Transcripts
1. Intro: Hey, my name is Juliet and I'm a designer and watercolor artist. I paint lots of repeat patterns using watercolor for my own products line and also for other clients as well. I have been painting lots and lots of floral lately. For this class, I'm going to be guiding you through a seven day painting challenge, and each day we'll be painting a different species of flower. Now, the types of flowers that we're painting are more illustrative rather than exact replicas of the photo you're referencing. So this is going to be a great way for you to just be loose and free and playful and develop your own sense of style. I'll be sharing all types of tips along the way, both related to watercolor and also finding your own unique painting style. Even though this is a seven day painting challenge, you can go at your own pace completely. You can come back anytime and do the next day. You don't have to do seven days in a row. This class is also perfect for anyone who's brand new to watercolor, but really anyone of any level can take this class whether you just need a refresher or you just want to have a fun experiment of trying a different type of style of painting. Next up, I'll be explaining the different supplies you'll need, especially if you're brand new to watercolor. We'll go through a quick warm-up exercise, and then you can get started on day one at your own pace. Thanks so much for joining the class and have fun.
2. Supplies + Inspiration: So before you get started painting, you're going to need some inspiration images to paint from. So I like to look at books. I think it's really nice to have a physical book to look at next to you, although sometimes I will look at my phone and just look on Google Images and just find just like, an image that has a really nice clear view of the shape, of a certain flower. So this is one I worked on. This was ocean spray. This one was a little more true to life of the actual colors of the plants. Although, when the pictures that I'm painting from are black and white, sometimes I'll just take liberties and just paint whatever colors I'm feeling, rather than just worrying about exactly replicating that flower, and this book is really great. I love vintage books I just think that photography is really beautiful and not just inspires me in general. So I'll look around on eBay and find books like these, and I'm actually probably due to find a new batch, but this has been my go-to book for awhile. This is just a few more sketches in my sketchbook, I've recently been working on lots of florals and working on different floral painting series that I share on my Instagram, and some are upside down because I flipped my journal over and I like to paint on the right side. So that's why some of them are upside down. Then here's something that I just worked on recently. I'm really excited about this, it's my first calendar design. So I designed a floral pattern for each month representing that month's birth, month flower. So this was a really fun project and it really got me used to painting all different types of species of flowers as well, then here's an example of just some other books I have on hand. This is definitely grade, if you want to paint more plant life of course, cactus succulent, are really popularly not paint. I love this file, this was one of my favorite finds recently on eBay. This is another really nice book I found recently that I'm going to paint from in one of the daily challenges. Sometimes it's really nice to have color pictures too, and as for the rest of the supplies, you're going to need watercolor papers. So this is a square watercolor journal that I've been loving using, and I'll share a link to this as well, and I just use a simple clip to just hold pages down when I'm painting, especially if they curl up because of use of lots of water. There's lots of pages in this book, which is great. Then I have a simple plastic palette that I've cleaned out for today, two cups of water, you can use any kind of jar, and just make sure you have two, one for warmer and cooler tones so it doesn't get too muddy, and a paper towel, and these are all of my different brushes I'd been using lately, I love this brand. It's silver and it's just a really nice brush. This is a mop brush which is new for me to experiment with, but it's great too, and then these are just simple round brushes. These are actually synthetic and I'll share the links to all of those. This is a fun paint to play with, it's concentrated watercolor from Dr. Ph. Martin's and it's kind of expensive, but it really goes a long way. So I suggest buying out by one or two of those to try out. This is a lower costs watercolor, which I think is great for beginners, it's caught min, by Windsor and Newton, and it's just a really great brand. They have some really great colors. I'll also be painting with a couple of galoshes just for a really opaque feel. They're similar to watercolor, just more opaque, and this is another watercolor brand that I have found is really nice to paint with mango, and that's it for supplies, and make sure to check out the project description page, where you'll find links to all of the supplies and some other suggestions.
3. Warm Up with Leaves: Now we'll do a few warm up exercises just to get you started. I always like to warm up because I find it just takes me painting a little bit to really loosen up. I'm just going to set up my palette here with lots of different greens, so we can play with different colors and make a variety of leaves to get started. First I'm going to take my silver brush, which is really great because you can make points with it and also broader strokes. It's been my go-to brush lately. I'm just going to start out with different shades of green and painting simple leaves to warm up. You can choose any leaf shape you want. This is just an exercise, just experiment. Look at some images for inspiration, or just paint from your imagination. Either way. This nice thick, darker green color is that quash paint. Sometimes I just really like to have a variety of quash and watercolor, because the watercolor is a little lighter and daintier, and then it balances well with the contrast of the deeper quash. You can see here these lighter colors I'm using a little bit more water than the mid tones or the darker colors. The water just dilutes it. Now, I'm going to start painting this fern leaf. I'm looking at that photo to the left. I'm not worried about making perfect shapes and just making each leaf actually different so that it feels a little more organic. Then I'll start to overlap some of the leaves to add some interest, and just really playing with the shapes and letting my natural hand do its thing. The paint that I'm using right now is the doctor ph martin concentrated water color. This is really fun to use because it really acts more like an ink than a paint. It's really smooth and feels like you're really drawing with ink rather than painting. Now I've taken out my mop brush. The mop brush is great for big round shapes like this, and also holds water really well, so you don't really need to dip it in a tonne of water because it really holds onto the paint and water for a long time. Just playing with different shapes here. Now I'm going to look for a leaf with an interesting pattern, like this one on the top left, and play with letting the water bleed out a little bit onto the main shape. First I'm going to take my mop brush and use a lighter color for the base shape. While that's still wet, I'm going to take my other brush that has more of a point to paint the details, the veins of the leaves on top. You'll see how the water will start to cause the paint to bleed, which is an interesting inky effect. If you don't want that effect and you want it to be really clean lines, then just wait for it to completely dry. The longer you wait, the cleaner it's going to be. You can also do somewhere in between, rather than just getting started right away while it's still wet. Here's a close up of everything I painted so you can see what a beautiful texture the watercolor makes. All the different types of watercolors do different things. One of the best things about watercolor is seeing how it dries. It's just different every stroke.
4. Day 1: Poppies: Now that you've warmed up and have all of your supplies, welcome to day one. So today we're going to be painting poppies. Poppies are really fun to paint because they're nice, simple shape. I think they're going to be perfect to start with for day one. I've got my inspiration image here, and I am going to play with mixing a couple of different reds and oranges and puppies come in a variety of colors. But like I said before, you don't really have to be exact to what the actual color of the flower is. Just use your imagination and use the colors that you're drawn to. So first, I'm going to start with the main shape of the poppy flowers and looking at this photo and not making a really perfect stylized shape. Now, this is my style and I'll show you another potential style that you can play with. Throughout this challenge, I'm going to be talking about different ways that you can approach it and just find your natural tendencies and what you're naturally drawn to. Everyone's hand is different so yours just not going to look exactly like mine. Like I said, I'm starting out with the really big petals here first and keeping them really organic and using different shades of orange just to change it up a little bit. I'm also painting a couple of those buds that you see in the photo there to add some interest. Now, for the stems and leaves, my style is to have a date on the anterior side. Sometimes the stems are broken up and they're not just perfect lines. However, I do like to look at the flowers, particularly leaves and stay true to that shape. I mean, even though it's not going to be perfect if you saw it, you could tell that was the poppies particular type of leaf. I'm changing up the amount of water that I use for all of the greenery just so it's not all just one even tone. I just find it more fun and natural to have different shades. Now for the center of the poppies, you can decide if you want to wait for the petals to dry fully and here I'm just starting out and they're still wet. The little centers are going to bleed a little bit into the petals which I don't mind. It just depends on the effect that you're going for. In general, when I'm painting the centers of flowers, maybe in real life they are the same color as the petals, but I like to just have contrast so that you can really see the difference between the centers and the petals. It just looks bolder than if it was all to be the same color. You'll see in a lot of my paintings that I like to add just some little details on top. This is just something that you can play with. It doesn't have to be something that you always do. You can try and find different little details that you can add that you think makes your paintings feel like you. You may want to paint with an outline around your petals rather than adding details on top as an example. Or you may not want to have any details at all and keep it really flat and add some details in the background. Just experiment and don't be afraid of what it ends up looking like, because the only way you're really going to find your style is by painting a lot and experimenting with a whole bunch of things so you can see what you end up liking. Now that I've shown one way to paint poppies, here's a more stylized version. I've grabbed my mop brush and I'm using the more classic red for the poppy color and just painting circles and where I'm going to add centers after these have dried. Then I'm also going to try painting not quite circles, but still you can tell that there's some petals going on. So just another style of painting. There's really like so many more ways you can go battered as well. Now these had mostly dried. I'm going to grab my Sumi ink. This is just a really nice opaque Ink. I find it a little more cost effective than using black wash or black watercolor, but I do use both. But right now what I have on hand is this Sumi ink. I just dip straight into the container. You can also just pour a little bit out onto your palette. Just keep in mind that it will stain things. So I try really hard not to spill it on my desk or on my clothes or anything like that. For these puppies, I'm doing them more like flat style little dots and my flowers here haven't dried completely. You're going to see a little bit of bleeding and I like the way it looks. I feel like it's interesting. But if I was going to go for something really graphic and flat and clean, I would definitely let the petals dry completely. That's it for day one. So make as many poppies as you'd like and I'll see you for the next flower on day two.
5. Day 2: Tall Larkspur: Welcome to day 2 of the painting challenge. Today we're going to be painting tall larkspur, and I have a taller paper watercolor block today. This is by fluid, it's a cold press finish which I love the texture of cold press versus smooth hot press, so I'll share a link to this paper as well, and I have my book open here, but I'm also looking at an image I found on Google, which are a little more representative of these types of flowers, and you can see all the different types of blues, and they're just a really fun, pretty shaped to paint and really like a simple shape which I think is good for only day 2 of the challenge. I'm using my concentrated watercolor today and this is just like a gorgeous color, there's so many beautiful colors in that line, and I definitely recommend checking out and trying a couple of your favorites, this is just a really deep rich blue, so I'm just painting the general shape of the flower, which is like a tall stalk, and making it feel a little more full at the bottom by adding some smaller petals as it reaches towards the top. Sometimes I like to paint the stem first, but for this particular flower, I'm going with the petals first. You can just see how rich and beautiful that color is, and staying in the same color family, I'm using this lavender watercolor, which is one of my go to colors. It's just a favorite of mine, and these two together are really nice, and this is actually July's, birth month flowers, so I created a pattern based off of these illustrations for my calendar. I'm just doing the similar shape here, and you can just keep painting as many as you want, just making sure your paper is tall enough because it's so frustrating if you start painting and you realize, you have no room at the top, so that's why I just made sure I had the taller paper today. Now I'm going to grab some my greens and add in a little stem, just a really thin dainty stem and just popping it in between some of the petals and adding some cute little leaves, and just keeping this one pretty simple. Now I'm looking over to my image to the right and creating more of a, a close up painting of this type of flowered, which you can really get a better feel of the actual shapes of the individual fires because when they're all grouped together, it just looks like the flowers to the left. Here you can see I'm painting the stem first and the leaves first, so that then when that dries just a little bit, I can easily add the different flower buds on top. This is again the concentrated water color and the olive green color, which is one of my favorites. I'm just painting a few of these little buds, not really worrying about getting a perfect shape, and then some of the flowers, and for me, the beauty of painting flowers is how organic it is and how imperfection is really celebrated, rather than worrying so much about creating these like perfect geometric shapes or something like that. Now that my lavender flower has dried a little bit, I'm just going to add some depth to it by putting that blue color on top onto the enzyme edges and the outside edges of some of the petals. Just to like give a sense of a shadow, but still keep it fairly simple. He is just a close-up so you can see how pretty these colors are and how simple really the forms are. Next up, we will be painting some lilies for day 3.
6. Day 3: Lilies: Here we are in day 3 painting lilies. There are lots of different types of lilies out there, so just pick your favorite and a color that you like and then we'll get started. I'm just looking at the general shape from this photo from my book and then going with the color yellow, which is a really bright and happy color, I think for alleles. For each painting, when I'm starting, I'm thinking about what the main focal point is going to be for that flower and then I'm also planning ahead based on colors. For these, the main feel of lilies is their very specific petal shapes so I'm painting these pointed edges to really get the feel of a lilie. I'm using a lighter color and so I'm planning ahead by using a lighter color so I can use a darker contrasting colors for the centers. Now especially with this brush, it's feels like I'm sketching with it. That's one of the reasons I really loved painting lilies is it always ends up feeling like I'm drawing more than other flower shapes and I think it's because they do have that pointier and wavier edge. Now while that drying a little bit, I'm going to start painting the stems and then the bigger leaves, just so that these parts will dry and then I can start adding on the details of the rest of the flower. Now that I've let the petals dry, I'm going to start mixing my colors for the rest of the flowers and I'm going to keep it in a warm color family and use oranges and reds. Now I've got the shade of orange that I was looking for, so I'm going to go ahead and just add some little line details on the petals just to help form that shape a little more. When you're painting your flowers, you may not want to do these little line elements. You may want to actually have more shadows, you can really see in that photo to the right, there may be an unique way that you can come up with to play with the details of these. Now I'm ready to start adding the centers, these are really fun shapes to paint. This was always one of my favorite parts and I love how the color really pops against the lighter background. That's really it for lilies. Have fun painting yours, and I'll see you on day 4.
7. Day 4: Geraniums: Here we are on day 4. I have a new reference book with me and this is a type of flower I haven't heard of before, but it's a type of geranium found in Africa. I was drawn to it because of all the pinks. What I'm going to do is grab a whole bunch of different pinks that I have on hand and just play with all of them and mix them together and just get a variety. This is a really fun way to play with color and keep it in the same color family. You can see I've got all my pinks already laid out, and I'm just going to get started painting the basic shapes of these flowers. I'm going to start with a really light pink. As you can see, I'm not painting the exact shape of the flower, but I am painting five petals each just to keep it consistent. I'm going to start adding in some different colors and seeing how they blend together. Which is always a fun process to watch. I'm going to go through and paint a whole bunch of shapes in different colors, mixing different pinks and let that dry a little bit before I start adding additional details. I just wanted to note here that when I'm mixing my paints on my palette, I usually use a cheaper brush or just not my paper brush because I don't want to mess up the bristles of the nicer brush by being too rough with mixing. I think I have enough of the bases of the flowers for now, so I'm going to start adding in some stems and the little buds that you see to the right. This is a color I had mixed before. I've heard some people say that they don't realize that you can reuse watercolor once it's dry, which I do all the time. It's just nice to cover up your palette if you aren't using it for a while just so it doesn't get dusty. I'm loosely adding in some stems. Now playing with the different types of pinks is definitely a way that you can add your own spin to it because you can mix any different shades that you like. If you don't even like pink, you could do some other color. I think color really speaks a lot to an artist's personality. I'm going to start with this darker, hot pink to start adding some details to the flowers and again, just having that contrast on low light background and the darker details. I love adding the little details on top. It's one of my favorite parts. Just for some more graphic appeal, I'm doing, a little bit more straighter lines than I usually do and you could take this really even further and give your flower shapes where really exact and then you have these really straight lines. I think it would be a nice graphic bold book. I'm just adding some little darker details to the buds too, so I don't want to forget those. That's it for day 4. I will see you in the next lesson for day 5 where we will be painting irises.
8. Day 5: Iris: Since I don't have any books with nice photos of irises in them, I did a search on Google just to use as inspiration and printed them out. I try and look for images that have a really clear view of the shape of the flower and then different angles, and also to make sure that I can see the types of leaves as well. Like I've said before, I usually I'm planning ahead in my head and thinking about what the main focal point of this flower is in. This is definitely a very unique shape, and that's what makes it so fun to paint. There's also some nice pops of color details on irises. Usually what I do is leave a little bit of white space, so that you can really see the contrast of the pop of color that you'll see that I will add. You can do that or you can do a lighter background flower petal and paint on top of those. There's pops of white in a lot of irises, so that's why I like to leave the white space from the paper. It just depends on your own choices, you can paint white on top as well. I'm just having fun painting these shapes, and I love this color that I'm using. The paint is by Van Gogh and it's Permanent, Red Violet watercolor. It's just a really beautiful color shade of the two, but I'm also mixing it with some other purples to just have some variation. [inaudible] I'm going to paint one more flower here. If you wanted to, you could sketch maybe the outline of your flower shapes ahead of time. You can do that in pencil or watercolor itself, but I like to just go straight for it, and it just feels a little bit more intuitive for me without sketching first. [inaudible] Irises have really nice, thick stems and beautiful tall pointy leaves, which are fun to paint and have peeking through the petals. [inaudible] Now, I'm going to start adding my pops of yellow. This is just like really quick little pops of yellow in the centers. But, you can see how it really helps define the type of flower that it is, just that small detail. Then, just adding in some little details here in that darker purple. These flowers would be pretty if you maybe did a wide variety of different hues within the same color family. This is kind of all reading as the same color, but I love that color so much, so I just kept using it. [inaudible] I hope you've enjoyed painting the big blooms of the iris flowers. I will see you in the next lesson where I will be showing you my process of painting hydrangeas.
9. Day 6: Hydrangeas: Hydrangeas are another great opportunity to play with color. If you do a Google search for photos of them online, you'll see they come in tons of different shades. I have some images printed out just to get the form right, but I was looking also at the color photos of all the different shades of blues and lavenders. I'm going to be mixing those colors today and letting them blend a little bit more than we have in some of the other videos. I've got this really pretty blue color that I mixed with white and then a turquoise color that I also mix with white just to keep them all in the pastel family and make sure that one color isn't overpowering the other too much by how dark it is. So they're just all flowing together. I'm just painting the general shape here, and then for my next set of flowers, I'm just going to add in some different colors of blue and have a little more purple. Even though we're on day 6 of seven, I'm going to be using this illustration for the bonus video, which is after you've completed the challenge and you aren't familiar with scanning in your artwork and how to clean it up in Photoshop. I'm just going to do a little brief overview of that in case you want to scan in your artwork and use it for different things like getting printed for art prints or on note cards and stuff like that. Stay tuned for that once you paint all seven of your flowers. I'm trying to get the jagged edges of these leaves here and I'm painting these in a really light green because I'm going to add some darker green details on top. [MUSIC] While I've been painting these leaves, the petals have been drying. So now I'm going to use a darker blue and add teeny little dots to the centers of the flowers or approximately the centers of the flowers, they're all random and it's really, I think, going to add some more form to the shape. Since now my leaves have probably mostly dried, I'm going to add in my darker green details on top, and then this painting is complete. Next step we'll be painting our last flower of the series, which are Peruvian lilies, and those are super fun to paint, and then don't forget after that video is a short recap on how to scan in your painting and clean it up.
10. Day 7: Peruvian Lily: It's Day 7. Good job. You've made it this far. This is a really fun flower to paint. I was drawn to it because of the little dotted details. I love dots in general, so that's going to be my main focal point for this painting today. Since I know I really want the darker details to stand out, especially on these, I'm going to go with a really light background. If you look up images of Peruvian lilies, you'll see they come in tons of different colors. They're really awesome and vibrant and fun. I'm going to go with three different colored flowers today. I think that they're going to end up looking nice together, keeping it in like the pink and orange and red warmer side of colors. While these petals I'm painting are a little bit wet, I'm going to add a darker pink into the centers of the flowers just for a little bit of dimension. Now I'm moving on to my second flower. It's kind of a orangey yellow. This is actually my first time painting these flowers. I feel like I don't know how I came across them, but they were so beautiful that I was so excited when I found them. So I will definitely be painting these again. We're going to add some more dimension again to this pink flower. I should've done it sooner on the yellow flower before it dried too much, but I forgot. But I still think it can end up looking okay. I'm going to use a little bit of a darker, more vibrant green that I've been using just to really play up the vibrancy of these flowers. Now I get to add the darker pink details. I'm just making sure I don't have too much paint on my brush so that it doesn't get goopy. I'm just going to go ahead while I have this pink out, start adding these little dashed details. I'm keeping them around the darker spot that I had painted. The simple lines for me really feel like they help develop the direction that the petals look like they're facing. As we're wrapping up, I just want to say, if you have any questions at all, whether it's watercolor technique or any specific questions about how you can develop your style or maybe how I've developed mine, I'm an open book, so I'm happy to answer anything. Post it in the discussion page and please also, I would love to see any paintings that you're working on that you feel comfortable sharing in the class project. I'll be checking them all out and commenting. Thank you so much for participating in the challenge. There is a bonus video for how to scan and clean up your artwork if you want to check that out. Also I have a couple of other classes here on Skillshare. One that you may be interested in is how to turn your watercolor elements into seamless repeat patterns. This most definitely would be a great place to start painting your florals here and then go turn them into patterns with my other class. Thanks so much for being here. Again, I'll talk to you again soon if you have any questions.
11. Bonus Video: Scanning + Photoshop: First step, I'm going to scan my artwork. I have an Epson Scanner. I'll share the link to the one that I use as well. Normally, the minimum for scanning for quality artwork is 300 dpi, but I went ahead and did 600 dpi so that I can scale the image up a little bit more than the actual size. I've got my original scan. I'm just going to rotate the image and crop it down as close as possible and making sure I don't crop off any of the artwork. The goal here is to remove the white background without accidentally removing any of your artwork. I've chosen this painting because it has lighter colors and that's usually the most challenging aspect of scanning and cleaning up watercolors, because it does tend to be so light and can easily get removed from the background. It takes a little bit of lightwork to make sure that you're not cutting that off. I'm just going to first do a quick overview, deleting of the white background, see the problem areas where I need to go back and individually erase around the edges so they don't get caught up and be deleted. Now that I've identified the problem areas, I'm going to keep going through and erasing edges until when I delete the white background they don't get deleted along with it. Sometimes when I'm painting, I try to be conscious of this. If I notice an edge that looks like it might end up being an issue later, I'll paint it a little bit darker. For here, this is just an example of if you don't do that. There are also a couple of other ways of getting the white background off of your painting. I have another class, and it's all about creating repeat patterns from your watercolor elements. I have a longer lesson on different ways to remove the backgrounds, including using the Refine Edge tool. Even though it seems very manual and time-consuming, it really ends up being a little bit quicker. I've cleaned all that up. I've erased the main part of the white background. I'm adding a contrasting darker background so I can really see those little white spots and delete them. Then I'm going to go through and delete all of the main white areas in the middle. Once I've deleted all of those, I'm going to go close up and delete any problem areas that may have been from my scanner. There's some paint that was left over on my scanner from another painting and just little specks of dust. I'll be using the Healing Brush tool. It looks like a little band-aid over on the left. If you want to easily change the size of your tools, you can use the bracket keys on your keyboard to make them smaller and larger. Then use the Eraser tool to erase all these little dots. If you plan on keeping your artwork on a white background, you don't have to be super detailed about deleting all of the white. If you wanted it to be on a darker background, I would be a little bit more exact on making sure your edges aren't too jagged and they're fairly clean. They don't have to be perfect. It's a handmade watercolors, so it's just up to your aesthetic preference. I'm planning on putting this on a lighter background, maybe a super light blue. I'm not too worried about getting every little white detail off. Here, I'll just show you how the look of the painting changes depending on the background color. I'm going to show you in the image size section how you can scale your image up. If you want to make your image larger but still keep it at decent quality, I wouldn't go below 300 dpi. You would uncheck, resample and you'll see you can put it at 300 dpi, 400, 500, and you'll see how it can change the size of the painting. I hit cancel because I'm not really going to use this for anything right now. If I were to print it larger, I would go under image size and change the size there. That's it. If you're interested in turning your elements into a repeat pattern, you can check out my other class. If you have any questions, please let me know. I would love to see your projects in the class project page.
Juliet Meeks, Designer and Artist
