Paint a Gouache Floral Greetings Card | Sarah Douglas | Skillshare

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Paint a Gouache Floral Greetings Card

teacher avatar Sarah Douglas, Papercraft designer & illustrator

Watch this class and thousands more

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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Introduction

      1:52

    • 2.

      Class and Project Overview

      1:07

    • 3.

      Materials

      4:31

    • 4.

      Sketchbook Inspiration

      1:58

    • 5.

      Sketching Your Design

      5:48

    • 6.

      Painting the Main Flowers and Leaves

      8:11

    • 7.

      Adding Details: Buds and Pollen

      4:55

    • 8.

      Finishing Touches: Sketchbook Experiments

      4:41

    • 9.

      Adding Finishing Touches

      2:14

    • 10.

      Conclusion

      1:56

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About This Class

Let's paint a colourful floral greetings card with gouache paint!

In this class I'll show you step by step how to create a bold and beautiful handpainted floral card. You can do this project in your sketchbook too.

This class is suitable for beginners and I'll talk you through: 

- How to achieve the right consistency of gouache paint
- How to build up your design beginning with the main floral and leaf elements then adding smaller details of buds and pollen
- How to add optional finishing touches for highlights on petals and leaves, experimenting with Necolor IIs, fineliner and pencil.

By the end of the class not only will you be feeling more confident using gouache paint and painting bold flowers, but you'll have a go-to card design that you can repeat over and over with a different look each time! I found this project SO much fun to create I've already made six more designs. I can't wait for you to have fun painting with gouache too. 

This class is designed to be a fun and relaxed painting session where you can create something beautiful with no pressure. All you need is a paintbrush, gouache paint and something to paint on – a card blank or your sketchbook.

I've been making cards for over 13 years and I run a small business called StickerKitten designing and making papercraft supplies including paper packs, stamp sets and stickers. My crafting style is clean, simple and colourful – I love using painted elements in my handmade cards and I want to share that enjoyment with you too.

Let's jump in!

Meet Your Teacher

Teacher Profile Image

Sarah Douglas

Papercraft designer & illustrator

Teacher

Hi, I'm Sarah Douglas, designer, illustrator, cardmaker, crafter and small business owner.I live in Berkshire in the UK with my husband, 5 year old son and 2 year old daughter.

I've been making handmade cards for 13 years and I run a small business, StickerKitten, illustrating, designing and making my own papercraft and planner supplies including patterned paper, stamps and stickers.

Since starting my small business in 2016 I've been on TV demonstrating cardmaking techniques, and my products and handmade cards have been featured in craft magazines.

My crafting style is clean and simple and I love using painted elements in my handmade cards.

In fact, lots of my patterned paper designs feature my watercolour artwork :)

I love bright c... See full profile

Level: Beginner

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Transcripts

1. Introduction: High School chef ends. In this Skillshare class, I invite you to join me to create a bold and beautiful hand painted card using gouache paints. This is a fun and relaxing project with the aim of allowing you to enjoy the feel of the smooth paint on the page and revel in the boldest and brightest colors of gouache that you can find. I'm Sarah Douglas, a designer and illustrator based in Berkshire in the UK. For nearly ten years, I've been designing and illustrating my own ranges of cute and contemporary papercraft and plant supplies, and I've been making handmade cards for even longer. As part of my creative practice, I love drawing and painting, and gouache is my current favorite medium. This class is suitable for beginners. You'll need some quash paints, a brush, a palette, water, masking tape, and a car to paint on. We'll sketch out a simple design of flowers and leaves and then paint it, adding small details at the end. This class is also suitable for intermediate and advanced painters who want something a little bit different to mix up their creative practice. By the end of the class, you'll have a beautiful hand painted card ready to use for family or friends, or you can even make a series and sell them online or at craft markets. You'll also have gained confidence using gouache paints, getting the consistency right, practicing finer brush strokes, and hopefully you'll also be feeling pretty blissed out from your half an hour of fun painting. Are you ready to start? Let's dive in. 2. Class and Project Overview: I'm so glad you decided to join me in this class to create a bold and colorful hand painted card. We'll start by looking at the supplies you'll need for the project, and I'll give you some alternative options too. Then I'm going to show you a bit of sketchbook inspiration from my own exploration of this theme and then we'll move on to sketching designs, painting the card, adding details at the end, and then there's an optional extra bit to add some highlights with No Colors. I'd love it if you could take a photo of your finished card at the end and upload it to the project gallery here on Skillshare. It's really inspiring to see everyone's different designs and I'm very happy to give you feedback on your project if that's something that would be helpful to you. Don't forget you can also use the discussions tab to ask questions as you go. Remember, creating art is not about making the perfect finished piece, it's about enjoying the process. It's okay if you smudge your paint or things look wonky or it doesn't come out how you pictured. Just keep going and keep creating and enjoy yourself. Next up, let's have a look at the supplies you'll need. 3. Materials: Let's talk about materials. For this class, I'm using Windsor and Newton designers gouache. I've tried a few different brands and I really like the quality of these paints, especially the bright colors. They go on really smoothly, and that's one of the things I find most enjoyable about painting with gouache is that really smooth, opaque feel to the paint. The colors I have are light purple, cobot turquoise light, permanent yellow deep, permanent green light, Bengalos, flame red and orange lake light. Now, you don't need to rush out and buy these exact colors, but if you do have some lovely bright colors in your paint stash, then get those out. You can mix some nice shades, but in this class, I won't be covering color mixing. I'm going to be using the colors as they are from the tube because I really like these shades and I really like the texture that they produce. So I do recommend this brand, but of course, follow along with whatever you have. Next, for brushes, I recommend a number four or five round brush. I'm using a number five. It's a Windsor and neat and brush, and even though we'll be painting small details, I've actually found that a brush that's smaller is harder to use. The paint tends to blob on the end and it's difficult to get that fine point. Whereas a number five brush, you can use the tip really finely to get some thin lines. So after much experimentation, I found that this is the size that works best for me right now. You'll also need a paint palette to squeeze out and mix your colors. This one is one that I got from Hobby craft. It's just a plastic one when I paint with gouache, I tend to just keep using the same palette over and over without cleaning out. Guash is water based, it's water soluble so you can keep rewetting the paints and it doesn't cause any issues with the consistency. It doesn't dry out like acrylic does. I've had this in use for probably over a month now and the colors are still vibrant. I just keep adding more on top. You'll also need some water to clean your brush and to loosen up your guh paints a little bit. I've just filled an old jam jar with water for mine, and some kitchen roll will be handy too to clean up your brush in between colors. For card blanks, I'm using this pack of watercolor card blanks and envelopes from South field. These are a nice thick texture. They're designed for heavier media, so they'll take the paint really well. If you just have regular card blanks, that will be fine, too. The way that we're using the gouache isn't too watery, so it shouldn't soak through regular card stock if that's what you're using. Or you could also try watercolor paper scored and folded to use as your card base as well. May find it useful to have some scrap paper to test your paints, the consistency in the colors as you go. I'm probably going to use my sketchbook. I got a new one recently, Royal talons. It's got quite thick paper. It's a creamy color. I'll just be using this on the side to test out my paints before I put them on my card. Finally, optionally, you can use neo colors at the end to add a little bit of detail to your card. I won't be using these too much. These are a water soluble crayon. It's a wax pastel. I'm just going to use maybe the pink one or maybe one of the yellow ones to add a few highlights to the flowers and the petals and the leaves at the end. If you want to do that, that's all you can do, but, of course, don't feel obliged to rush out and get ahold of some neo colors if you don't already have them. I find that these are actually quite pricey. You'll also need some masking tape to mask around the edges of your card if you want to do the same design as I have. I'm using this brand, which I found on Amazon. It wasn't too expensive. It's really light tax, so it comes off the paper nicely and it's an excellent pink color, which I very much enjoy. Okay. Now that we've talked through what materials we'll need, let's have a little look at some inspiration for flowers and leaves. 4. Sketchbook Inspiration: It's summer right now in the UK as I'm filming this and I've been really inspired by everything floral and everything garden themed. I've been painting with these colors in my sketchbook using the same technique of taping around the edges. I loved experimenting with different designs and different ways to finish off the pieces. This one has some colored pencil on it. This one has some neo colors on it. I've taken inspiration from different sources, mugs I've seen that I've seen when I'm out and about a tea towel I found on a shop. I've done my own different sketches and designs and ideas. And there's really not too much to it when it comes to florals. I've just pictured different types of flowers in my head and leaves, I tend to paint a similar way each time. If you want to make sure you have some really varied and interesting designs on your card, then you could have a look on pin dress for different types of flowers, or you can go outside in your garden, or in your local park and take some photos. But if you just want some quick and easy ideas, then I've done a mix of long petals, blobby petals, maybe something like this, which is more of a tulip shape with some stamens. You could do something like this, which has small buds to it. I mean, you can tell I'm not a gardener. I don't know the names of the flowers that I might have drawn, but also maybe a mix of something which is a little bit more trailing. If you want to before you start your card, you can have a play around in your sketchbook with some different ideas for flowers and some different designs and practice painting your leaves. But for this class, we're just going to dive straight in and get on with our cards. 5. Sketching Your Design: So I have my watercolor card blank here, and the first thing I'm going to do is put masking tape around the edges because that gives a really nice finish when you peel it off. It makes the finished card looks like this with a large border and the image in the middle, which I think looks really smart. It looks really neat, and it means you don't have to worry about finishing things off perfectly and making the design fit nicely and all that sort of thing. I like to reuse masking tape where possible. I think you can get a few uses out of each piece. Once it gets too much paint on it or loses its tack, then I replace it. So maybe after three uses, I found or if it gets too tangled. I'm taping my card to my desk here, but you might like to tape it to your sketchbook or to some artboard or something that you can move around if you don't want to do your project all in one go. Now that we're taped up, let's sketch out a design. I want to do a mix of large floral elements and leaves and smaller pieces, but we're only going to sketch in the large pieces for now. So I'm going to start top left. I'm going to do a bigger flower with rounded petals. I'm sketching over the edge of the masking tape because I'm happy for this to be cut off. I like the look of that. I know I want to have a tulip in here, we'll have a big tulip with a stem. I'm trying not to draw too hard because we're going to want to rub this out a little bit before we start painting in order that the graphite doesn't show through the paint. I want to have something trailing down here. And then come off it to have some smaller flowers. The way I'm drawing my flowers, I'm leaving space between the elements because when I paint them, I'm not going to leave time for each color to dry. I'm just going to carry on. If they're not touching, then they won't bleed. Which they shouldn't really do anyway with the consistency of paint that we'll use. But still, for this particular style, I want to keep the colors. Separate, we'll have another larger flower up here. And then down here, I want something with a bit of a different shape. I'm going to give it some funky kind wavy petals. I'm not afraid to shape my petals to fit the space either. I've got longer ones that reach to the edge of the tape and then shorter ones that fit in that gap there. That's all part of the design a bit more deliberately. I'm going to have a leaf here that comes off the edge. I don't really want to overlap that petal, let's come in a bit. I'll redo that a little bit. We've got a space down here, so let's add another flower. I'm going to have a larger center. I'm going to have some blockier petals. Then let's have a leaf coming down here and one here, and then add a smaller flower in this space. Again, I'm varying the length of its petals so it can fill the gaps. I suppose because I'm used to designing patterns for my paper craft supplies, that that's coming through here as well, and when I look at the layout, I'm picturing it as part of a bigger pattern rather than a finished illustration in its own right. That's all I'm going to draw in for now. We've got some gaps, but we'll fill those when we finish the main elements. We don't need to draw every single tiny piece right now with the simple small bits that we'll add later. They don't need to be sketched. Before I begin painting, I'm just going to use a rubber to try and take away some of the harshness of these lines. I want to be able to see my design, but I don't want the pencil to show through the paint. It should be easier because we're using bold colors that not too much will show through. You can use a clean dry brush to sweep those rubbings away if you don't want to brush your fingers on your card to avoid any oily marks transferring. Next, we're going to move on to painting and I'm going to talk a little bit about getting the right consistency for your guash paint before we begin. 6. Painting the Main Flowers and Leaves: When it comes to quash paint, the consistency that you want to aim for is that of double cream. You need to use a little bit of water. You can use quash straight out of the tube, it's quite thick and it can leave a dry edge, which looks really nice for some pieces, but I like it to be a little bit smoother for painting flowers. I'm starting with Bengal rose, and I just add a few drips of water when I first started painting with guache, I used far too much. I was treating it a little bit like watercolor. But then I read some advice that said that gouache paint is ideal at the consistency of double cream. Now I try and aim for that whenever I use gouache paint. I find that it does come out nicest if you can get it not too thick and definitely not too thin. I find these Windsor and Newton paints are good for getting the right consistency. It's easy. Whereas with the cheaper brands, I was really struggling to get it looking smooth and opaque and not streaky. If you can invest in a little bit better quality of paints, I think it is worth it. It's a much more satisfying experience to paint. We are diving straight in. I'm starting top left, but I am going to dart around the page. I like to use one color at a time and then move on, which does mean that I'm sometimes trying to paint over here when there's something wet up here. I'm just careful as much as I can be with where I put my hands. But if you prefer to paint left to right, so you don't smudge as you go, then please do. The way that I enjoy painting as well is to do the outline first and then fill it in almost like icing a biscuit. I find that that's the most satisfying for me. That works if you're doing a small area at a time because the paint doesn't have time to dry. The other thing I'm thinking about when I'm adding different colors is the balance of the colors across the card. I don't want to overload too much pink on one side and then nothing on the other side. Once I've done one flower, I'll have a think about where I want the pink to be next. I'm going to come down here and then I'll do a little spot down there. As I mentioned before, I'm using a number five round brush, a Windsor Newton one. I found that I can do a whole piece with this one size of brush because it's quite versatile. I can get fine details and I can also do bigger broader strokes if I want to. I spent a long time getting angry at my tiny brushes because I thought the smaller brush, the more detail I'd be able to do, the more carefully, the more intricate. But it didn't work out like that. It took me a while to realize that a bigger brush was giving me more control. It could hold more paint and it would give a finer tip. That's why I'm using this size for this card. I also use this size brush for my bigger A four sketchbook page that I did with the similar design as well. Of course, because these are abstract flowers, they don't have to make any botanical sense. If we want a bright pink center to the flower, we can. The next color I'll use is flame red. I've been working with these colors that I'm really enjoying using for a few weeks. I just keep adding them to my palette in the same place. I'm only using a little bit of red on this flower here and here and this center here. I realized it was fairly similar to this orange. I really like this vibrant orange, we're going to use a little bit more of that. Okay, I've added the purple turquoise layers. I love this turquoise color. I think it's probably my favorite out of these. Now we're going to use the permanent green light to add in some of the leaves. I've swapped out my water. It was getting a bit, um, cloudy and gray, to keep the colors fresh, I've changed it. I don't always. Sometimes I'm a bit lazy. I just paint with dirty water. I think it depends what colors you're using. When they're super bright, it doesn't matter, but if you're using pastores, it makes them muddy quite quickly. Let's swap it out. With this color, I'm going to do the leaf up here. Yeah, check, there's no fluff on your card before you paint. I don't know where all the fluff comes from in this room, but every time I swap colors, there's a new layer of fluff on my card. Also using this for the vine shape that goes down here. Again, I will try my best to do a steady hand. I don't know whether that's something that just takes practice or whether some people just have naturally steady hands, but I don't think I'm one of them. I also want to add some leaves to this vine. I haven't sketched them in, but I can see where there are spaces for bigger leaves and smaller leaves. For this, I'm doing a slim line, pressing down with the brush and then lifting off to create the leaf shape here see if I can fit the mini one there. I'm also going to put one here to balance out the colors a bit, so I have green here here and here. They don't always come out nicely. Sometimes I have to fill them in a bit, but that's okay. Now I'm going to swap to yellow and I'll do the centers of the flowers. Okay. Now we finish painting all the main elements that we sketched in, and it's time to add some smaller details in between the larger pieces. 7. Adding Details: Buds and Pollen: Point, the composition of our card looks a little unbalanced. We've got all the large elements in, but we've got some bigger gaps, white areas that we can fill with patterns. On my original design here, I mainly filled in the gaps with yellow and I chose to do these small bud type, leafy type abstract elements. I'm going to do the same here. I have tried different colors for this type of filling in the gaps. But I find that yellow really lifts the card and adds a feeling of movement and life to. I know I still have some pencil marks that I could do with rubbing out, but I'll go through and do those at the end. I haven't let anything dry completely yet. It's not taking too long. It's quite a warm day. It's quite warm in this room, it's not all super wet. But if you prefer to let your layers dry in between, then you can if you're too worried about smudging. With these little leafy buds, I'm just varying the direction. If there's space, I'll give them three. I don't know, frond. And where there's less space, I'll give them maybe two. Another nice way to fill space is to add extra leaves, so that's an option too. If you want it to look very green and like a lush tropical forest, you could choose a dark green. One I ordered recently is this one, Windsor green. It's quite a bluey green like turquoise. It comes out really nice on the page, but I'm sticking with brights for this card. One of the things I like about this design is that it's so simple to do. It makes me feel that I could do it ten times over, do a series of them testing out all my different colors. I hope you're enjoying your painting as much as I am. Now that I'm done with the yellow elements, I'm going to add some green elements, even smaller pieces, just dots this time. I already have on my palette this pale green that I'll use, which is this permanent green light mixed with some white gouache to create a pastel color. I find that this type of pastel tone is quite nice in the background because it's not too dominant. It allows the bright elements, the flowers to stand out. But it makes the whole piece come together a bit more. I also like that it feels somewhere in between sparkles and somewhere in between pollen floating around in the air. Again, just gives it a little bit more of a feeling of life and movement. I'm just going to do almost like tiny poker dots wherever there's a gap. One of the things I like about simple shapes like this is that you can quickly fill up a space with a design that looks complex, but actually doesn't have much complexity to it. Each shape in itself is quite simple, but the overall effect when you're finished is something that's very detailed. I'm just adding some tiny thin strokes of green too where I can't quite fit a dot. They're just almost like tiny little flick marks of green. Now that all the painted elements are done, we're going to add some finishing touches to our card. But before we do that, I'm going to grab my sketchbook and just experiment with a few different ways and show you a few different ideas for how you can finish off your card. 8. Finishing Touches: Sketchbook Experiments: In my sketchbook, I've quickly painted out some leaves and petals in the colors that we've used for our cards, and I'm going to try out some different materials over the top of these to decide what I like best before I put it on my final card. You can follow along with this process too, or you can pick what you like to look of and add that to your final card design now. First up, I have neo coolors as I mentioned in the materials introduction. These are water soluble wax pastels. I have this set which has subtle colors in it. I'm going to try out the pink. When I did my practice card here, I liked how the pink looked on top of the yellow, so we can just see how those colors look together and see if the pink would work as a highlight on these other colors too. I'm not normally such a fan of mixed media. I like quite a flat look to my work, but I do think it lifts the design a little bit to have just something to finish it off. I definitely like this pink. I think it looks really creamy. I can also try a yellow, which is maybe a little bold for purple. I've also tried out using a darker neo color to add shading, but I think this brings the design down too much. When I tried this before, I decided not to do it this time around. But just to show you what it looks like, you could use a darker color, for example, to do lines on leaves or a shadow on the underside of some petals. Another thing we can try is a fine liner to add details. This is a UI pin fine liner, not 0.5, and we can add lines over the top of the paint. It creates quite a bold look, so you have to decide if that's something you like. It can be nice if you use it to add details like little stamens to the flowers. Or if you've left space and you haven't filled it completely with paint and extra elements like I have on mine, you could use the fine liner to add extra small flowers and details in between, like this. I could do vines on the leaves. It doesn't really go over the top of the neo colors because they're waxy. Decide one or the other, or maybe use the fine liner first if you want to do both. I also found a white colored pencil in my stache. If you've got some darker colors, you could use that to add highlights. It works better on some colors than others. Actually, it works quite well on the yellow still. It shows up nicely on the red. So just have a play around if you want to. You can use a mix of white pencil and a fine line or two to add details. But what I'm going to do for mine, I'm going to give it a bit of time to dry. I've peeled it off the desk. I was about to put my sketchbook on top and I was like, now, I'm going to smudge it. Once this is completely dry, it's nearly there. I'll carefully rub out any remaining lines I can see, and then I think I'm going to go for the pink neoclor that I tried out first to add some highlights. Then we'll do the fun bit of peeling off the tape and seeing how it looks. 9. Adding Finishing Touches: Okay, so I decided to go with the pink one. I'm going to add some highlights to some of the petals. I guess I just try to think about not too perfectly, but in rough terms, where the sun might hit. If it was shining on the petals and leaves. I mean, this is obviously quite abstract, so it doesn't have to be perfect. I'm not doing each flower the same. But it's just to add a little bit more life to it. I'm also going to add a bit of pink over the top of these yellow elements. Because these are water soluble, you can, of course, use them wet or you can use a paint brush to add water afterwards. But I'm using them dry for this. I find that it works better on a bigger piece where you don't have much control once you add water. So something small like this. I think at least for me, I'll make it too messy, so I'm not going to use water this time, but it is something fun to experiment with on a bigger sketchbook page. Let's take off the tape and reveal our finished card. Here we go. Doesn't that look cute? Thank you so much for painting with me today. Keep watching for the final conclusion video. 10. Conclusion: Thank you so much for joining me for this class. I hope you had fun painting and experimenting. Now there are a few final steps to finish off. Firstly, please leave a review of this class in the review section. Not only does it help me, but it also helps your fellow students decide if this class is for them. I actually has a huge impact on how people find this class in the search results. So if you can leave a review, please do so. It only takes a few minutes and it makes a really big difference. Secondly, please make sure you've uploaded your class project. So take a picture of your finished card and go to the class project section. And the tabs below, upload your picture, add a little bit of text to tell people about what you created, and then others can see it and comment on it and gain some more inspiration. It's great to see everyone's different designs. I love looking at all your submissions. Thirdly, hit the follow button above to follow me as a teacher on Skillshare. That way you'll get notified whenever I publish new classes. Finally, if you want to find out more about me, you can check out my website, which is stickkitten.co dot K. I design and sell my own range of cute and contemporary papercraft and planning supplies. So on my website, you'll find paper packs, stamps, stickers, stationery, and all kinds of lovely goodies. You can also find me on Instagram at Sticker Dot Kitten please also check out my YouTube channel where I upload lots of behind the scenes and small business type content too. I'd love to keep in touch with you, please do add yourself to my mailing list. If you go to Stikkitten dot code at Ukfwardslash NewsLetter, just pop in your name and email and I'll keep you up to date with everything that's new from me, including products and Skillshare classes. Hope to see you again in another class soon. Bye.