Paint A Nordic Christmas Wreath With Watercolor

1. Introduction and Class Project: Hi, Welcome to my class on painting, a Nordic or Scandinavian style wreath with watercolor paints. In this class, I'm super excited to bring it to you. It's holiday themed. I don't know if you guys are familiar with the Scandinavian style declarations for the Christmas season, but I love them. They're simple, they're really nature-inspired. So that's what we're gonna be creating today. This is a beginner level course. I'm going to walk you through everything. We're going to start by sketching our wreath, and then we're going to paint it with watercolor. Like I said, this is beginner level. I'm going to walk you through everything. We are painting in a more layered style. If you've ever painted with me before, this is typically style that I like to paint in. Don't worry, it's not gonna be hours upon hours of painting. I kept it to just a few layers. So you can still get that layered look, more realistic look, but it's not going to take us what my normal paintings tag, which is like 10 h. So this class is only an hour. Also if you don't feel like sketching in the projects and resources section of this class, you can just trace the wreath that I've already drawn out for you. So you have that option as well. For the class project, you are going to be painting along with me and painting a wreath. Please post it to the class projects. Just snap a photo of it because I really love seeing what you guys create. And even though we're all painting the same reef, though really looked different. And I love that. That's why being an artist is so unique because you can do the same thing, but you put your spin on it. So grab your watercolor paints and a coffee and tea, and let's get started. 2. Supplies: Before we get started, let's talk about the supplies that I'll be using. That first thing is, of course, of watercolor paper. I am working on an Arches block. But you don't have to work on a block. You can work on any watercolor paper, just make sure it's 140 pound or above. Otherwise, equality is not going to be good enough for all the water that we'll be putting on the paper. Another thing if you are doing just a sheet of watercolor paper, make sure you tape it down. Something like a masking tape or painter's tape, even washi tape. Sometimes I find that washy tape isn't quite strong enough, so make sure it's strong enough and you tape it down. The reason we tape it down is because we don't want the paper to warp when we add a bunch of water to it. Second thing is brushes. I'm using a variety of sizes because we will get pretty detailed here. I have a size six, a size four, a two, and I believe this is like a 2/0. This one is really small. You might not need to go this small, but have a range of medium large size brush in a small brush. Next. Hi my watercolor palette. You can use a plate. Just make sure you're using watercolor paint. And I am going to be using a pencil and a gum eraser. The gum eraser is just optional, but I like to use gum erasers because when you press down, it picks up a lot of the lead. Without tearing up your paper. We won't really need to do a lot of erasing today since our subject is pretty highly contrast against the white paper. Probably be good there. Then I have two cups of water I like to do. One for cool tones, one for warm tones, and a bowl. Anything you have that as round because we want to make our wreath perfectly round. And lastly, I don't have up here, I'm going to grab one real quick, but grab a paper towel so you can dab off any excess ink or any, sorry, Any excess watercolor paper. Alright, we're ready to get started. We're going to start with sketching. 3. Sketch Your Wreath: We're gonna get started with sketching our wreath. Now the sketching is going to be really important because we really want to make sure that we get the details in. This isn't a loose style wreath. This is a more realistic ones. So we want to make sure that we know exactly where we're painting app. But I grabbed my bowl, grab one. You can do any size you want. This is probably, I want to say like 8 " by 8 ". But of course do whatever size you want. And then just lightly outline it with your pencil. I like to use an HB pencil. The lead is little softer I find, but you can use whatever pencil you have on hand. Now, we have our perfect circle and we're going to start sketching out our wreath. Now, if you guys are familiar with the Scandinavian or Nordic style Christmas wreath, they're usually very natural looking, almost looks like there's olive leaves and then there's usually these wooden beads that go throughout it. Or those are just the things that people decorate when they're going with that style. It's pretty popular. It was really, really popular About three years ago. I remember we did a photo shoot and I think it's hygiene. I might be saying that wrong, but it means cozy and so that's what people are really into. So these are pretty popular. The first thing I'm gonna do is actually that beaded piece around. That way I can put all my leaves around it. What I'm going to do is I'm going to start with a big, not that big, but a pretty big circle. Then I'm going to make two little ones. And I'm going to do two little ones down here. Now, you don't want it to exactly follow this because that's gonna be really boring to look at. Make it go a little curved. So my next bead, I'm going to make that big one again. So it's gonna be a big, big to little beads, big bead. I'm going to make it off-center from my circle. And then I'm going to make it come back up. And maybe do one more. Now. We're going to do the leaves so they're covering up some of these spots, but we want to make it look pretty well balanced. So I'm going to do four of the same, maybe like a couple more or less, but in four corners of this, so it looks balanced. You do not have to follow exactly how I'm doing it. Feel free to add your own spin on it. But just go ahead and sketch those out. I'm sketching pretty dark so that you guys can see. But you don't have to sketch that dark. You want it to be light enough that you can paint over it. And the pencil lines aren't going to show through but not so dark that the pencil lines are going to show through. And just remember you want to keep it similar. I know right now they just look like bubbles, but we're gonna make them look like wood with paint. Then you could even make one side come down a lot more if you want. You don't want to do. That's the thing when you're drawing and when you're painting, you don't want everything to be so symmetrical because then your eye loses interests. So you want there to be some things that are a little different. But then you also want to make it make sense. Okay? I'm going to do just a little more here. Maybe just one more. Okay. I'm happy with the way that that looks. I might add just one little one up here and then maybe a little down there. Oh, I just realized these are all the same. So I'm going to add one extra because I don't want it to be too much the same. And I'm going to move that one down. I just totally did something I'm not supposed to do. But when you are erasing from watercolor paper, don't scrub. Use a gummy eraser and press down and pull up to pull up your pencil marks. Otherwise you remove some of that texture and you really don't want to remove your texture. That's the key to watercolor paper. Alright, we have our beautiful little wood beads, and now we're gonna go in and add those leaves. Now the leaves are going to be a little more time-consuming and I might speed this up just because I know you guys are drawing your own. Of course you can follow along with me, but we just want to go in and the leaves are similar to olive leaf, leaf shapes. So that long slender leaf, leaf. Then you want to of course make variations. Also. Make it, if you want to make it kinda flap over. So I do a curve and then I come in and meet the center again. Then almost just like a little triangle up here. You could do like a side view, so the sides a little thinner. And then something else that we're gonna be adding in is these little berries. And you can do those wherever you want. But we're just coming in and we're adding a lot, a lot, a lot of leaves. And you want them to cross over, you want them to go under. You want it to look very fall. Some of them will be straight along our circle and some of them will come out more. You want variation, because you want this to be interesting to look at. Like I said in the intro to this class. This is going to be a lot. Something that takes a little bit longer to paint because we are doing a more realistic style. There's a lot more details here. I think that this is a great way to expand your skill level to do something like this, because it's challenging and it also pushes you to spend time on a piece. And especially in our world, we're just so used to like busting stuff out so fast. I mean, as an artist you feel so much pressure because of social media, TikTok and Instagram. And it seems like everybody is just pushing out content at a ridiculous speed. But it takes awhile to paint something really cool. And it's important to remember that while you're going along and making your leaves, make sure that you're really paying attention to filling out this whole thing, but not having it be so stagnant and the same. So maybe some leaves go more straightforward and some come out more. Maybe some are more pointed and some have more of a curved edge. If you guys are just maybe hating drawing this. I mean, I hope you're not. But if you are in the little class project, are in the I always get the class description. There is a line drawing that you can just trace if you want to, that I drew. So feel free to do that. Don't forget to add in your berries every now and then. I'm gonna go ahead and speed this up. You guys, of course, take your time spent as long as you want drawing it. But I'm going to speed this up on the video just in case maybe yours is a lot smaller than mine, so it's taking you less time to draw these leaves. So I don't want you to just sitting here watching me draw forever. You can watch me draw lightning speed. Alright, here we go. One thing I do want to mention, if you are coming in here and you're like, wait a second, I really want to add more beads. You totally can. This is about you and how you want to design this. I'm just guiding you along. The one that I'm creating, but feel free to add whatever you want. You could even add flowers if you want to. I am focusing more on the Nordic, Scandinavian style of a wreath. And typically you don't see too many flowers in them, but if you want to add bars, I flowers. Back to going fast. Okay, now that you haven't drawn something that I like to do to make sure it looks even and this is not gonna be possible if you tape your paper down. So you could actually walk around your drawing if you want to. But I turn it and see how it looks like if there's any places that are missing some thickness. And I can see over here that this is missing a little thickness. So I'm just going to add a leaf coming out a little bit and maybe one coming out here. Now, I can already tell this is gonna be a lot to paint. So you can also do a little bit thinner if you want, but this is a fun tutorial and we're cool with painting. That's why you came here, right? So now that we have are it's already sketched out. Everything's looking pretty even. I definitely need like berries down here because I don't have any here, so I'll put those there. I think we're ready to start painting. I painted this pretty dark and I'm going to just lightly erase, but we are a wreath is gonna be greens and browns. So I'm not overly concerned. I M a little bit concerned about these berries because I was going to make them yellow. And yellow is a lighter color. So maybe just if it's not light pencil mark, just make it a little bit lighter. Okay? Alright, I think we are going to do a couple of lighter leaves. So I'm gonna just get some of this pencil mark off because I don't want it to show through. Okay. There we go. 4. Painting The First Layer: Now we're ready to start painting and we're going to be painting in layers. Just removing a little extra. We are going to be painting in layers. So I'm grabbing my size six brush and I'm going to mix up a color. So grabbing green, I have a couple of different greens here. I have sap green. I use Winsor and Newton paints. And then I have whatever is already on here. Then I am grabbing some undersea green. Basically what you're looking for is you don't want a super bright green because these are all lovely use. And if you've ever seen all these before, They are very kind of a muted color. There's almost a little bit of blue, so I'm going to add a little blue to it. Or blue undertones. Maybe this blue. And if you feel like you're green is still too bright, you can grab a little bit of red and just lightly mute it down, but we don't want it to be too muted. So that's one color and we want to make a variation of colors. I'm going to set this down. Over here. I'm going to do a darker green. I have this super dark green and I don't know the name of it. That's my toxic trait, is I put paints on my palette and I don't know the color. But hopefully you guys have a dark green or you can make, if you want to darken your green, you can add a little black to it. So we have this darker green. I'm going to add a little bit of sap to it just so it comes up a little deeper or a little richer in color, not so dark green. Have this one. Add a little more. Kinda, have like a blue or a more bright vibrant green. Add that in. If you guys have something good to do, a good practice is to have a little scrap of paper where you test out your colors. That's always helpful to make sure your colors are similar. And then over here I'm going to mix up a more yellow greens. So these would be leaves that are brand new coming in. But we want to have a variation in color. But we don't want it to, right? So I'm going to add a touch of red. Okay? Now we're going through and we're painting our first layer. And our first layer is going to be more water down. And we're going to build on top of that. So the important thing to make sure you're doing is not painting over your beads or the berries. So make sure that you paint around. And I realized that I made this wreath way too vague. This is going to take me a long time. But just come in and you're going to alternate colors. So just poke in some of the lighter greens. What I like to do is go through and make all my light green leaves and then go through and make all my mid tones and then go through and make all my darker ones. Because if you're switching through colors, it's going to take a long time. But this is also, since this wreath is so big and there's so many leaves, the good thing is that we won't really need to get out our blow dryers or wait for it to dry because it'll be drawing by the time we get back around or be dry. So this is just my light layer. I'm literally just I'm not doing any special technique. I just have a pretty watered down paint on my brush and I'm just coming in and painting each leaf. So I'm not doing like a special wet on wet or what on I mean, technically this is wet on dry, but I'm just very basic painting. And sometimes it might be a little bit darker. And don't worry, we're not going to do like seven layers on this. We're just going to do honestly probably only two layers. But I like layering because you can get a more realistic look, but it also is just more interesting to look at because there's so many variations. Come back and just add a little more of these green ones here. I will if they're not already launched by the time you're watching this, have some loose watercolor wreaths available as well. If that's more of your style. But like I was saying earlier, I think it's really good to do stuff that just takes a little bit longer sometimes, because it really teaches you patients and what it takes to work on a project for a long time. I realized in my own practice that I started getting used to things being really fast. And the quality of my artwork was starting to go down. Or also I was becoming increasingly frustrated. I had a I do sometimes I worked for other stationary and I do watercolor artwork for their wedding invitation suites for them. If they don't do it themselves. And I were just going along when painting you guys and I'm just telling you stories. So there was this hotel and it was so intricate. It was the adult Adolphus hotel in Houston, Texas. And I just was like, I was driving myself nuts because I thought it was going to go so much faster, but it took I want to say like fifth team, like 12 to 15 h for me to paint that thing in watercolor. We only did a section of it, but it was so detailed. And I realized that I had really gotten used to things being really fast. I was painting in a loose style or there's nothing wrong with painting in a loose style. It's awesome. I'm just saying that I like to paint realistically, but I was finding that I was becoming really impatient. But, or I was doing, which is another style I really love is doing kind of loose watercolor and then adding a sketch with ink on top of it. So that was just making my attention span really short. And there's a course, like it's good for me to get into those different styles and have fun with them. But at the end of the day that I like to work in a more layered style. It looks more realistic and I was just getting so inpatient. Art takes time. Okay. There's a little I'm going to add, just saw another one down here. Now we can move on to our second layer, which is this mid tone green. And we're just gonna do the same thing. If you guys are painting along with me, which I hope you are. Somebody told me that they just watched these videos because they just like to watch people paint. Which is really funny. But if you are painting along, feel free to grab a cup of coffee or wine or tea or whatever your thing is. I'm a big fan of t and put on some music. You can just turn me away down. We're not getting into the technical stuff yet. We're just adding in all of our leaves the bottom layer. Make sure though, that you're mindful of where those beads are. You want to paint around them. So there was one right there. And your lightest leaves should be dry by now. If yours aren't, say you have a smaller wreath than me, makes sure that you don't touch that because we don't want that bleeding look today and that's not the look we're going for. And I am choosing not to speed this up because I have heard from a lot of you guys that you like to watch it in real time because when people speed it up, you feel like you're behind. And I totally get that feeling because I've had it before when I'm doing a tutorial, I'm like, I don't speed it up because now I have to pause it and I feel like I'm behind and I'm rushing. And also, if you're behind, I don't even want to say that word because it's not really true. But if you feel like you're behind right now, don't worry about that either. That's totally fine and you can pause it. And when you've completed your first layer, you can come back to it. There's no pressure. I'm just painting, just filling. It's like that I paint the numbers. Just filling in the colors. Now, now that we're on our second layer, we really want to pay attention to how many leaves are left, right? Because we don't want like three dark leaves altogether. Because like like if I did all of these ones dark, it doesn't look very interesting. So make sure that you're paying attention to that. I think that you're definitely having a separation. And if you make a mistake, like say you're like, Oh, I didn't do enough of the mid tone. You can always come back later. You can also always darken. We can never go lighter though with watercolor. So that's something to remember. Let's see here, let's do this one. And you might like the look of just the first layer done and you could totally do that. And then you can skip ahead to when I do the beads on here, that's totally up to you. I like a layered look, but not everybody does definitely need some variation over here. It's looking really similar. And sometimes your brush might pick up a little more like that color is definitely different from anything I've put on here. So because of that, I'm gonna come over here and make one of these other leaves that color and then one probably down here because you don't want just one sore thumb sticking out. Our eyes naturally will go to what's different. So I think it's like an evolutionary thing where we look for something that's different because it's signified danger when we were hunters and gatherers. But the same thing happens with art. So because that's different, we want to make sure to just add in a couple of those here and there so that everybody's eye isn't immediately drawn over there. Okay. Let's move on to these guys. Alright, I think we're ready for our next color, which is our darkest color. We are going to keep this water down though our darkest color, so don't get it like super saturated. And then you can always tap your brush off if you're finding that it has way too much water on it. So coming back to that darkest color, making sure to paint around our little beads. Another thing you can do if you really don't like painting around things, is you could use masking fluid. I will not be showing you how to use masking fluid today, but if you go to, I have a beginner watercolor course on Skillshare. And I show you how to use masking fluid. But sometimes I find that masking fluid tears up my paper. I don't know why. The Arches paper is pretty strong, but if I use I think it's called Aqua, aqua Trello, that one at terrorism, it tears up legions papers so bad. So I really don't use it for that, but I love legion paper. But you could use masking fluid if you if you're not familiar with it. Sorry, one thing about this, You guys, you want to make sure with all of these beads that they're feeling like they're tucked into the greenery. So makes sure you are having leaves come right up to them. Because otherwise they're going to look funky. Back to masking fluid. If you've never used masking fluid before, it's like it sounds it's a mask that you put over your paper and it protects whatever is underneath it. So protects your white paper so you can come back and add whatever you need to add. I like to use it if I'm doing a house painting and there's like a picket fence or there's a lot of details on the windows. But I've seen people just come in with white gouache too. So totally a personal preference. We're going to come back for that one. But I am going to add in a little bit of dark around here. It doesn't have to be like a perfect leaf, but I just want to outline where those beads are. So it looks like they're pushed up over the greenery. Just painting our next one. This is pretty dark. I'm okay with it. I like it. But if it's too dark for you feel free to lighten it up. I'm just going to poke in some little like green spaces. And you want to be careful because we're using the dark colors so you don't want it everywhere. But just to show that these beads are on top of it. See, it's already starting to come together. Again. I'm just painting like I'm not doing any special techniques. I have my size six brush and it has a pretty sharp edge, so I'm able to really make those lines that I need. You never want your watercolor brush to be dripping paint. That would mean that we're using way too much water. And if that is happening, just tap it lightly on a paper towel. I'm just filling in some of these spots with greenery, maybe adding an extra leaf here and there. If any of the leaves are folded over, you want to make sure that you're not painting them the darkest color. Because you want there to be like what it folds over the bottom is going to be the darkest and the top is going to be lighter. So you want to have the dark color left that you can put on the bottom of the leaf. If that makes sense, it'll make more sense when we paint it. If you're working in a different size, like I said, my my wreath is pretty big. I'm going to add a dark leaf over here because it looks like it's kinda missing dark color over here. If you're working in a smaller size, you might want a smaller size brush. So just be aware of the control that you have over the brush. If you feel like you're losing control because it's too big, then get a smaller brush. Okay, we have another folded one over here. I'm gonna grab my mid-level green because we want to make sure we have an option. Then just poking in some color here. Got a skinny leaf on its side. I'm going to grab another color because I don't want to dark leaves by each other. Actually, I'm fine with that. That's fine. Okay. Alright. And I can see that there's a lot more dark color on this side. So I'm going to come back and grab a little darker color and just add it over here. This is only our first layer, so you don't have to be overly concerned about it, but I do want to make sure that we are consistent and your eye travels across. Okay, that looks good. So we have our green layer down and now we're gonna move on to the beads. 5. Painting The Beads: Moving on to the beads, we want to mix up a brown color, but kind of a light beige brown. So I have yellow orchid right here. Ocher, sorry, not orchid. And I'm going to add it into this brown, whatever I was using. I think I was painting cookies here earlier, so that's what this color is, but just a real light color. And we're gonna go ahead and put our first layer down and it's going to be pretty watered down. Remember, we never want paint dripping off our brush. Then I'm just lightly filling it in. Now, if your grains aren't dry, it's going to start bleeding. So make sure that your greens are dry. I just saw that mine wasn't completely dry over here, so it did start bleeding a little bit. Oh, a tip for you guys. This just made me think of it because if you put lotion on your hands and then you start painting on your paper and you're putting your hand down, you are going to make your watercolor paper essentially oily. And it's going to not soak up the water or the water and the paint so well, this is what I'm going to leave that for a second. I realized that I was doing. And I'm like, oh my gosh. And I hear people, sometimes they think their paper is faulty and sometimes granted, they're not using very good paper. But a lot of times it's if you put lotion on your hand or if there's any oil, like if you just got done eating french fries and you're touching your paper, you're going to create an oil barrier and it's going to mess up. You're not gonna be able to get the depth that you want because the water is not going to soak into it. It's like a otters for a can't can't penetrate. So I'm just going in and I'm painting, I'm doing the lightest layer, makes sure that your greens not wet. And I'm just adding this light beige brown to all of my beads. You might want to grab a smaller brush. I'm thinking that I probably could have used a smaller brush here. Because if you, water or watercolor can be reactivated. So if I'm painting, I start touching the green with the water. I can reactivate it and start to move it around and I don't want that. So you really want to try to get just the bead. I am touching the green a little bit here. It's okay. It's not like the worst thing in the world, but if you really want that crisp, clean look, you want to make sure that you're staying in your circle, stay in your lane. Got these guys up here. These are wet so I can see that the greens bleeding a little bit. Yep, there it goes. That's okay. It's not horrible. I am probably going to let this dry though before we keep going because I don't want it to bleed. Okay. Alright, we have our base layer there. I can see over here that this is a little bear. I'm going to grab that mid green and kinda just fill it in a little bit. But be careful you don't touch your beads or they're going to bleed. We can actually do that later. Now we're gonna do the berries. I'm going to definitely grab a smaller brush. I have a size two. I'm going to mix up a yellow light. We want it to be pretty light yellow or watered down. My yellow is a mess. I'm going to add some of this orangey yellow to it. And then just really watery. And then make sure you tap your brush down so it doesn't get too wet. And then I'm just filling in these little berries, yellow berries. You can make them white. If you want. You can make them red, 0 red would've been killed. I didn't do read because you don't see a lot of red with the Scandinavian, Nordic style Christmas. You see a lot of beiges and greens and earthy tones. Now that red is not an earthy tone up, I see we're missing a leaf right there. So how to fix that? If you see missing leaves that you didn't paint, feel free to just fill them back in. Hope I see you went up there to fill these leaves in. And I also have to go back and paint that little wooden bead. Then something else is, there's going to be these little twigs basically mix up a brown that's darker than r would be IDS and just make lines coming down. You can make them a little jag it if you want. But they're just connecting these into the wreath because they wouldn't really just be floating. I mean, they could be if you want, this is our cell. Do whatever you want. Okay. I'm going to grab this one last bead with some brown. And let's see. I'm going to let this dry because we have some areas that are a little dangerous if we're going to be painting around them, I don't want them to start bleeding. So let your artwork dry completely and then we're going to come back and we're going to start our second layer. The second layer for the light, the mid tone and the dark green. And then the second layer for the beads. 6. Adding Additional Layers and Details: Now that we're dry, we can come back and add in all of our color variations to our leaves. So that lightest tone, I'm going to darken it just a little bit and maybe add a little bit of yellow ocher. And then I'm going to come in and i'm, I moved down to a size four brush because I wanted a little more finer detail. And I'm just painting along the edge of it. And if you want, you can rinse your brush off. Grabbed just water and then kinda blend it in. I'm okay with that. Having a little bit of a harsher edge. And basically what I'm trying to show here is that there's like a shadow on the leaf. You can alternate between colors too. For, even with this one variation, maybe you want to add a little more green to some of them? Totally. Okay. I'm just I'm just paint I have just paint on my brush. Not just paint. It's obviously paying water, but it's pretty saturated. And I'm making a line that I'm rinsing off my brush, adding just water and then just letting it move, kinda helping it along. So now we're just going to go through and do that. This was like if I want to be super particular or you want to be super particular, the shadow would be on the side that's covered. So e.g. like right here, it would be more shadowed because there's a leaf right here, but I don t think we don't have to get that crazy with this. You can put the shadow on any side you want. It also doesn't have to necessarily be a shadow. It can be the other side of the leaf. You know how? If you look at an olive leaf, one side is quite dark and the other side is lighter. It could represent that as well. And feel free to make this one just darker. Pop in some darker colors, like not super dark but within that same shade or change it up a little bit and add a little green, or sorry, a little more yellow, or you can even add red if you want to mute it down a little bit. But what we're looking for here is just to add more interests to the leaf. So we still want to see the lightest tone popping out. Then just adding in water to move it around. Since it's wet, you can always just tap and bring in this is the wet on wet technique and bring in a little darker color if you want. Okay, so now we're just going around and we're doing that to all of those light leaves. Sometimes what I'll do to save time or it makes me feel like I'm saving time is I'll do three leaves. I'll rinse off my brush, get just regular water, and then do them all at the same time. But you don't have to do it that way. Do what's best for you. I can see I've got more green on this one. Another thing you could do is you could just leave it like that too. If you don't want to blend it, I want it a little softer look so I'm blending it. But if you don't care and you like it, more of a harsh look, not harsh but bold. That's a better word. You can totally do that. And some of them, I like to leave a little more bold and then maybe you just poke in some darker color here and there. That's the fun part once you get so we have our base layer down is just adding in like the fun little details. So I want to add in just like a pop down here that's darker and it'll bleed up because it's, it's wet stone. And I like to say this in all of my classes, but this is the way that I paint. It's not the end-all, be-all. This is my style. This is the way I like to paint. And not everybody is gonna like to paint like this. So feel free to explore my style and if it's not for you, then do whatever you want. Some basic, obviously rules and with watercolor. But there's a lot of different techniques that you can do. And some people like to work how I painted all the light color and then all of the medium color. They don't like to do that. They like to do like one section and get super detailed and then move on to the next section. For me, I don't like to do that because it makes it hard for me to see the whole picture. And when I do the layer upon layer, I can really see the whole picture coming together. So that's why I like to do it that way. But again, that is my choice. You can choose something different if you want. We're just outlining every once in awhile I'm adding a little yellow ocher to make it a little more yellow and tone. And I do always leave a little part. So you can see that base layer poking through because that's giving us the depth. And realizing this is getting real green over here, or sorry, really yellow. So I'm coming over here and just adding some of that over here as well. So it's nice and balanced. When we took our little break and waited for this to dry, I realized that it's not perfectly filled out. And I'm gonna be okay with it because I'm working on not being a perfectionist. But you do want them to be pretty filled out if you can, like evenly filled out. But it's not the end of the world. I just did or I didn't just do, I did it last year, but I sold wreath Clip Art and they were really popular in my Etsy. And I realized one of them is really not filled out and it really bothers me, but nobody's complained knock on wood. So hopefully it's fine. I think sometimes you just really getting our heads about perfection and we don't need to be that crazy about it. Sometimes, like other people, especially if they're not in, not like a watercolor artists, they don't even notice a lot of the time. They're like, I just think it looks good. And that's the best. Feel free to add in some little darker spots if you want. Realize I didn't paint this guy coming around starting to run out of this color. So when you come back in to blend this, you really want to make sure you have a clean brush. Because if I just took the paint like this and then just kept blending, it's going to be all the same color. So you need to rinse off your brush and pick up clean water. That's another reason I use two cups. Especially when I'm working in a similar color palette like this, where there's a lot of variation in colors. I'm not worried about my water getting really muted. So I keep one for dirty water and one to just pull water out of so everything stays real crisp and clean. Yeah, I'm just barely gonna do that one because I wanted it to look a little bolder. If you ever need to pull up color, just rinse off your brush and then tap it on the paper towel and get as much water off as possible. Then you can press down and pull up and you'll pull that color right up. That is one of my favorite techniques that I learned. I can't believe I like just something so simple, can really help you out so much if you make a mistake. Instead of being like, oh, I guess I, watercolor painting is ruined. Right? Now we can move on to our mid tone. Just may take one, peruse over your artwork and make sure that for the most part it looks balanced with that new greenish. Greenish. Why do I keep saying that new yellow tone that you added in? And it looks good to me. So now we're moving on to our mid tone and we're gonna do the same thing. So we're going to make it just slightly more saturated than the original layer that we put down. We do have to be careful because it might touch some areas. That are wet, so just be mindful of that. And I think for this one, I'm not even going to blend it unless I think it looks really crazy. Also, you guys, you can see I have watercolor splatters all over here. I don't recommend keeping your watercolor above. The reason I'm doing that is because the way I have this setup to film, I can't put my watercolors to the right of me, or sorry, my water cups. So you want to keep them somewhere that's not going to splash onto your paper. Of course, this can all be fixed in Photoshop, but if you wanted to sell an original, you don't want watercolor spotter is all over it. I recommend. I'm not keeping it right by your paper. I'm just doing like I'm not using the water to blend these N I really like the look of just having it as like it looks similar to an olive leaf. So feel free to follow that method if you'd like. I might see, this kinda looks funky, so I am going to blend it there. Just so it looks a little smoother because we have that bead. It's already coming together quite nicely, I think, because just when you start to add those different colors, it really makes it pop. And make sure you're not getting too much of the same color. So if you're noticing, oh, these look really similar. Just go ahead and add in maybe a lighter tone or a darker tone or water down that color that you're using more. That can also be a good method. And add a little more brown in there. Now I'm getting confused which leaves are which? I think that's the darkest one. It doesn't really matter. I mean, once you start painting all these leaves, like nobody is gonna be looking at each individual leaf. They're gonna be looking at the whole painting. I might blend some of these in just a touch. Just to touch. That's looking a little too harsh for me. And I see that I missed a couple of these lighter ones, so we'll have to come back in for those. Now, here's one that's folded over. So this is the top. It's going to stay darker. Sorry, it's going to stay lighter. So I'm just outlining the bottom here and filling it in. So you can tell that this is the top and we'll add a leaf vein at the end. So you can tell that it's a leaf that's folded over. I missed. Actually. That's another folded over all n. So do that dark. A little brown. Eyes off my brush and add. Just make it blend a little bit more. And I think I'm going to blend that because that turned out really kinda bright green. Looking good. I'm going to come back and fix this with our original, like the lightest color, its second shade. I'm makes sure there's not any other ones that I missed. I might add a little yellow to these folded over ones. That yellow, green color. Okay. Alright, Now, there's two up here. It's like a scavenger hunt. You realize that, oh, I forgot to put it on that one. There's one more here. Now we are moving on to our darkest one. And we are going to just, I don't know, Like I said, I don't know what color this is, but it's pretty dark. You can add black to one of your grains if you really want to darken it up. I'm getting my darkest tone on the darkest leaf. And I am just making that line. And again, I'm not really going to blend it unless I feel like it needs it, like it's standing out too much. But I love that. Look, I think it looks really cool. Sometimes you start a painting and you have a specific vision in your head. And then along the way, it kinda turns into something else. And I will say a little bit that this kinda turned out that way. So we're just adding, I'm just adding a line in, but it's darker. So it's creating dimension. Dimension is a lot more interesting to look at than something that's totally flat. I can't believe that the Christmas season is here. Got here so fast. But I'm so happy to be offering this tutorial this year because last year I really wanted to do more tutorials, but just gotta wait for me. This is another folded leaf, so we're making the bottom part darker. And if at any point you realize, hey, I don't really have a lot of dark leaves over here. You can just add it in, right? Like just paint that second layer over whatever color is there. I got one right here. Now our leaves are basically done. Take a bird's eye view. Sometimes I like to do is hold my paper up to the mirror to, and that can help. But see if you need to add in any colors somewhere. I'm noticing that there's a lot less dark over here, the darkest leaves. So I'm adding in a little bit of that. Or if you have any spots, I feel really open. Okay, that looks good. Now we're gonna move on to our beads. If you, if this isn't dry, most likely it won't be completely dry because we just painted it. Just be really careful or pause this, come back when it's dry because we don't want to stick our hand in wet paint. Now we're going back to the brown and we're making a second layer of brown. And for the beads were probably going to do three layers just to make sure we're giving it enough depth. Honestly, I could make 700 layers on this painting, but I want this to be quicker than Paul hours. Don't worry, it's not gonna be anywhere near that long. Mix up a darker shade of that brown. And then we are doing same thing. Now for these, I'm gonna be a little more particular on where the shadow is coming from. I'm going to say that we have light coming from the right-hand side. So all of these shadows will be on the left-hand side of the bead. I'm with the paint just following that circular line. I'm going to rinse off my brush, grab clean water. This water has a little yellow on it but that's fine. And then I'm just going to scrub it like a toothbrush. And it's going to blend nicely and look like it has a shadow. Now, we can't paint the bead right next to it because this is what we want, that crisper cleaner look. So you're going to need to skip and go to the next one. And do that. If they're right next to each other and they're not touching, you're totally fine. But if they are touching, then you need to wait until it dries. But we'll be able to come back and do that. No problem. Again, I'm just adding the paint to one side, rinsing off my brush, grabbing just water and then blending it in. Now if for some reason, all of a sudden, this whole thing is the darker brown. Rinse off your brush and then dry it off on your paper towel, and then just do that technique I taught you. Pressed on your brush and pull up and you'll be able to pull a highlight. And if you want to do that little method where you're kind of saving time, you can do a couple at once and then just blend it. Just make sure you're not getting sloppy. Wear. Your brush isn't clean. This is really key. I see I got sloppy there. We don't want that. You can always tap in some darker tones. Actually really like that. Okay, you guys come in with a darker shade and just lightly tap it on that left edge. It's gonna give us a really good shadow. And we might not need that third layer because that's looking pretty good. Painting painting. If they're touching makes sure you skip. Then we're just painting on one side, grabbing that clean water and blending. Blending, then grabbing that little darker tone and just lightly tapping it in. Boop. Boop. These are touching, but I'm going to try to be really good with my water. So as long as you don't get it wet right next to the other bead, you'll be totally fine. Got to wait for that one. Just be mindful of where you are adding the paint. So we're originally adding it more like up here and now I'm adding it closer to the edge. Because the location is changing of where the beats that and our sun is coming this way. You can make the sun or the light source wherever you want it to be. That's totally arbitrary, but whatever you do, just be consistent. Now this one, we would just paint the bottom right because the light's coming from here. Consistency with light source matters. Especially if you're trying to paint in a realistic fashion. There's just something about our eye that knows to look for that inconsistency. And then we're like, Wait, that doesn't make sense. It's appears that my original Good idea of just lightly popping in that color actually wasn't that good of an idea because it's all wet, so it's just blending all the way in. So we are going to have to do a third layer. So you can stop doing that if you're doing it. If it's working out for you though, keep doing it. It was not working out for me. Oh my gosh, I'm making a disaster of my watercolor paper. My husband always jokes that I'm so messy and I am just a messy person. I can't help it. But I think I'm a pretty good artist, so I'm not too upset about it. Again, make sure you're not going directly to the bead that's touching the wetland. Or it will just all bleed into itself and we don't really want that. If you guys ever have any requests for tutorials, I love to hear requests. I I try my best to publish classes on them. Was really helpful for me is if several people request the same thing that I know, okay, this is really going to be popular, but I always love to hear what you guys want to paint. Now we can come back up here to these guys. Yeah, we're gonna do one more layer because it'll really make these pop. If you need to wait for this to dry, please do so. Don't don't rush these or they're not going to look as detailed. They're going to just look flat. And you can grab a smaller brush to if you need to. My brushes a little big for this. I paint this one already. I think I did. It just really bled into itself. Yeah. That wasn't a good idea that I sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't it. Okay. So that is our await. Sorry, we got to finish these ones up here. Our second layer on our little would-be, it's now we need to make these dry completely before we add on our other layer. But something we can do to make Those little yellow pieces, more interesting is to add some texture to them. I'm going to show you guys actually how I could clean this up right now. Grabbed clean water and just start scrubbing. And make sure you have a clean paper towel and you'll be able to pick up some of it. I mean, this is pretty dried on here. When it was wet. If I would have done this, it would have picked up. But just in case that happens to you, that's a good way. It makes sure you get to it as soon as possible. It's like a stain on your clothes. The sooner you get to it, the easier it's going to be to remove it. For these little yellow berries, we are going to grab a darker, darker yellow tone. I'm grabbing this kinda golden tone. And I'm actually going to get my really small brush, my 2/0. And I'm just going to come in and add just the littlest, like swish. It's like a little half circle on the edge. And it's just going to make it look a little more interesting. Move it around. So it's not all in the same place. Just to give it a little more depth. Something really important if you're going to be working in a more realistic style, is to focus on shadows. Because that really tells the I were to look and if something looks realistic, we're not doing a whole I mean, we are doing shadows here, but we're not going to make shadows behind the leaves. Grab a brown that's slightly darker. I think this was CBR R3 here. You're going to need a darker brown for the beads anyway. But we're using our smallest brush because we're going to come in to these little branches for the berries. Don't have too much color, then I'm just going to make a line on the underside of it. This line is going to be its shadow. So light is coming from above. And just make some that much more realistic looking. Who are getting so close, you guys are almost done. I can't wait. Please post your wreath in the class projects. I love seeing what you guys create and sometimes people don't post them that much. And I'm sad because I love to see what you guys create. For the final thing, we are going to be making these with one more shadow. I'm going to grab my size two, brush, that darker brown, but I'm going to mix it into that golden brown because we don't want, all of a sudden we're using a brown that does not look like the original color. We want to keep some consistency there. I just coming in and adding it to that left side, rinsing off our brush, grabbing just water and blending it. The key here is you don't want it to spread across the entire bead because you want to see the color variation from the darkest to lightest. So I'm just tapping with water on that edge so that it's softens up a bit, but I'm still seeing all the layers. Let's just go ahead and do this all the way through. Feel free at some of them. Maybe you want to add a little black so it's a little bit darker than the other one is, or something that's totally cool. Also, if you have any connections in here, adding just a dot shows that there's like a little shadow here. I love when it gets to this point because to me, this is the fun part because you see everything really come together. I mean, it's all fun, but this is the most rewarding part, I guess, is what I'm trying to say in my mind. But you know what art is rewarding all the way through because it teaches you so much. And I'm gonna get on my soapbox about art and how important it is for us. Because it teaches you a lot of things like perseverance, keeping going, or keep going when things are really hard and they might not look that good, but you keep going in faith that it will work out and it will turn into a beautiful masterpiece. I can't tell you how many times I are. First of all, I've painted so many pet portraits. But I swear to you, every time I get in my head and I'm like, freaking out that it's not going to look good. They always work out. But it's just like it's really teaches you a lot of things in my mind. To me, in my opinion. It's also relaxing. It's a good way to just totally kind of zone out, but just care about what's in front of you on your paper. It's metadata. There we go. That's the word I was looking for. It. It's meditative. That's why you think it's so important that we keep art in schools. It was my saving grace as a kid. So I'm really thankful for it and I'm thankful for my parents because they really encouraged me. And I want to do that encouragement for you guys to just keep going on your art journey. And it doesn't have to be your career. It doesn't have to be like a moneymaker. It can just be a way for you to really relax and to connect with yourself. It can be a form of self-care. If you guys are like, Okay, Shut up, just show me what you're doing. So remember we are just painting the bottom edge. Our light source would now be turning and pointing down here. So the shadow is going to be on the bottom of this bead. I'm going to rinse off my brush. I'm getting clean water. And I'm kinda swirling in this lower third because I don't want to get rid of that second layer of color that we have. Took a little shortcut there. Something else that you can do if you'd like to work with gouache or like a gel pen is, you could add in some white highlights here. You can get that effect by keeping the paper clean, but that's kinda like a pain in the, but for some people. So you could also grab a gel pen or grab white gouache and add in little highlights if you want. I'm going to make some darker areas here just because I feel like it. And because this is wet, I'm just lightly tapping the edge. Right. Because it kinda turned into a disaster when I did it earlier. But the paint that I had is really thick on my brush. If I'm just lightly tapping the edge, it's not going to bleed too much. Plus the stuff up here is pretty dry. You might like that, you might not, you don't have to do it. I might blend it, just touch. See, this is my problem is that once I get going, I'll just I could do this first. So feel free to tinker as long as you want with your painting. There's no time limit. Unless you have kids, then they're probably trying to get to you right now. I have a dog. She is my whole world and love her. But she's sleeping right now. So that's why I'm able to record this tutorial because she's a puppy and she has so much energy. All right, you guys, take a step back, look at your masterpiece. It looks beautiful. Feel free if you want, you can come in here and you can add another layer if you want to. You could keep going for so long. You could also add a quote in here. You could digitize this and turn it into gift tags or Christmas cards or tote bags. There's so much that you can do with it, but I really hope that you enjoyed this tutorial. Please post your projects in the class project section. If you guys are on Instagram, tag me at lavender and see, like I always say, I love to see what you create a mean so much to me that you took this tutorial and or class. And I'm really thankful that you did. If you could leave me a review that also is wonderful. I love seeing your reviews. It makes me so happy, but it also shows me that I'm doing something right. And it also helps my class gets seen by other people so that they're able to take this class as well. So I hope you have the most beautiful holiday season and a wonderful day.