Loose Watercolor Sweet Pea

1. Introduction: Hello, and welcome back. In continuing with the birth flower series. Today, we are going to learn how to paint loose sweet peas to celebrate the April birthday. Our early practice will begin our time together by observing a few reference images online. Together, we'll discuss the shapes and structure of the flowers and point out any details that may feel significant and special. This time will be used to stir inspiration and help you collect more information about the flowers. As always, I will emphasize capturing those flowers through a loose lens, keeping our objectives simple rather than narrow focused. Main strokes and minor details should be thoughtful and intentional without feeling the need to pin down every mark. Next, we'll take a few moments to sketch the sweet peas with our paint brush as an exercise to help us capture the general shape and structure of the flower. This time spent purely in exploration and in preparation for the lesson will be extremely beneficial later on when we go for it and begin painting the sweet peas. During color creation, perhaps one of the most exciting facets of this class will be the use of watercolor inks. Although we've used one or two in a previous class, today, we will use five. These are ideal when using wet into wet technique and for creating fireworks or bleeds within the wet media. If you're not familiar with inks, not to worry, I'll cover the entire mixing process, and I'm certain you will enjoy using them in other projects. Bonus points, they're on sale right now for $0.25 using the link below. Finally, we reach our class project, where using the knowledge gained from our time and study and application, we'll assemble a beautiful bouquet of sweepeas featuring both the color palettes we studied in early lessons. I'll take you through the composition flower by flower, explaining how to avoid the edges so as not to work yourself off the page and how to achieve balance, which is not the same thing as symmetry, and lastly, how to create foundational lines from which to build. This is an intermediate class. Although I do my best to accommodate ambitious beginners, basic concepts such as how to mix water and paint to achieve proper water ratios, and a year or more experience using wet into wet technique is recommended. Additionally, I will be working slightly quicker through the material. With that in mind, let's begin. Okay. 2. Supplies: Okay, so let's take a few moments to discuss the supplies that we will be using to complete this project. If you've taken my previous classes, you'll know that one of my favorite things to do is to introduce a new supply to the project, whether it be a brush that we don't typically use or a new paper or paint. I just find that having some facet to bring in extra interest or an extra challenge, it allows for a better and more rounded experience. That's always my goal. As I've selected the sweep to celebrate the April birth flower, and I'll talk more about this as we move forward. It's a very simple flower, and so it can be challenging and that it is so simple, it can be hard to navigate it. So what I've done is I am paring down supplies and I am introducing inks. And we've used inks in previous classes. However, we typically have only used one to two. In this class in this class, we are primarily going to just be using only inks with the addition of the undersea green. I may throw another color in there. I did quite a bit of experimenting. And I don't think we're going to need any more colors, but occasionally, as I'm going through the process with you, I like to pop up a new color. So if that's the case, I will make sure to list that in the supply list, post production. So let's go ahead and cover that right now. We're going to be using our Canson watercolor paper. That's 140 pound cold press, but of course, there are substitutes. You can look in the supply list to see, substitutes that are comparable. I'm going to love for you to have a variety of inks obviously. If, for whatever reason, you aren't able to get your hands on them and you need to use just regular water color out of a tube or a pan. Totally fine. I'm going to present a few options for you. Um, but if you're able to make your way over, the brand that we're going to be using is the Dandelion paint company. They're not expensive and they really are so fun. It's not something I would say, get it for this class. I believe that you will really have fun using this in a variety of ways. They react so beautifully, they're highly pigmented. Meaning you need just a drop or two depending on which color it is to make it work quite a long ways. We're going to be using the lemon yellow. We're going to be using the orchid. This is the Tahoe blue. This is the burnt orange, and this is the rose red. Those are the colors we'll be using and then along with like I said, our undersea green, the Daniel Smith, and then a variety of round brushes. Like I said, I'm really going to simplify things. I would love for you to have two or three round sixes and eight would be okay two. I'm going to pop in a number three. Just in case we want some super fine lines. You can see. I practice the sweet little curly cues that we're going to be adding to our sweet bouquet. So a variety of nice. Shapely round, with a nice point on them. Other than that, I would love for you to have either an iPad or some reference image. But it's not necessary. I'm just going to be going through some of the flowers with you so we can in the next video as we observe and take notes and then move into sketching them, we'll be able to just move through this part together. Then obviously, a water cup and a paper temple that covers it for our supply list. So grab yourself, either a cup of tea or some coffee. If you need a snack, good time to go and get one and let's move into the next slide. Okay. 3. Observing The Sweet Peas: Now we're just going to take a few minutes to comb through some of the Google images that I found of the sweepe I'm going to walk with you through this flower, why I selected the ones that we're going to paint and also invite you to do the same thing because what you gravitate towards may not be the same thing that I gravitate towards. I tend to love my vintage palette, but many of you out there love those bright and vivid colors and with the inks we'll be using, you will be able to achieve those colors. The theory that I'm going to be teaching you is going to be universal. Meaning that even though I may be painting a sweepe in these shades, the same concept is going to work across the board if you were to do peaches or bright fucias or pinks and then whatever color palette, like I said, that you gravitate towards. Let's take a few moments to walk through this flower, point out what we see, what we find special about it, and how we're going to achieve that on paper. The first sweepe that I found that I absolutely loved was this one right here, I reminded me so much of an orchid and even an is with those beautiful speckles and I just loved that brownish pink color that is just so vintage and just the level of detail in this flower. As I mentioned in my supply list, this flower, a lot like some of our other flowers is quite simple in structure, and even more so than some of the other flowers that we've covered because there is no identifiable center to it. Unless you are looking at a complete open face sweet pea. Even then, it's very subtle. It can be hard to, like I said, identify where the center of that flower is. As we paint, the center is usually leading the eye, it's guiding the eye around the composition, and so we can have a lot more freedom and flexibility in the petals because there is this anchor point being the center. With the sweet pea, it's not the case. As I was exploring and practicing, I really had to figure out, how can I best express this flower gesturally indicating and intimating to its structure and composition without overwhelming it with too many details as that's always the goal. I found that I really had to just simplify and bring it back to the basics and not try and get too technical with the flower. Let's look at these right here. I adore this color palette. We have a really pretty soft white that we'll be using a bit of, I just realized I forgot to pop in that lamp black. I set that off to the side. So we're going to be I'll put it in the supply list. Always check the supply list first guys because sometimes when I'm exploring, pains get pushed off to the side and I don't have them all right next to me when I go to film. So this is just a side note to always check the supply list. We'll be popping in a black. It'll either be Janes black or lamp black. I'll show you as I'm working here on the palette, which one I'm using. But, that will include all the details that you will need along with Pinterest links for the specific pictures. We'll be using a really nice, calm, cool black to create the white, and then we're going to be mixing up a couple of the inks to create this beautiful brownish pink. We will not be adding quite this level of detail to the sweep. We're going to be really focusing on bleeds. I will show you a little bit of the exploration. These are just rough. Rough mock ups, but you can see there's a lot of exploring happening on this page, and what I ultimately found works the best is to allow the colors to blend and merge and create these beautiful bleeds to indicate the level of intricacy and detail happening within the sweep. Um, so I really like this front over here, and we'll be adding the green in using wet into wet. So really, we're going to focus on timing, those beautiful blooms that we see other watercolor artists use, allowing the water to push back against the paint and create these fireworks blooms. However, you've heard them referred to, and then adding the beautiful curly cues along the way. And it's all going to come together really beautifully as we As we focus on each step. We'll start from the beginning and we'll work our way towards putting it all together using the green, adding the little curly cues. Even though this is somewhat of a simple flower, I think you're going to find that you're able to do some pretty special and unique things with it, especially with the addition of the inks. Okay. As I mentioned, I love all of these little details here, but it's mostly the color that I gravitated towards just love this beautiful maroon pink and these speckles. That's going to be one of the options. You'll see that on my Pintres page, the skill share board, you'll be able to see all of the flowers that I'm noting here. Then let's just go through and discuss what it is that we see when we're looking at the sweep. One of the things that I do, especially when I wrote my book was fine common things that, you know, we all know, you know, like a globe, you know, that that's something we all know what that looks like or, you know, a pyramid. I try and use objects that our brains can easily just relate to. With this flower, the image of a fan came to me, if we were to pull out a lady's fan, spread it apart, that's what that initial petal looks like to me. It has this very either shell like or fan appearance, and we're going to be sketching that out in the next slide. But if you could try and lock that into your mind and just get that image conjured up, I think that will help as you move from brain to hand to paper because it can be a long way to travel sometimes. And then what we have is this sort of petal that curls over, which is extremely hard to do if you're not painting botanically. If you are not taking the time to create this fold, allow it to dry and then layer with paint underneath here creating darker shadows. You're just going to miss this. With the gestural approach that I teach, this is not something we are going to focus on. This is a botanical approach and something that another artist you'd be best served by that study. I'm going to show you how to look at this flower and just indicate what's happening here with the petal. We're going to focus on that fan like shape. And then creating some beautiful additional petal shapes on the side, allowing the paint and the water to do its thing and create some gorgeous colors. Those will be our focal points. Um, Okay. So that's the fan. Then that's just that specific sweepea some of the other sweepes you'll see that they have these rougfled edges to them. I'm going to take you through the fan where it's very smooth and then I'm going to take you through the rougfled edge as well because I'm all about options. How can I present you with as many options as possible so you can figure out what it is that you love most about the sweepe. This Sweepes a little bit more structured. You have a center here happening, and then you have this fan like, but it has rougfles or little mountains or hills along the side, and then you have some roughling up here as well. That's another we'll modify the fan, the basic fan shape, and we'll create some different shapes to it as well. This is another one of the sweet piece that I thought was just so beautiful, very striking, and I will again show you, we're going to walk through it as we did with our daffodils showing you just simple structure, loose, and then a bit more structure and then highly detailed and you can pick out which aspects of each part of the process that you love most to create something special and unique. I also loved these very moody sweet peas. I thought the combination of that dark egg plant purple with the maroon was really special. Again, you have this fan like shape curling over and then this little rouffle happening here in the middle. I think I need to close out of something. S. Yeah. And so we're going to be doing that with just simple strokes. We're really not going to, like I said, capture the rouffles along the edges or the shadows. We're going to create that with just a one shot or maybe a two stroke and create something that's just indicating towards what we're seeing. So again, these are just a couple of different color possibilities. We're going to explore three together. But you can go back in here and look at all of the different options. There's gorgeous pinks. Let's look at this one because there's some buds on here that we will incorporate into our bouquet here at the end. So The buds remind me very much of how you would see a geranium bud or possibly a poppy. It depends on the species of sweepe that we're looking at. Across the board, it typically looks like this, but you see some that have more rouffle some that have those beautiful fine lines and speckles in there. It just depends on which one you're looking at. So we'll incorporate some buds. You can see one right here, little back end of the green, and then just a little round m ball coming out of that. We're just going to attack that. I always say like attack, but approach approach it just gently and very loose and not just get too over focused on creating too many details because that's really when we start to get in trouble when we're not focusing on a botanical style. Okay. That gives you a good idea of just the different shapes that we're going to explore and the color palette. These are really beautiful, these very, very pale lavender sweet peas. You see more of the rougfling here. But as I mentioned, there's no identify. I just made up a new word. Mark that down because I tend to do one of those in each class, and by the end of the birth flower series, you will have a book of non words that sound like they might be words. Identify. There's no identifiable center to the sweet piece. So you can kind of see here there's a little bit of shadow work happening. And we're going to use, like I said, the inks to create a really strong bleed. But overall, there's no defined center, and so we're just going to play with the delicacy of the petal structure. The other aspect that we're going to pop in there are those beautiful little curly cues. You can see them here with these beautiful elongated stems that extend from the base of the stem. We're going to have a lot of fun with that. There's some that are really super curly and then some of that are just more of a slight curve, we'll play with both and just take some liberties too because we're artists and that's just what we do. 4. Swatching The Color Palette: You would like to have your iPad or your reference image out. This is the picture I'm going to be looking at. I'm going to be moving it off to the side so that I have this area to work with and it's not encumbering what's happening here on the page. I'll be drawing inspiration literally, drawing inspiration from this photo if you want to have it out. Then I'm going to also walk you through the application of putting the links on the links. The inks on the palette. That way you can see how it's done one time, how much water I'm using for those who are not familiar with inks that don't use them often in their work. I just don't want to gloss over that brush by it and then your left stuck not knowing how much water, how to decrease the color value of it and all that. We're going to do that together. Let's go ahead and make it real simple to start with. Let's just use two colors. I'm going to pop in my orchid. Okay. Two drops shall do. Then let's go ahead and pop in a little bit of the Tahoe blue. We'll keep those separate because what we can end up doing is creating different versions of this color, which I'm going to show you right now. Okay. Okay. Let's go ahead and put that off to the side. Getting my number six brush out. This is the heritage series, and I'm going to begin mixing these two colors together. I'm going to pop in just a little bit of water on the palette. You don't have to do that, but sometimes I like to do that, and a nice beautiful neon blue, not my favorite blue, but that's okay. It's the color we need it to be to move forward. Now I'm going to pick up a little bit of pink. And we're going to make this a nice purple. If we wanted to lean it more towards the blue, we can add in more blue, so it's a periwinkle. Let's go ahead and swatch that color to see what it looks like. You're going to see that there is the potential for several colors here, and we use these all within the same flower to create something that's complimentary. So we don't go outside of that color family, but it all looks like it's meant to be together. And then what we can do is take this cough syp consistency, pull it out one step further to create that broth consistency. So I remember our cough sys 70% paint, 30% water, and our broth is more of a 50 50. And so we can create two versions of the same color as well. Okay. Okay. So that's this color. If we wanted to draw it out just a bit further, Here we have the potential here of two different colors. So we could use this color initially and then rinse off our brush and do another petal with this color. That's our first color. If you want to make a little note that says periwinkle, it's a blue purple. Go ahead and do that now. Now we're going to add in more pink. We're going to turn it purple. You can see we've changed the color quite a bit here. Let's go ahead and swatch our purple. Okay. Now, we bring that out, add some water to decrease the color value, making it more of a broth consistency. Thank you're really going to love these inks because they are so amenable to bleeds, more so than I found in the pans and the tubes. That's our second color. Now we're going to really lean into the pink here. I'm going to put in a little bit more. Mixing it all together. Okay. Okay. And creating the broth consistency? All right. I tend to create maybe three colors with when I'm using two different colors. You can make more. You can head back in with the blue, add that to the pink, and then you can make it really highly condensed and get an even stronger purple. Let's just go ahead and do that. You can see that this is a new color. There's so much potential here. It just depends on how much of the water you're using. So very similar to this one, it's just you're using more of the ink at that time to create a stronger version of that color. So if you want to continue exploring with the inks a little bit, feel free to do that now, just swatching out your colors, maybe making little notes and labeling things, and then you can move along to the next video with me. 5. Sketching The Sweet Pea: If you were able to take the March birth flower class, then you'll remember what we're about to do here. I like to bring in this technique of the sketching, because it helps to familiarize us with whatever the subject matter might be. In this case and typically is flowers, then what we do is we give our brain permission to look at what we're going to paint and then to allow our hand to just free hand what we see. What happens here is we get out a lot of the mistakes that we would potentially bring into the next step where we're really painting it out. We work out the problems ahead of time by doing this. Then when we go into actually painting it, putting all the strokes together, timing, the wet into wet, bringing in an additional color, our brain has worked out a lot of the initial setbacks of shape and structure. Before we get there. I always recommend doing this if this is a new flower for you, it is a game changer. It's been so free and liberating for me. Let's go ahead and do that now. I'm just going to keep working with this beautiful periwinkle here, as I said before, this is the picture that I'm looking at. We're going to just take a look at what we see and then put that on paper. I'm going to start here with this flower and I'm just going to begin to draw out a fan like shape. Okay. And then there's kind of something happening in here. And Okay. Very simple structure. You can see we have is just very simple. There's also a little petal that's coming up here. If we wanted to work that in there, we could. I don't tend to color in. This I try and keep this primarily just sketching because then I start to be too focused on that didn't bleed right or things were too dry. Really to pare down this part of the process is my recommendation. Then we can add some of the rouffles here if we wanted to. That just gives me an idea of how the rouffles work. Then sometimes what I'll do is I'll put the lines in so I know this is the direction things are going. It's a very rough nonstatic part of the process, but so helpful. Then the sweet pea below it, I see there's a little area where the petal dips and then it comes out like this and down and maybe back through here, and then I have a petal that comes up and down around. There's a roughle here. But again, we're not going to be doing that. So if I were to be if I were to try and um, capture that ruffle, then I would need to do something like this, where you see the rouffle come in here. But we're not able to do that with water color unless we are again, creating that whole shadow, waiting till things are nice and dry, and then we go in and we lighten this up and then we go back in and we pop in color and allow that to get darker. So it's a whole process. Really just focusing on the sketching part. Okay. Then we have another petal that would come in here and let's just keep working our way around. We have thing like this. And then one that's kind of like this, getting the Ruffle shape in here, the fan, almost looks to me like a clam, you know, if you were to take a clam and fold it. Then let's go ahead and take a look at a different flower. We have this one that's facing down. What we're going to end up doing here is we're going to be running a stem. I know it doesn't make sense. We're going to be running a stem and we're going to connect all of this using wet and to wet and a beautiful array of colors. While this might look very just like I said, rough and rudimentary, it will all come together, and this is our brain just working through some of the shape and structure challenges. Then we have this one over here like this and this one comes out here. Okay. And let's take a look at this one. I like to look at a whole bunch just so that I'm not feeling like that's the only way to do that flower sort of thing. There's no wrong way to paint a flower. There are so many different potential options. Let's see. I like this one. I know it's not allowing me, there we go. So again, with that fan like shape. And then we could do something over here too if we wanted to. Okay. So if we were to do this one right here, we have something that starts there at the center coming out. And then a nice little ruffle here and something else here. And then we have this pretty one here at the top. That's just a nice shape here, and then we have another petal here. What we would do and we will do this is we'll lay down that first initial color and then overlay it with either another color or with some water, and then we'll have a beautiful bloom happening here. Just a few more moments here, and then we'll move into the actual painting concepts. I like this little pink one right here. Okay. Now having looked at a few, I'm going to just intuitively and I invite you to do the same, start creating some fan shapes with me, okay? Again, this is your brain just getting familiar. We're going to some shapes over here, and then maybe one right there. Let's do a nice big fan here and maybe we do something there. Something there. Let's imagine that this is the little stem that's connecting the stem here and how we might approach that. Making a little bit more sense, right? I'm going to flip my paper around so we can fill up the other side. Actually, I need a new piece of paper here. Okay. So drawing in that little stem or the little cap at the base the stem and then I might see the sweet pea come up like this and maybe something really big here. Again, just this is my brain saying, okay I didn't really like how giant that was. It feels too overwhelming for this stem. So later on, when I go to actually make the shape and then color it in and then add that shape. I'll know. You know what? I didn't really love how giant it was. So let's do something a bit smaller. Okay. And then I like what's happening better. We'll get to that part, but I want to show you why it is that we do what we're doing so that it all makes sense and feels worth your time. I know as watercolor artists, sometimes we feel like we just want to get to the fun part, but this builds up muscle memory and these drills really do help. The next part of the process is to try and sketch them in different angles. Let's do that for just a few moments. We understand that here's the little cap, coming out like this. Let's draw one this way. Let's draw one coming down. There's our stem, there's our cap, and then let's get comfortable with drawing upside down, say we were to do a stem like that. Okay. And a few buds. So let's go ahead and draw the cap, and then maybe a few buds kind of like this. Very simple. You can already see how much fun the inks are going to be. There's so many different colors working its way through this one or through these three flowers. There's a purple, blue, and then a brighter blue, and that's just using one consistency. It's going to get really interesting and fun here in just a moment. A few more. The more you do, the better off you're going to be doing the stems now, just understanding the positioning, the angles of the flower. Do it in this direction. This will help you when it comes time to put it into a bouquet together. Y let's pretend that we're looking at one open face, here's the stem and then it's sort split in half a clam shell. Maybe there's a or something happening up here. Okay. Okay. All right. Hopefully, this gives you an idea of the shape and structure playing with different angles. I invite you before we move into the next slide here, if you're not feeling quite confident to fill up another page. Just take a couple reference images, put them next to you, and just sketch what you see. Don't get too caught up, and the details are over focused on it really loosely, strengthen that connection between brain hand and paper. And then when you're ready, let's join me in the next slide. 6. Painting The Sweet Pea - Purple: I'm going to go ahead and refresh my palette here by adding a bit more of the orchid. Be careful. Those inks do get on your fingertips really easily, and then you bring it onto the page. So be careful when applying them and then a little bit more of the tah then I'm also going to bring in some burnt orange. Okay. This is going to mute it a little bit, so I'll have a bit more of a vintage feel to it. Let's go ahead and mix that together. We'll take our previous mixture, pop in some pink. You can't go wrong here. If you're not getting the same amount, the same ratio of color paint, it's really not a huge deal. Pop in a little bit more blue. T I'll stick to purple because we're going to be using a different color to create that brownish pink. I want to give you guys a bunch of different color possibilities here. Let's go ahead and Stick to purple for now. All right. Little bit more brown. Here we go. So many shades of purple. I wanted to walk you through this mixing process because it does take a little while. Then go ahead and bring that color out over here so that you have the broth consistency as well. Okay. Okay. All right. So let's go ahead and start practicing those basic shapes, those fan shell shape and the combining of the two consistencies. We're going to load our brush with the cough Ser consistency, and then we're going to take an additional brush and load that with the broth consistency. We're going to begin with the broth, laying down a nice even coat, then let's color that in. Okay. And then let's immediately touch against the edge here and create another petal. And do the same thing over here, touching against the edge and creating another petal. Leaving a little bit of space here, I'm going to swing out to create a little bit more of a fan like shape. Okay. Okay. And now we have a really beautiful merging of the colors happening here with the first with that broth consistency and then adding in. Then what we'll do is we're going to put a little bit more color on our brush and head in one more time here to strengthen that color so that you have three varieties of colors happening. You have this really deep beautiful purple and then it's spilling out into the broth. Let's go ahead and do that one more time. Load our brush with the broth consistency. And filling it in. You want to make sure it's nice and wet. Take your time making sure that it is properly filled in and that it is an even coat. Then with our brush that's loaded, touch the edge. One more time. You can even spill out here along the edges if you want to, and then let's add another petal. Filling that in as well. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense until we add this stem in, but we're just going to go step by step here. If we want to one more time, adding in that color. Then I'm going to show you the next magical step once you have that part situated. Take a brush. You're going to rinse it off, blot it, put a little bit more water back on it, and now we're going to create a really beautiful little firework. Bringing you in closer here so that you can actually see this step applied. It's push back against the paint by adding water. In order for that to happen, the surface, the media has to be wet. We'll do it over here too and you'll see the difference. Still moving because we're working with these inks here, but it's just a little bit different. I can extend it through the petal as far as you like. You can push back against up here too if you want to create a couple of different leads. Okay. And then you can also while things are still wet, go along the edges, add in some more color. Just really play here with the bleeds and with the amount of pain. That coughs are consistency is really going to be key. You can see I'm really working with this color right here, nice and dark and then balancing it with this color. There's a of potential a lot of potential here between these two colors and what they're capable of doing. Okay. Okay. Let's go ahead and do that one more time. Loading up my brush and the cough syrup consistency. So I have broth on one and cough syrup on the other. Okay. Nice and wet. And let's go ahead and touch right against the side here. Okay. Pilling it in. And now what we can do is take our broth brush and add in one more color. So if you have a little bit of that Tahoe blue, I'm going to have to freshen it up a little bit. I'm going to pop in the Tahoe blue up here. And come up again this side to create a third petal. Then I'll rinse off that bruh, my broth brush or what you can do, like I said, having two to three brushes. I have a third brush here that I'm putting water on. Now let's create a beautiful bleed here at the top. And then still have my cough srt brush. I can add some stronger color in here. Okay. You'll note as things dry, they're going to lighten up and they're going to get more crisp and you're going to see those beautiful hard edges and they'll continue to change. All right. Now we're going to do the cough sy consistency first and just note the differences. Okay. Filling that in. Then let's do with the broth consistency, that lighter color. We added that Tahoe blue in and then adding that broth a little bit later. And then we can add a bit more color into the center here. And watching things how they move as they try and deciding whether or not you want to add in a bit more paint here. Okay. So pretty shapes here. I really find that the more simple you go, the better the result. I'm really going to do a light light broth consistency for this one. Okay. Okay. We have that initial flower and then coming up. All right. For this next one, I'm going to pick a really light broth consistency. So mostly just water on the brush. Let's go ahead and begin with the initial petal. And then just a bit of water. Okay. All right. The next step is we're going to be adding the stems in, which are going to make a whole lot of difference. You're going to see how it all starts to make a bit more sense and we'll start putting it together on an actual stem, so we'll take a look at structure and composition as the sweet peas come out and as they come up and just looking at how it'll all as we build essentially to creating a bouquet. 7. Wet into Wet - Maroon: Now I'm ready to make that brownish pink. Let's go ahead and we're going to add in the rose red, really beautiful color here. I'm going to swatch it just so you can see what it looks like all on its own, a very strong red and just the capabilities here with the inks because they are so potent and highly concentrated as you get a very opaque result which just makes for really fun water blooms. I'm going to add a bit of water on that just to push back. Really got to rinse my brush off. For you to see the whole spectrum of color. It's beautiful. Okay. So we're going to add in here, adding that Tah blue to create sort of a maroon brownish red pop a little bit more off to the side here. Okay. Okay. With each step, I'm going to attempt to introduce a new color. That way. You will have worked your way through several of the color options and then can continue on if you like. Let's go ahead and swatch that to see what it looks like. Beautiful. Nice M. Okay. I want you to have the coughs consistency on one of your brushes and then the broth consistency on the other. Go ahead and do that. Taking a bit of the paint and then drawing it out further. And then what we're going to do is add a touch of the Janes black. To get a nice cool color here. Just plugging in a little bit here. And a bit more and then adding more water to it. We want there to be a really stark difference between these two colors to create the ultimate effect. Since we're not getting supers structured here. I'll show you as we decide to add more details with this next step. But because we're not adding lots of a defined center and all of those gestural details that we did with the daffodils, we want to make an impact with our colors. Okay. All right. Now our palettes ready. We're going to go ahead and do the same thing except go ahead and put those off to the side for just a moment. With your third brush, a little bit of undersea green here. Plug into the side, or if you need more room, you can get a new palette. I tend to just let my colors blend and merge because we're putting them all together anyway, especially when we're working with this technique. Okay. There we go. Okay. Now we have our three working colors. We should be ready to put it all together. Let's go ahead and start with the broth consistency. It can be a little confusing using this many brushes. Go ahead and slow it down as you need to. The media will stay wet for a while, but just keep in mind that you're wanting to work fluidly here. Let's go ahead and start with the broth. Okay. Filling it in. And touching the edge. Now, that third brush with the undersea green on it, we're going to just run a bit through the center here to get an idea of how that's all going to work together. And we're going to let these colors just play with each other. You see things have to be nice and wet in order for it to work. We have lots of really beautiful blooms happening here, and then what we can do if you're up for it is you can take your fourth brush, adding just water to push back against the color here to create a bloom. We're going to do that all over again because I know using this many brushes can feel overwhelming. That's why having a palette that's ready for it is essential. Okay. So just giving that a minute, and it can also be confusing, remembering which brush has what loaded on it. But as you can see the result is extremely beautiful and as we continue to build, it only gets better and better. To make a little cap here. Okay. Putting that together. Nice even coat, and then taking our cough shirt consistency, and then let's plug in here at the side. You know what? We can even leave it like that. If we don't want to get two over worked, we can just add a touch here and just have that exist as a smaller. But if we want to continue along with it, we can do the same thing over here. What happens though is if you don't leave the white space, you lose the separation. As you can see here, we have some space. And so you have to be careful about what it is that you're adding on here. So let's go ahead and just keep playing with this one. And then what we can do is add the broth consistency here. Okay. Okay. Okay. And then we can push back with that fourth brush against the edges here. And while things are still wet, we can always add in more color too. If you wanted to add a bit more color to the existing sweep, you can come along the edges here, as things dry, you'll see what happens. Go ahead and do that again. Okay. All right. So I have my broth consistency. Let's keep a little separation here this time. So we'll go in at the side, but then we'll come out here. We'll just give it a little moment and let remain to be a bit of separation. I'm going to add a little more of the rose red to my palette to. Things are starting to get a little bit more purple. And that white space acts as a light source, and so you can always decide to keep it in if you like. I feel like it creates a bit of dissonance within the flower if you're not doing it within every one of the flowers. So it's got to be a conscious choice. But then once you've waited for things to dry, you can see a little bit of the colors merging. As we add in more of the green, if we were to add in some leaves to it and you'll see as we do that more and more the onset of new colors invites new interest into everything. We'll put that together. This isn't really where this would go, but just showing you how as we move along, it all starts to make more sense as we put together and pull together a stem. So really beautiful here, the greens and the pinks interacting. Okay. And our cough sy consistency. Let's start here at the middle now and kind of come out here. Nice pretty shape here. We'll give that a minute. Let's do another flower. Let's do a nice little bud here. And another flower off to the side here. Then we're going to put together a couple of different flowers, see how those together. Using our fourth brush with a little water. Let's push back. This is still a little too wet to do that, but we'll try it. Going to create some more hard edges rather than a bleed, but we'll work with it. And then our brush loaded with the undersea green. Let's go ahead and pop in a bit of green here. And add a little bit on the side here. And then we can even come out here, blend it together. Okay. And see how find all those colors look together. My tip for remembering what color you have on each brush is to have a little paper towel off to the side, you can just quickly go, here's my if I'm using a scratch piece of paper, then I can do it on my scratch piece of paper, but I have a paper towel over here and you can just say, Oh, that's right. That's my green. That's my broth consistency and that'll help you to keep track of all the different colors you're working with. Okay. All right. Let's go ahead and do one more and then we'll move along mixing that broth consistency. So this is what my palette is looking like right now. You can see as these dry, they just get more and more beautiful. And you would think initially with just doing two different colors at two different consistencies wouldn't be all that interesting. But as you put it together and add in the green, it all starts to be so beautiful. Here, let's add a little bud here. Okay beginning with that basic clam shell. And with our coughs consistency, we'll keep a little bit of white space in here, come here at the center. And I really like the flowers that have a little bit of white space. I love this one, what ended up happening here. It looks very much like a sweet pea, the way that these petals ruuffle over each other. This one looks a little bit too much clam shell to me. I would probably add in a little something over here just to break it up a little bit, which you can do once things are dry. If you really want a crisp edge, then you would wait until it's dry and then add in another petal over here. And you would just run your brush along the dry side. And then let's go ahead and create one more petal here. And then using our water brush. And then our green brush. Adding a bit more of the green along here, if we were to do some leaves and then popping in another stem here. Let's do another bud here. We'll do another here. I like to do a couple at a time because the paper does stay wet for quite a bit of time. You have the space. Go and then adding a bit of the green to it. See how it's all just coming together beautifully. Then as we work towards building the bouquet and adding all of these colors together, putting them in the same arrangement, you're going to just see how stunning it all starts to look all thanks to the inks. The inks really do create something very special. I hope you're enjoying using them so far. I know I certainly am. But if you wanted to pop in while things are still wet, you could add a purple here, which I still had on my palette. And then you have a really beautiful flower. So we're going to do a little bit more of that. I want to just take you step by step. You can see you started here very basic, moved into something a bit more evolved, and then we'll move into adding another color in the next part. Okay. 8. Wet into Wet - Maroon Part II: Okay. This is essentially going to be the most challenging of all of the steps. We've worked our way here. We have our different consistency. We have a broth over here consisting of the rose red and the Tahoe blue and a bit of the Jines black. That's all that mixed together. I'm going to load that onto my brush. If it's looking a little bit too much like this color, it shouldn't because it's a completely different consistency, but you can add a bit more of the jins black back into it, cool it down, and then set that off to the side. Second brush. We have the rose red and the Tahoe blue. Nice thick consistency. Consistency is going to be key here to achieve the results that we want to achieve. Third color. We have the Tahoe blue and the orchid. Same deal as here, consistency. We just have a different color. We're going to put all of these together to create a beautiful sweet pea and then take our fourth brush and push back the water. Then we will rinse off a brush and add the green into there. I know it sounds like a lot, but I know you can do it, take your time, have your palette set up for success and work through each step along with me. All right, go ahead and put that off to the sign. Going to begin with our broth consistency. Nice fan shape. Take your time. Okay. Second color. Brushing it up against the side. And one more pedal over here. Okay. Okay. We're going to use our brush to push back. And over here. We're going to give that a minute. Using my broth brush to pick up a little bit of the undersea green. Popping that in to come up here. Another stem down here. Okay, rinsing off that brush, going to create a few more. I'm going to give that a minute. Okay. Cough sp consistency here. Okay. And now, with our purple loaded on here, we'll go into this color, which is still nice and wet and adding that third color. And we'll just kind of watch that sink in for a moment. You can go along the edges here. Taking our water brush, pushing back, pushing back. Again here. Taking our third brush, you can add a little bit of color here if you want to. Blend those together. Okay. Well, things are nice and wet. Touch along here in the middle. Really having fun with the bleeds here. Again, while everything is still wet, you have time to add in a new layer color. If you really like that purple in there, you can add that and keep going with it. I try not to do it on every flower just to give some interest to the whole stem at large. You'll see when we build the whole bouquet. The idea is to have each one stand uniquely apart because it is such a simple flower. You don't want it to be simply paste of each flower. Okay. Okay. Adding a bit of green here. Adding some leaves here. Add a bit more green. Just allow those colors to run and play together. The more you allow that freedom to happen, the more beautiful the results. Don't be afraid to just while things are still nice and wet, just begin adding some leaves. We're not going to get too structured here with the leaves today. Not that we usually do. We tend to keep things pretty light and loose, but really this class is focused on these beautiful bleeds and the merging of colors and not focusing on the details. This is nice and wet, so I'm just going to add a bit more green into here. So one note I wanted to make, and I will mention this in the class details, which I always recommend reading over to because I tend to put more information in there is that I expressed that initially, I struggled with the sweepee how best to approach it in a loose gestural way. And it was only in finding out that the more simple and laid back I became the better I was able to at least for my taste express the flower and allow the looseness to really be the main character, you know, of the composition, rather than, I mean, the color is beautiful. And, you know, the blending of the water and the paint is very beautiful, but it's almost the loosenss that I'm attracted to, if that makes sense. Whereas in a bit more of a structured concept, I love all of the little details that I pull out, you know, just like the speckles and the spots and the center of the flowers. So with this, it was really important that I have an idea in mind and really focused on allowing myself to not overwork and to get too attached to wanting things to look exactly the way that I see them in nature. For those of you who struggle with perfectionistic tendencies, that might be a struggle for you as well. I just invite you all things are wet. Just keep moving them along the technique we practiced initially. I will really help you work out like I said, some of those problems where you just feel stuck and stagnant. But as you put the paint together, and it's a complicated process. It's something even as a professional artist, having two brushes is enough, but then to add three and four, I'm really challenging you here with this material. K that and know that it's not going to be a home run right out of the gate. Give yourself time to work up to each level and give yourself grace and permission to just be messy and explore and play. I mean, you see, I initially created a whole page of just whack a doodle sweepes all over the place figuring out, Okay, what did I want to do? You'll see here with a bit more of the structure, I plugged in some specs and speckles and some lines, and I really didn't love that. We'll do that here just because I don't love something doesn't mean that you aren't going to gravitate towards. I'm going to do that a little bit now that things are dry and I've given it a moment to settle. But I want you to, like I said, give yourself permission and allow the looseness to really be the main character energy here with this class. Okay. So before we move on to exploring a new color, I want to take our brush and add a few of those detail markings in like the first flower that I showed you the beautiful brown pink and all of those speckles and markings. I didn't love it when I put it onto the sweet peas, but I think we should at least do it once so that we can see how it all looks together, and then we can decide unanimously that we don't like it. Or maybe we will. Things tend to work out differently. You know, each time. So the paper may not have been quite as dry or maybe it was too wet, and all of those little those little factors end up playing into how it all comes together. So let's go ahead and do that now. I'm just going to take my brush and I'm going to run through the petals here and just add a few little markings. This is done with a very loose hand. We practice this again and again in our classes. But if you need to off to the side, practice how to graze the brush against the paper. It's really using the toe of the brush and lightly. You're going to come a little bit closer. Your fingers are going to be on the feral. You're not going to sit so far back here because then the lines will get chunky. You want to have a little bit of a tighter grip but not so tight that you're death gripping it on the feral and you're going to come right above on top of the brush and just some really nice loose markings here. Grazing the paper. Things are still actually a little wet, if you can believe that. It's been like maybe 6 minutes since I painted that and things are still a little bit wet. So you could wait until they're even drier are more dry if you like. But this will give you an idea of what it would look like if you were to add just in a few more details. It really starts to bring things to life. I'm liking this better than I liked it before. I think the defining difference is that these petals are a bit darker, so the lines don't pull away so much as they did when I was painting a little bit lighter. Okay. Really trying to just not overwork it here and just a few little markings here and there. You can do some speckles in here if you like, as there were in the inspiration picture. And again, just in case you missed it, I will attach the image on my Pintreb. Okay. Okay. I'm going to end this video just because this was its own little thing where I'm just talking you through the looseness and showing you a bit of the embellishments that you can make on the sweepe if you want to add those gestural strokes. You don't have to. It's completely optional, but that will give you an idea of how it all works together. You can see this see is so sweet all on its own, but will look even more beautiful when we assemble it together in a bouquet. Follow me into the next video. 9. Wet into Wet - Peach: Okay. Are you ready for a fun new color? We're going to create sort of a corly peach here with the ink. So I'm mixing up the dandelion yellow and a bit of the orchid, and I'm going to mix that together. I'm trying to be respectful of your time while also keeping in mind that there might be a few beginning students who are ambitious and wanting to take this class. Walking you through the steps as much as possible. Although this is geared as an intermediate class for certain and even in some aspects, more of a advanced class, I want to make sure that everyone has a chance to succeed here. Okay, so there we have our really lovely peach. Now, here's the thing with these and I wanted to do one that was more softer is that you're not going to get quite the contrast as you get with these purples and maroons and the greens. It's more of a light color. What we did initially when we were doing that light periwinkle, you just can't get to pigmented here with these colors because they're just on the lighter end of the color spectrum. Keep that in mind, but for those of you who love those soft delicate colors, this might completely be your jam. We're going to do the same thing by loading your brush with the cough sy consistency. Then using your other brush. To pull out the color. This is where I remind you to empty out your watercup and to rinse those brushes because they will hold the purple and the pinks and that is not what we want for this flower. We want more of this peach color. Got a bit of the Jines black in it as well just from what was on my brush. But otherwise, it's pretty Clean. Okay. So let's go ahead and we're going to do the same thing here. Just to show you one more color. We'll add the greens in there as well. And then if you like, you can add those gestural markings. Okay. So let's start with the broth consistency. Filling that in. And cough sy consistency. I'm going to move a little quicker here because you're getting a little bit more further in the material, so I won't take quite as long to do each step. Then using our water brush, make sure it's nice and rinsed. Can push back a bit here. Okay. And with that third brush, undersea green to run that through. Just putting it on my brush here. I'm going to put it right here in the middle, running that stem all the way through while things are nice and wet, so beautiful, such a pretty color. Let's add another stem here, touching along the edge. Maybe a leaf or two. Again, try not to get two, focused on those leaves. Okay. Okay. Now we have a framework. Let's go ahead and keep going Broth consistency. Playing again with those angles that we practiced initially. If you're struggling to get positioning and the angles, go back to those initial videos where we were practicing the sketching to see how those angles work together. I really love these two colors together. Too much pain. There we go. Okay, let's keep building here. I touch the side. Okay. I'm going to use our water brush now to push back here and push back here. Come over my little peach lines here. I think I picked up a little peach when I was working, so we'll darken that up a bit. Again, this is all just practice. I'm not going to be thinking too hard about each step along the way. Letting the looseness be the main character. Green in there. Okay. I'm going to do a couple of buds. Plug in a bit of green. Just letting it all run together. Do a little bit of the coughs consistency in there. Do one right here. Playing on this flower. Oops. I think I used the wrong brush there. That's all right. I'll soften it off a little bit more more of a pink, and then coughs are consistency here. And we'll do the same thing here. Go. Putting a bit of cough syp in there. Then just let that sit for a moment. Things are quite wet. You have to keep in mind since we're moving a little bit quicker. Things are staying wet a little bit longer. Then we will use our water brush to push back at create that beautiful bleed. Things will get even more beautiful as they dry. Let's go ah and plug in a few leaves here. Okay. Just playing here. We're not trying to get the leaves perfect. We'll work on that as we assemble the bouquet. But really wanting you to just get an idea of how the green presses up against the wet media, how it all interacts together. There's time to it and make it more elevated and precise as you practice the material again. The initial run through should never be you trying to get every leaf in the right spot because you're going to miss out on the exploratory phase, which is so essential for not only anchoring joy into the process and just, you know, creative epiphanies, but it's what lays the foundation for the entire piece. So you need to work out all of those little bugs, find all of those little details that you like, and then as you put it together, you know, as we do in the bouquet at the end, then you can make those choices that are a little bit more calculated a bit more intentional. Just sort of playing here. Okay. Now that things are a little bit more dry over here. Let's practice those sweet little curly cues that we saw in our reference image. We're going to go ahead and practice them off to the side. I'm going to show you if you happen to have the velvet touch brush, this is the one I recommend. It has a really nice point to it. More than the heritage series. I invite you if you have that brush to use it. If not, no big deal, a fresh brush or one that is still quite pointed, will work great. 10. Painting The Curlicues: So much like we approach these previous sweet peas with the gestural markings, we're going to apply the same technique with those sweet little curly cues and lines. So we're just going to be grazing the paper and we're going to be moving the brush in a way to create those fun little lines. So we have something that looks a little bit like that. Okay. Your brush may lift up at certain points, especially if you are moving very lightly, and that's okay. I feel like that actually brings just a really special interest and intrigue into the painting. You can go the other direction. You had some that were really more just like curves like this. You can play with how curly you want to make it. You can do some real corkscrew curls or you can just keep it really light here. Okay. But I would suggest definitely filling up a page because the more you do it, the more comfortable it's going to become. You can work on getting some curls that are a little bit tighter together like these and then do a really one or you can have them spread out. Again, I think where the brush lifts up, it actually makes for moments. Okay. Just be filling up the whole page of these before you move into actually putting them on the paper because, you know, you get a little bit more anxious as you're moving along. Practice both directions, moving towards the left, moving towards the right, moving upward, moving downward, and just get real familiar with that whole before you plug in. Let's go ahead and add those onto the sweep up here. I'm just going to get some more pain on my brush. You're wanting to use a cough S consistency just so you know. It will dry two to three times lighter. So you can already see when we applied it, it was a bit darker and now it's lightening up, but not too dark. The reason I say practice in all directions is because you can move your paper around to get a better angle. But sometimes if you're painting, you just want to be able to move in all sorts of different directions. So the more able you are to do that, just the more enjoyable I feel like the experiences. Okay. Let's go ahead and start here at the top. Okay. And let's see I think to be right here. We connect that down. Very cute. I think these curly cues are so fun and are essentially the thing that just bring it all together. You can see as we've continued to build upon each step as we've learned. Each new part brings us a little bit closer to feeling like there's sense to the piece. I know that when we begin initially, you see these things where we're at this stage, and you're just like, how is this ever going to be beautiful? And I find myself struggling too sometimes thinking like, Oh, my gosh, is this ever going to pan out? Am I going to be able to make something that's makes sense, and it does. It all comes together as you patiently wait for each step. All right. Let's see. Let's do a nice line here. Also, what the curly cues can do is provide a directional identity for the flowers. We talk a lot about that. And so if your stem is kind of looking like it's going too much in one direction, you can use these lines to kind of pivot and move the painting into a different direction. So we talked about that in our in our daffodil class where we created a bouquet and then we took out two daffodils and really extended them far over to the left side of the page to create this contrast of a composition where we have a lot of flowers going in one direction, and then we had a couple, and it really made just for an interesting way to assemble the bouquet. If you didn't have a chance to watch that class, I definitely recommend it because we explored a lot of different techniques and approaches. So Right around here is probably where I would stop. I mean, there's definitely more potential, but you don't want to add so many that it becomes unspecial if that makes sense. So choose your moments. If you want to go back within the practice pieces, you can just kind of begin plugging in where you feel like they might be most beneficial and serve the entire painting at large. But I I wouldn't do every single branch. Oops. Sorry, I came out of the frame there. Let's see, maybe up here a little bit. But again, like I said, the velvet touch brush really is wonderful. It has such a nice point to it. It makes this a little bit easier because the stroke is not easy. I know it looks easy because I practice these strokes all the time. If you're not getting it, please be patient with yourself. I know that initially it can look more like this. And it's just it's so easy to chunk up your strokes when it's just hard. It is just hard. Sometimes we need someone to just acknowledge that it's hard and it is. So please be patient with yourself, fill up a page, moving your hand back and forth, all around, grazing that paper, and giving yourself lots of room to play here. Okay? We have covered so much in such a little amount of time. I really challenged you here. I feel like I do with each class. I hope that you love the way that we've approached things so far. I tried to show you some simple structure and then making things a bit more detailed for those of you who love all of the pretty details. Hopefully, you will find your happy place within the framework that I've set here. We're going to finish up. We're resuming the next video, which will be our class project. Clean off your palette and your brushes if you need to and join me for the next part of our time together. 11. Class Project Part 1: All right. Welcome my friends to the class project portion of our time together. I have moved my paper so that it is in portrait orientation. I like to do this when we're working with a bouquet because it gives a little bit more length here for the stems. But if you like working with your paper and landscape, you can definitely do that. I've also added a palette to separate my green so that they're not flooding into my palette of peach and coral and pinks and all of that just to keep things a little more separate since we're going to be using several colors. Keep that in mind. Additionally, give your inks a little shake if everything is settling to the bottom, just to freshen them up and make sure your brushes are clean as we're going to begin with the lighter colors first and then we'll move into those beautiful deeper hues and finish strong with those. Let's go ahead. I have loaded up my brushes. I have the same color that we were using in the last portion. I have the cough sy consistency on one brush and the broth consistency on the other brush, and we're going to begin here at the middle of the page and begin building our bouquet. As always, we're going to try and stay away from the sides of the paper so that we leave ourselves lots of room to add leaves and curly cues and bring a center focus here to the composition. Let's start here with a beautiful fan shape coloring in. And then we'll plug in with the cough ser consistency. Okay. Then giving it just a moment. We'll use our water brush to create those beautiful fireworks. And then using our velvet touch brush, I'm going to add a little bit of the undersea green while things are nice and wet. Okay. Go. That's where I'm imagining that stem is landing right here coming towards the center. Then I'm also just going to bring it through. I really working with some beautiful, nice wet and wet green on top of the orange, all looks beautiful together. We're going to continue building here. Setting things off to the side that we don't need the green brush, can turn your paper if you need to as we go about this next sweep. Go running those two flowers up against each other. Let that settle for just a moment and continue working here. And right here at the center. This flower is still very wet, so I'm just going to let it sit there for a moment. And picking up my brush to add a bit more of the green. Just adding a bit of the stem work in here while we can while things are nice and wet. Okay. And then I'm going to begin moving the stem in this direction. We're wanting to create a sense of flow here. We'll do this first. I don't want to cover up where the sweet peas would be. I'm just going to create a nice stem down here towards the end of the page. This helps to remind me okay. I'm staying in the center here, I'm not going too far left or right, but I'm beginning to create some flow here. Okay. Using our water butt brush to kick back here or push back. You can kick back. But I suggest you also push back. I'm going to do the cough serve consistency first here as I create another sweet pea. I'm going to turn my paper just a bit as well to get a nice angle on this flower and touch it right against the side here. And then with my broth consistency, am I using my water brush. Okay, we have a nice little bud here. I'm going to create a nice stroke to kind of curve over to do the same thing and begin to plug in some sweet peas down in this direction. Also going to add some green here and connect the stem to the flowers. Again, bringing things back to center, creating these nice long stems. Let's continue building here. Turning your page if you need to. Having a few beds burned below. Yeah, continuing to make the connections here. Add in a few leaves as well. I want to make sure you leave space for your curly cues, so keep that in mind as you're working. Right. Using your water breast, you can kick back here. And if you like, you can also head back in to darken up some of the areas if you want to do that. You don't have to. Okay. Okay. We're just about done with the peach and coral, and then we're going to add in a different color palette than one we were using previously when we were mixing the two colors together. Go to put a few more leaves over here. Using broth consistency. Okay. Okay. And now we're going to create a few stems to sort of filter through the middle here that we're going to add to our next arrangement of. This will give us a framework. Adding it a bit of color here. Well, things are nice and wet. Plugging in the green, adding a few little gestural markings. It's pretty stems connecting. You can do the same thing up here, adding a few gestural markings. Remember, we're just using the tip of the brush. I'm not going to add those lines in that we used. When I was teaching you how to add the speckles on the marks, not going to do it with the peach ones, but we'll do that with the other color. You can, if that's something you want to do a little later on. But I'm not going to do it just so as not to overwhelm the flower. Okay. Okay. Okay. I like how things are looking here. I'm going to add one more stem to circle back here and provide a little bit more interest. This will help bring things up and around as we bring the other set of sweet peas in this direction. I like the lines that we see in the sweet peas and I want to continue to try and capture that. Let's go ahead and add another flower. Okay. You had a bit more color here. Handing my water brush. To make a few more blues. Okay. All right. I'm going to pause here because I'm going to clean off my palette a little bit and get things ready for the next round of sweeps. So part two of the class project will be below for you. 12. Class Project Part II: Okay, we're back ready for part two of the class project. Have a look at my palette here. You can see that I've mixed together, the rose red along with the Tahoe blue to make that really beautiful brownish red. I also have the broth consistency. This is this color pulled out. I've lessened the color value by adding water and added a touch of that Jines black. The same thing we did initially, I just did it already so that I could walk you through it and we're not having to spend too much time doing that. Then I have that loaded on this brush, and then I have the co sir consistency loaded on this brush. Then we also have third color, which is more along the lines of that purple that we used when we were doing this sweep. That's where we're at. We don't have a fourth brush for the green, so we'll have to be rinsing off a brush when we want to add green in there. Just make sure your piles are nice and ready for you. Load those brushes, set them off to the side, add a little bit more ink if you need to. Okay. Add a bit more ink to this pile. There we go. Nice egg plant purple. It was looking a little too close to this color. We really want to lean into the color potential here. Okay. So now that we've laid a foundation. We have something that's really beautiful. We have some messy structure here, intentionally messy. We're going to begin to pull the sweep in this direction to fill up this portion of the page. With composition, we never want to have things just completely chunked or plugged into the middle. We want some things happening in the lower regions of the page or the upper regions of the page just to lead the eye in an aesthetic way. So we've done our part by anchoring the piece here in the middle. Now we're going to be a little bit more playful, and we're going to come up here into the higher regions of the paper and then also down below. We'll do that with curly cues and also with the sweet piece obviously. We've laid the groundwork here by adding the stem. We're going to build on here and we're also going to begin to mix the sweet piece together, so it doesn't look as though they were separately created. Let's go ahead and do that, making sure I have the right brush here and refreshing this brush, moving things back and forth, and then we can beat it. Maybe our breath consistency. And now let's plug in here. So you can wait until these flowers are dry, or if you like the look, you can obviously overlap we go. Giving that just a moment. I'm going to do the same thing down here. Okay. Thank you. Okay. So kind of working around these leaves here. You can re wet them if you like. So you can take your water brush and just re wet it so it's all kind of blending together. Or you can keep it separate, whatever you like. Let's use our water brush to push back a little here. And let's continue building. Go ahead and touch the outside here. I pause for just a moment so that it's not immediately going in there. So just giving it a little moment. Because this color is so dark, it works really nicely over the stems. Okay. I'm going to add a sweet pea up here as well. I don't mind the look of the stem here because everything is so loose. I like that it looks it's a shadow in the background. Okay. Okay. And then what we can do with our third brush, we've kind of been waiting here. Because we can add another color. If you like, don't have to. And use your water brush. Okay. Adding a few more buds. Okay. And then using our water bag. Okay. Okay. I'm going to use my water brush briefly to dip into the undersea green and begin pulling the bouquet over in this direction. I had a chunk on my brush. Okay. Okay And adding a bit of the green. Now we can practice those calculated strokes being intentional with where we place them. Let's look at our bouquet for a moment. We have a little bit of symmetry happening here. That's not typically my favorite thing unless I'm working with a pattern. What I'm going to do here is I'm going to bring down some flowers into the lower region so that it feels a little bit more off kilter, which actually brings more balance into the piece. We don't want it symmetrical, we want it balanced. Those things are not the same thing. These calculated strokes will allow us to do that. M. Okay. Okay. I'm going to turn my paper around just to get a nice angle on this flower here. And dipping into my cough ser consistency. Okay, I use my water brush here to push back. And just taking a look at what you have, if you wanted to add some more colors, some more purples to the palette, you absolutely can. I weaving these together so that it looks like they're put together in a bouquet and not so one on each side. Let go ah and create another flower here. And then we'll dip into our purple over here. And picking up a little bit of that blue. Okay. And picking up my water brush. I like the idea of there being some merging here. Okay. Okay. And then picking up our water brush. Bending those two together a bit. Adding a bit more water here. And now we have something that I feel is much more balanced and we're going to plug in a few more leaves before we add the curly cues. So using my velvet touch brush, Mm. And we'll add in some gestural markings as well. Through our leaves here. And through the center here. Remember the looseness is the main character. I keep saying that in my head. This is not a flower where everything is supposed to make perfect sense. Okay. I'm going to go ahead and add a few of the curly cues now. When I'm looking at the piece, I'm figuring out where can I put those markings so that it feels like it is an extension of the flowers and not something separate. That takes a little bit of thought. Stand back, look at the piece as a whole and figure out where could some extra markings benefit the piece overall. There's some room to play in certain areas. I'm going to do one down here. Make sure if you want, you can even wait until things are dry before you add them because it's going to be difficult to navigate if you have some wet spots. You may want to wait until things are dry. Okay. I feel like that benefits the piece without taking away from it, without adding too many moments. I feel like it leads the eye beautifully through the bottom of the piece up through the top. I'll pull you out a little bit. It's always a balance between getting you close enough to see what's going on, especially in this orientation, and also making sure that you're seeing everything that's happening. This is typically where I would stop. Things are a nice balance of gestural and loose. Things are still drying, however. There might be a moment where I see that things are still wet and they're drying a little bit lighter than I might want. I'll go back in with a darker color or I'll see this stem and just think, Oh, let's just darken that up a little bit, add some gestural lines here. Just to add a bit more interest. You're going to be able to notice the same things as you move through your painting. The last thing that we can do and we're going to have to wait until things are dry is to add those gestural markings. Go ahead. Take a look at what you have, figure out if there anything else needs to be added, and then meet me back here and we'll add in those final markings to the piece. 13. Class Project Part III: Okay. The painting is dry. I'm ready to add in those gestural markings. So I have my palette all prepared here. I'm using the number six elvet touch brush, that nice pointy brush, and I'm going to go through and pick out which flowers I want to add those markings to. All right. I do? Okay. Okay. Just using the toe of the brush to those petals. Trying to make sure every marking isn't exactly the same. Again, you don't want it to just look like and paste. Okay. I've decided that I do want to make a few gestural markings through the other sweet peas. I thought that I would like just the loose look of it altogether, but I think a few intentional markings would look really nicely with it altogether. So I'm going to come into my ink collection over here and I'm going to bring in a little bit of the burn orange. I'm going to add that to the palette. Okay. And I'm going to mix that with my rose red and Tahoe blue mixture. And I'm going to do the same thing with the sweeties. Careful and mindful of my wrist. Sometimes it just takes a couple markings to make it feel as though everything belongs together. And that's what I feel here in this case. I feel those markings actually complement the curly es so well because they're similar, but they're just different enough that they feel as they stand alone too. Okay. So there you have it. I'm going to pull you back here. You can see the whole And I think that we did a beautiful job of blending the two flowers together, using a variety of colors and employing gestural approach while allowing the looseness and the bleeds to really shine here in this project. Um, I know this might have been a stretch for some of you who aren't used to possibly using inks or just with the wet into wet technique, which it really was so focused on. I hope that you learned something new. That's always my deepest hope is that you learned something new and you also found something that just feels like you that um you know, when you go to paint, it just speaks of what you love and what you gravitate towards. As always, I so appreciate you spending your class time here with me. I love our time together, and I'm already looking forward to the next month's flower and just a reminder to upload your projects so that I can have a look at them and just see what you've been up to and to tag me on Instagram. Thank you again for joining me today and look forward to seeing you next time. Happy creating my friend.