"Millie's Meadow" Floral Ditsy - Watercolour, Gouache & Ink

1. Welcome To Millie's Meadow: Welcome to Millis Meadow. We're going to be creating a ditzy design. Ditzes are made up by regular patterns of small flowers or motifs, multi directional and a scattered placement. I use dises a lot in my design work. And here are some of my diss, which I've done for the design industry. The great thing about them is once you zoom out, it all becomes really cohesive. There are some large design houses whose identity was built around ditsy designs, and growing up in the design world, they influenced me hugely. So today, I wanted to share with you my signature technique. So we're going to primarily be using translucency and opacity. And we're going to achieve that by using different values of paint, starting with less value and working up to a greater value. And if translucency and opacity are the star of the show, Detailing is its support. We're not only going to change the value of our petals. We're also going to go from larger and to smaller and more detailed. This also creates a sense of depth. If you're new to skill share, let me acquaint you with our projects and resources area, which is just below the class. Here, you can upload your project, and it's brilliant because you can not only keep in touch with me. But also you can get tips and a whole lot of support from your fellow students. So let's move on with our class. 2. Materials: Let me run through materials with you. This is a fabriano artistic hot pressed, and this is the five by seven pad. Let's take you through brushes first. I don't quite know what shape this is, but I can refer to as my pointed filbert, and this is a size 12 memory point. These two blue ones came in a set, which I use a lot. First, I use the size four. This is master touch aquamarine and its ab, and the size two in this range as well. I'll leave all the details for brushes. Finally, just a fine liner. This is Billy Schools. If you don't have a fillbert, don't worry. I'll take you through how to use a round brush as well for this class. Here I have a size two coda, and this is travel brush. Here I have a size four Princeton Neptune. I would normally go up to a size six, probably, but I don't have access to all of my art materials at the moment. I used a size ten in the demo. This is an cow go through paints, we're going to be using an awful lot of white. I've used white gh, but you could also use white watercolor. That's our friend today, the white. The green that I chose for the initial layer, which I actually mixed with some quin lin is permanent green light. This is the Daniel Smith brash too, but it can be watercolor or any choice of paint that you like interchange wherever you feel necessary. The Quin lilac, as I just mentioned, I used just to make this a little bit earthier for our first layer. I also mix it with the titanium white for some little pink butts that we do towards the end of the class. Use any pink that you like, any red. Pink or red, mixed with the white or mixed with the green would be perfect. As for yellows, I used a hands yellow deep go again, but it could be watercolor. I used hands yellow light. I think I only used a tiny bit of this, and this is watercolor as well. These two on the side, we're going to use the black for the centers of the flowers, but you can mix a black or you can mix a brown or a gray, I should say. The way to do that is to mix three primaries together. We have a blue here and just before I go into that, this is Prussian blue, but any blue of your choice, and I use a ti amo of this towards the end of the class. It was on my palette and is a little bit out of view, so I apologize in advance. So we have the three primaries here close enough because we have the pink yellow and blue. If you mix all of those through as we have in previous classes, it will turn into either a gray or a brown depending on how warm or how cool it is. If you have a black that will make things a lot easier. As for inks, now I use inks just because they're very vibrant, but also they make lovely first layers because we're going to be using translucency and opacity today. The inks are more translucent, generally speaking, guash is more opaque. We're working with that and going through the full spectrum to very opaque. The inks that I used here are doctor PH Martin's 25 B olive green, is the radiant concentrated at color, and lemon yellow, which I think I referred to as daffodil yellow in the class. So correction that is lemon yellow, one radiant concentrated a color. I think I also used a tiny bit of this, which is 25 H hands yellow medium, doctor PH Martin's hydrous. I accidentally, I think, dipped my brush into 14 H yellow cha. I don't think I meant to use it, but I just want to show it in case you wanted to use that if you had it in your stop. Okay. Apart from that, all I needed then was just to take off the page. It's not necessary, but I do like the way it outlines your work and just makes it look really finished and polished and clean. When you're using white and mixing with white, you have to be really careful to be using a clean brush, constantly can just keep washing a brush between going back to white because you can pick it up from anywhere. It seems to come in from all angles. Sometimes it can pick it up from your palette by accident, sometimes off the blotting paper that it might have. Sometimes because your water has got dirty. Clean water and white, that's what we need primarily in this glass. Let's move on to our next lesson. 3. Preparing our Palette: First of all, I'm going to make sense of the palette for you. I started out on this before realizing that I was going to make a class from it. I was working with paints that were already on my palette. In the first lesson, we're going to be doing the initial leaves, and I used a mix of permanent green light, which is here and quinacridme, light, which is here. What that does is it just makes the bright green just a little bit more natural. Let's start to do that now. I'm just reawakening the green here and this is the gash but you can use watercolor. Then all I did was just bring over a little bit of that quinn it makes this gorgeous natural color. So I'll just pull that out for you so you can see that. Gorgeous. Okay. In the second lesson, we were mixing a white, but just with water because we're wanting some translucency here. So just going to bring a little bit of that down here. Then I can show you this over this green here. So you can see it's very watery. Can I add a little bit there so you can see. This is the first translucent layer of white over the green, and we'll build on that, but you can see that it has a lovely effect. For the third lesson, we put down some translucent yellow petals. I'm just going to bring it over here so that it's easier to see and I can put some fresh paint down. We were using a white g or water color. Okay. And all I did was just bring some of that over and it's so concentrated, you can easily mix a lovely buttery yellow if you add more even more color. And what we were doing there was similar to the white petals. We were just pulling these over the layers underneath. For the fourth layer, I actually used the 25 H handsy yellow, and this is where I mixed it, so I'm just going to add a little of that I'm running out here. Let me go. And we're trying to reach here a 50 50 mix. So I'm going to bring over quite a lot of the white mix that into a 50 50, a little bit more water, I think. And I do want to block this because we're still going for layers. So I'm going to take a lot off my brush. It's a little thicker than this layer. I put more yellow in it so you can see. But we could also add more white to that as well. So for lesson five, we're using yet more pigment to water. I'm just going to clear this away so beautiful color, but I need this to be very clean because we're now going into just white. I'm going to pull this over that green there so you can see what we're aiming for here. It's quite tacky there, adding a little bit more water. I think that's about right. This is probably a 65% or 70% pigment to water. You can start to see there that we're getting a lot more coverage. This is a lot more opaque. Now we're going to move to 90% pigment. 90% pigment going in with a damp brush, not too much water. All we're doing really is adding enough water to make it move and let's just see how that's shown up. You can start to see the different layers and how opaque this is even next to this one here. I just pull along here. For layer eight, where we do the inner yellow petals more pigmented. I brought out my anti yellow light watercolor, but any yellow that you like. The reason why we're using watercolor or gouache is because we started out with the inks, which are very soft and flowy. Now we're wanting quite a lot of pigment to water because we started out with the inks, which are very soft and flowy. Now we're wanting quite a lot of pigment to water. Then I just added a bit of white putting some out there because I need it to flow. So I'm just bringing some of that white over to my hands yellow. We put it over the green. When we get to the flower centers, we're actually going to use a little tiny bit of black. So I happen to have ivory black, but any black would be great for this, and we're just needing a tiny bit, so I tend to just put this in between the wells. Again, we're going to be mixing this with 90% pigment and ten water. In the class, we're going to use a liner brush, but I just wanted to show you what it looks like when it's pulled out a little bit. That's the black and we're going for that mix of dark with a little bit of water. That's just because we're using it very sparingly and we'll do that in brush practice. The other thing for the centers is to mix a peach. You can mix your yellow with whichever pink or red echoes and on the side of the yellow, I think, it's a lovely peachy color. All I did there was I just put little centers in the middle of the flowers. It's even smaller than that. Let me just pull this out. So you can see the color. You could certainly err on the side of the yellow if you wanted. Okay. But again, these are tiny little blobs even, so we want to keep control by having that mostly pigment with a little bit of water. Then when we get to the bright leaves that we're going to do, we can mix what we have here with some of this this and just make a really bright spring of springy green. Just adding a little bit of yellow mix or white and not the red this time because we're going to keep it nice and bright. It looks a lot brighter than one where we added the red. And we will be using a lot of pigment to water again. I'm just going to pull it out so you can see the color. And sometimes, I like to add a little bit of blue because it feels to me that it brings the piece together and it calms it a little bit. Very reluctant to come out of the tube but got there in the end. This again, very thick. Enough just to do little blobs, nice control, and we're going to just add some white to that. I'll just pull that out for you to see. Just so you have an idea of what you would like to mix. Any blue, and you can just mix it with the white or a little bit of pink, whatever you fancy. But for this, I think I just use the Prussian blue and a little bit of white. You could also use hands yellow deep. You could also use this to mix into your pink for a peach. So just pick a top and mix it with the hands yellow light to get somewhere in between. It's just another choice of yellow, but you don't need to have this. It's just a lot warmer than the hands yellow light, which is quite a cool yellow. I realized when I stopped filming that it didn't pick up the pink mixing. I'm just going to redo this for you. It is just a mix of quinacridone light for your choice of pink or red and titanium white gas. This is water color and the white is gas. But you can interchange and just used what you have. That's a 50 50 mix. It's quite bright and it all depends on how much contrast you want. I wanted quite subtle layers, but you could go in with a very bright pink for the buds and for the inner centers of the flowers. Then if you wanted to have a paler mix, you could have this kind of mixture here. It's a beautiful color. M. 4. Brush Practise Part 1 : Moving on to brush strokes. I'm going to pick up my filbert. This is the memory 0.1. But you don't need to have this brush. Now, let me just demonstrate what we're going to do for that first layer. We want quite a lot of pigmentoal brush, but maybe we're going for a 50 50. I'm just pressing down as far as I can and dragging it up and then just twisting a little bit. I wouldn't worry about the finish of the brush because we're going to be adding so many layers on top. Pressing it down and pulling it up. Let's try that again. Allowing it to fan out. Particularly because this has a point on it, you may not want that. As you push down with this brush, it does make a can a fill book shape anyway. Pressing down quite hard and then twisting. Let me show you where the fill. This would be a size eight, it's quite big actually. This would be very similar shape. Let me demo that with the round brush. I'm using good. This is a size ten, which is good for this size of leaf. But as you go, we're going to be reducing the size of our brush. With a round brush, you try to create the same shape as a bit. We can do that by just allowing the brush to fan out quite a lot and then bring it up. It's a similar shape, it's not exactly the same shape, and you need to work your brush a little bit more, but I think it looks really nice. We're going down and wiggling the brush so it fans out, bringing it, drag it along the page. Let's do that again here. Don't feel you have to be at a loss if you don't have a field rate, there's always something we can do. I'm always trying to think of things that you may already have in stock and give you alternatives because art materials are way too expensive, I think. That's pretty much our first layer. For layer two, we used a very translucent white, but it's the same brush shape. First of all, let me just show you where the round brush. I'll just pull it over these green ones so you can see. I'm doing it a little more pigmented just so you can see because it's very hard with translucent layers. Allowing the brush to fan out bing it up to the point Mince your brush, and let's try again. Exactly the same movement. And I will get my memory point back. I'm just going to put this in here because I've got quite a lot of color going on there. Wash your brush really well when you're using white. Then with the filbert, we're doing the same exact movement as the green underneath and I show you how to lay these down. They can go in between the leaves or we could pull them over the leaf. That's just as simple as the other green. Exactly the same movement as the green underneath. Here, I'm just showing you with the round brush how to do the transparent yellow layer. Again, keeping it transparent means more water than you would normally use. We're looking for something like 30% pigment, 70 water. Then as we go through mixing other colors, we're going to get more and more pigmented as we go along. For this next layer, which is layer five in the lesson, I used hydras. It just is a lot than the concentrated water color, and I mix that I've only got a tiny bit left of that. Okay. The brush stroke doesn't change too much, but we're going down to smaller brushes as we go through the class. This is size four fiber. There are two strokes that we could use. We can use the full brush. We're putting splaying out again just as we did with the leaves underneath and twist. We can do that again here. And the other brush drop is just to use the side of the brush for a side petal. Let's try that again over the green leaves. So we're aiming to allow the brush to glide, but we do want a lot of pigment on there as well. I'll just demo that with a small round brush for you. This is the size for Princeton Neptune. For this, if you want a fill shape, the same as with the larger round brush, we're going to wiggle and fan it out and then bring it in and twist. Let's do the same here. W fan it out, and then bring it up. You could go for the shape of the round brush and just have a more pointed petal if you like. Which is equally as nice. Then if you have a smaller gilbert, we can go down to a size two. And this is for the inner petals. It's pretty much the same brush stroke as this here. For the inner petals, we're going for a smaller movement. Now what I often do is I don't go full on like this with my brush. I can use it side on. I'm using the side of the tip if you like men pulling it through. Let me just show you the different movements that we can do with that. If you wanted to vary the direction of your brush strokes, we can start by doing four brush. So your size two though, very small and then pulling that down like this. Let's do that again. We can also go up, it's harder, but the more that you integrate that into style, the easier it becomes. We've got the down, we've got the up. We can do side sweep. We can do side sweep. We could also do these angles here. I often use it in my work. The way that I would do that, I wouldn't approach it like this you can do, but I can approach it side on and I pull the side of the son It's really hard to demo, but let me do that again over here. I'm using the side halfway down the brush and then fanning it out. It creates a really nice petal shape. I really like it because it's slightly irregular. If I did that from this side, I would be going in again like this and then pulling it in. Side of my brush again here, tip and then side of the brush. So that's what I used here, used tiny little strokes. And if I want to do one here, I could do this one here. Coming in between these two petals. It would be this movement. Four brush arm downwards movement. Side movement, this stroke here, tip, flare to the side and bring the side of the bush down. I've got a size two round brush here, so I'll demo that too. We to do inner pink petals. There's nothing much different here. I'm going to use the same strokes. I just wanted to show you quickly, and I'm mixing all the colors a lot brighter than the actual project just so that you can see. But you could, by all means go with any color scheme you like or go in with a very deep pink likeness. We're getting smaller with our movements here. What I was doing there if we go on this area here, we can do side. We can do that side sweep. And now just demoing this with coder number two. I do like this brush for making petals and it's so easy to hold and like with it being a travel brush. So with this, you can either just go with the shape of the brush. This is it's normal kind of brush stroke, or you can do the little fan movement that we tried earlier with the other petals. Down and then fan it out as much as you can, and then bring it up. Fan it out and bring to it tip. You definitely could do this class with all round brush. 5. Brush Practise Part 2: And then we get into the flower centers. I'm mixing some black here, and this is 90% pigment, 10% water. Just enough to allow your brush to glide. We're also going to take off the excess as well because we've got a lot of control here. First of all, let's just do some little dots and dashes here. I'll make them a little larger and then you can see what I'm doing. Just allowing my brush to dance. It doesn't need to be a complete circle. So very, very simple and economic movements. It's best to go in with this once all the petals are dry, but mine are a little bit wet here still, but I can still show you what I mean. Just allowing your brush to dance, some dots, dashes. I do like this. It's so minimal and yet so effective. Then we could do a little center. As I just showed you earlier, we can mix a cana peachy color, which I think is here. Let me pull down again. A little bit of yellow, a little bit of red, and you've got i peachy color. Then again, 90% pigment ten water, blot bit and then we're just doing little blobs, maybe like half moons or full circles. These little details do matter because this is like a peach made up of the yellow and the pink that we've used adds as a way of blending the colors together. Cute? I think so. I do like doing these little details a bit, but quite easy to do because all we're doing is circles or a whole circle, if you want or a blob, and that's it for the sentence. I'm going to do a technique then with dry brushing. I'm just making sure that I have a really clean brush. This takes a little bit of practice, but once you got the hang of it, such a lovely thing to do. It makes your piece look a bit angelic. I don't know there's something about it that's magical. The way that I do dry brushing is the same movement as we did here, that movement where we're using the side of the brush, starting off of the tip just off the tip and then pulling through the whole brush. Now, the key to dry brushing of course is having your brush dry enough to create that effect. You want to dip your brush in that very pigmented white. Take the excess off and then start to pull out little dry brush marks. I usually start at the edge of the flowers, whatever wherever they are, and I just go from the tip of a petal and just bring it in like that. You can always go in between as well. I'm just going to create some stems here so that we can just practice the little buds that we're going to do. I have my hand off the table for this movement and just allowing the brush to do its thing. For the little green leaves, really bright ones that will help to bring it forward again, we're going to just use a smaller movement than these petals that we've just done. I love this movement. It is just the tip to the mid part of the brush. And you can do a downward movement like this one. Sideways. Or across like this. I do like to interrupt the brush flow because it makes these little leaf shapes, which I really do like. Do these a little larger than we will do in the project. But these are almost abstract, so they are shapes really. Don't think of them as leaves. We're just putting blobs down loves. You can also add these little petals around the flowers as well, little leaves poking out from behind. Then we're going to bring in that blue that we mixed earlier. You don't have to do this. In fact, you can stop at any stage throughout this whole project. You can see I've only got a tiny bit of paint there and that's because we're not going to be using a lot. We just little flops and put them down where fancy really. You can vary it from a tiny circle dot or I can pull through a little leaf. I tend to do this quickly because it doesn't give me time to think and we're not trying to make leaves here. We're just putting blobs down, and it's nice to place them next to the green in places. All I'm doing there is a little blobs basically using half a brush size two tiny brush and just making little marks. Again, you can do them poking out behind your flowers. I realize I missed out putting the buds in, which was one of my favorite things. It's the same movement as this really. All we're doing is just building up little blobs of color, sometimes next to each other, sometimes on their own. I do that slowly. I'm interrupting the movement, I'm not pulling it right down. It's more like this. You go along your stems here. Drop these in where you fancy. You can also do this with white, 90% pigment ten water just put tiny little highlights over certain areas. We're really enhancing our little project here by adding all these tiny little blobs of color, and they interact with each other. I do like it because it's expressive. It's easy to do. We're not trying to make it look like leaves or bubs. I just blobbing away wherever we feel like it. I cut really love this technique. And then should you wish. Again, you don't need to do this. It's just something I did at the end to go in with one last, pigmented brush and just put some tiny little marks all adds interest to the piece. I mean, you can carry on and carry on and at some point, you have to stop. It's very hard. The very final thing we're going to do together, and I'm just going to pull through some leaves here so I could demo this much better. Make it quite dry so I don't have to wait for me. I just want to show you how we can splatter some white on right at the end. It is very tempting to do a lot of this. I'm trying not to B again, it gets so enjoyable that we can go a little bit overboard. We want this way. I I got enough white here, probably not. Remove some of this here, we're just going to water it down quite a lot. You can always try it out on some paper before you splatter. I tend to just knock on my finger. People have different ways of doing it. That's the way that I do. I like this brush for that. It's really nice splatter. Then you go. I do a lot so it shows up. That's my excuse anyway. Isn't it pretty? It just really finishes off the whole magic feel to this. Oh, I love it so much. Absolutely gorgeous. One more thing which I forgot to include is I did use a little bit of this olive green, 25 B do PH Martin. This is such a nice vibrant green that it's nice to add to watercolor or gush. You can see just changes things up a bit. I forget my little page back. Or I can just show you how we can just pull in a slightly different green with that in. I enjoy using these inks. Now we are just another green that you can bring in at some point if you want to. Okay. 6. 1: Green Leaves: So let's start by taping off our page. I'm using five millimeter tape just so I don't lose too much of the page. So I'm going into the permanent green and mixing a little bit of white guash, bringing over a little bit of the quin lilac there just to make the green a little more earthy. And we're using that first brush stroke that we went through in our practice. This is with the memory point brush, but you could also use your fill bit here. Tading a little bit more white there to my green and randomly placing this cluster of three leaves. And all I'm doing is keeping an eye on which direction they're pointing and making sure that I keep turning my page round. I'm just adding a touch of the daffodil yellow there into the green. And we're just going to continue on making these random leaves. And you can see I've just carried on here, adding these leaves and just leaving a little bit of white space. Let's move on now to our second layer, white translucent petals. 7. 2: White Translucent Petals: So what we're going to do for this layer is to add quite a lot of water to our white guash or white water color. Now, although guash is very opaque, you can still achieve a translucent look. I'm taking off the excess water pigment. I don't want this to be too watery. We need some control for our brush. And you can see here how beautiful these translucent petals and leaves are. I'm continuing to pick up the watery white and just taking the excess off. Even though this is watery, we do still need to blot off the excess water, just so that we have control over our brush strokes. And you can see here the lovely interaction between the petal going over, a leaf which is still quite damp, and I really love that. So I'm just continuing on building up the layers. In some places, I'm going right over the green leaves and in others in between. It can be a bit of a challenge using white because it just picks up any other color that you're using. So to avoid that, just keep washing a brush and picking up fresh paint. You can see that my white has a tinge of green despite my best efforts, but I think it looks really nice. In the next lesson, we're going to move on to yellow translucent petals. 8. 3: Yellow Translucent Petals: So I'm mixing some of the daffodil yellow, and this is the doctor PH Martin's concentrated watercolor with white gouache. I'm adding quite a lot of water to it as we did with the previous layer and blotting off the excess. I'm not too worried about making these perfect flowers. So I'm just placing down these petals wherever it feels right. And as in the previous layer, sometimes over the white, sometimes between the white petals. But don't get too worried if it all seems a little out of control at this point because it will come together. And don't feel restricted to the previous layers. I'm putting some petals in here around the edge onto the white paper. This is more of an intuitive process. The nature of a DTC means that it's small scale and randomly scattered. And as we work through the layers, this becomes more defined and more cohesive. 9. 4: More Opaque Yellow Petals: This whole design is about transolucency and opacity. As we go through the layers, we're going to increase the value of our paints. We're using more paint to water. I'm mixing up some more yellow here, what we're aiming for is a 50 50 ratio. Continuing to blot and take off the excess just to keep that control. So you can see that the layering in our class project is very gradual and quite subtle at this stage. If you feel you've laid down too much paint and mortar, go in with the dry brush as I just did then and lift it. So I'm just looking at placing them over the white or in between the white as we have with other layers. Remember, we don't need the flowers to look like flowers. This is a random stage of the process, where we're just doing intuitive marks on the page, making sure that all the motifs are scattered over the page, but with not too much white paper showing. Let's move on to the next lesson where we'll be placing more opaque white petals, increasing pigment to water. 10. 5: Opaque White Petals: So this time, we're going to add even more pigment to water. I'm using white guash. But white water color or any other white that you generally use in your painting should be good for this. I'm just ensuring that my brush is really clean and adding a little water. This is probably 80 pigment to 20 water. Trying out the movement here. I'm really pushing down on the brush and allowing it to flare out. You can see that because we're using more pigment, this is sitting on top of the layers that we've done before. Again, I'm keeping my brush strokes varied. I'm thinking of this more as an abstract layer, keeping up the random placement of the petals. The white over the deep green in particular is really lovely. And I don't want to go overboard with this layer. So maybe just one or two petals. And then, yeah, I'm happy with that. 11. 6: 90% Pigment White Petals: So now we're moving over to a 90% pigment, 10% water. And I'm just taking off all the extra color that's made its way onto this little glass coaster and putting down some fresh white. I really want this to sing, so I need to make sure there's no stray color getting into the white. Just ensure that you have some fresh water that your brush is clean, and that there's no stray color which could get into the white. We want this to be really white and. Because we're making more defined petals now, this takes a little longer, but it's also very restful to do. You can just take your time and I'm alternating there between the full brush and the side of the brush. It's at this stage that we can really appreciate all the layers that we've already done. Keep varying your strokes, and the direction of your petals. I'm starting to add some very tiny details. Using the side of our brush, but our very light and quick movement. Just adds a little character to the petals and suggests a side view or petals that may be on the far side of the flower. It's worth spending time over these little details. You could also use a liner brush to make these tiny little lines. Again, making these tiny little marks over the darker green really brings it forward. Just a few more petals, a few more little gestures, and none, I think we're ready for the next layer. 12. 7: Stems & Buds: So now we're getting to the pretty little details part, which I really enjoy. So getting our line a brush, we're going to use 90% pigment to ten water, but ensure that there's not too much paint on our brush that just gives us control. And we can make thin lines that aren't blotchy. I'm adding the lines randomly. I'm not worried about them connecting. I'm mixing a little bit of the quin lilac with the white gash. Using quite a lot of pigment on my brush. This is the opposite to what we were doing with the liner. And then we're just adding these pink blobs, if you like to the little stems. It's such an easy little brush stroke. These are our most throwaway movements. Semi abstract. Just the suggestion of maybe some pink blossom. Adding another color at this point really brings our project to life. And that's it. Let's move on. 13. 8: Inner Yellow Petals: So this time, we're needing a very pigmented brush, so I'm using handsome yellow light water color. And that's because the PH Martin's concentrated watercolor is quite runny, and we really want something that's going to stand out here. I'm going to use a lot of pigment on our brush again. Tiny little movements smaller than the white ones that we did inside of the white petals. All we need to remember here is to keep a balance between having a very pigmented brush with a lot of paint on it, but not so that it gets tacky, and we also don't want to go the other way where it's too watery and we'll start to spread. Whereas these are very much defined now. And I'm using the full brush and also the side of the brush, as we did with your larger fiber. I find it useful to keep moving my paper around at this stage. It gives me a good perspective. Again, this is a very meditative thing to do because we know the brush stroke and we know that we want to add these inner yellow petals to every flower. It's a repetitive but meditative process. We can relax right into it. I'm adding a couple of petals here and there over the green leaves. Again, this gives us a feeling of. Starting off with more watery strokes in the background and now creating this foreground with more defined brush strokes. That's really great for creating that depth of field. And now I'm just putting in some yellow next to the pink blossoms. Just little dabs of color here and there. So let's move on to our next layer. We're going to be adding some inner pink petals on top of the yellow ones. We'll start to see all these gorgeous, luscious layers. 14. 9: Inner Pink Petals: So I'm using that mix of quinacridone lilac with the white for these inner petals. So I'm using my size two filbert. But if you don't have a filbert, you could use a round brush for this or any small brush that you're happy to use for petals. And we're going inside the inner yellow petals that we did previously. You could use your choice of red or pink mixed with the white for this. It doesn't have to be Quin lilac. By now, you'll be in the flow, and this becomes slightly easier because we've already warmed up so much with the previous petals. So it becomes more and more relaxing. So our little ditsy is really coming to life now. A 15. 10: Flower Centres: So now we're going to concentrate on the centers, but this is a very simple technique just to bring the flowers to life. Very minimal. So we'll be using a liner brush for this. We're going to mix a bit of black. If you don't have black, any dark color like a dark purple or brown would be just as good. I'm adding a little bit of water to this, but I want it to be mostly pigment. What we're trying to achieve here is a brush which glides easily with not too many dabs of paint on it. So it's very thick paint with a little water, but enough for it to move. And we're just going to.in these very simple centers. What I've learned about centers is it doesn't have to be as complicated as you think. I think a lot of us shy away from centers. I certainly do. And I've realized that actually just a few little specks of color can be just as effective as when we spend a lot of time over it. Sometimes just little deft movements, little dots, little dashes are enough. So less is definitely more I do apologize because this is just off the screen. But I noticed I had some handsy yellow deep gash on my palette, and I thought I would use that along with the black for the centers. I'm just mixing that up. It was actually dried on my palette, and I'm just adding some water to it. I want it to be quite thick and we don't want too much water on our brushes either. We want just enough to fill in between the little black dots. Very thick paint, 90% pigment, ten water again. I just thought they would look really cute against the black. Of course, you can use any yellow that you have. And actually, if you mix a yellow with the quin lilac or the pink that you have, it will make a lovely peach. 16. 11: Dry Brushing: If you haven't done dry brushing before, it can take a while to get used to it. What we're doing is we're applying a lot of paint on the brush, very thick, 90% to 10% water again. Then we're taking the excess off. This is where we need to practice because if we take too much off, nothing happens, we don't take enough off, then it can look quite opaque. What we're trying to get there is an idea of not even translucency, but transparency. We can see through the dry brushing to the leaves or petals underneath. It's such a delicate technique to master, and I really love using this in my work. So what I do is I use the side of my brush just as we practiced, and I'm starting at the edge of the petals and bringing the brush in. So what we're looking for there is a partial coverage. The reason I love it so much, it almost has a magical quality to it. And I just curve my brush around in the shape of a petal, and I'm using the full side of the brush, although this is a very small brush. I just pulling it towards the center of the flower. And bear in mind, this looks particularly good over the darker colors. So if you see any of your dark leaves, pulling some dry brushing over that really looks effective. And there's an opportunity here to knock back any bright leaves that you feel are coming through too much. Just by dry brushing over the green, it will knock it back into the background and integrate it with the rest of your painting. So we're coming to the end of the lesson. Let's move on to the next. 17. 12: Green & Blue Leaves and White Highlights: So I'm using my permanent green gouache here, and I've just mixed it with that yellow and white mixture that we were using earlier. Because these are so bright, it really makes it. I'm just adding these where I feel they're needed and putting some on the stems with the pink buds and some next to the larger white flowers. So what I'm doing here is mixing a little bit of Prussian blue that I happen to have on my palette, and I mixed it quite thickly as we did with the permanent green and yellow mixture. I'm just adding them where again, I feel intuitively, they're needed. Just little blobs, they don't need to look like leaves. Some are placed next to the bright green leaves, some over the petals or beside the petals. You could omit this, or if you wanted to mix your own blue, any blue of your choice with a little bit of white will make a very gentle blue. I don't know what it is about blue, but I often do add little hints of it in my work because it seems to calm the piece and also creates that cohesion that we're looking for. So I've got an area here, which is less defined, and I think I know how I can correct that. I'm going to clean my brush and load it up with that very thick white again and I'm going to pull in a little bit of dry brushing around that area. And I'm just adding a few little dots of white as well. And now I'm continuing just to add a few dots on those sprigs of blossoms. And I just want to catch the edge of the colors. So tiny little dots over but not completely the green and blue leaves. I'm just freshening my brush up and mixing a little bit more white, probably 80% pigment to 20 water. I'm putting in these tiny little highlights over the flowers. We don't want them to be overbearing. They're just little touches than the petals. Sometimes painting quickly like this doesn't give your brain much time to think, which I think is a good thing when we get to this stage because what we're doing now, we don't want it to be placed. If we think about this a beforehand, sometimes it can look a little bit contrived. What I aim for is almost an intuitive just paint where I feel like it and hoping it works out. Self here. You've done a lot of brush strokes so far in this ditzy, by now you will have warmed up and been much more relaxed. Try and allow yourself to make these movements in a very abandoned way. I think abandon is such a difficult thing to achieve in art and music. We've done so well to get this far. There is so much work in this. And now I think it's time to move on to the reveal and a last minute finishing touch. 18. 13: Final Reveal: Yeah, we're here. Final reveal. I love this bit where we can take off the tape, and it reveals these crisp edges. I just think it looks adorable. It's also practical, because it's easier for framing, as well, having that margin. So pretty. One last trick up our sleeve. Let's do a little bit of spatter. I'm watering down the white here. We've want it quite watery. I'm just checking because I haven't splattered with this brush before, what it looks like. I've just got some scrap paper there. And yeah, it's just about the right size of droplets that I'm looking for. With splatter, less is more. I'm so tempted to go overboard, but just a tiny bit, I think it's lovely. And we got there. It's finished. What a lovely journey we've been on together. 19. Thank You!: Thanks so much for choosing this class. I hope you feel you can move forward with more confidence in the use of paint value from translucency to opacity. Lose to detailed. We've used different techniques, including wet on dry, expressive marks, dry brushing, and splattering. I can't wait to see your project. In the meantime, I'm over on Instagram at Holly Thomas Design, or you can leave a comment or a review underneath the class lessons. Take care of yourself. See you again soon. Bye for now.