks, it really does just start to benefit. There's so much more interest now. You have all of these up in this direction. And then this one lonely little snowdrop that comes out that just says hi peekaboo. And it really just lends so much interest to the whole overall cluster and painting. Okay, let's move on to the next segment, where we're going to do more of this beautiful wet and to wet. 6. Wet into Wet Technique: Taking a brief moment to remind you to update your piles on the palette. If you used all of your white mixture, go ahead and mix yourself another batch. Same thing with your greens, because we're going to be loading brushes this time. Brushes is a technique that I use when I'm using wet and to wet so that I don't have to hurry to mix the color. Once I've laid down the wet media, I can lay down the stroke and then I can head in right away with a brush that's already preloaded with paint. I'm just going to roll that brush through this mixture, get it nice and wet and ready for me. Then I'm going to begin with my Filbert brush here, pulling that through my mixture. Then I'll set my palette off to the side and then we will begin, I'm just going to be doing a couple at a time, a couple snow drops, noting that there's still wet. That's something that you'll need to look for on your end because your stroke is not going to be exactly the same moisture level as my stroke. Depending on how much water you have on your brush, you might need to actually wait longer before you plug in the next step, which is the stem cap. And plugging that all together in that same fluid moment. I caution you, and I just encourage you to note what's happening on your paper, not what's happening on my paper, because that's there's just going to be either small or large differences between what's going on. All right? Okay. So that's a good amount to start with. The four, I can see how wet they are. Not overly wet. Now, I'm going to take my brush and I'm just going to plug in a little bit of paint and allow it to flood into the beginnings of that snow drop. If you're more comfortable doing like one at a time, you can do that too. It doesn't have to be four at a time. I'm going to lighten my wash here just a little bit off to the side. Still a little dark. One more time, lighten that up and then I always go back to the first one that I created because that's going to be the one that's probably trying the soonest. I love the way the wet into wet looks what will happen if things are too wet is the green will completely take over the white. Which isn't a terrible thing like you saw that happen here in this petal. As long as it's not happening in every single petal, I say go for it. You can really add in and play with how much green you allow, but you just don't want it to look exactly the same each time. All right, and then heading back in for the stems. You can choose to let that stem run into the petal here, or you can make a break and not have any connection there whatsoever. It's completely up to you. I'm going to have this one peeking in behind here. All right? So a nice, sweet little bundle there. I'm going to do that one more time. You can see as this is drying, it's getting quite a bit lighter. I say it was still a little, initially darker than what I began with up here, but becoming a bit lighter as it dries. Okay. Remembering that you're trying to angle these petals in different directions, not have them all just come up and down. But we can start with one like that and then be thinking about the different directions. We have one that's going to be coming out this way. Now I can't move too slow or things are going to really dry on me quickly. Brushing. So here's an example of really allowing that green to soak in and just kind of let it dominate that petal, okay? And then adding the stems. Excuse me, adding the caps. And now we can add the stems. Okay? Visualizing where I want these stems to come from. So I want this one to disappear here. Bringing it through, bringing it down. This one I want hooking like a little candy cane, bringing that through, having your stems come up at different lengths. Also another fantastic way to bring some interest into the painting. All right, now we have a couple little clusters here and we can begin adding some leaves to them. Let's go back up here to this one where things are dry. Go ahead and refresh your paint if you need to. I need to take just a moment to do that. Now, I have a nice mixture. I'll show you what I'm working with over here. Okay, getting it nice and dark to begin with. And then I'm going to add water and lighten it here. Okay? This is where things can potentially get overworked. Just take your time here. Just figure out where you think that leaves might benefit, this overall cluster. Now, in a real snowdrop painting or a photograph of it, you're going to see lots of bulk and volume coming up here where they're growing out of the ground. But it just didn't work for me. As I've already mentioned several times, I'm going to do some really light strokes here. These are the same leaves that I use when we're doing our floral bouquets. Is just one nice long stroke here. Then what I might do is to give this a little interest. I might come up and hook it over, just to show that things are going in a different direction. In real life, the snow drop leaves are quite a bit thicker than that, but I just found it didn't work. Okay. This is where I would stop. I feel like if I go any further than this, things are going to start to get really bulky. What I might do, just to add a little bit of interest here and just to bring things up to a different level is add one final leaf just to break up the level here. Because then essentially what's going to happen is when we add in those little details going through each little cluster, we're going to see that each new detail as a layer of interest. Same thing here with our little one here. Let's go ahead and do that. Just some really sweet little leaves here at the base. Not overwhelming it. Let's head down here and do the same thing, coming out to the side. Try not to think too deeply on it, but just gesturally into it where I feel like the leaves might look best then adding some more gestural lines, You can even if you wanted to tinker with doing strokes that are more along this line and then ran out of the camera there. Let's try that one more time. A little bit more like this. And then doing some that are nice and thin, like this. Again, that's going to be a pressure thing. You're going to come more on the belly when you do that stroke. Then really coming up on the tip of the brush. For those light strokes, having the leaves run into each other too is really pretty. The leaves don't come up too much further than right about here. But again, feel free to take liberties. If you wanted to add a leaf that pops up right here, filling in that space, you could totally do that. Just own, that does not have to be exactly as it's seem there. You have just a sense of the whole different process of the wet on dry and then moving into wet into wet. You can decide what you like, what you gravitate towards. We're going to head in and add little details along each stop here that will finish off the snow drop. It's very simple. We're going to add, like I said, a few key details that will help bring it to life. Then we're really going to have some super duper fun with our class project with a whole different concept. 7. Class Project: Part 1: All right, my friends, welcome to the class project. I am so excited because I'm about to teach you a concept that has been asked for many times and it's never been taught here by me on skill share. And I think it's just going to be so much fun for you to learn this. This essentially is another class on top of what we just learned because they look so different. The approaches before we begin, I want you to make sure that you have a lot of room on your palete, because we're going to be mixing up a color right here. Additionally, I need you to have rinsed out your cup so that it doesn't have any green or yellow in it, and then rinse your brushes as well, just for good measure. Then, I also neglected to mention in the supply list that you are going to need a flat brush. Any flat brush will do, it does not have to be this brand. This is a Princeton one wash. This is the heritage series. But any brush that is flat and just good for covering a lot of space. If you are trying to do that with your little six filer, it's going to take you forever and you're not going to have very good results. You want to be able to lay down an even coat of color on the paper. That is step one. Most essential to this process is being able to get down an even coat of this wash that we're going to mix up. We're going to go into great detail here that I set you up for success. If you do not have a brush like this, definitely pause here. Order a brush because it is very versatile. You'll be able to use it for a whole lot of different purposes. But for those of you who are ready, let's go ahead and dive in a. You're going to take your carbon black, go ahead and dip the brush into some water and then just begin pulling it into the middle here. We're going to mix up quite a bit because we have a lot of space to cover. It's going to end up looking more like a gray background than it will a black background. But we're going to layer it pretty well so that it's dark. That's going to provide the background for our snowdrops to really pop and just look super beautiful. We're going to be using the white guash to create our snowdrops. Just a whole different feel and looks, like I said, two classes and one, I think you're really going to enjoy it. It's just a whole lot of fun when you add a different element to the process and to the project, all really taking my time here, I don't want to run out of paint, I really am making sure that I have plenty adding water in as needed. It's a little piece of paper, it's only a nine by nine, but you'll be surprised by how much you need and how much of this gets soaked up. Take your time. I wanted to show you exactly the amount of time that it takes, rather than just come in already, have my palette mix and say, go all right, Make sure there's no chunks on your brush. Really look at it. Turn it back and forth, add more water until you have a nice size mixture that you believe is going to cover the entire page. All right, then. It's really not super complicated, but it does need to be done in a specific way. Let's move this over to the side. We're going to start here at the top. And we're going to take our brush, and we're basically going to run it back and forth, adding a little bit of water and paint as we move along. Now another way to do it would be to wet the whole page and then add the water in. But we're not going to do that today. We're going to do it this way. All right. Before I begin, some people like to tape down their paper. I find when I'm working with a canvas that's this small and if I'm covering, the whole page is actually going to be fine. It's not going to warp and buckle too much. I can end up putting it in a book or putting it under something heavy and it will flatten it right out with a big piece of paper where there's potential for like a big ripple in the middle here. You would want to tape the border. We may do that in a future class where we're leaving a little bit of a white perimeter around. But here for our purposes, we are going to paint the entire thing. All right, let's go ahead and get started there. Adding a little bit of water. Bring this over here so you can see how often I'm dipping in. Like I said, it's going to end up looking more gray than anything. I do like to work from top to bottom, a nice even coat. If you see some dry areas, go ahead and just plug in the paint. You can see how black it was. But I am quickly using almost everything on my palette. All right, coming all the way to the bottom here. I've used up almost all my paint, but I'm going to go ahead and just use the rest of it. That looks good. There's a little puddle there. So I'm just going to smooth even that out. Those stripes will disappear because the canvas is wet. Okay, Lifting up my finger as things settle. And we're going to get a nice even coat here and the canvas will be ready. So I'm going to pause here, allow this to dry. And then we're going to come back in and add our snowdrops to the canvas. All right. 8. Class Project: Part 2: Okay, a few things to note before we begin step two of this painting. I want you to go ahead and rinse off or wipe clean the palette where you were mixing the black. You don't want any of that to get into your white mixture or your greens and your yellows. Also, you will need to rinse out your water cups so that it's not heavily dominated by that black paint. Then thirdly, you're going to want to make sure that your painting is in fact dry. It may look dry, but if you really look at it, pick it up, you're going to note that there's still areas that are damp now. If it's still wet a little bit on the back, that's okay. We're not going to be painting on that side, but you do want to run your fingers along, make sure that it is in fact dry. What you can do, sometimes I take a small hair dryer and I just lightly on low and don't use the hot setting. I use the cool or the warm and just from a distance can dry it that way. Sometimes if I do that, when it forces the process along, it will cause warping or buckling. I do say if you can wait, it really doesn't take that long. Maybe five or 10 minutes. Just let that dry on its own, and the effect is going to be all the better for it. Anyhow, my painting is in fact dry. It's still cool to the touch, and I know that it will continue to dry further. But it's dry enough now to begin step two of the process, okay? All right. So go ahead and you're going to pick up your filbert brush. We're going to mix up our white mixture for our snowdrops pulling into our white guash, which we have used before in previous classes. If guash is completely new to you, then you may want to go and take a look at my Guash elements class. That way you actually know what it is and how it works and what makes it different from water color. But essentially it is that in between medium of acrylics and water color, it is water activated, water based. So you can rewet it. Unlike acrylics, it's really a fantastic little medium. Now the trick with gas is you can use it at its full opacity, meaning that you can block out the color that is shining through. We have a color here, but let's just say this was a pitch black background. We could take a large amount of the gas and apply it to the paper. You would not be able to see the color coming through. However, if you were to use it at half its opacity, you could do apply the same principles and you would see that color popping through the quash the same way you would if you were to lay down water color on top of a dry media. Hopefully, that makes sense. We're not going to use it at full opacity, but we will use it at nearly full. All right, I'm going to mix up a nice little pile here. But I want the snowdrop to be nice and dainty. We don't need to use our mixture for white, because we're actually going to use a white now that we are painting on a colored background. That's another benefit of using a colored background, is we are able to actually use white in this case. Whereas if we were to try and paint with white guash on white paper, not much would happen. All right. Just making sure I have the right ratio here. This would be a little more than a cough syrup consistency if we were using water color. Just to give you an idea what's going to happen and you'll see as we paint along, the guash is going to look like it's quite a bit darker than it is. We're going to lay down a stroke, a few of them using the same principles, everything all the same technique. We're just using a background. This time the guash is going to do something a little bit different how you're going to see that as the guash dries, it will in fact get lighter and it may be best to go back over that stroke with a new layer of guash. All right. As I mentioned, when we were painting the snowdrops on the white paper, I am most comfortable painting them upside down. That's what I'm going to do. It's not something that you have to do. You don't have to follow along exactly in that way. But I will give you some guidance and some tips. Although the paper doesn't really have a directional identity yet, I am going to flip it around so that this deccling that I have on my paper is going to remain on the left hand side. So I'm just going to flip it like this. Now I'm going to look at my paper as though it were broken up into three sections. Like this would be the first section, this would be the second, then this would be the third. While painting the snowdrops, I'm going to keep in mind that I want them to fall right here, not too close to the top of the page, but not too low either. That I don't have any room for the stem right here where I would imagine that the second and the third little section and area would be overlapping. I'm going to start here in the middle. And then I will begin to cluster them around in different positions and directions. Keeping in mind that some will be buds, some will be partially open, and some will have that really funky little lady bug wing shape. There you see there's my first stroke and it will light up, excuse me, light as it dries, okay? The same strokes that we used when we were practicing on our white paper. We're just now applying it with G again. If you're unfamiliar with this medium and it just feels tricky to you, go back, take a look at my gas. I'll have you up to speed in no time. All right, so let's just continue here. Taking my time, just imagining where I want all of these sitting. Again, I'm focusing on the middle and the top area, not going too far down or else I'm not going to have a lot of room for my stems. Do a nice little bud here, maybe one right over here next to it. Adding a bit more of the guash to my brush. You can see already the beginnings of this petal is starting to lighten a bit. We'll see if we need to go back over. It really all depends on how much paint you have. Once I get a lay of the land, then I might turn my paper back over just to see what's happening. Just looking here, seeing what I have. My snowdrops are up nice and high. It's going to give me lots of room. I don't want to encroach this bottom portion of the paper. I want that to serve as breathing room all along the sides here. Being mindful that I want some of my snow drops to be really open so that I can head in with that little squiggle. I'm going to do that right here, flipping it around, see what I have. I really taking my time and then imagining my cluster, my stems coming right here. I'm also going to pull out a little snow drop like we did in our cluster to kind of just serve as a little peekaboo over here. Oops, come off the page, bit the camera. There we go. Now we have a nice little peekaboo snow drop coming off to the side. We may want to add more of those, but this is a good starting point. I'm going to put my brush down and I'm going to go ahead and mix up the same mixture we used before. We're going to use that undersea green mixed with the rich green gold. 9. Class Project: Part 3: Pre in here. Go ahead and add a little bit more of the rich green gold because we are working on a darker paper. It's heavier on the rich green gold than it was before. I would say it's more like 70% rich green gold, 30% Daniel Smith, undersea green. Add a bit more of the undersea green back in and I'm going to pull it out one more time so I can see what it's going to look like. There we go. We have a nice blend. Now we're more at 50, 50. And we're going to begin attaching our stems. Same thing we did before adding that little cap. It's still a little wet there. That's all right. If you find that the gash is still very wet, then you're going to see the color run in to the petals here. It's something we can definitely correct when we're done, or you can leave it as it is for a little bit of wet and wet. It works with gash as well. Okay, now I'm going to begin attaching the stems as I did before. Pulling it all the way through and down. Don't worry too much if things don't match up or if there's breaks in your lines, we're going to be adding those leaves at the end, are going to make it all come together. Just have fun breathe, enjoy the process. We can always add in a few more snowdrops if the painting is going to be benefited by it. Remember again having your stems come up at different areas. See you have a little bit of the green coming into the snowdrop here, which is lovely. Something you can intentionally do, or it's something that you can decide not to include. Okay, so we have a very sweet little dainty snowdrop cluster happening right here. Let's just take a moment look to see if we feel like the painting would be benefited by adding a few more. I think so. I'm going to go ahead and get back into my gas and create a few more of those snowdrops. Not coming too far over here because I don't want to encroach on that little peekaboo. But just a few. There's one there. Just taking a moment look at what I have now, I'm feeling like the painting is just a little bit more full. I'm going to add a few buds here at the top again. Really just taking my time, not feeling rushed, looking to see where things are lining up again, I like this being breathing space for the painting. I want to make sure that there's enough room here at the bottom to add leaves without feeling like I'm crowding this area. I'm loving the little touches of green into the white here. Again, I'm just taking a moment to enjoy it, which sometimes if you're anything like me type a recovering people please are wanting to do everything perfect the very first time. That could be a struggle for you. I just encourage you, enjoy it. Even if it's not working out, it's going to work out eventually. Everything is an experiment. All right? I'm going to add, I think I'm going to add one more. Not decided yet, because what I don't want to do is add one so far over here that my painting becomes unbalanced. That's important. I want to keep things key in the center here. But I love this little peekaboo snowdrop. I'm trying to remain mindful of the shape that I have going. Maybe what I'll do, maybe I'll add one over here. We'll see. Let's just play it by ear. I'm going to go ahead and add in the stems. I can do this painting six different times and it's going to come out a little bit differently. I never like to just say this is exactly what I'm going to do or until I've seen what's happening. Okay, I'm going to get a little bit of the wet and wet here and then begin adding the stems in. Remember what I said, not everything has to line up perfectly. These stems are acting as though they might be down in this area. But I'm going to plug in one more, right around here. Then I see what I have. I like where this is headed. The next step is going to be to go ahead and add leaves. I'm going to mix up my mixture and begin plugging those in. Just like we did in our practice pages. Right here, down at the bottom, just those simple strokes coming out and overlapping. You can, if you like, bring up a stem through the top here to show that it's coming up. Not necessarily what would happen in real life with the snowdrop. But that doesn't matter. I'm going to do the same thing on the other side, just coming up a little bit higher, adding a nice little line in there, giving the painting some balance, some interest, filling up that space until I have something really nicely balanced. Then what we're going to do is we're going to mix in. We're going to give that a moment to settle. If there's any areas that you want to see a little bit darker, I'm going to show you what you can do is now taking your Gh, add a little bit more to the brush so that it's more opaque. You can layer on top of your snowdrops if you want it to be a little darker. For example, if you wanted these darker now I really like them light, I think they look really beautiful like that. But you can essentially just layer over what you have. You can do all of them like that, you can do some of them. It's really completely up to you. Okay, now I'm going to take my mixture and I'm going to dip it into my gas and make this really pretty pastel, Easter Green. Okay, really rotating my brush and we're going to layer on top instead of going darker. We're going to go lighter now because we're working with a dark Bra ground before we went dark to really make those details shine. But now we're going to go light and we're going to do the same thing that we did with our studies. And there you have it, some nice layered lines. You can always darken those up. I don't know why I say darken them up. You're not taking them up or down. You can always darken them. Then what we'll do is add that final touch. We're not going to add the structural lines to this because it does not need it. It's not on white paper. They really do pop as they are, but we will add in that little squiggle. So go ahead and rinse off your brush, pick up that rich green gold, get it pretty dark. We're going to go ahead and plug that in anywhere where you see a spot where it looks like it might be open enough to add it in. Then what we'll do, once we have plugged in those little squiggles, we're going to add a little bit of gash to it using the same rich green gold. Adding a touch of gash to it can go over those areas where you put that squiggle down or just fresh areas and you'll have a little layered effect there. All of these steps are optional. You can omit any of them if you don't like the look of it. It's completely up to you. I've given you all of the tools and then the fun part is you deciding which ones you would like to add. Anyway, this would be completely beautiful as is. You can frame it. You could go on to add more to it if you like. I'm just going to keep things very simple today and just keep it like this. I love it. You could matt it, it would be beautiful. You could scan it, do something with it as well, turn it into a pattern or a greeting card. But I'm just excited to see you come away with and how you end up using the material. Again, you'll notice things are going to keep drying. What you can do is let things dry and then head in again. If you wanted to darken up those lighter green areas that we just did, you can do that whole process over again. You'd wait till it dries and then you'll do another layer. Squash is all about layering and it's all about playing with the different opacities. All right, that was a lot of fun. I hope you feel like you learned a whole lot in this whole new concept with the background. I can't wait to see what you create. Please tag me on Instagram when and if you share if you have a chance to leave a review for this class, I would appreciate it. Thank you so much for joining me today and I look forward to seeing you again.