Painting For Textile And Surface Pattern Design: Master Ink, Gouache And Watercolor

1. Lesson 1 - Intro: Hi, my name is Darya Karenski. I'm a United States based professional textile and surface pattern designer, educator and painter. I turn illustrations like this into fabric and wallpaper designs like this. I live in the Boston area, Massachusetts, where I went to college for textile design and have over nine years of experience as a full time surface pattern designer, Illustrator, and fine artist. You might have watched my first class called Introduction to Surface Pattern Design. Your unique path where I laid out all the possible career options, ways to make patterns, and so on. In this course, I would like to focus specifically on painting for textile design. You might think painting. In this digital world. Yes, you heard it right. Traditional media are still alive and well in textile design. Of course, we do eventually take our creations to Photoshop Illustrator or other computer applications to prep artwork for production and build the repeat. There is nothing wrong with starting out on paper with good old paint or ink. Hand painted artwork has a particular beloved and recognizable feel to it that still cannot be 100% emulated with digital tools. Traditionally painted artwork can be used in all kinds of categories of surface pattern and textile design from women's and children's apparel, including swimwear, home textiles, such as table linens, wallpaper, computer and phone cases, and much more. Who is this class? Anybody who prefers traditional painting over digital art for any reason. Perhaps you are a painter who would like to learn about the nuances of painting specifically for textiles or someone who just prefers to keep their hands dirty with real paint and ink. You're in the right place. There is special magic and commercial appeal that comes from hand painted art. We will go over three most popular media for painting, ink, gouache, and watercolor, the right brushes for them, and variations in their use that can produce different visual impact. Will also show you how to work with different kinds of references for inspiration, such as magazines, books, and online resources like Pinterest and Instagram, and how to not breach copyright when doing so. I will walk you through my sketching and planning process, touch on different pattern layouts, and outline what kind of products can the painted artwork be applied to. We will explore a variety of popular topics, such as loose watercolor florals, inky abstract designs, hazly Christmas designs, and do you have to know how to paint to take this course? You will most benefit from it if you have some experience working with art materials, but most of the techniques I'll demonstrate are super easy and beginner friendly. An important note is that this course does not include info on how to put patterns and repeat yet. We will focus on the first stage of textile design, painting motifs and croquet. Croque is the future repeating pattern. Grab your notebook, prepare your paints and brushes, and I hope to see you in class. 2. Lesson 2 - Paper and palettes: Welcome to the class. I'm so excited that you are here. We will start painting very soon, just to give you a general idea of how paintings turn into textile prints. We will be painting motifs on paper, and no matter what medium we use, eventually, we wait for the paintings to dry and then scan them onto the computer. So it's essential to have a good scanner. You do not need it right now while taking this class, but if you are serious about painting for textiles, it's an essential tool to have. I shared some information on the scanners in my first class called Introduction to Surface Pattern Design. Now let's talk about paper. I just want to say that for all fluid mediums, it is very important to use artist paper that is thick enough. 140 pounds or 300 grams/square meter is ideal. It is okay to use student grade paper, especially in the beginning, but it's essential that the paper is thick enough to take in all the liquid. So I would say try not to go below 100 pounds. What happens if you paint on thin paper? Also not the end of the world, depending on how thin the paper is. Although it's not ideal, it can create warping on the surface that later can impair the look of the artwork when it's scanned. The warped areas will appear blurry on the scan. I will show you this artwork painted on thin paper. See? First of all, you can see warping on the back. And, of course, it's not the end of the world. You can still use this artwork. You can still scan it and turn it into a repeating pattern. But it can get a little bit tricky. You have to be really careful. You can, of course, experiment and see what happens if you paint on thin paper. Still has to be it's not printer paper, it is artist paper that we use, and we can compare it to this one, for example, see how thick the paper is, and I will show you what kind of paper it is in a second. The difference between artist quality and student grade paper is the way it preserves over time. The more expensive and higher quality the paper is, the longer the artwork stays intact and brand new looking. But because in textiles, we usually scan our artwork and don't intend to display it in galleries, paper quality can be a little more forgiving. Not so much worried about the paper artwork itself, you know, this, but rather getting a crisp and quality image on the scanner. So the way we scan artwork will be very important, too. It's definitely up to you what paper to use, and sometimes if I anticipate painting a nicer piece, I will use high grade paper. But I think when we are practicing and playing with brushes, it's totally okay to use more budget friendly kinds of paper. Here are some of my favorites. Artisa I use quite a lot, and I like the size, and it does fit on my scanner as well. So this is 11 by 14 " or 28 centimeters by 35.6 centimeters. It is cold press paper, and I will record demo of the texture close up as well. So I do use Canson and paper quite a lot, as well. So this is a sketchbook for mixed media. But again, this is not thin paper. This one is 98 pounds or 160 grams, so it is quite thick as well. Like Strathmore paper as well. There are different sizes, different kinds available, and this one is eight by ten, a smaller size. So these are kind of, you know, the okay quality papers. Now let me show you the best of the best of the best, the luxury papers. Of course. Arches is one of them. Arches paper is really, really nice. So this is Arches paper. Different kinds of texture. I will explain it later on as well. Sandras Waterford is kind of new for me, and I mostly use these top tier papers for painting landscape, but I use them for textiles as well. This is also Saunders watercolor paper, 14 by 10 ", bigger size. Every artist has a preference for size. Someone likes to paint smaller, someone likes to paint larger. As you start painting, you will see what you prefer. I prefer painting medium to large, but again, it depends on the project. This one is called Bohm and it is hot press paper. For watercolor, we usually use cold press paper, which has a texture to it. This one does not have any texture whatsoever. This kind of paper, hot press watercolor paper is great for gouache, and as we do each project, I will add more details on the paper so you are not completely overwhelmed. This one is ten by seven, and this is also 300 grams/square meter. Another important thing to consider is paper size. It has to correlate with your brushes and palette well sizes, and also we need to make sure it will fit on our scanner. My scanner glass is 12 by 17 " or 30 by 43 centimeters. So if I plan to paint loose gestural florals like this, for example, I use bigger brushes, so it's going to be something like this. Right? And I need a big palette so I can actually accommodate this brush. So let me show you a couple palettes that I use. This is my go to watercolor palette. It's by Schminke It was a part of the Watercolor set in a wooden box. But for this brush, it is even a little bit too small. So for really particularly big projects, I will use a plate like this. So this is just a plate, a dish. And you can buy them, you know, thrift stores or regular home goods stores. You just have to make sure, you know, your brushes correlate with the size of the palette. So if I'm painting something like this, I will probably use about this size of brushes, ten, 12, and so on. Don't worry, I will show you all my brushes that I use as I'm painting. And for something small, the smaller we go, the smaller the brush size. This one is Artisaeight size round brush. And for something really, really small like this, you would use an even smaller brush. And, you know, a small palette is good enough for that, too. So the way I see it, I try to maximize the scanning surface in one go. So I like to use larger paper. But don't get too caught up in paper size. As long as it fits on your scanner, it's fine. And even if it doesn't fit on the scanner, you can still work around it. Larger pieces can be scanned in two or more rounds, but it's just a little extra work, so I don't paint that big too often. It's also helpful to think of the scale in terms of the product you're designing for. So I would advise against painting too small. For example, no smaller than this size. This is five by seven artisa watercolor paper. So this is a good you go smaller, it gets trickier when you're trying to enlarge your image. I would say stick to this. Working with small artwork is also not impossible. It is just harder. It's just extra work to do. It's up to you as an artist if you prefer more textured or smooth paper. Generally, it is recommended to use smoother or hot press paper for gouache and markers, or you can use bristle paper as well. While watercolor looks great with a little bit of tooth to it or texture to it. It does definitely take some experimentation and play. As I start each of my projects, I will name the paper that I will be using. Are gradations of textured paper as well. For example, watercolor can be called rough textured, which means it has this maximum rough texture, and cold press is the usual go to for watercolor. Hot press is the smoothest paper. Let's look at different paper textures. Watercolor paper usually has this slightly rough texture. O colo looks really beautiful with this kind of texture. So, see, this one is called rough specifically, as opposed to the regular cold pressed one. And here, the texture is really pronounced. It's really, really rough. This is more like a choice. You don't really have to use this one. It's just, you know, if you're a fan of texture. This is a popular choice as well with great rough texture, cold press, and these are very important numbers for us. So this one, see how thick it is. It is twice as thick as the regular one. Again, you don't have to use it. It's just an option. See? How thick one sheet is. It's really, really, really thick. This is my go to paper. You know, the Artisa one. It's very budget friendly. It is student grade, so this is not professional paper, so I think this is a good paper to start with. See, there is some texture. It's not as pronounced as the arches. Let's look at the smoother paper. So this is also what I call a paper, which is hot press. So see, there is very little texture noticeable here. And this thicker sketchbook paper is also a good option. This is Canson mixed media sketchbook with these numbers. And it's also very budget friendly because there are 60 sheets in here. So, see, it's not as thick as the other paper, but it still works. There will be some warping if you use this one. Let me see if I have any example. So, see if you paint on paper that is not quite thick, you can get this warping. Hope you can see the paper is a little distorted. But as you can see, I still keep painting and even sometimes on both sides, which is risky, which I do not recommend, you know, as your go to option. But these are markers. These are not watercolors. I also wanted to tell you that if the paper doesn't work for watercolor, you know, watercolor is the most demanding in terms of paper. This is allegedly, everything is right here, everything is great, but for some reason, this particular paper didn't work for watercolor color was sort of curling up, creating, you know, dry patches. So the texture is nice. Everything is nice here, but the paper is covered with some kind of sizing, some kind of chemical. So this particular paper did not work for watercolor, but it works for gouache just fine. So if paper is not cooperating with you very well, do not throw it away right away and use it for gouache because gouache is more forgiving. 3. Lesson 3 - How big should motifs be. Let's talk design scale and resolution: As I was working on this class, I received a question on Skillshare yesterday, and I realized I have been asked this question before, so I would like to talk about scale. So the question was, how big should the motifs be? The quick answer is, they can be as big as you need them to. I would say that you'll benefit the most if you paint at medium scale, and this is what I would call medium scale because it's easier to shrink things down. But when you are painting too small, it will be much more complicated to blow things up. So medium, in this case, is about 1.5 " to 2 ". These are the original motifs, and I drew them in markers on seven by ten paper. So the motifs are about 2 " or so, and this is the fabric with the same design. The way the design is represented on fabric or on wallpaper will also depend on the manufacturer limitations. With digital printing, the possibilities are pretty much unlimited. There is usually the bigger limit, meaning that most of the fabric sizes repeats don't go beyond 24 or 25 ". I will elaborate more on it later. So here, see, this is the fabric, and these are the original motifs. So even if you mean them to be kind of ditzy designs, hate them a little bit bigger because all of this detail would get lost. If I painted it too small, it would be much more difficult to paint, as well. But it is way easier to shrink this down. So in this case, the biggest motif here is 3 " across, and we have this super long branch, which is about 8 " tall. And the paper is nine by 12. So for me, it's easier to think in terms of the paper that we are using, and I included information in this class on which sizes of paper I recommend using. So if I were to paint something at this scale, this is too small, too ditzy. So this is a printout. This is the original, see? This is the way it was painted. Paper is six by nine, and every flower is about 3 " tall or so. But this design, when I was painting it, I knew right away that I wanted to be ditzy. So I did not intend to blow it up to giant scale. If you know your design is going to be ditzy, you can paint it smaller. The shirt that I'm wearing, look at this small scale floral. There is no point in blowing it up too large. It does look great at this scale, so that's always a possibility, too. What you do in case of small motifs, when your motifs are fairly small. So I would scan this at 600 DPI. Normally, I scan my motifs at 300 DPI. This is standard resolution in design. But when I have something as small as this or something as small as this, I will scan these guys at 600 dpi, all of these guys, too. So when I'm drawing, see, there are several designs on the same paper. I love to maximize the paper already put this in repeat. I will include a photo here, and I scan those guys at 600 DPI too. Some scanners have the capacity to scan even higher, like a 1,200 DPI. Mine can do that, too, but I rarely use it because it makes the file too large, and I really do not intend to blow up this little guy, which is about an inch to the size, right? So 600 DPI is usually enough. And what it does is say, if this is 1.5 " wide, if you scan it at 300 DPI, you will get 1.5 ". So if you scan this at 600 DPI, he will be 3 " wide. So this is how you can manipulate the size of your motifs as well. So a couple words on this wallpaper. I work with, you know, this is spun flower wallpaper, and I have taken the time to study their technical limitations. So spun flower roll is maximum 24 " wide, and they can go down by increments, like 12, six, four 2 ". When I applaud to spun flower, most of my designs, I applaud as both fabric and wallpaper, and I usually offer two sizes, large and small. I mean, there's definitely a range you can have medium and extra small and things like that. But I try to make it a little easier. I don't want to have too many sizes. So this is my small size. It is a little smaller than the original, and I had to use, you know, spoon flower limitations. So on this particular wallpaper, the repeat size is 6 " wide. If we look from this blue leaf to this blue leaf, I can see the repeat size. It's six inch. The large size for this wall paper would be 12 ". So it'll be two times bigger. It is possible to blow this up to 24 ", too, but I think that it will be a little bit too extreme. This is a ditzi design, so I want it to be smaller, even at large scale. I hope you see what I mean. Talking about small scale designs, I cannot but mention vector designs. And in this course, we speak about paintings only, so we will not be turning any of the stuff we paint here into vectors. But since we are talking about scale, if your motifs happen to be too small, you can turn them into vector. And when I start a design, I usually decide right away or, you know, at least very early in the process. I think I'm going to turn this into a vector. This is definitely going to be a vector design. So if you are familiar and confident in Adobe Illustrator, you can draw smaller designs and turn them into a vector later on. This is definitely much more work. This is more intense. But as a reward, you know, this is one of my best selling designs. Or the motifs. They are pretty small. You know, they're about 1 " wide and about 1.5 " tall. You know, I do not like working at this scale because it's a lot of work. I mean, it does look great, and, you know, I recolored it digitally as well. So this is my best selling color way. This is inspired by Milli flour or thousand Flowers, right? The famous tapestries, medieval tapestries. So what you do with vector, you know, you turn these into vector points, and you can enlarge these. So see, this is the original scale. This is my small scale, and this is the large scale. So if you do something like this, you have to make sure your lines are crisp and clean and beautiful. I did not always do the best job here because this was so small. I hope you can see this this little triangular pedal, which is not very pretty. What I'm trying to say is when you're working at the scale that is too small, you are giving yourself a lot of work to do. I would say, for starters, stick to medium scale. Not every design can be a vector. The way I decide is usually, you know, these are pretty flat. They are not painter opposed to these, for example, see these gradations. It's almost like a watercolor effect or a painterly effect. So this looks really pretty. I probably would not flatten it and turn it into a vector. I could, but then you would just have one solid color. You would not see this little beautiful gradation. But these are pretty flat. There is no texture here. There are no flow effects. And I spoke about this quite a lot in my introduction class. Also, it's important to have a ruler on your desk. I use it quite a lot. As you're working on the screen, you need to understand how big your motifs are, right? So I always keep a ruler on my desk. Now let's talk about large scale because I also get questions from time to time. People suggest that if they're painting for wallpaper, they need to go really, really big. This is not necessarily the case because like I just mentioned, you can scan at higher resolution, and this will blow up your design. And it's also very helpful to order samples if you can, because very often, when you are working digitally, you don't have the feel for the scale. You don't know what the wallpaper will actually look like in real life. With this ditty design, I had no idea that it prints that big. You know? When I ordered the sample, I was shocked. And then I offered the second size because I personally think it looks better, smaller. But again, it's also a personal choice, and some people might enjoy it bigger because see if it covers the entire room, maybe it's a little bit too busy. So this is what I would call big scale. So this paper is 11 by 14 ", and each flower is about 4 " wide. So in my mind, this is and, you know, this is slightly larger because this is 11 ". And remember the size of the wallpaper. So this is probably the 12 inch size, so it's slightly bigger than this original painting. And this can also be blown up to 24 ". So this flower would be this big. And it's also a possibility, and there is a market for jumbo scale wallpaper. And, you know, one day I was showing my mom my wallpaper designs, and she was like, I don't know who uses these. You know, they're so busy. They're so colorful. They are so crazy. Many people do prefer very neutral and soft wallpapers. I honestly prefer solid both, but there are maximalist. There are different styles of design. So, trust me, there is a market for any kind of design. Maybe not everybody will buy this wallpaper, but the person who has the right home for it would be thrilled for it. Also, you can have an accent wall, right? You don't need to cover your entire home with this design. And remember, with a big size, we have to make sure it fits on the scanner. So this one does. This is the biggest size I can fit on my scanner. And I mentioned as well that your paper is bigger, you can put it on your scanner twice and then merge them in Photoshop. But again, I personally don't like giving myself more work than I need. I hope it answers the question of how big the motive should be. 4. Lesson 4 - Ink. General info, brushes, brands. Materials care: First medium we'll get acquainted with is ink. Why? Because it's extremely versatile and beginner friendly. This is one of my designs painted in ink. The paper I'm going to use for painting with ink is this one. I just took it out of this notebook. It is Artisa Watercolor paper, 140 pounds. You can also use bristle paper, which is smooth and thick. Bristol paper is also great for painting in gouache. You can also use thicker sketchbook paper, like I mentioned before. So this one is not quite as thick, but it still works for ink as well. Ink is a fluid medium, but it is not as wet as watercolor, for example, we're not going to be soaking it too much with water, so paper is not so demanding for ink. Here are some of my favorite ink brands. Higgins is India ink or regular ink. Amsterdam, which is new for me, I only have one color, but it's really beautiful. It worked well for me. Da la Rawi wasn't bad, either. So it's right here. But my favorite brand of all is probably Liquitex, and this one is Acrylic ink. And also Da Rawi and Amsterdam are acrylic inks, as well. They are very bright, very highly pigmented and look beautiful when used, you know, as a fluid medium. India ink can also be used for drawing with a pen. So, see, I did some comparison here. Yesterday, I played with the colors a little bit, and as you can see, liquitex is really, really bright and saturated. These work as well. Inks can come in a variety of colors. You're using black ink, it doesn't really matter which brand you are using. You can also have metallic inks and white ink for painting on black paper as well and a variety of different beautiful colors. A general thing to know about ink is that it is very similar to watercolor and gouache in a lot of ways, particularly to watercolor, but it dries a little bit differently. It doesn't flow as fast as watercolor, and it is way more saturated with pigment. So it's really, really bright and saturated like this. Also don't really need much water to work with ink, but it's helpful to have some, so you can rinse out your brushes, keep them clean, if you're switching between colors as well, and we use a lot of paper towels. It's handy to keep them on your desk. These blue paper towels can be purchased in home improvement stores such as Home Depot. Have to use them, but, you know, they are new to me. I learned about them from oil painters in case you're wondering, you know, what they are. So they are very dense and smooth, so they are great for cleaning, you know, palettes. But you can use regular paper towels. I always keep a roll of toilet paper in my studio, you know, it's fancy natural colored paper. So anything that you can wipe your brushes off, you know, tissues are a little too thin, but you can also use them. No big deal, really. The brushes that work best for ink are synthetics, and there are a few different kinds, and let me show you. So here are a few kinds of different brushes. The most universal type is the round brush. They are over here in different sizes. I would say this is an absolute minimum to have, you know, maybe a round brush like this, a bigger one, and a smaller one, you know, something like this or like have square or rectangular brushes that are great for painting stripes and plats, and we have filbert brushes which are this organic oval shape. Filberts can be pointed like this, so you have a nice thin tip, or they can be rounded and blunt like this. And these are great for painting abstract shapes such as leopard spots or flowers like daisies. Another helpful kind is a script liner, very thin brush. If you need to make a thin, long line, this is handy to as you see, oh, this is a big filbert that escape to the square brushes. So as you see in all of my groups, I have a variety of sizes. So I have bigger brushes and smaller brushes. You know, it depends on the size of the paper you're using, the size of the motifs you are going to paint, the product you see in mind when you are designing. The palettes we use with ink are something like this. With wells because we want to dip our brush, and we're going to be dropping some ink in here just so, you know, you can easily rinse out your brushes, you know, when you are working. But if you let the palette dry like this, this is what ink will do. You cannot wash it away. I was just reading up on it, and it seems like you can use alcohol to clean ink, but I haven't tried it yet, so it's a good practice, you know, to, of course, keep your brushes as clean as possible and to clean out your palette after you are done. Heating. Also, you know, I use this little cosmetic jar for black ink because, you know, I use so much. I just close it, so I don't have to wash it every single time. A, old cosmetic jar you might have. And none of these brushes are expensive. These are all very, very budget friendly options. So we have here mi, which is the gouache brand that I will show you. This is a size nine. But sizes vary greatly among di brands. And, you know, in a different brand, this could be a size 12 or size ten, so don't get too caught up with brush sizes. It's just like big medium and small brush. Then Royal and Nickel is another brand that I have quite a lot of. Then creative mark, these are new brushes. This was a big set that I bought, so I'm going to use quite a few of these. These are very nice. I have a couple of those Princeton brushes, Princeton select pointed Filbert, and this is Prince and select Filbert. There is simply Simons, which is half an inch square brush another Princeton brush. Again, you don't have to go crazy with brushes for ink. They can be very, affordable. I like to have brushes that are longer. See? You compare these too. See this one's short and this one's long. And they will give you a different mark. And it's a great idea to, you know, before you embark on painting your final design, play with your brushes and see what kind of marks they make. And, you know, it's good to warm up also before you start painting your main design so you get a little bit loose and relaxed and you don't stress out so much about your painting. And this is what we are going to do. We are going to test out our brush shapes and see what they do for us. Just some general notes on art materials and brush care. Keep your containers closed as much as possible as you're painting, and if you're only painting in one color, it is possible to dip your brush directly in this little jar. But then, you know, close it. Don't keep them open for too long because it will ruin your art materials. And as for the brush, so let's do this. I wet it a little bit, just so it takes good shape, and then I wipe it like this on the edge of my cup, and then I dip it into ink, and I can do this again and, you know, say you painted something, you, you know, played with your brush. See, this is too dry. This needs a little more. Either more water or more ink. And say, you know, we've painted a design, we did something, and now we want to clean our brush. We do this. You can dab it lightly on the bottom, as well to make sure you get all the pigment out. We do this again, and then we clean it on and try to never leave your brushes like this, no matter what medium you're using, but particularly acrylics, they will dry. Acrylic inks will dry. Acrylic brushes will dry. So don't leave your brushes like this wet and dirty. Of course, it can happen sometimes. Try not to do this. This is good practice to keep your brushes clean, rinse them well, pad them dry. And there is still a little pigment that means that I didn't wash it well enough, so I'm going to do more. Okay, so it's clean now, and I can live it like this until I need it next time. Start playing with the brushes, and I'm going to use black ink at first. An important note on ink is that it does get separated if you don't use it for a long time, so you need to give it a very good mix. It takes some time, so you might even need to do it over a few days. For example. Yesterday, I knew I was going to paint and I haven't used them for a while. So I gave my inks a good shake, a good stir so that the liquid combines with the pigment. And then using the dropper, I will add some ink in my little improvised Well, reduce reuse recycle. Be careful because it is very hard to wash out. Try not to get it on your clothing or any nearby furniture. You can use one of the Brush rests. You don't have to, but you can. They look Neat, right? So let's start with round brushes and see what we can do with them. I'm going to start with this smaller one. See, some of them are more pointy, some of them are blunt and rounded, and they're all handy. I definitely think it's great to have at least one brush with a really good pointed tip because then you can do stuff like this. Like I said, round brushes are the most universal. You don't really need to have a Filbert brush. Round brush can do the job as well, but it will take, you know, two strokes instead of one. So let's start with this small one and see what it does. Like I said, you can go straight into ink. You don't have to use water, but I will use a little bit of water just so my brush has a nice tip. And see how saturated it is, how dark it is, and play with the pressure, you know, see what you can do when you press against the paper more. Now I need more. So I dip it again. You can do things like that. Isn't particularly a great brush seed. Doesn't have a lot of body to it. It's a fairly thin brush, so it doesn't do much. But you can draw nice lines with this round brush. And this one is royal nickel from a cheap, cheap set, you know, with inks, you can really use really affordable brushes. So you can do things like polka dots with this sort of brush. And you can color it in. And you don't have to wash your brush too much, right? Because you're working with a solid color. You can do little hearts. Colour it in. If I feel that my brush is going dry, I add more ink to it. Now let's try a bigger brush. So I do not use this one anymore, so I'm going to rinse it out well, pad a little bit on the bottom, brush it off, and I can put this brush on the table and not worry about it for some time. It's also good to dry it a little bit. Now let's see what the big brush does, right? Let's go to town with this giant brush. I'm going to wet it a little bit, add it dry. This is a little too small for this brush, but I think we'll make it work. See, you can make beautiful organic shapes with this brush. It has a very nice tip here, so we can create flower silhouettes and whatnot. So just play with your brush and experiment. You know, what kind of marks can it make? You can make simple leaves like this. 5. Lesson 5 - Ink solids - zebra pattern : Using black ink is a great opportunity to paint a zebra print. So I just Google Zebra to look at the way patterns look on the zebra, and we can decide if we want them to go diagonally or horizontally, and we can play and experiment and then see what looks better and choose. So, see, sometimes they join with stripes and sometimes they sort of go parallel and we can make them thicker and thinner. We striving to have some variation in our stripes, size, scale variation. And I'm doing this by switching up the pressure that I'm applying to paper. And some of them have to join something like this and maybe a new stripe and sometimes they don't touch I sometimes take the sheets out of the notebook like this. Sometimes they just fall out, but also eventually I will be scanning them, so it's great to have them flat like this. See, my paper started warping a little bit because it's wet, but it's okay. It's thick enough, so nothing bad will happen. And see, I joined my stripes over here, so I want to join them over here as well. We're sort of working diagonally like this. I'm not worrying about my repeat for now. I'm just painting what is called a croque, a less known term in textiles. I learned that in college. Croque is basically repeat that has not been joined yet, though, it's, you know, your sheet of paper, your tile, before you have digitally fixed edges, so they line up. I hope you know what I mean. So this is not a repeating pattern yet. It's a croque. It's an idea of a repeating pattern. So what do you think? Maybe, you know, we could have thicker white stripes because pretty much here I made all my black stripes thick and the white stripes in between are very thin. Maybe I could have some variation in that. Now looking at the negative shapes at the white shapes. And we will be able to change our color, you know, when we take it to Photoshop or this is a very good candidate for vector. We will be able to move these shapes as well. So this is pretty much a future repeating pattern, just like that. So we can later turn these into a vector design, and here are some designs that I created in a similar way. This was also painted in ink. This was also painted with blank ink on white paper, and then I digitally change the background color. See how simple it is. But what is important here is learn to see the beauty of shapes, lines, and silhouettes. Not every line is created equal, so it's good to relax your let it go and just, you know, play with the pressure you apply on the paper, you have some nice, relaxed flowing shapes. Wanted to show you how fast it dries. See, it's almost dry already. The paper absorbs ink very quickly quicker than it does watercolor. There's a lot of pigment in there, a lot of color. 6. Lesson 6 - Ink: camouflage pattern: Of course, we do not have to only use blecking and we are going to paint a camouflage or a camo for short, using several ink colors. So if you look at these images, of course, we don't want to copy anybody's work too closely. But this is such a generic pattern. And, you know, if we look closely, you see the idea is having, you know, one, two, three, four colors, three, four, five colors of the same hue in these abstract shapes. So that's exactly what we're going to do now. You don't have to only use black ink. You can use colored ink, and you can mix the colors as well. You don't have to always use them as is. So I'm thinking of painting a camouflage and I think this color is probably a little too much. Let's see what we can do here. I'm going to drop a little bit here. A little goes a long way because ink is so pigmented, and we can also add water, and I probably need to change my water because it's very dirty already. It's good to have clean water handy. So some people keep two water jars at their desk. This sap green permanent. These inks come in sets sometimes, and you can also buy them separately. But don't plunge into buying everything until you realize, yes, I really do want to paint with ink quite a lot. You don't have to have all colors. Although I'm definitely guilty of that because I like colors and art supplies. Parent burnt umber, a very dark color, and I shouldn't have added that much. Let's see what happens. This is Royal and Nickel Zen number six round brush. At first, you know, this is a scrap paper. I want to see what colors they give me. You know, This is definitely a little too crazy. So I want to see which colors I need to mix up. I think I need some kind of yellow maybe to lighten this. And what I'm going to do is make a darker green over here. Yeah, that's what I'm talking about. So this is a mix of sub green and amber, and I need a lighter green as well. So I'm going to use Sienna to lighten my asy green color. You can also lighten the ink color. If you are happy with the hue, you can just add clear water to it to make it more transparent. So I think that's what I'm going to do add water here. This is becoming lighter. And I think this is still a little bit too green. I could either add a blue in here or maybe a little bit of umber, but not too much. An important thing is to remember which is which, right? This is my amber, the super dark color. So what if I do this? Yeah, I think that's a good color. So I'm going to use probably this one, this one and this one. But let look at our reference again. So, there seems to always be a black in there, right? Or, like, a deep dark color. Well, see, we can play, right, and see what happens. So I will start with painting my lightest color shapes, and the shapes are pretty chaotic, you know, so we can do these sort of abstract clouds. I'm still trying to keep my shapes pretty solid. I don't want to go too watercolory at this point. See, I'm running out of ink, so I will need to mix more. It's good to premix your colors and make sure you have enough, you know, once you realize the color recipe, so I'm going to need more, I think. Now I don't want my colors to bleed together, so I will wait until this is dry, and then I will start painting the darker shapes. Okay, now this is completely dry and I want to use my medium, you know, my mid tone color, which I think is this one. That's why I have this paper in here. Yeah, I think that's the one. I could even a little bit of water. It doesn't have to be this dark. So I will start filling in some shapes. And they can be quite abstract. I'm running out of ink. Yet again, let me mix up some more colors. Painting in between. Don't forget to watch your variety. We don't want everything the same shape, the same size, you know, the same length. And now I'm kind of thinking of what's left here. These shapes will be dark. And maybe I even need to add more yellow shapes as well. And again, we can change these colors later on the computer. The most important thing here is the shapes themselves and, you know, different color blocks that we can later on select in Photoshop or Illustrator. And recolor. If you don't feel confident about your shapes, bring up some references again and look. So see. Which one do you like? I think this is a little too ditzy because all the shapes are about the same size and weight. These are a little better. But again, it's whatever effect you're going for, whatever you would like. And later on, we can recolor it even into pink if we want. You can also paint a couple loose shapes over here so you can easily select them later and move them in Photoshop. Again, I'm going to wait until this dries. Maybe I want to make this a little bit darker. And then I will add the darkest color, the third one. And I think maybe I'll mix up a little bit more yellow and add in a few light spots here. But even from here, you can already create a textile design. Maybe we need to fill in these spots. Okay. And remember, I added a little water to make this slightly less saturated and see how it will behave. We need more yellow. Oh, I accidentally I added the wrong color. I added green instead of sea and a yellow. Yeah, now it's, like, very, very spring green. And we want to have a little bit more yellow at this point. Something like this. So maybe a spot in here. And this is a good exercise in seeing shapes and deciding, you know, whether I want to, you know, I'm looking at this spot. Now, I'm looking at this negative shape, and how do I want to fill it? You know, Where do I want to add more? Light. And again, this is not the final version of the pattern. We are playing and experimenting and, you know, getting acquainted with the brush and getting acquainted with ink as our art medium. Something like this. And then, again, when this is completely dry, I will add my darkest color. I was going to say this is a little too big, but actually, it's fine. I think it's fine. My pattern is drying. I wanted to show you that alternatively, of course, if you're freaking out about painting freehand without a sketch, nobody prevents you from making a sketch first if you would like using a pencil. This is a mechanical pencil, so it doesn't really matter not too thick, not too bold, right? Just sketch out your shapes. And maybe it's easier than you can paint them out. But I encourage you to paint freehand as well because there is certain looseness to it. There are certain freedom to this free hand method of painting. But as our first artwork is drying, let's create another alternative one, pay attention to how the shapes relate to each other, how they connect, right? And you can fill them in as well. You can even, drop your shape here. In Photoshop, we can later on grab another full shape and just mirror it over here and continue it. So it's no big deal. Don't let the paper limits, constrict your creativity. It's good to train yourself to see interesting shapes, interesting spots. And we can maybe use black on this one. Or we could later on paint these same colors and use them in the same design. But I think this will be enough for one pattern. So we could play and maybe add black to it or whatnot. So, again, I have water on my brush, and I will start by using the lightest color first. See, when you are using pencil, which is not a crime at all, you will see the line in here, and that could also be a part of your design. And also alternatively, there are ways to remove this line. It is, of course, extra work, so why use the pencil? I'm saying, you know, you don't have to. But again, whatever feels comfortable for you, no one I remember I went to a painting workshop last year and the teacher said, No one can tell you how to express your creativity. I was asking him something about painting bigger or smaller. I'm like, What's the right size? And very often at classes and demos, students get too caught up in materials. You know, What is the exact name of this brush. What is the exact number of this brush? What is the exact name of this paint? It doesn't matter that much. What matters is, is it a cool color or is it a warm color? Is the brush large, medium or small? And then I'm talking, and I'm trying to think, you know, am I doing this right, or I think I need some of this yellow in here, as well, for good balance. Happens, you know, alternatively, again, if we don't wait for this to dry. Are you curious? I'm super curious. Let's just jump in and see the ink. See, it flows, but it doesn't flow as quickly as watercolor. So for this purpose, you know, my plan was to create solid shapes. I did not want to have any of this bleeding, but it is an artistic choice, and you definitely could have some bleeding. It's always an option with fluid media. See, I'm kind of making up shapes as I go as well. I encourage you to lean into the properties of ink. Trust your brushes. See, we almost got the same color. Not good, but we can fix it in Photoshop. What happens if I just, you know, use ink with a little bit more water? See? So I have the same hue, but a more transparent shape. That's also an option. And we're still using the round brush. And now could use brown or it could use black. What do you think? Maybe let's use black. I will borrow some of my black from this little Jar? Ready? Let's go. The darkest color. Does it look like camouflage to you? Does to me. All painting, every kind of painting is about shapes, shapes, lines, and values, which means dark and light. Painting with super dark ink is satisfying for some reason, isn't it? Don't be afraid to ruin something. Don't be afraid to mar paper. Don't let that stop you from being creative. We compare these two. See the line is here, and I don't think I like this bleeding, actually. I think I'm going to stick with this one, but it's a good experiment, too, and we can use these shapes till we can scan them. And if there's not enough in this croquet, I can use this one as an additional one, as well. Now I have to decide which color I'm going to use, and I thought I was going to use a super dark one. But actually, this one is pretty dark already. So maybe I need some kind of mid tone to go with this. Let's do some color experimentation. And if I were to use a mid tone, what color would that be? What if I take this yellow and add it over here and add some water as well, because ink is very pigmented, so you can dilute it pretty well. I think this will be a good one, maybe a little more water, maybe even a little lighter, I'll add a little yellow as well. I'm using sienna instead of cadmium yellow or, like, a regular yellow color because it makes it a little more natural, more earth tone. I don't want my colors to be too punchy. I want them a little more natural. Let's continue playing with color and finding the right hue a little more water. If I feel this is too dark for me here, I can transfer some of the color into a different well over here and keep adding water. And maybe knowing that I will run out quickly, I will premix a little more. I could also add in a little bit of blue to make a hue variation as opposed to having everything of the same warm green, yellow. But I think it's okay. Like I said, it doesn't have to be my final color. I can change the color on the computer. I'm more concerned with shapes right now. I want to have good edges, good shapes, solid shapes, so I'm avoiding to use too much water. This big blob over here. Make sure you're happy with the edge here. See, I made this edge a little shaky. While this is wet, you can fix it a little bit when this dries. And it dries very quickly. See, we're going to Keep going. A few more shapes. Well, I honestly expected this to take a lot less time. And I always give myself extra time. I don't expect to sit down and paint everything in one go. I make several sheets like this, and then I can choose what works better. I can repeat something again. But textile design gives you opportunity to manipulate shapes on the computer, so don't be too concerned with making everything super perfect. You know, I think this is good enough. I think this is good enough for my camel. 7. Lesson 7 - Ink: leopard with filbert brush: A I want to show you one of my favorite kinds of brushes which are called Filbert brushes that have this characteristic oval shape. Sometimes they are also called oval wash. So they are great whenever you do not need a pointy tip like this. It's good to have both options, right? Sometimes you do need a really sharp thin line, and sometimes you don't when you are painting something blunt and organic. So these are some Princeton brushes, Princeton select Filbert number two, Princeton select Filbert number 12, HimiGu brush number eight. Filbert. It doesn't say here, but it is a Filbert shape. And polar flow half an inch overwash by creative mark. So let's see what they can give us, what we can do with these brushes. This is a brand new baby. Let's put it to work. I'm wetting my brush, and I will dip it into my black ink. So this isn't particularly great paper. Please don't pay attention to it. This is my scrap paper that I'm just using, you know, to test out the brush marks. So Filbert brushes are great for making petals, flowers, things like that. You can also tilt it to the side and use it like this. So it's really great for painting organic botanical shapes. You can do different spots like this and textures. You can play whether you paint in this direction or in this direction, right? And you can make lines when you tilt it to the side. Really, really fun. It's great to make daisies with filbert brushes. So give it a go, you know, test your filbert brushes and see what they can do. And now you can probably notice I have some leopard prints over here, so that's exactly what we are going to be doing. We're going to use this fashion catalog as our reference. This is by Boden, which is a British brand, famous for their bold hand painted prints. This catalog is approximately August or September 2023. And of course, we have to be very respectful of copyright, and we're not going to copy any exactly, but you probably already know it, right, this mantra. You don't want anybody copying your designs, right? So we are not going to copy too closely, either. We're just going to take inspiration. And, you know, leopard print is pretty generic. It's pretty abstract. You know, it comes from animal skin, and we're going to look at animals as well. So leopard spots give us variation in terms of the shapes and the spacing. Here is one version, and I'm actually going to cut them out. Here is a bag with leopard print. So you normally get these catalogs. If you buy clothes from different brands, sometimes you go to their stores. They might have free catalogs. You can also subscribe on websites. There is an option for some companies to, you know, opt in for a paper catalog. Or I bet you could call customer service and say, you know, can I receive a paper catalog? You don't have to do it. You know, if you are environmentally conscious, you can always look online and create Pinterest boards, you know, and screenshots. But sometimes it's fun to hold something in your hands. And these are some of my patterns that I made previously. See how many variations are here. It's the same leopard pattern, right? But we can choose what we create in dark colors. We can choose where we use black, how much spacing we have in between the spots. Look at this little fun leopard pocket and leopard pins, another two collar leopard print over here and a bag. You know, Leopard can be very sophisticated. It can be pretty much any color. You can make pink leopard, if you would like. And even, you know, seemingly the same, look at these three. They all stem from the same source, probably, but they do look visually different. As you can see, spots can be really, really spaced out like this, or they can be really dense. Like, these guys over here here is kind of, you know, medium spacing, and you can only have two colors, the background and the leopard. So there are options, right? I'm going to use the same exact paper that I was using in the previous sections, and now I just have to decide, you know, what colors I'm going to use. I think I'm going to use and we could start with something like this, really one color spot and experiment and see where it takes us. I'm going to take this Himi number eight Filbert brush, make it a little wet by dipping it into water first, and then dip it into black ink. My paper towel is always near. Okay, let's do this. I'm looking at this reference. I hope you can see it. Well, I forgot to look at Mr. Leopard himself. Let's do this now. See, there are also variations in animal skin patterns. For example, cheetah is just this dotted pattern, and then we have variations of leopard, and we could also try that. So let's go. See, my brush is creating a little bit of texture because it's teased like that. And also, see how it kind of goes around a center, right? I'm rotating my brush to get some variation. And I can join some of the spots and leave some of the spots unjoined. See, there are smaller spots in between. Also, just like single brush strokes. As long as it still resembles leopards, it is an abstract print, but it still has to be recognizable. See how everything is kind of going at the same angle? I could also rotate my paper and do this. Just remember not to touch it with your hand because you will get dirty. It's kind of starting to look like flowers, maybe because I paint a lot of flowers. Time to go back to reference, and maybe I'm making too many marks. They look like petals. See sometimes there are only two shapes. There are three shapes in there. So we just pay attention to the shapes, right? Making it more abstract, and you can definitely move it, you know, later on in Photoshop and you can recolor it kind of letting the brush do the work for you. I think it works, right? We could also try, you know, doing a little cheetah print like this to have some fun. This is always a popular print with fashion brands. I would say Leopard is already a classic, you know, I used to have this bad reputation of cheap and gaudy, but like I said, it can be very sophisticated. We are kind of going to have several prints on one sheet, right? These are two different patterns. And honestly, the possibilities with ink spots are endless. Abstract designs. I've made quite a few abstract designs. Something like this. You could also take a smaller brush, right? Or a bigger one, if you would like. Because, of course, the same brush kind of gives us the same size of the brush stroke. What if I take this baby Filbert? Well, it's definitely very small. I'm not going to go crazy with it, but I'll make a couple marks. Always, you know, remember, whatever you are doing, if you're painting something organic and natural, remember to keep some variation in there some variety. So it looks more natural. You know, nothing is super symmetrical in nature. Even if it looks so, it's still very organic. Something as simple as this, you could also easily modify on the computer. I would probably turn this into a vector, and then you can easily add, you know, lighter spots in the middle, something like this, right? Or even if it's in photoshop still, you can draw very simple shapes and fill them with a solid color. Now let's create a two colour leopard print, something more like this and like this. We have to decide which color we want to use, and you can always add a digital background. There is no need to paint the background right now. It doesn't really matter, honestly, which color you choose, because you can very easily change it digitally. But still, you know, to put you in the mood, whatever you feel like, take some kind of neutral brown. How about we mix raw siana and a little bit of burnt amber? Give them a shake and I will just add a drop, so it's a little bit darker, you know, I don't want it to go too dark. Now I need to decide which brush to use. Of course, you can use, you know, a round brush to paint Leopard. You don't have to use a Filbert. But I think Filbert just works better for this purpose. Let's give it a try. Let's try the round brush as well, and see where it takes us. Mix up our color. So what I'm going to do now is I will paint the centers in yellow, and then I will paint the black spots around. Very generic, very simple shapes. With a round brush this time, right? See how every brush gives you a different brush mark, and that's why they're fun, right? It still looks a little bit different. And you can use whichever brush serves your purpose best. Let's try and maybe make this one a little more spaced out, not so dense as the previous one. You can also move your shapes digitally, you know, once you are done painting. Things like this, honestly, you can take five, six, ten sheets of paper and just paint and experiment and then see what works best, what looks best. I keep coming back to the references and so there is a good balance of space around the shapes. But I want to make mine a little more spaced out than this one, kind of more like this. Also, it's good to break up the pattern, so to say. What I mean is, see, again, I'm making these sort of evenly spaced, so maybe I'll add a little closer to the other one. A baby leopard spot and make some of them bigger, too, right? Well I'm making these sort of the same size, space at the same distance. And you don't have to paint large sheets because we will be reflecting these shapes. We'll be rotating them, moving them, so you don't really need to paint, you know, a giant wallpaper size. You can if you want to. But I think work smarter, not harder and don't give yourself more work than you need to. Now I want these to dry, I'm going to let them dry for a few minutes. This is finally dry. Took longer than I expected. It depends on humidity as well. It depends on the temperature. See, we got different shades of yellow here, and when this is completely done on the computer, we can decide if we want to keep this sort of watercolory, then we would keep it in raster in Photoshop. Or we could turn them all into vector, and it would just be one yellow in illustrator or it could also be a vector design with different shades of yellow. All right, so I'm going to use this brush. It's called Princeton Select Oval mop, another name for a Filbert, and the size is quarter an inch. Take my black ink, wet the brush a bit, and we're going to start painting the shapes around the centers. Looking at my references, right? Now, this looks like leper, right? Okay, I can even look at my own design over here. Just go easy, you know, easy. Don't take it too seriously. This is a very simple abstract design. Time to play. Remember to make variation in size and rotate the brush slightly so you get a different angle. Join some of the shapes and keep some of the shapes separate as well. We could even throw in a few loose black shapes in between. Y Just remember to keep your lines pretty. Don't make them flat, like I just did. Not like this. This is not good, right? Pay attention to the silhouettes. It's better to underdo than overdo. It's better to stop a little bit sooner than when you think you're done. Join some of the shapes. We goot this little guy. Maybe we could even have a little black spot without the yellow in here. We'll see how it looks. I think it looks a little random, right? Do you agree? But it's okay, you know, that's why we have photoshop. Almost done. You can also cover some of the yellow, right? You don't have to preserve it. You can go over yellow. And later on, when it's vector, it will be very easy to change the color. This truly is a very universal design. And then, you know, this can be scaled down, so you really have a dits leopard print. I'm kind of concerned with this little random guy. Maybe I'll add more shapes. And I can always take them out if I don't like them eventually. Alright, I think we're done here. So these are our animal skins here. So I want to show you a little trick. If this isn't dry yet, and this is a clean, solid color, you can put it back into your bottle, so you can save a little ink, make sure the dropper is empty, push here, squeeze, and just suck it all in and put it back. Art materials are expensive, right? So we want to save where we can and wipe the palette right away so it doesn't dry. And clean your workspace before it dries, too. And 8. Lesson 8 - Ink: stripes w square brush: O, We on working with square brushes. We're going to do a different design or maybe a few different designs. And I changed my water. I have clean water now, and I'll show you how you can clean your palette. Of course, you can just take it to the sink and rinse it out. Quick way, you know, if this is almost dry, you can just do this. See, it's already starting to dry and it's already a little bit difficult to get it out of here. And there's still a lot of ink in here, and I might use it, so I'm not going to clean those. See it's already dry, be careful. Don't turn it over. We're going to use this beautiful ultramarine blue, Amsterdam ink, and we're going to be painting stripes. Don't forget to shake your ink beforehand. Preferably a little earlier because it gets a little bubbly in other air bubbles, but it's still fine to use. A little bit more. And I can add some water to it because I don't need this extra saturation, I think. I'm still using the same kind of paper, you know, the sketchbook. And here are my square brushes. Simply Simmons, one stroke, long, right? Plat long. Interesting. Maybe it's a different language or something. Himi number six, and polar flow, creative mark, one quarter of an inch. But again, doesn't matter that much, you guys, as long as you have the size and the shape you need. And of course, you can go even bigger. Look at this guy. Premier amethyst size 12. So, what are we gonna do? Go big or go home, right? We're going to paint. A classic design. Nothing more classic than a blue stripe. Relax your hand. Have fun with it. There you go. There's already a textile design. So when you're painting stripes, try to make this straight here because this is where your repeat will be joining, and there will be a bump in here. But again, no big deal. It's very easy to fix. You can make uniform stripes or you can maybe make variegating stripes, larger ones, right? But I feel like whatever you paint in one stroke looks better. So I would suggest if you're going for a thick stripe, that was not good. Just get a bigger brush if you need, you know, bigger stripe. But it's not impossible, of course. So that's how we use Square brushes. And you can finish up painting. You know, I don't like to waste paper. I will just finish my sheet. With stripes, and then I can choose whichever work for me. I don't think I'm going to use this one because it's so curved. You can play and see what else you can do with a brush like this. Even from one stripe, you can create a textile design because you will be repeating it. You don't need to paint 12 stripes, right? Maybe three is enough. It's just, you know, to have fun, to relax your hand, and to have some interesting variety. And maybe you notice that I rotate several notebooks, I rotate several papers while one project is drying and working on the next one. Just, you know, a helpful time organizing, tip, optimizing. 9. Lesson 9 - Ink: Square brush plaid: I'm planning to paint a plaid. But first, I want to see which brush works better for this task. I'm going to use this leftover color. So maybe that's a little too thin for me. This is the way this brush makes a mark, and I'll try this one. Maybe it'll work better for me, Amy. Yeah, I think that's the one. Yeah. I like the thickness of it. It's also a little bit more springy. This one's very soft. See. And this one has more spring to it. So let me mix up my colors to use red. So I already put in some red ink over here. I think this is a little bit too warm. So I'm gonna see. What happens if I drop a little quinacridoma get? Let's test it out, mix it up well, add a little bit of water. Yeah, I think that's exactly what I wanted. So I'm going to paint a primary colored clad. Ooh. Exciting. So I'm going to reuse my sienna that I had from the previous project. I'm going to use this red mix and the ultramarine blue. And I need to make sure my brush is clean. So what you're not seeing is I'm doing this. Take my paper towel, dry my brush. So I think we can add a little water over here as well, clean water. You can also use, you know, as long as your water is clean, you can use a dropper, something like this. My water is already a little bit pink, so it's not ideal, but normally you take a little water and you can add it to your palette. You can buy these, you know, on Amazon or wherever. They're very cheap. So now I want to paint a plaid using three colors and my medium sized square brush, Himi number six, a gouache brush. So what I just did, I went for it. I was like, Oh ho, I'm painting. A plaid. But the mistake I made here, see? If it's a stripe, it's not a problem that the distance is different here. But because I will be painting over, we want them to be roughly symmetrical. We don't have to go crazy, but we would like them to be more or less precise. So I will use these little squares as a benchmark, right, or as a starting point. And I know I will have three colors. So very roughly. I don't even know if I'm using the square holes anymore. I need to make sure, you know, they are roughly the same. I don't want to have any pencil lines, either, so I will try not to go too crazy. Use a ruler if you want, and you don't have to paint the entire sheet, either. You can do, you know, a small section like this. I would just say, make sure the size of your brush matches the size of the plaid you are aiming for. I added water to my sienna mix. Want to test the color real quick. I think it'll be pretty. Relax your hand. Don't freak out. It doesn't have to be perfect, and you don't even have to go the entire sheet, right? I'm going to use a blue and red, so I will make some space for those colors. As this is drying, you can also rotate the paper and let the ink flow wherever you want it to flow. I waited a little bit too long to rotate it. So it doesn't look that good, but if you do it quickly enough, it can be really pretty. And if you are getting something like this, just spread it with a clean wet brush. So this is almost dry, not yet, but almost it's been a couple minutes. See? This is still a little wet. I'm going to be careful and just try to give myself the same pointers like I did here. I think I can start painting carefully. Some edges are still not dry yet. Maybe I should just wait. And as I'm sitting here, I'm contemplating whether I should now paint my blue and red horizontally, or I should instead paint my sienna vertically. And I think I'm actually doing letter. Though, this, I think is dry now, and we can start painting. My brush, the same brush just clean. And I will rotate my paper and make sure you don't smudge your stripes, but I think this is dry now, so we are pretty much safe. And again, this doesn't have to be perfect. Don't worry about it. It just has to be good enough. So maybe I'll start from the edge, and I'm actually kind of ruining my surface, but that's okay. I'll clean it later. So red, blue, it's better not to go over again because see, I did it here and it blended the two colors, but we do want to see some variety over here. Clean this. Red, blue? Red blue. Even if you get a good section as big as this, that's good enough. So don't freak out, please. I promise it'll be okay. Red blue. Maybe when this is dry, again, we can go in and reinforce these overlapping squares. Maybe not. We'll see. I don't want to have extra bleeding that I did not want. Let's let this dry. Okay. So this is dry now. It's been about five or 7 minutes. And some people also keep a small hair dryer in their studio. If you are not patient enough, you can dry a painting. But I just let things happen naturally. So I'm going to paint red stripes now, wet my brush a little bit dry on the paper towel slightly and dip it into red ink, which started drying a little bit already. And carefully, I will be painting under the yellow stripes. This is quite saturated. Maybe we could use a little bit more water just a bit. And under the second stripe, well, see, it started warping a little bit. But that's okay. Remember, we can crop things in photoshop, we can alter what is not working for us. Yeah, but try not to do this like me. Now, let's wait for the red to dry. Now that it's dry, almost, it's a little bit wet here, but I'll start painting here. I'm honestly almost ready to take out my hair dryer. You have to be patient, otherwise, it's not gonna work. So I will paint the red stripes in this direction now. So all we have to do now is wait for this to dry and paint the blue stripes. Alrighty. The final stage rinse our brush well, and we're going to paint the blue stripes. We could probably add a little water because this is going dry a little bit. See what happens. Definitely need a little bit more water. Otherwise, it's too dark. Trying to keep my edges straight, but it's not always working out. I think I started getting a little bit nervous, you know, it's not turning out quite as perfect as I wanted it to be. And the last thing we have to do is to paint our blue stripes vertically once this is completely dry. Oops, look, I dropped a little bit of water here, so it might start blooming. While it's not too late, I'll grab my paper towel and just very gently try to pat the water dry. Our final step. This is almost dry, and we have to paint this third stripe in blue. This turned out a little bit more watery than I expected. I think I need to add a little bit more ink just a drop. Maybe two. And I just want to test and make sure it's not too dark. No, that's fine. And we're going underneath this yellow stripe in here. I know it doesn't look perfect at all, and sometimes I start freaking out, but we need to learn to embrace imperfections, but I want to keep this edge here, because otherwise, see it's like I added another stripe. Okay. I think we're done here. Colorful stripe in primary colors in here. And as you see, when it dries, it becomes a little lighter so we can see other hues a little bit better. And of course, you don't have to use these three colors. You can use other colors as well. The most important thing in this sort of design is letting the stripes dry in between and also trying to keep them straight. 10. Lesson 10- Washy ink, monochrome painterly paisleys: Y, In the previous lesson, we used ink for painting solid opaque shapes. But since ink is a fluid medium, we can also vary the amount of water we use to create designs that look like watercolor. I'm going to use clothing catalogs as references to paint a washy inky design. Like I mentioned before, it is very important to respect copyright when taking inspiration from different visual sources. We can't copy the design exactly or too closely. So it's a good practice to combine several reference sources in order to create a new unique design. Want to paint a monochrome ink design with some hue gradations. So as references, I'll use my own artwork that I created during last year's 100 day project. Plus, I'll use a textile book called 1,000 Patterns edited by DrusillaKle, which has a great collection of historic textiles. I will be looking at Indian fabrics to paint a paisley design, which is more correctly called Bota or Buta. You can find some information on. Right over here. This is page 72, if you happen to have this book. It started being called Paisley after English factory in the city called Paisley started creating similar fabrics and the name stuck. So here we can look at some layout options and also I'm going to use some fashion catalogs. This one is by Talbots and see there are different things that we can do with a paisley. Paisley is a shape, right? So, this one looks like ecote an imitation of a woven technique. There is a more modern paisley over here as well. Solid paisley right over here. I don't think I'm going this way. And there is one the catalog just arrived today. It's by Garden Hill, so it's a very modernized painterly paisley. And I think I'm going to do something like this. So what we're paying attention to over here is what happens, you know, inside those paisley shapes and what happens around them? What kind of filler motifs are we going to use? And looking at all these references and combining them, I'm going to make some sketches because I'm not ready to jump in right now. Using my sketchbook and a pencil, I need to decide which direction I want to go. I already know it's going to be monochrome and painterly like this, and I will choose a beautiful color, possibly this one. These all are monochrome. So there are two colors of ink over here. This is one ink color. And see, I'm varying the amount of water over here. Same here. It's the same ink. Two colors ink here, right? A cooler green and a warmer green. But mostly the variation here is achieved by varying the amount of water. And that's what I want you to do as well. So we could go, you know, an overlapping paisley design, something like this. You know, I'm just kind of thinking out loud. I'm not, you know, ready yet to commit to anything. Then we could do something like this where they sort of go in two directions, up and down. This can also be done in Photoshop later on, right? We can flip our shapes. This is not good, right? Exactly the same shape. So one of them has to rotate a little bit more like this. This is a sketch, so I'm not super concerned with what is going on now. We could do this, you know, something simple, two or maybe four directions. But I think since we're going to use ink and a brush, I want to go this really organic way. So something like this. Funny, I was thinking something like this, and the catalog just arrived this morning. And I previously did a design with paisley in ink. I will include some pictures to show you. So I think I'm going to paint some paisly shapes rotated and there will be some flowers or shapes in between. Right? So I'm not going to do any overlapping like here. I think I will do this organic, flowy kind of design. And then I also need to decide what the shapes are going to be made of, right? Do I want them to consist of little flowers over here? Because that's also an option. Can look at my references again. Here they are solid shapes, but they just have little decorative strokes around them. And very often inside the paisley, we have this kind of floral motif, so we need to decide what we're going to do over here. And it's a combination of slight pre planning, but also when you start painting. You decide on the go what you're going to paint, looking at some references as well, right? So it could be some kind of flowers. We could use a tulip shaped flower, as well, another paisley. I could do, like, a solid line. The decoration could go outside. Or inside. That's one option, right? That's another option. We could keep them smooth over here. They could be made entirely out of flowers see right over here. It's completely stacked with flowers. That's also an option. We could also, you know, fill it with a color around. We could even have these little flowers over here, but then we could have, like, a solid color around the shape. I hope you know what I mean. And I will let my brush also help me decide what I want to do. And I'm not taking this again, too seriously. Don't get too caught up with, you know, what do I need to paint? What kind of shapes. It depends, you know, how much pre planning you would like to do. You can always change things a little bit as you go. I don't know if I'm going to use the solid color. So let's start painting, I guess, right? I want to use bigger sheet of paper, and I'm going to use my bristol paper for this. So this size is 11 by 14. It still fits on my scanner, and I need to pick a color of ink that I want to use. So I'm going to start painting in a minute. All my references are here near me. I might move them out of the frame because there's not enough space. I want you to see me painting, but I will be looking at them. You know, I will be looking at my sketch. I will be looking at these shapes if I need some reference for, you know, what is inside, the paisley shape. This is a reference for the inky washy effect that I'm going for. Look, I also have this beautiful dish that I think would be a good reference for the flowers inside the paisley. I'll edit in as well. And I think this design requires a little more structure, so I'm not going to jump into painting right away. I will do some light sketching, you know, to help myself. I'm looking at the pencil sketch that I just did a minute ago. It doesn't have to be super precise, you know, just a little guidance, so I know what I'm painting, you know where I'm going. I think, you know, because they are so decorated and ornate, we need to go a little bit bigger. That's why I took larger paper and what kind of shape? Maybe in this direction. We need to paint about five motifs. That should be enough because we will be digitally manipulating them and rotating them. But it's good to have a couple extras because maybe I screw up this form, the shape, then I can take this one and use it a few more times. So I think this is about to be exactly the same as this, so I'm going to erase this, and I want to tilt it a little bit more. Don't be afraid to rotate your paper if you need to. So I think I want to go maybe like this. The pencil will be showing a little bit through the ink. So try not to make unnecessary lines, especially too thick lines. Don't press too much against the paper. But it's okay. Even the more I'm doing design, the more I kind of like this raw handmade, hand painted hand drawn quality. So it's not necessarily a bad thing that pencil is showing. I could jump in and start painting or I could also plan what will be inside here, and I have to decide do I want to decorate them on the outside or on the inside? I think it will be cute if I do it on the outside. You could also add an additional line inside and see where that takes us. I think that's what I'm going to do, actually. I will paint the lines first, and then I will decorate them with a small filbert brush. Then maybe later on, I will start painting in some shapes like these flowers or maybe something like this. Oh, you could also attach this little flower at the bottom, right? That's kind of cute. What do you think? Like here. That's an option as well. I'm going to use these two brushes, a Himi number six with a pointed tip, and a small Filbert brush number two by Princeton. I think they should do the job well for me. Well, see, I might need some additional brushes as well. Shake my ink, and I'm going to use this muted green color. It's really beautiful premixed. It was a set, you know, liquitex. Four different muted inks. They all are really beautiful. My palette. And I will be varying the amount of water I use because that's the point. I got some clean water over here, and I need to make room for all my supplies. And I also need some kind of scrap paper, so I cast, you know, whether the consistency is good for me. Are you ready? So I'm wetting my brush, paper towel here as well. I will add a little bit of clean water to my ink and mix it up. See what we have here, and I will start painting. I'm using the baby Filbert brush now, testing the brush mark before I go into my design. Let's see. I want to do something like this. So I have to make sure I don't have too much ink on my brush. Otherwise, it will be a blob. It's okay, you know, if it's not perfect, I'm not aiming for perfection here, but still we don't want it to be messy, either. I think one of the most fun things about this is I don't know what the final design will look like. I think it's fun. You know, I can be nerve wracking, but you never know where the artwork will take you. Sometimes, and then you're like, Whoa. How did this happen? But I think it's part of the magic. I hope you agree. You can also go, you know, smaller at the tip here and larger over here. And, you know, as I'm painting, I'm always looking at the entire shape. Don't be stuck looking just here. See how each brush mark reflects on your overall shape. Now, I think it's a good time to start thinking what goes inside. It could be one of these flowers here. You could again, take your pencil and draw if you don't feel confident jumping in. So there's very often inside the pasty, there's, like, something big over here. So we can start drawing this flower. And it's very easy to overdo. You know, sometimes you look at it and it seems very elaborate, but it's actually not overloaded. Kind of like the leaf over here. And I like this little cross of a flower. And then see this is going to be so loaded, we have to see what happens around. We could, again, paint it with a solid color around, right? But I don't think I want to do this. It could have some smaller flowers in here, something like this. A couple of leaves. And it doesn't have to be perfect. That's part of the deal. I'll add some polka dots in here. Now, let's use our brush magic. I'm going carefully kind of slowly. I'm painting with just the tip right now. Or once this is dry, we can also erase the pencil, but you have to really make sure it's dry. Tulip like flowers, I could use a smaller brush, honestly. This is a little bit too big, but it's not bad. When you learn painting, they usually tell you. Grab a bigger brush, you know, paint with bigger brushes. I might lose some of the detail, you know, that I drew over here, but I think it's okay. As long as you have some interesting shapes in here, I'm squinting my eye and looking. Do I have enough detail? Do I need more? Do I like it overall? And I would have to repeat it again in these shapes or we could have, for example, two variations of the paisley. They don't have to be all the same. Like in this design, for example, see, we have one, two, three, four different kinds of flowers. This is a modernized paisley. We could do this, as well. Or we could repeat exactly the same motif. Something is missing. I have to decide, you know, what is missing. Maybe some vertical lines because it's looking kind of ditzy right now. Maybe I want to join this a little bit, the stuff over here. It's very organic, so you can go however you want to go about it. And I think I want to actually paint a little bit around it. I'm going to use a more transparent shade, test it out again. So I think I want to go a little bit around because there's a lot of white in there. And that's not exactly how I want it to be. It's okay if some shapes touch, but again, I don't want them to bleed too much either. I could also maybe use some darker dots over here. Maybe some, not all of them, you know, not all the way, but maybe just on top. I think I like this. So I'm going to paint the other one now, taking my round brush again, rotating, and I'm going to do exactly the same things that I did here. I think I do want to stick with one design. Let's see. Relax your hand. Let me try. And paint the little thing with the same brush. Will it work? It has a very pointy tip, so you can do some detailing work with it just fine, as well. Paint this flower again. There's a little dot. Now that we have a plan, right now that we have done this one, we can repeat what we just did. Or we could also draw it with a pencil again. So there are a couple, like, tulipy flowers and some leaves. And dots. And we are looking at the balance of details, so everything is pretty much the same weight and thickness now, so I'm adding something thinner. So we have an interesting balance, but don't overdo it because it will be too busy. I will let this dry a little bit and paint with a lighter ink around here. I think it's time to start thinking what will be happening over here, right? So while this is drying, I can paint this guy, as well. Going to do the same thing that we just did. Maybe I want to try and add a thin line inside it just with a tip or take a smaller brush if you don't feel comfortable doing this. I'm looking at this, as well as I'm painting and thinking, you know, whether anything needs to change. When you're painting, you're always kind of moving your eyes across your painting, comparing elements, and seeing what needs to be fixed. Here, the flower goes in this direction. And we need to paint the decoration around the paisley. And when I'm not using the other brush, I'm putting it in my brush rest because I'm not using different colors. I'm only using the same ink, so I don't have to rinse my brush that much. So I'm going to grab the baby Filbert now and paint these little dots around. As you're doing this, watch how your curve goes. You know, I don't want this to go too flat. So I can make these a little bit longer. They almost turned into dots. We don't want things looking strange either. We don't want to have any, you know, nipples on our paisleys. I think actually these dots work really well. Maybe a couple more dots over here. Is that too much? We can decide later on. We can decide once we're in Photoshop. Alrighty. I think we can start painting with a looser mix around a little bit of water. So I want to leave a white line around the inside of the paisley. But I'm okay if some things bleed together in touch. Makes things look more organic and more natural. All right. And we can do the same here. Don't forget to add a little water. It's good to learn to paint with different values, right? So this is a lighter value now than the original ink that we were using here. We have a lot more water in this mix. So there are two more guys to paint over here. Honestly, even these three would be enough, but I don't like to waste paper. So since I started this, I'm going to finish them. I am going to pause my recording as I paint them because, you know, I'm repeating exactly the same steps. So I finished painting my paisley shapes, and I would probably call this design kind a toss because our shapes are toss, and I'm also going to add flowers in between that are also going to be tossed in different directions. So I was painting the same flower, the same things, you know, as in those, but I added this line inside of the shape, and I also wanted to repeat it over here. So these don't have the other line inside the shape. So it's good to have some variety and balance. And as we are going to paint the filler flowers between the pasly shapes, I also don't want to make them exactly the same as these because it will be too repetitive. And we also have to be mindful of the right? We don't want the filler elements to overpower our main elements. The paisley should be the center of interest. So this is slightly wet, so I'm going to be carefully drawing in between. I'm thinking, you know, since we had this almost daisy shape as our focal flowers, maybe we could use a different floral shape for the fillers. And we are going to have a lesson on flowers very soon, and we'll talk more about flower shapes. But in general, it's good to pay attention that, you know, there are different shapes of flowers, such as, you know, I don't know all the botanical names. Clearly, there will be something like this, something like this, maybe you will have a little multiple floral like this. And just like in a good bouquet, you know, it's good to have different flowers for visual interest. So I think I'm going to do something like this for my fillers and possibly another tulipe Flower or like a carnation kind of lower for the fillers. And it's also interesting to think about leaf shapes because leaves can also be like this. Leaves can be long and thin like this. Leaves can be thin and small, you know, like branches. It's good to keep these little things in mind. But don't stress about it too much, okay? Not very serious. This is not botany exam, so don't you worry. I also need to think about the direction of my filler flowers, right? How are they falling? How are they being tossed around? So if your painting is not completely dry yet, be careful. Don't touch it with your finger. Don't smudge it. It's almost dry, but I still have to be careful you can probably see that I'm not very comfortable drawing at this angle. I could rotate my paper. You know, I just didn't want too much hassle, I guess. So now that I invented this flower, right, I have to repeat it somewhere. So probably over here or, you know, I could just give myself a little hint and then kind of paint it as I go. But I think it's good to plan what your shape is going to look like. You could also have a few branches, right? And I will need a smaller brush to paint these guys here. And maybe I could have another type of filler over here, maybe this, like carnation like laurel And what about the leaves? I don't want to have the same leaves in all my flowers. Or maybe I can do, like, a fern type of leaf. What do you think? Like that? So when you have time, thumb through some botanical books and look at leaf shapes or, you know, when you're at a botanical garden or at a walk, pay attention to different leaf shapes. This is slightly busy here. You know, maybe I squeezed in too much. Little flower here. Oh, see. That's okay. We can always modify it on the computer, as well. And we could have some kind of small fillers, as well, like maybe loose flowers or something like that. Something floating, so we'll have big scale, medium scale, and small scale. And it's always cute to have little, you know, fillers. So I want to use a smaller brush here. This pointed filbert or oval mop is going to do the job for me. It's one quarter of an inch Princeton select oval mop brush. I just had an idea. Maybe I will modify this shape. Maybe I will tilt my brush and have this double petal sort of situation over here. I think I went a little too modern here, but I think it's fine. It's okay. I'm not going to stress out about it too much. Let's paint this guy. So it's very easy to paint leaves with the side of a Wilbert brush. But I think I probably need an even smaller brush for the flowers. You can paint. You know, as I was learning to paint, I was told you can paint everything with one brush, and that was sort of regarded as a good skill when I was learning to paint. But using different brushes just makes the job easier and faster. And, you know, you get a variety of strokes, not from manipulating your hand, but just from using different brush shapes and sizes. Oh, that wasn't very pretty. I'm almost going like, bamboo like, right? Okay. I think I'm going to use my baby filbert brush that I used recently to paint this little Uh oh. See what I did. And I can also vary the amount of ink and water here. It's okay if some flowers are more transparent and others are more solid. I just added more fresh ink, and I'm going to continue making my dots. Over here. And remember, flowers, you know, organic shapes, they overlap, they touch each other. So don't be afraid to, you know, make them a little messy. There are different styles of painting, of course. You could have, you know, folk flowers which are very geometric and symmetrical. But here I am going for a more organic look. And also, remember to move your gaze from here because now I'm painting and I'm so fixated on this branch, and I kind of forgot what is going on here. Is not good. So remember to pay attention to all your painting because this is sort of getting busy over here. I might have to make some modifications on the computer. I guess I kind of have to decide whether I want to do five petals or four, because right now it's all over the place. See the line is getting too thick, all the thickness is pretty much the same, so I will use a tip of the brush to bring in a little more of thin lines. That's getting a little too complicated over here, but that's okay. It's important to stop on time, so I'm going to stop. I'm going to leave this little branch. Let's move on over here, and I'm going to make my doughty flowers here. And since I made this, I need to make more of them. I remember I was going for this double petal look. As there are different kinds of flowers themselves, there are also different kinds of petals. So there are single petals and double petals, and we can use it in our painting. Now, let's paint this other little guy. And I think I'm going to use a little more water. I want them to be a little more transparent. And as I need thinner lines, I'm using my round brush with a pointed tip, and remember my fern esque leaves. There's, like, a little hole over here, so I'm going to add a small bud and maybe a little leaf as well. So let's see what we have here. I think we're missing the washy aspect, so I want to have something washy. It could probably be, you know, the painting around. But also, you know, I don't want to ruin this and also we could later on add a watercolor wash behind it on the computer. I think I need to have one more branch like this because this one is really big, this one is really small, and I probably need one of these guys, but I definitely need to have some kind of Vilar. And maybe that's where I could also use more water. I'm paint a little flower over here. It doesn't really matter where it is. You know, I could do it here or here because we will be moving them in Photoshop. But I think I want to have something a little more washy. So I'm going to use a lot more water this time. So we have a good balance of, you know, dark and light shapes. Rambi said, we always look at everything and compare how it all looks. I'm kind of unhappy with this branch right now, but I think I will make it work. I want to paint a few more washy flowers so I can use them as fillers. Here, I intentionally let it bleed, so it looks a little more watercoloring. Ink bleeds slightly differently from watercolor. So, see, this is a little too much. I could take a paper towel and clean it up a little bit. I think that's better. And I don't know if I feel like this is a little empty here, so maybe a few more leaves. So I was going to say, if you paint around, it's a good solution, but it might, you know, it will be more difficult to create the repeat because then you will have to take care of the watercolor parts as well. So it might be easier just to put a watercolor wash behind it. But I'm going to paint it, so you just see, you know, the way it looks and you can decide if you like it. Oh, see? This kind of looks pretty, actually. I'm using quite a lot of water here because I want them to look light and washy. And we can later on decide that, you know what? We're not going to use this. We can remove it. Oh, hail photoshop right. Sometimes I think about people pre computer times when everything had to be painted really perfect and beautiful, right? Life is so much easier for us right now. What do you think? Do you like it with watercolor wash or without it? I think I kind of like it this way because it also gives us a good balance. You know, we have detail. We have decorations. We have solid areas where the eye can sort of rest. I think I do like it. I'm using my intuition right now. And you can put almost anything in repeat. I want to say anything, but, you know, I don't want to be so categoric, but pretty much you can, right? It's just a matter of how much time it will take and if you have the necessary skills. I'm also looking at everything and looking at the shapes and the outlines, and I want my shapes to be aesthetically pleasing. So I'm painting around, and I'm paying attention to these white areas and the way they look. And we can make several versions from this pattern if we want. And I would also probably paint small solid section over here so we can use it if we need to fill up the space. But I will also finish painting around here. Rambi said, you never know what the final pattern is going to look like. Yeah, that's not what I envisioned, but I'm happy with it. I like it. Cause, I've painted paisleys before, but I've never painted something like this before. So it's something new, something original. And I think this is enough for the pattern, but like I said, I will paint a solid area over here so I can use it with a clone stamp in photoshop and fill out my space if I need to. But also, it's good to have some generic watercolor washes. You know, once you're bored and you don't want to do anything too intellectual, in a few sheets of watercolor washes, so you can use them as ground fillers. This is what we have here. This is almost dry now, and I think I want to erase some of the pencil line. I don't think it contributes anything beautiful over here. But please please make sure this is dry because there are some wet areas, and I don't want to scrub them. I think this is better. Also, an important note, make sure you are using a good quality eraser because if you're using something bad, it can ruin your artwork like this is not a very good Easor at the tip of the pencil. So something soft, something smooth. And before you jump in erasing on good quality artwork, just give it a try on a scrap paper. See? So, see, this is not a good eraser. It doesn't even erase properly. This is a good one. Here, I press really strong against the paper so it doesn't erase very well. But if I do a light sketch, it erases, no problem. So I'm going to erase the pencil wherever I do not want it, and I will see you in the next lesson. 11. Lesson 11 - Gouache, general things to know. Tools, brands. Design vs acrylic gouache.: Gouache is a long beloved medium used in design and textiles. The first medium I learned to paint with as a teenager was gouache. It's very beginner friendly. There are just some nuances that we have to know. Gouache gives us a very flat and opaque surface, which is perfect for scanning. Here are some of my artworks made using gouache. So this design is from my textile design college days. It is fully painted in gouache. This is the original. These are the color chips, and when you're painting for commercial use, it is helpful to include colour chips. It is not mandatory, but it is definitely a bonus, you know, for your customer. So these were made by masking it off with masking tape and then painting all the colors that are present in this design. See how smooth and made it is. And there are also some hand painted colorways. You don't have to do it every single time like this. It's just while we were learning, learning to actually create the repeating pattern by hand using tracing paper, you know, the old school method without using any computers. And we were also asked to paint some colorways. God knows why I made his color choices, you know, as a beginner designer back then. And this is the fabric from the same design. Just in a different color way. It is fleece fabric, and I changed the background color digitally, and I probably adjusted the colors a little bit as well to match the background because usually when you touch one color in a design, everything else around is influence. So very often we have to change the colors around as well. These are some floral designs painted in a more loose painterly manner, even a little bit transparent. You can do that with gouache as well. It is not as opaque as the bird design that I just showed you. To here, it's completely non transparent. And here I'm using a little of water as well. Painted on colored paper, and you can even use black paper. This is black watercolor paper, so it's very thick and it is ready to take in all the moisture. I'm also wearing a sweatshirt, the design on which was probably painted in gouache. See different hues of blue. It is by gap just for reference. But we don't know who actually painted this. It was probably a print studio. The most important thing to know about traditional gouache is that it reactivates with water when dry, so you have to be careful with it. See this pre painted motif that I did yesterday in gouache. If I drop water on it, it will be ruined. See if I even rub it a little bit. See what happens. Well, if I didn't do this, it was possible to fix it. Don't worry. I scanned this, so I can use these designs. If you accidentally dropped a little water, you can pick it up quickly with a paper towel. And then also, see, it's still a little bit ruined. This is completely botched. I wanted to show you how it works. Also, you know, I can even wipe this, wait until this is completely dry and repaint it again. So you can fix squash. But you probably don't want this to happen to very nice artwork. So be careful with it. Now, I just said traditional gouache. What does that mean? So there are two kinds of gouache, the traditional one or what is now often called design gouache or designer gouache. And a newer development called acrylic gouache or acrylic gouache in some sources, which has properties of both acrylic paint and the smooth matte surface of regular gouache. So when acrylic gouache is dry, it cannot be ruined with water, just like we did here. You might lift it a little bit, but it will not be completely screwed up like this. So let's give it a try. And this is also scant, so don't worry. See, it's completely dry, just like acrylic paint. I can even use a spray bottle. See, it doesn't do anything. This has dried quite a bit, so there's not much happening to it. I mean, I'm definitely giving it a very rough treatment, which you normally probably would not do. But if it is not dry enough, you could still, you know, lift up some pain. But in normal circumstances, you would not do this, right? So these are the two most important differences between regular guash or design guash and acrylic guash. Have to be very careful with your brushes because if you are using acrylic gouache and you leave your brush and palette like this, it is going to dry and it will be very difficult or maybe even impossible to clean it, and your brush will get easily ruined. So you have to wash your brushes very promptly when you're using acrylic paints, including acrylic gh. But if you do the same with regular gouache, if you just leave paint like this and your brush like this, nothing bad is going to happen. Of course, it is not ideal for the brush. You still have to wash it on time, but this can be easily reactivated with water. You can even reuse this paint. If it is traditional gouache, you can clean your brush as well. And it is not that, you know, either of the two kinds of gouache is better or worse. It is a personal preference. You have to know the nuances of using both. I see a lot of contemporary artists using acrylic gouache quite a lot. It is also easier to find for some reason, but I like to stick with regular gouache. You can even see how smooth this one is. You know, see the painted background. Yesterday, I was painting these two. This one still has some kind of texture, some striping to it, right? And also, it was harder to load the brush because it is kind of slimy. You know, acryl gouache is very sleek and slimy, while regular gouache is just flattery smooth if it's good quality. So, again, it is your personal preference. What I often do is I paint the ground with acrylic gouache, so I don't have to worry, you know, if I accidentally drop a little water. And then I paint the designs, especially if they're very detailed using regular designer gouache. We'll talk about painting grounds in a few lessons very soon. Guache comes in tubes and pans or tubs and it's a personal preference. I use both. I tubes. There are premixed colors, you can get primary colors, you can get larger tubes, four colors that you use a lot of that would be white for sure. Here I have a mix of acrylic guache and designer guh and regular as well. Of designer gouache and regular gouache, there seems to be a slight difference. So whenever you have the word design here, it's usually the best quality, the highest quality, but it's also more expensive. But, for example, Holbein doesn't have the word designer, right? It says artist squash, and it's really great quality, too. So as you see, the pens or the tubs or however you call them are something so you can dip your brush directly. You don't have to squeeze it out of the tube or these are another version of the pens. And we will talk about brands in a couple minutes as well. Though I do like to use pens because I can just dive in, you know, directly. I don't need to squeeze anything. But of course, it comes with a price. And so this one, just a couple of words on the squash, it is not very good quality, so I do not recommend using but, you know, maybe if you are practicing because it's, you know, very affordable. So what can happen with gouache, you know, an important thing to know. It can dry very easily, and it will dry, I promise you. So you should keep it under a cover like this. But even covered, it will dry. But that is normal. You know, see, I haven't used this gouache in about a couple months. So it is already starting to get dry. So see if I start painting like this, it's a little bit water. There's not enough body. So what I would do in this case, you know, some of them are not bad. Like, this isn't really bad. It is still kind of liquid, right? But, for example, this green color is already really, really dry. So what I'm going to do, in this case, you take some water and add it into your colors. So whenever you want your gouache to be a little more liquid, just keep adding water and let it sit about, you know, overnight. And then you need to mix it again. You can try mixing it now, but it will be really difficult because it's so dry. So later on, you know, tomorrow, give it a good mix with a palette knife, preferably a metal one. Find the made out of plastic as well, but metal ones are better because there's a lot of pigment to move around here. So one of these shapes should work. It's also a personal preference. So, you know, imagine this has sat overnight, and then you would just give it a good mix. It doesn't want to do it now because it's so dry. You would just stir it really well, make sure the consistency is good to paint with. And good consistency would be something like, you know, straight from a tube. Let me show you. So nice and smooth like this. We would add a little bit of water here as well, because it's just a teeny, tiny bit too thick. So probably something like this. You can keep dropping water if you are not happy with the texture. But don't add too much because it will make your paint too liquid and runny. If you do not like these shenanigans with the palette knife and reactivating your gouache, just use tubed paint. Here are my three favorite gouache brands. Turner Design gouache is a Japanese brand that is absolutely amazing quality. They come in handy sets like this and boxes that are a good deal in terms of pricing. And later on, you can also purchase separate colors if you run out. So I own a few of these sets. This is the regular designer gouache, and I have a couple boxes of acrylic gouache, and then these are separate of pastel colors. So they have interesting lines like pastel or Japanesque which is beautiful darkened colors. There might be a little bit hard to find, I heard, especially in Europe. But again, I'm not saying you only have to use this brand. This is what I use. And the bird painting that I showed you earlier was painted using Turner gouache. They also have large tubes. Himi is a good student grade quality gouache that has a bunch of fun colors. They do separate quite easily and need a good mix up from time to time. Like I mentioned. It's essential to keep them under a tightly closed lid. And, you know, here, see, remember, I spoke about it in the previous lesson. I added some water, and I'm waiting until tomorrow to mix them up. I also have a larger set. They come in smaller and larger sets. So I think it's a good starting brand, you know, to try out quash. Artisa is a good compromise between the first two. I'd say it's a very good quality student grade quash. How many colors do you need? Well, you definitely don't need 60 colors. I think something about 20 colors, 24 or so is a good amount. Again, it's a personal preference, sometimes, especially when you're learning to paint. You are told you can mix up anything and everything. Using three primary colors and white and black. That is true. But again, who has the time to mix up all the colors from scratch is definitely a great learning exercise. But, you know, particularly for gouache, I think pre mixed beautiful colors are very handy. Using it for design is great. I love doing it. There are other brands, of course, like Windsor Newton is a great brand. Holbein, I have a few tubes over here. Holbein gouache is great quality as well. And there are other brands, and you are very welcome to experiment with them. Just pay attention whether they are student or artist grade and whether it's design gouache or sometimes they also call it opaque watercolor or acrylic gouache. So you know what to expect and can make sure the paints you are buying fit your goals. Websites such as dgbliq.com, Jerry's Artama, Jackson's Art supplies are a good place to start. These are reputable website. Some of them have physical stores, too, some of them don't. I also recommend you to check prices between all these stores and also Amazon, as you can often find a better deal. Also, whenever I buy a set of paint, any kind of artist colors, I create this swatch table, you know, so I can refer and see how the color behaves, what it looks like. And I keep them together with the paints in the box. And, you know, whenever I'm painting, and I think, Oh, I really need to find a pretty lilac color. And I can see that it's this one. This is actually a metallic color. So the Artisa big set contains metallics. I'm not a big fan of painting with metallics, because as you scan them, they kind of lose this effect. But, you know, as a part of creative play, why not? You always want to test out different colors and pigments. Da da da da da da in terms of paper, smooth paper works best for gouache, and it can be either bristol paper, which works great for gouache. It can be hot press watercolor paper, very smooth, very minimal texture. I use other options as well. You know, you can paint on acrylic paper, which is even heavier than we use for watercolor. It's really, really thick. I also use this craft paper, which is a little bit too thin, but it still works. I use pastel paper. There are plenty of options. You can use watercolor paper as well. So just make sure the paper is thick enough, and I previously mentioned it as well. The best brushes for gouache are synthetic brushes, and you can use the exact same brushes as for ink. They do not have to be super expensive. So here are some examples. You can also use different shapes. You know, round brushes, Guerre brushes. I have a Filbert brush over here that I showed previously by Princeton Select Oval mop. This is a really great series by Robert Simmons. It's called White Sable. It's a synthetic brush, and I use it even for watercolor sometimes. So actually, watercolor, I would say, if you are also planning to paint in watercolor, keep your best brushes separate and try not to use them with gouache or ink. Technically, you can use, of course, natural brushes with gouache and with ink. But I would say the best practice for watercolor, keep everything super clean because it's so demanding. So there's a Grumbacher, round brush number ten. This is a pretty standard shape with a good tip. Couple imi brushes that we used for ink, also round with a pointed tip. This is number one for some reason, and this is number six, even though I wouldn't say they're that different. There is no universal sizing, unfortunately, across different brands and once received a complaint on my, you know, YouTube channel that I named that this was a number 12 brush, but actually, you know, in a different brand, number 12 is different. Yes, you know, but I have nothing to do with it. A very important kind of brush for gouache is a script liner. It can be either natural or synthetic. The most important thing is that it is very long because to paint thin lines, you need to have a little bit of this length, even though it might seem to you that, Oh, I'm not going to paint super long lines. You still need this because the paint will spread along the bristles. So this one is creative mark Mimi Kolinski script liner number two. This is a very good brush. And this is, you know, an old cheap brush from Michael's or something like that, and they are pretty much the same. You know, I'm a big believer in being economical, not overspending where you don't need to. Another good brand is silver, silver, black velvet, round brush number four. I also have them in number six. Number eight, I think in number 12, they are great for both wash and watercolor. But again, I would recommend to keep your watercolor brushes separate. If you do end up using the same brushes for different media, make sure you meticulously wash rinse and clean your brushes. A word on palettes for gouache, I often use ceramic palettes. They just feel nicer. You can buy these as plates. These are just plates, you know, dinnerware plates like this. Or this is specifically designed palette. So this can come handy when you are planning to paint a large area and you need to premix a lot of colors. You don't want to constantly add and mix the color again. So you have decided, for example, that you are going to use a palette of six colors, and you need to mix, you know, a pink, a blue, a yellow, and whatnot. So you just mix them up in this well. And, you know, if you're using regular gouache, non acrylic gouache, it can stay a little bit. You can cover it with a plastic wrap, so it will survive for a couple days. And if it goes a little bit dry, you can add a few drops of water to reactivate. Okay to use plastic palettes as well. It's just, you know, personal preference. I like using ceramics. It's always good to keep some kind of scrap paper. This is cardboard from actually markers packaging. So you can test, you know, your stroke before you start painting. So yesterday, I was painting the little bows. So I was re using, you know, this old card stock to test my script liner. I was painting with this brush. Helpful tool that I showed previously with gouache is the palette knife. I like the round one because if you're using a round container, you can mix it really well and it will go around easily. That is what I mean. If you are painting something large, particularly painting a ground, which we will have a separate lesson on you can mix up your color over here, and this is really convenient to mix it up with a rounded shape. Or you could also store your paint in here. If you feel like you might not finish today, you can mix it up again and use this. I honestly bought these containers in college. They told us, you know, it's an option, but I never use them. I somehow just use my palette. There is another one I want to show you that I use with gouache sometimes. So this one has nice deep wells. If you are painting a large design like the one with the birds on blue background that I showed you, and you are premixing a few colors, so this kind of palette can be handy. Of course, you do not have to own all these palettes. It's just I like experimenting and trying new things out. And I also want to show you that there are options. It's not one correct answer, you know, to use this or that palette or this or that brush. It's more about the characteristics of these tools that we are looking for. 12. Lesson 12 - Gouache demo: sunflowers: Let's do a quick demo so we can see what gouache is all about, and I'll show you how I mix color, you know, how I use brushes and things like that. So you can repaint a colored ground if you would like, like I did here. Here, I did it very casually. You know, I didn't even tape it, or I just, you know, had leftover paint, so I painted it with a flat brush, something like this. For this size, I wouldn't use the big one. These brushes are hemi, flat brush, it came in a set, and this is a ing nickel two inch flat brush. But we will have a separate lesson on painting grounds later on, so I will not focus too much on it. So if you are pre painting a ground, just wait until it's dry. I'm going to sit down and think, what I want to paint, right? I need a plan. I want to paint something simple and something trendy, something that is marketable commercial interesting and, you know, what people would buy. Decided that I want to paint some sunflowers. Sunflower is pretty much a very classic motif that is very, you know, late summer or even just summer harvesty cottage core, table linens. So it's a classic pretty much. And I'm going to use this card by CavaliniPapers, which are made with vintage images. I'm going to use it as a reference. I don't want to copy it too exactly. I just want to use it as a reference for the botany of the flower, you know, how big the leaves are, how the petals are located, and the colors a little bit. So let's dive in. We can use our sketchbook to plan, you know, to get the ideas out there similarly to the way we did with our paisley because we can just have single flowers like that or we could have full stem flowers, you know, a half drop like that. We could have the green leaves over here or we could just have, you know, sunflowers tossed without any leaves. I think this is what I'm going to just plain and simple sunflowers like this. But I might change my mind as I go. We need to decide, you know, what colors we're going to use and how we are going to treat our sunflowers because sometimes, you know, this can be all black. This can be brown. There are many options. There are also painted sunflowers which have, like, brown spots over here. A lot of options. Tiple ways to treat this texture as well, right? We could use dots. We could even draw, like, a little net, something like this, right? We could use concentric circles. Decided that I'm just going to do sunflower blooms freely tossed, you know, and I want to make it very simple, so I'm not going to go wild. I'm going to use a pencil to lightly sketch the design. There is no need to draw every single petal, just kind of the idea of it, because we will later on use our pointy round brush, which has the exact shape of the petal. You also have to decide, you know, which scale is comfortable for you. For example, for me, it is much harder to paint something really tiny, really small, so I prefer kind of this scale. And this paper is the Artisa watercolor paper that I used in my previous lessons about ink. It does have a little bit of texture to it, but it's not too pronounced, so it's fine. You can also turn the paper around because usually one side is smoother. Actually, that's what I'm going to do. It's not too late. I will draw my sunflowers. And I think I'll do three, right? And then digitally, I will be able to rotate them. I'm not even going to draw the petals. I just want kind of the general position of my sunflowers, but I do have to decide, you know, what color the centers are going to be. I think I'm going to do yellow petals, and then I will paint black centers and do yellow dots on top. There's also an option, you know, this doesn't have to be black. If you look really closely, it's not really black, actually. It's more like gray or green. So it's up to you. You know, it's your artistic choice. We could probably use orange to paint some details over here. So I'm going to paint my sunflowers now using ArtisaGuach, and I pulled out my color charts. And I think I'm going to use, you know, this color. I will definitely use white, you know, to soften the colors. Even if you want to use something straight from the box, it's usually not a good idea. It's good to add a tiny bit of white into a pure color just so it looks a little more natural. I'm going to use black, and I'm going to add a little bit of white into black, as well. I might use one of these colors for the veins on the petals, and let's see what we have. So I will start by squeezing out my white. And we always try maybe that was a little too much. Okay, we always try to keep our white clean, but that is very difficult because you will be putting your brush in there all the time. But it's okay. Whenever you need some fresh white, just squeeze out more from the tube. My bump will be yellow for the petals. This is a nice premixed color. You know, it's pretty much ready to go. Maybe just a drop of white. Orange, for the veins. Painting a fairly small piece, so I'm not using a lot of paint. And black. So you have to be careful with black because it's very strong. Whenever you know, you put a little bit of black on your brush or anywhere, everything will be contaminated with black. So whenever you're using black, wash your brushes out really well. And I'm going to paint that last. I will start with painting yellow petals first, and then I will add the black. We often start, you know, light to dark, and I'm going to use my round hemi brush number six with a good pointed tip. It's about the size the petals that I'm going to paint. It is better to use brushes bigger than you think you need, and it's a good idea to learn to paint with a bigger brush. It kind of just looks more professional. I'm thinking, you know, I'm planning my project. We could alternatively have two shades of yellow. Mix these two and get a second color. Let's see how it goes. Working with fluid media, it's very important to change your water frequently, especially when you are working with several colors. You know, with ink, we could get away with using less water, but we will be using the same brushes for different colors. So remember to change your water from time to time. When it gets cloudy and colorful, just get some new fresh water. Some people keep two containers of water on their desk, and they use, you know, one for lighter colors and one for darker colors. It's an option. There are also water jars that are double, you know, so you can have two containers. I tried that, but nothing works as good getting fresh water. I'm going to use this paperweight just to keep my paper from moving. It's a metal fish, so it's heavy. You can also tape your sheet to the workspace, you know, using masking tape. So I'm making the brush wet, and I will start with painting my yellow petals, and it's handy to keep a dropper with water here as well. I'll drop a little water here and start mixing up my color. We could probably use a smaller brush. I know I just said it's good to paint with a bigger brush, but this one's a little. See how slimy this gouache is. This is our tiza, so it's like our medium quality gouache. But it's okay. It's totally workable. I'm going to grab a smaller brush. You can use both, too. You can have some smaller petals and larger petals. Variety is good. Variety is the spice of life, right? Who said that? Maybe I'll make this guy a little bit bigger. I'm leaving space for the other yellow color. Here, see, I made the space equal everywhere. Here, I want some of the petals to touch. I think it makes things more organic. I'm always very inclined to organic designs, slightly asymmetrical, because that's how it is in fine art painting, and that's how it is in nature, too. Two stroke leaves, pretty much. Now we can mix up another color. So I will just add a little bit of orange. I'll wet the tip of my brush, grab a bit of orange and mix it into my yellow. So I want the hues to be slightly different, but I don't want them to blend, either. You know, they have to be different enough. They have to have a reason why you use them, right? Why use two shades. When you squint your eyes, if the colors blend, there's no point in having those two hues. They still should be different. So we went a little bit orange over here, which I think is fine. Where's my reference? I made my petal shorter than here, which is probably good, right? We don't want to copy too closely. Things don't have to be perfect, remember? Nothing is perfect in nature. It might look so, but if you look closer, no two petals are alike. You can paint on top as well. If you feel like the brush is getting dry, just dip it into water again. See it's getting dry, dip it in water again. Alrighty. I'm washing my brush out really, really well in the same manner as with ink. Paper towel. So I forgot about this guy, right? I don't think I'm going to use it, so I can wipe the excess on paper. It will not contaminate your water so much. This I also learned from oil painters recently. You can't use water with oil. You have to use a chemical called gamsil. So I clean this guy and I can put it aside. Black is a very strong colour, so what I'm going to do is I will take some white first, and then I start adding black. You could make it a little more natural by adding a little yellow to it. It will make it a little bit warmer. I think this is a good color for us. I'm loading my brush, so it's fully covered in paint. So this is almost dry. I might have some blending in, but I'm not very concerned about it right now. A little too dry, dip it in water, mix it again. Change the angle of your hand so you can paint in tough areas. And also, I'm going to use the trick that I learned kind of later in life, you can rotate your paper. When I went to an art school as a teenager, we were not allowed to rotate the paper. This was considered cheating, but I'm a grown woman now, so I can rotate my paper. So see how this is a little messy. It's okay. We can leave it like that, as well. But I do kind of want to clean it up a little bit. So it's more comfortable for me, you know, to paint at this angle than like this. That's why I'm rotating my paper so it gives me a comfortable angle again. So this isn't dry yet, but I'm working with the same color so I can paint on top. And remember not to put your hand on top of your painting because you'll smudge. Learn to love imperfections. Nothing is perfect. Nobody is perfect, even sunflowers. I'm going to let this dry, and there are two things that I want to do with this design. I want to add some yellow stripes for detailing, and I want to add the yellow dots inside, you know, just like here. So but I cannot do this while this is wet because it will ruin my painting. So I want to let this dry completely. So this is dry now. See how nice in mat it is. So it's the white that makes it so mat. So I want to paint the orange veins or lines on the petals now. Kind of like this. We could outline everything with our thin liner, you know, the entire petal, or we could just ed it here at the base of the flower. No, we choose. We are the artist. I think that this color is now not dark enough because I kind of used it for the other petal color. So I am going to pull another color to darken my lines, and this is going to be burnt sienna brown. So the color wheel can be helpful in finding pretty color combinations. I don't go crazy about color theory. You know, it can be overwhelming. But here see. So with this lover we're somewhere over here, right? Colors that are close to each other on the color wheel always look nice together. So I'm going over here. This is called analogous color palette, the colors that are right next to each other, right? So there's a complimentary color palette, complimentary, split complimentary like this, you would have blue, orange and green. And where is our analogous word here? Analogous, right? So this is a fun little tool to have. They are not expensive at all, and you can read a little bit on color or just use it as visual reference. I'm going to use a little bit of burnt sienna to darken my orange color. Remember to cover you tubes right away, and we're going to use our script liner. Remember I mentioned this brush. I'm going to use the old one for gosh. I save the best brushes for watercolor. So I will use this orange color, and it's a little bit strange to mix it with this thin long brush, but trust me, it will work. Trust me. See, it's very thick, so I will dip my brush into water again. And where is my scrap paper? With thin lines, always test them first. And with this brush, you will have to dip your brush into paint quite often because it wears off. You can add a little water, again, add a little pigment, as well. I hope it's not too dark. Maybe a little bit. So I will add a little orange and maybe even a little bit of white. So I think this should work. Why can't we use a short brush? Because if we're using a thin, short brush, the line will not be as thin, see? Even though the brush is kind of thin and small. Te is just kind of short and stubby. It's good for its own purpose. We probably will use this brush for making our dots inside the centers. But for now, let's just stick to our script liner. So I will be rotating my paper quite a bit now, so I release it from that fish. And I haven't decided yet. Do I just want to go over here? Or do I want to go around? Maybe I'll start with painting a few at the base and see how it looks. Hmm. I kind of want to add a few long lines. What if I do this? So I pre painted the first layer very messy, and now I kind of want to bring more definition to it. Kind of like this guy, remember? As I'm painting more, I'm watching, you know, what is happening around. Does it make it better or does it make it worse? Now that I started outlining these petals, I kind of need to keep going at least every other petal, right? And of course, this is not the only way to paint sunflowers is just an option. I'm not quite happy how straight this petal came out. Oh, you know what? I could show you how to fix things, right? But it's kind of more difficult on the edge. It's easier to fix things when they are, you know, inside something. I zoomed in a little bit. I really, really dislike this unusual, unnatural pointy angle, and I need to think how I can fix this. I could probably change shape over here. So when this is dry, I will repaint it with this yellow color again, Saffron golden yellow color, right? This sky looks kind of lonely. The only one that hasn't been outlined. So I kind of got the idea of what I want to do, right? So I will keep painting the other flowers as well. Don't forget to re wet your brush if it's getting too dry. And usually when we start painting, we're a little stiff. You know, our hand is a little stiff. As I'm painting the second flower, I'm already more relaxed. That's why it's good to kind of paint something easy and small before you, embark on your important project for the day, like a warm up. Again, I did this. I'm keeping my brush wet and covered in paint. I don't want any teased hair poking out because it can leave a mark on my painting. As the brush is drying up, I keep reactivating paint with water. So the painting is going fairly smooth. It's because we're using traditional gauche. Yesterday, I was painting the bows, and I was kind of struggling with the bulk of the paint here. I don't know if you can see it over here. The paint was more slimy and heavy the acrylic gauche. Okay, so this is dry now, and I want to fix it. I don't like this big brown blob. I'm going to clean my brush really well, wipe it on a paper towel. Now that it's clean, you know, I made sure it's clean, I make it wet again, and I want to pick this color again. So here it is on the palette. Oh, see, it dried, actually. What I can do, I will add more water on my brush, and I will reactivate this color. See? It might be a little bit lighter. So just make sure you grab all the paint you can before you start. You can definitely, you know, mix it up again with these two colors. I think it will be enough for us. Just make sure it's not too transparent because we want to cover this area over here. Just made sure that this is dry, right, and I'm going to fix this. So this is not thick enough. I have to still remix the color. Grab a little bit of yellow and a little bit of yellow orange, test it out on a scrap paper. When it dries, it will be a little bit lighter. So it does look a little messy. No, but I think it will be better. And maybe I could add a little more white, as well. Sometimes you have to create several layers. I want to paint these dots around, you know, around the center. I'm going to leave the center black. And for this purpose, I need a short Stubby brush like this. I don't need the script liner because I will keep getting those long lines. This is Artisa number one spot brush. See, it's made for spots exactly what I need right now. Let me see which color I want to use. I think I will add a little bit of white to my yellow. I want it to be lighter than the petals, and it's also going on top of black. So always remember about your values. In fine art painting, values are absolutely crucial. But the rule applies in design as well. Paying attention to the reference, see? It's kind of dark closer to where the petals grow. Then it's very light, and then the center is dark again. So let's see how I can do it. I will create a little reminder for myself, you know, where the center is like that. It doesn't have to be exact. You know, I could stop sooner or later. Just has to read as a sunflower. Maybe we could have a few dots here, so it doesn't look so detached. Again, a reminder for myself where the center is. And I'll go around, make your brush stroke vary. Don't make them all copy paste like this. Some of them should be bigger and some of them should be smaller. I think we're looking good, right? And we want to keep the sunflowers similar, of course, but we also want them to be different enough. So it's more interesting. We don't want three identical looking flowers, right? Why did we paint them? We could just have painted one, and that's it. I'm kind of going back to this area over here, and I will even use, you know, a different yellow on top. I this area could use a little love too over here. But again, even if something is not perfect, that's fine. That's okay. We can fix things in Photoshop, and we can also keep them, you know, imperfect, just like in real life. I'm kind of tempted to throw in a few leaves now that it looks so empty, but it's okay. We could actually, you know, put it on a black background. Maybe we could have a little polka dot inside. We could make them overlap digitally, right? Kind of cover each other partially. So there are options, always. We fix this, but I think I want to have a small orange line over there. I think I want to add some leaves. Again, we can omit them later and not use them. This color is called olive green. Could be a little bit brighter on a sleep. Maybe I'll add a drop of bright green. Let me find a pretty bright green, sub green, possibly. Exactly. And the brush I started with is perfect to create the leaves. Mixing up my green, mix it well so you don't have streaks, and I will just paint some free hand leaves just, you know, as my soul tells me to. Kind of even like this torn edge over here. And we will paint some veins, as well. We could also use a darker green to have variety in leaves. I think I will stick to this one for now. So as I'm painting, I'm watching the general outline. You know, I don't want to overcrowd my pattern. So I also have to add leaves here, right? So I'm not going to paint more over here or maybe I will. I'm deciding as I'm working on this. But we don't want things touching like this, you know, point to point. Should be overlap if they are touching, right? So how am I going to go about it? Is something like this. So this is not good, S. I accidentally did this. We can fix this later. Maybe I'll rotate this flower slightly in Photoshop. And again, don't keep the leaves the same size, see how this one's bigger. This one's smaller. It's more interesting like this. Even if you go off the edge accidentally, we can still fix it in Photoshop. I keep referencing to Photoshop all the time. Can you imagine how people created designs when there was no computer in Photoshop? These are still some of the most beautiful designs. You know, some companies modern companies buy vintage designs from old fabric mills, and I've seen these designs that are like 100 200-years-old. They are beautiful. They're also painted in gouache like this. I mean, way more meticulous, because at that time, I guess things had to be more meticulous, kind of perfect looking, but times are changing. Maybe a little leaf. And also, since I know this will be a textile design, I will also maybe paint a separate leaf, maybe even a couple, you know, like fill of leaves. Yeah, I think it's more interesting with leaves and maybe a couple stems, you know, if I decide to kind of join everything. Maybe even a couple straight stems. You don't have to use all the elements later, but it's good to have them just in case, right? We can use our big leaves. Painting leaves and botanicals is so satisfying. I think that's good. I want this to dry, and I will add a few dark lines on the leaves, and we will be done. But this is dry now. I'm ready to paint my lines on the leaf, and we have a few options here. I definitely want to use a darker color, so I could add black into my green. And I think that's what I'm going to do because I already have black. I think it will look good. Another option we have, we could use a different hue of green. For example, this is a very warm green. We could use a cool green. We could use some blue, added to this green or, you know, a cooler green added here. I think I'm going to go with black. I'm going to use my script liner again because I'm going to be making thin lines. See, my black is dry now, but I can easily reactivate it with water, and I don't need much. I don't even need to dip into here. I definitely squeezed out too much black. But I might need it still. Maybe I'm an optimist. Yeah, I think I do need a little bit of pure black. I keep dipping my brush into water whenever I need to. So it looks like black, but it's actually a dark green. And let's give it a try. Is it dark enough for us? I think it is. So remember when gouache dries, it will be a little bit lighter. And just quick organic lines. Don't overdo. It's very easy to do too much texture too many small details. Remember to leave some air in your design. Don't try to cover everything and anything. So I think I'm portraying leaves not quite correctly, see? The way veins are going over here. If you want to be really precise, we could do that. Maybe let's do a few for our botany people, so we don't offend them. I respect my botany people, so Alright, how does it go over here? Also, they start from the same point over here. I don't know if you can see or if it's too dark, see? That's what I'm talking about. Maybe we could even paint a few darker leaves. Remember I mentioned that we could have another color, right? For an interesting variety. See, this brush is not particularly made for painting large areas. It's more made for thin lines. The script liner. And you can always add some simple lines. You know, if you forgot to paint something, you can easily add it in Photoshop. It's harder to paint something from scratch in photoshop that looks exactly like this. But if you just forgot to paint a line over here, it's usually no big deal. You can find a photoshop brush that looks very similar. So I honestly was going to create something way simpler, but I guess I went with my natural instinct then just painted loose organic free falling botanical. That's what I often do. Alright, I think I need to stop because I'm kind of already starting to overwork it. I think we're good. 13. Lesson 13 - Using tracing paper, transfer paper and light table: I want to share with you a few more helpful tools, such as tracing paper, carbon paper or transfer paper, and a light pad, which is here underneath. So we already know that you can paint directly on colored paper. You can paint on your colored ground, that you prepainted yourself. But what if some of your motifs are more complex and you don't feel confident enough painting directly or drawing directly? Feel like it happens a lot with animals for me personally. If I started drawing out all these animals on this paper, I wouldn't be able to nail them down right away. I would have to use the eraser quite a lot. I would have a lot of leftover lines, and I don't want that. So this design was created using this paper, guash, a white pen to outline, and I used the light pad to transfer it onto my paper. I cannot locate the actual painting, but I will include a digital image somewhere here, the scan of what I painted. And since we're here, let me walk you a little bit through my planning process as well. How did I end up with these animals exactly? So I usually start by sketching out things in my sketchbook, and I did this design for a design challenge, and the topic was nocturnal animals, and it's called Creatures of the Night. I wanted it to be ironical and fun. So I start by sketching out ideas, drawing things, writing things down. I wanted it to be, harvesty. Anything that comes to mind, I just write it down, and I'm not going to use all of this. Had the name down here. I don't remember if it was later or early in the process. It helps to name a design as soon as you can, because then you can save all your files under the correct name. And here I was throwing in, you know, Oh, I want to have a hedgehog and an owl and a fox and a watering can with some garden flowers and a moth. And, you know, I think I pretty much used everything here. Very often, you know, I sketch out a lot of motifs, and then I do not use some. When I was choosing my main motifs, I also thought, What kind of filler am I going to use? And I sketched out some flower ideas, and I also added a brown filler floral over here. So I was painting my main motifs, and then around them, I added some flowers. You can always choose your own layout. Do you want your motifs to touch or overlap? Do you want things to go really closely together? I see this kind of pattern is very popular with people. Then, you know, when I finalized my ideas, you can prepaint your entire tile if you want. But here, I just wanted to have nice painterly motifs. And I also wrote here LsGuas, right? When I plan to paint or draw a design, I ask myself, What kind of feel am I going for. So here I wanted something very, you know, rural New England. And these are all the animals that I actually encounter. Living here in New England, in the suburbs of Boston. What I did next, I drew them in my sketchbook, and, you know, I did as much erasing as I needed. I was using photos for references of animals. Then when I finalized my drawing, I traced it with a bold pencil so I can see. And then I used a light pad to transfer the design. I accidentally turned it on So this is a light pad, and you can use it to transfer your motifs onto backgrounds. But what I did in this case, I actually cut out this sheet, and, you know, I took my background paper, and I put my drawing onto here, and I put my final colored paper on top, and the design was showing through, and I traced them. And then I painted it in gua find these light pads or light tables, right? Some people have fancy light tables. We had one at university, where I studied textile design. You can find them at artist stores or online. Mine is by I don't know, you probably can see it. It says US art supply, and they can be much smaller. Again, when you are starting, painting and designing, you'll have your preference for sizes that you work with. Again, it's the size of your paper, it's the size of your motifs. See what happens when you put something on a light table. You can see things that are on this side and on that side as well. But when I was tracing it, I didn't have anything on the other side. But what happens when the paper is too dark, see, you can't see anything through a light pad. You can also use a window. Sometimes if you're tracing something from, you know, white onto white paper, you can hold it against the window pane and trace it as well. Might not be as convenient, but it's also an option if you don't have a light pad. So in this case, and I'm going to shut down my light pad, when the paper is too dark, you can use carbon paper, very old fashioned product that was used for typewriters, you know, to make two copies of whatever you were typing. It's kind of hard to find right now, but, you know, not impossible, and they come in different colors. Black is the most common one. I also have some white carbon paper. I used it on a black pattern that I created, and I needed to transfer, on a pattern that was on a black background. I mean, let's see what it looks like. So see, it looks like this. And you can see some bird motifs that I was tracing. So in this case, you would do the opposite. You would put your final paper onto here, put the transfer paper, make sure you know, it's covering all the area over here, and try not to smudge it like this because it will leave a trace. And then you would do this. You might also want to tape this so it doesn't shift as much. And then you would trace this again. It will transfer onto your final background. So let's give it a try. I will pretend that this is my final product. So I would go like this pressing kind of hard and trying to make my lines clean because I'm tracing onto my final surface. You have to press for it to transfer, but on the other hand, don't make it super duper black because that's one of the advantages of that method, the line is waxy and it's there. You can't erase this. The eraser doesn't work on it. Let me give it a try. See, it's not meant to be race. You probably could, but Imagine this is a gouache painted background. But again, it's an option. It might be something that can be helpful. I'm not saying you have to use this method. Again, it's an option. It's an idea. It's something to work with. And then you would be painting with gouache on top of this. So I personally prefer I'd rather draw directly on the surface, you know, not use this paper, but there are some circumstances when I had to turn to carbon paper. Another helpful tool, if we may say so is tracing paper, which is this transparent, crinkly kind of paper that you can see through. So you might not even need a light pad. You might be good with, you know, using tracing paper. So if you take a sheet, and again, all of your rough sketching has been done in the notebook, and now you just want a clean copy, and what you can do with this copy later on, is you can actually draw your motifs like I did here. Again, this is a very elaborate design. So I sketched out my palm trees in the sketchbook, and then I put tracing paper on top traced it a little bit with the pencil again, and then I just drew my file motifs on tracing paper. It's quite durable, so it's possible too. And then I scan this and created my repeat digitally. So the advantage of this method is, let me show you. Actions speak louder than words, right? So the advantage is that you do not need a light pad. And another advantage is that you can reflect your motifs quite easily. So this is one owl. And say I want to add an owl facing in a different direction, I'm just going to turn over my tracing paper and do this. Again, it's an option. Of course, you can easily rotate things on the computer later on. But depending on how you work, this can be handy as well. If you forgot whether you've traced something or not, just lift it slightly, and you will see. See? And I could keep going. I could think, Oh, okay, I want to have two foxes over here walking towards each other, so I could have this design. And then later on, when you have finalized everything, you can either take another sheet of tracing paper and, you know, trace it finally on top, or you could use a marker, you know, something like this, a thin marker so we can get rid of this, right? And I could just draw on top of this. And finalize my design. I think it's called inking, right? We're inking now. So all these things, of course, can be done on the iPad digitally, but that's not why you're here, right, washing this glass. So this is how things were done before the computer. And that owl is on the other side, but it doesn't matter, right? I can see it, so I will trace it like this. And again, I'm not trying very hard right now, so it's kind of sketchy and messy, but you could really, really perfect your design. Kind of trying to go symmetrical. Too many feet, right? And then, you know, when this is dry, you could erase your pencil again. And when you scan it onto the computer, it's going to be really, really clean. Or you could use this with some transfer paper and transfer this onto this background. We might be even able to do it with our light pad. No, I can't really see. Oh, I can actually see. You guys probably can, but I can see a little bit. The garage layer is quite thick, so you guys cannot see because of the lighting and camera settings, but I can actually see the owls over here, so I could go in and, you know, start drawing them again on my background. I hope these are helpful. I hope they make sense. Again, they are not mandatory techniques. They are just something to be aware of, and I hope it's useful. Uh, 14. Lesson 14 - Painting colored grounds in gouache: B. If you would like to paint on a colored ground, you have several options. First of all, you can use colored paper. Just make sure it is thick enough. This is slightly too thin, but it still works. This paper is something like this, and you can get it at craft stores like Michael's. But please be aware that the background color affects all the other colors as well. So if, for example, you paint this on gray and then you scan it in and you want to change the background color, you can, of course, do this. But when you remove the gray color, all the colors here are sort of gray down and muted down. So if you compare the white swan, with white paper, S, it's not white at all. Also, I think it wasn't white originally. I probably used something like a cream color. It's just something to be aware of. Alternatively, you can paint your own ground, and it's fun to do, and you can get any color you want. So these I painted in acrylic gold acrylic paint. That's why they are so textured. But when you paint it with regular gouache, designer gouache and get the best quality for this particular task. It's going to be a battery smooth, gorgeous surface, and the paper won't work once paint on top of it. An important thing to know is that when you are painting your ground, it is better to be standing. I am standing right now, so I have enough distance, enough lever, my arm and hand can have this free, easy movement. When you're painting your main motifs, you can, of course, be sitting down. We want you to be comfortable. But when you are painting a large ground, I do suggest that you stand up. It's going to work much better. It's important. So in order to paint your own colored ground, you will need bristol paper, which is very thick and sturdy. It will survive whatever we're going to do with it. Water, obviously, water bottle is handy. You know, it's a spray bottle. A brush like this is essential, a flat brush, a palette knife to mix up the paint, a deep palette well for mixing because we are going to paint a large area, so we want to premix a lot of color. And it doesn't have to be this size, of course. I just try to fit it inside the camera frame. I've painted larger grounds having a board of some kind is definitely helpful because we're going to be taping our paper to this board. Tape is handy as well and paint gouache paint of the best quality that you can get. This is essential for painting the ground. While you can use different grades of gouache for painting on white paper, if you specifically want to have a colored ground, you need to use really good quality paint. You can use a premixed color, if this color is good enough for you and it works, you can use this color. This is a little punchy, but, you know, maybe you are painting something tropical. But the advantage of this method is that you can premix any color, right? We're going to use a lot of white, and I want to premix a blue color, light blue. So this is Prussian blue, and this is Holbein gouache. A word on tape. So in artist stores, you might see this kind of tape, which is not good, unfortunately, which is a paradox, right? Construction masking tape works much better. So this one is called frog tape. You can get it at stores like Home Depot or Lowe's. It also comes in several widths. Whatever works, you know, for your paper size, for your board size, and you can also get blue tape, masking tape. So why is this tape no good? See, it doesn't hold already. It's going to stick out and peel off and we haven't even started doing anything yet, and we are going to wet the paper. So there will be a lot of physical processes going on with the paper, right? So we want to have sturdy, reliable masking tape. So let's get started by taping our paper. See how smooth and thick this paper is. Perfect. My daughter made a little bit of art here a few years ago. I was so mad at her at the time, but now it kind of reminds me of my little girl, you know, she's almost 15 now, and this is a sweet little reminder. I hope it doesn't distract you too much. So another helpful trick. Why are we so concerned with the correct tape so, like I said, we don't want it peeling off prematurely. We want it to be secure and sturdy. And also what happens very often when you start peeling this off, the top partial layer can get off with the tape as well, and we want to minimize it as much as we can, because it can ruin our artwork. So in order to avoid this, you can take your tape I need about this size with a little extra, and I'm going to tap it on my clothing, actually, either on my belly or on my leg. So it picks up a little bit of the lint from your clothing, and it is not as sticky. You know, it is still very sticky and very reliable, but it will sort of create a little buffer so we do not peel off the paper layer. So we want to try to avoid this as well, because paint can get underneath this folded tape. Get the paper flat and tape it to the board, trying to make it straight. So we have to make sure this adheres really well, and this is not good either. So readjust it. Smooth it out. And this paper is high quality, so you can take it off a couple of times. This tape, I mean, trying to make it straight. I'm looking through the tape and trying to measure so that my sides are equal. This should be fine. I will smooth it out with my nail. Now I'm going to tape the opposite side and do the exact same process. Approximately measure a piece of tape with a little extra. We need a little extra because we will be peeling it off when we're done. See what I'm doing. Make sure it's well attached because, again, if it is not taped down well, paint will be coming underneath the tape and everything will start warping and dancing, and we don't need that. Now we're going to do the vertical sides. And our final side. So we're all good taped on all the sides, and now I need to premix my paint. Preferably not on the surface, I'm going to paint, right? And it's also handy to have a pipette, you know, a dropper with water. So I am going to mix a light blue color, probably something like this, you know, very roughly, of course. So I will start with squeezing out my white color. Quite a lot because this is a large surface. Relatively large. So we want to premix the entire color right away because it will be very difficult to match the shade once we have used up the premixed paint, and we're like, Oh, I actually need more. It is possible, of course, but it's just a little unnecessary work. I'm going to add a little bit of water here and Weeze out my blue. I haven't used this paint for a while. So say it's crumbling a little. Start with a small amount. Maybe this is even a little bit too much. So now I'm going to use my palette knife and give it a good mix. It kind of looks like my paper towel. This isn't the best vessel that I chose because my palette knife can't touch the bottom and ideally it should. I might grab a plastic knife, actually. So I think this might work better because it's very flexible. So this is not enough to paint this ground. I need more paint. So I will add more white and a little more blue. In place of these, you can use plastic containers. There is a kind of cat food that goes around plastic containers if you have cats. So, let's see. I think this is still not enough. I might also add a little bit of water. Okay, are you guys ready to rock 'n roll? So we are going to wet the paper now. My paint is ready. Hopefully it will be enough. I have a water bottle. You can spray the paper, or if you don't have a spray bottle, it's okay. We're just going to use this large brush, but I'm going to do it. It's essential to wet the paper so that gouache spreads really well. Here we go. Water needs to be clean, obviously, and we're going to put a thin layer of water. You might get some splatters here. It's okay. We will cover them as long as it's not a different color, right? Like yellow or something. So wet the paper in both directions. You can tilt it and look on the side whether you have made your paper wet all through. It shouldn't be soaking wet. It should just be moist. And now, quite quickly without going anywhere with the same brush, we are going to start painting. If you get a gig in construction business after thank me. I'm just kidding, of course. So it's not going to be perfect. Don't worry about it too much. When it dries, it will look better. It will look smooth. If your gouache is high quality, if the paper is the right kind, if your brush is fairly good brush, it'll be fine. So now I'm going to paint in the other direction like this. And see if I find some blue clumps, I mix them in. It's very satisfying, actually. But this has to be done in one go, you know? See how great and smooth it already looks. Yeah. Well, I actually had enough paint. I will do a couple more layers because I don't want to have any streaks in here. I'm doing my best. Sometimes there will be streaks. Not the end of the world, for sure, but if you can make it pretty, why not do it, right? Yeah, actually, I think I mixed up a little too much paint. I was panicking, but that's okay. I like to use this up, so I might paint another ground. And I'm just spreading the paint. I'm not adding anymore. There is enough already. See, the paper is warping slightly. That's why we taped it, and it's okay. When it dries, it will look good. It's important to relax your hand so you don't force it on the paper. Just nice and smooth. I think we're actually good. I will show you what it looks like when it's dry. See, everything is painted. There are no holes. Nice and smooth. It's very important to let it dry completely for at least an hour. If you can leave it even for longer, because once you start tampering with this, you know, you can mess up your edges, you can mess up your paint. So just go get a cup of coffee and let this dry. So I decided I had a little bit of leftover paint here, and I decided to use it up, you know, so I don't waste it. See, this is bristol paper as well, but I didn't tape it, and I didn't make it wet before I started painting. So see the difference. You can use this as well. It works, right? You can still paint on it, but it's not going to be as smooth and perfect as our taped paper. I also wanted to mention, you know, why paint grounds you might ask. I think it's a great starting point for your imagination. You know, white paper is scary sometimes. And when you already have this color gets you thinking, you know, what am I going to paint here? Maybe it's going to be cherry blossoms against the blue sky or maybe it's a coastal design, or maybe it's a baby boy design or something like that. But of course, normally you choose the color depending on, you know, your project. So when I start a project, I already think about what kind of palette I'm going to use, what kind of design, roughly, what is it for and so on and so forth. So this one is just a little extra. If you don't want to waste your materials, you can use leftover paint and digitally change it later on. You know, we can turn it into something vector if we're not happy with the texture. But actually, texture isn't necessarily bad. Sometimes you want to have a texture design. Sometimes you want to put something painterly behind another design. And I don't know if I mentioned it in this class already. It's good to have a library of textures. So something like this, you know, scan it in. Maybe you'll need a textured gold somewhere, something like this. Watercolor washes. These are ink washes, actually. So texture is not necessarily bad. Another thing to know is that wash reactivates with water. You see, this is already starting to dry, but say, I want to modify it a little bit. So I just dipped my brush into water. See, it does look lighter at first. And don't leave it like this, right? You will have two different colors. But if you start smoothing out the paint on the entire surface, it will be fine. My ground is now dry. Look at this beauty. The other one doesn't look so bad either. This needs to go underneath a pile of books to smooth it out for a couple hours. This one probably wouldn't hurt either, right? Let's peel the tape now. It's so satisfying. Let's see if all my tricks worked well and, you know, we're not going to pull any layers of paper. So you have to be gentle while doing this. Don't yank it. There's still a possibility to mess it up and see how I'm pulling it at this angle. Not like this kind of flat, close to the surface. If you see that you started to lift up paper on this end, you can leave it like this and just start on the other end. It might work better. Go slowly. Don't rush. Also, another option before I finish. So you don't necessarily need to take the tape off now because you already know what you are going to paint here and you are comfortable enough to draw and paint on top of this background. So you could finish painting your entire design, say it's a floral. So you would still be having it taped and you would just be painting there. And when you are completely finished, you then can take the tape off. But say you want to trace something, you know, using a light pad, and then you would need to take this off and then re tape it again. So let's continue peeling for now. See, now I'm done with this edge. It looks good so far. Nothing has lifted. It looks great. Now I'm going to go to the left upper corner and start peeling here because this is on top. Again, be careful. Don't rush it. See it even lifted something from my board. I think I painted over some kind of lint. That can happen. So far so good. This edge is looking great all the way as well. So now we can start peeling off the top. Pull it away. Be careful. See, I think we did good. Nothing has lifted. See, this layer is slightly lifted over here. There's a little bubble, but, you know, as long as it stays flat, I'm not concerned with it, unless we're going to re tape it again, you know, if we choose to paint. Looking good, looking good. And now we final side here. And I think everything looks great. See, look at this beautiful, smooth, made surface. The texture is barely noticeable. I think we did a great job, you guys. And I'll show you what we can do with this beautiful background. So here are some of my designs from college days, this collection was inspired by 18th century textiles. These are the hand painted guash, croque, and the fabric. This is hand block printed. This is digitally printed by spoonflower. So I just wanted to show you, you know, I was just mentioning that while painted background. Both of these have been pre painted in gouache. It's still taped to your board. I drew the motifs with a pencil. You can still see it somewhere. And then, you know, this was still taped, and I painted these motifs, and that's how you got this crisp edge as well. And then, you know, when I was completely done, I peeled the tape off. See, there's a little drop of water that got onto the dry gauche surface. This is what happens then. 15. Lesson 15 - Meet Watercolor!: Welcome to our final block of painting for textile and surface pattern design. Watercolor. I don't think I need to tell you that watercolor is a beloved classic. It has established itself as a perennial trend. It doesn't go anywhere. It is used across different categories, bedding, home decor, clothing, swimwear, sleepwear, and whatnot. It's very popular in baby products, including baby clothes, blankets, and so much more. Watercolor is revered for its breathiness, its airiness, its light hearted and beautiful feel. I work quite a lot with watercolor, and I'll show you some examples of my designs. This is a Christmas watercolor design. I probably doesn't scream Christmas that much, but these inset of flowers and the greenery kind of imply Christmas. There is a pillowcase printed on cotton canvas, and these are the original croque for this design, painted in watercolor. This is the original painting for this design called Flowers of June. Both of these coways are created digitally. This is what it looked like originally. I will show you how to do this eventually in one of my future classes, how to create digital colorways. Watercolor causes some distress among art lovers. It is considered to be more difficult than gouache or acrylic paint. I would agree with it, but it's not as hard as it seems, and I will do my best to share tips and tricks for using watercolor successfully. The most important thing to remember is that watercolor is all about Water, it cannot be used in the same manner as gouache, for example, where you load your brush with a lot of pigment. With watercolor, you have to make sure your water is always clean. You have to change it quite frequently. You have to particularly make sure your brushes are rinsed well. Watercolor is not very tolerant of muddiness. That's what robs watercolor of its beautiful airy feel. So we always want to be as clean as possible. And the art materials are a little bit more demanding. When I spoke about ink and gouache, I always said, we can use affordable brushes. We can use affordable so all the money that we have saved on ink and gouache supplies, we're going to spend on watercolor. And I would suggest that your watercolor brushes are separate from gouache and ink brushes. That's what I try to do. I have some brushes that I use with all my art materials, but they are very, very minimal. Let's talk a little bit about art supplies, the artist colors, and the brushes. And I spoke quite a bit about paper in one of the previous lessons, and then I will do a quick demonstration of what to expect from watercolor. 16. Lesson 16 - Watercolor Palettes and Brushes: Et's talk about palettes first. This one is my favorite palette. I already demonstrated. It was a part of this Shiminke watercolor set. It came with it. It's ceramic, and I do prefer ceramic for watercolor. You can use a tile, you know, from a home store if you're working with small brushes, small size of paper and everything. And for bigger projects, bigger brushes, you can use the plate. These are the watercolor brushes that I use the most. There is no need to buy them all, of course. I will try my best to explain what the minimum is, but brushes are really, really important for watercolors. So in terms of the shapes, it's the same as for using ink and gouache. So there will be round brushes, pointed and Filbert brushes, again, also kind of bland and oval and pointed. Different sizes, right? Also, Filbert brushes. This one is called Cat's tongue. It's a new introduction on the market, and these are script liners or detailing brushes. I also use square and angled brushes from time to time, but they are not my most commonly used, and I will show you in a couple minutes some other interesting shapes. Let me talk about these so back in the day when I learned to paint and I started learning to paint when I was 12 in Belarus, where I am from originally, we were told that only natural bristles work for watercolor. And that was true at the moment, but right now, things have changed, and there are some really great quality synthetic brushes that can also be used for watercolor. These guys, for example. Are all the same brand and kind. They are Princeton Neptune. It's a great series. It's a synthetic brush, but it works amazingly for watercolor. So these are sizes ten and 12. These are called quill brushes, and they are Da Vinci. Great quality brushes. They dig in a lot of water. So this is the name. I'm not going to read it in French. So these have strange sizing. So this is size three, size two, and size two slash zero. So for a very long time, I actually only had these brushes. I also have a are very good quality. They work amazingly for watercolors. See how big the brush is and it takes in a lot of water, which is very important for watercolor. Next, we have quite an affordable brand, which is called silver silver black velvet. This is size eight round brush, and also size four, and I have a bigger brush as well. So this is a great economical choice, too. I believe they are synthetic. They work great for watercolor. Tested and tried. Next we have Chinese calligraphy brushes. They are very interesting brushes. This is what they look like when they are dry. This one's wet, let me show you. They have a great tip. So they do take in a lot of water. We need to press them dry a little bit, and then you have this amazing pointed tip. They can be bought in sets on Amazon, you know, Chinese calligraphy brushes. I don't know what this says here. But these are also used in fine art painting. When I take watercolor painting workshops, we use these brushes as well. So these three are from the same set, and this guy is just dry as well. Next we have some round brushes, and this is not an official term. You know, I just call them blunt, but they do not have as pointed tip as the other ones. And like I mentioned before, it is handy to have both because sometimes you are painting, for example, daisy petals and you do not want them to be sharp. So this is Princeton art brush, round brush number ten. I believe this is a synthetic brush as well. And this guy is also a great, great synthetic brush, and I have them in multiple sizes. It's called White Sab by Robert Simmons, and this is a size 14. This is another one from the same series. It's a Filbert number one. Big brush, big next, we have a couple Filberts from Mimi Kalinsky Creative Mark Series. They are both Filberts number eight and number 18. But again, your choice of sizes and brushes will depend on the project on the size of paper you like to use, on the wells of the paint that you prefer. We have more neptunes Princeton Neptune. These are called overwash. I would call them pointed Filbert, so size 1 " and three quarters of an inch. Read brushes. Good stuff. These you might recognize from gouache or ink I showed them before. So these are one of the few brushes that I use across several art materials. Prinston select pointed Filbert, number six, Princeton Select oval mop one quarter of an inch. Different shapes, pointed and non pointed. This is an interesting guy called cats tongue by silver silk 88 number six, a very pointed Filbert, nice for painting flowers and things like that. These are script liners when you need thin lines. Normally, you can make thin lines with brushes like this, it has a pointed tip, you do not really need to have a specific brush for lines unless you are creating a very specific design with a lot of thin lines. This is also Princeton Neptune. They come in sets, so maybe some of these guys were together in a set. Number six, script, Princeton Neptune and a variety of different liners, creative mark number two and number four, script liners. A couple detailing brushes, which you don't need as much as you might think. Sometimes you need to add little dots on flowers or something like this. Is Coda reserva, these brushes are very expensive, so I do not have a lot of them. Then we have Princeton Long Round number two, which is a very affordable brush and Princeton art brush and co liner, and this is the size 20 to zero, whatever that means. So a couple other brushes. This one we were asked to buy in college when we were painting for textiles. It's Windsor Newton Scepter Gold two, number six. It was very hard to find for some reason. It's a nice brush. And this one is very affordable Grom Baker, number ten, Golden Age round. And as I promised a few more interesting shapes of a brush nerd, if you have a lot of extra cash and would like to splurge on brushes. So I do use these, but not as often as the other ones. This is the cat's tongue that I already showed. So some square and flat brushes, these are Princeton velvetuch, half an inch wash, and Snap is a very cheap brush from Michael's, I think, 1 " wash. As long as you have these soft bristles, they should work for watercolor. Angled brushes like this are very handy for painting color chips, stuff like this. Is a breeze painting with this brush, either of the two, you know, the square or the angle. Some people paint florals with them. I'm not a big fan, but give it a try. So this is angled shader by Princeton art brush, half an inch, angular shader, and another one, same thing. Are they the same? They don't look the same, right? Oh, this is heritage. Okay. This is heritage, and this is non heritage. See how different they are actually. Alright. This is a cool brush. It's called Dagger striper, and you can create long lines with it with this edge. And you can make interesting floral shapes as well. So it's a fun one to use. This one is by silver, Ruby satin three eighths of an inch. And this whole big bundle is triangular brushes. I have a little tutorial on my YouTube channel, how to use them. They are really interesting. See, they are shaped as a triangle, and they create interesting floral shapes. I will probably include examples over here. Again, choosing brushes, you do not have to buy every single one. I just wanted to give you some references, you know, some brands that are already proven winners. And as you start painting, you sort of decide, you know, what size range you need and what exactly you will be painting. The most versatile brushes are round brushes with a pointed tip, size ten or eight, something like this, and, you know, you will probably need a smaller brush. So I would say this is your starter pack, a number eight or ten round brush and a smaller probably number four brush. This is something to start with. 17. Lesson 17 - Watercolor paints: Water colo comes in tubes and pens, just like gouache. And again, it's a personal preference. It is a general opinion that it stores better in tubes, but it's not necessarily the case. I mean, anyway, you have to keep these closed when you are not using them to hide them from light and air. I personally prefer pens, to be honest with you because they are always ready to go. You just pull them out and start painting. With these guys, you have to squeeze them out on your palette. But again, you can make some custom palettes, too, so it's a choice. We'll show you some of my favorite watercolor brands. Again, you don't have to get them all. I will start with the most economical ones. I always like to get a bang for my back. So the first two are sort of brought to you by my roots. I'm half Russian and half Ukrainian, and I'm a Russian speaker, and I learned to paint using these back in the day. So the first brand is St. Petersburg, made in Russia. These are the ones that I used as a teenager to start painting. This is a very reputable factory that makes paints. So they're also called NevskaPatra, which means the palette of the Neva, which is the river, Neva, actually, in St. Petersburg. So these are great quality, and the ratio of quality to price is great. You might not find this particular set because I bought it about ten years ago, but they are available on Amazon in different configurations. They're also called White Knights sometimes. So NevskP white Knights St. Petersburg watercolors next one is a Ukrainian brand, which I discovered actually just last year, but they are very similar in quality to St. Petersburg. It's called Rosa Gallery, Rosa Watercolor. So here you have a palette, and you can use it to mix up your colors. It's a nice brand, as well. I like it. So these are very similar to me. The next brand that I really like and that is actually very affordable is called Prima Marketing or art philosophy. They go by two names. So it's Prima marketing here. These are interesting. They are not fine art paints. I would say they are more like designer watercolor, but they are actually good quality, too. So they do not work for fine art painting, painting landscapes, and things like that. They are great for design. They come pre created nice palettes like this. And I love these colors. Look at these yummy, yummy greens. And I do love a premixed color, especially for design. You know, I fine art, it's sort of frowned upon to use premixed colors, but in design, I say, go for it. Look at this gorgeous palette. Everything works together. Everything is beautiful here. The only disadvantage in my opinion is that they are very, very small. See how tiny they are. So that means you would have to use a small brush, and you cannot really paint giant watercolor floals with these. That would be a little bit challenging. But still, you know, I use them quite regularly. I like these colors, and I do recommend this brand. My next go to brand is Schmincke. It is very expensive watercolor, but this was sort of my gift to myself. I think for 35 years or something like that, and they come in smaller sizes as well. They are German watercolors, amazing quality, amazing segmentation, highly recommend. If you can't afford it, it's great. They come in tubes as well. Another nice brand is senilier which I use a little less frequently for some reason, but the quality is great. So these are the colors. It's like a little travel set with a small palette and a small brush. Daniel Smith is a great brand. They come in tubes and pens. They come with this pre printed sheet of colors, but I always suggest that you make your own something like this and keep it in your box for reference. And I see, I edded some colors, which were missing. I added a purple here and the paint's gray. I mostly use this for fine art painting, but they work for textiles as well. And these are, again, very small. So I do prefer larger pens. That's why I use this set. You can accommodate bigger brushes over here. But again, maybe you are not planning to paint giant floals, maybe this is just fine. I also want to show you this guy Durban is a British brand. They make great colored pencils. This is actually ink. Even though it looks watercolor. Ink tens is their ink brand. They make colored pencils with the same pigments, and they are very bright, super highly pigmented. So this is a fun option. I wouldn't say it's my go to, but sometimes, you know, when you are looking for something interesting and new. Also, a word on these Watercolor pens or water pens or whatever they are called. I'm not a big fan of them, so you're supposed to put in water in here, and then, you know, you just squeeze your brush slightly and get the color onto here and paint it. So I do find it a little bit challenging, but some people really enjoy using this tool. Another interesting brand that I wanted to show you is doctor F Martin's. Liquid watercolor. It's very popular in textile design. I see it on the Instagram pages of print studios all the time. They are very highly pigmented. They are already premixed and liquid. So they kind of resemble ink, but they are actually watercolors. And let me show you some artworks painted with this particular brand. They do separate, just like ink. So if you haven't used them for a while, you need to give them a good shake as well. So see here, the pigment is all over the place already. But they can be diluted with water because they are watercolors and they come in multiple sets, and of course, I bought them all. Color freak. Alright, let me show you the artwork. So these were painted with this Watercolor. Here, I use the triangular brush, and I just realized I forgot to mention the brand of these triangular brushes, so They're actually not that many. So Princeton makes triangular brushes. Silver was the original manufacturer of this sort of brush. So this is the original one, and they only used to come in two sizes, medium and large or small. I forgot this one. So these are the two original triangular brushes by silver. It's called triangle, so it's very easy to find. But then King art, this brand on Amazon, made a set with all these sizes. But this is more like extra. This is definitely not something you should rush. To buy, okay? I just wanted to show you all the different effects. So see how saturated these are compared to regular watercolors. They are almost neon, and it's great because when you scan them onto your computer, you get these bright vivid colors. So it's another interesting brand to look into. 18. Lesson 18 - Watercolor effects: timing, moisture, general tips: Let's lay with watercolors and see what we can do with them. And I'm going to use this watercolor paper again. It's by Artisa and it's the expert kind. They have several options over here if you pay attention to this word, and these are my magic numbers over here, right? I am standing right now. Usually, it's good advice to stand when you're painting large. If you're painting on a small size, you can sit as well. I'm going to use Rosa watercolor. This set has 28 colors. General notes on color and pigments. Remember to use this guy. He's your friend. Don't freak out about colors. The most important thing to remember is we almost never use colors straight out of the pen. You always need to mix them up a little bit with something because it looks very unnatural, artificial and cheap when you just take this colors straight out of the box. Also, a very common mistake is that beginners take too much pigment and let me show you. Normally, when someone starts learning watercolor, they get tortured with watercolor washes. Watercolor runs or whatever it's called in English, I'm going to wet my brush. A lot of the principles we studied in gouache still apply to painting in watercolor. But the most important thing about watercolor is controlling the amount of water. So at my brush, wipe it off, and it's important to have enough water over here. If this is too dry, it's not going to work. So you can just start playing even with water, relax your hand. It's very important to keep good posture and be relaxed. Otherwise, it's not going to work. Keeping our paper towel close at all times. So this is wet right now. What I could do is I start adding a little bit of colors here. See? What I'm doing here now is wet on wet. It is more difficult than painting wet on dry, which would be, you know, I'm adding a little bit of water to my palette. I'm adding some color over here. And I want to start painting this gradient. More color. So before you jump into painting your final project, play with your paper, brushes, colors, and things like that. So, a very common mistake is that I'm going to use a different color just for fun. See, I'm washing my brush very well. It's very, very important for watercolor. Even more important than with gauche. So people start doing this. They just take this very saturated color and start painting with it. They're afraid to add water to it. But that's what makes watercolor watercolor using enough water. Like, this is not really pretty, right? I'm trying to exaggerate it. I mean, of course, it can be a choice, if you want to use watercolor squash, who's going to stop you, but that's not quite okay. We like these variations of flow and water. So if I were to paint something like variation is always key to have a beautiful design, so you would have something more solid and something more transparent. And that would make your design more interesting. Let's test out our round brush Princeton number ten. I made it wet, and I want to use this turquoise color, so I'm looking at my chart. It's right over here. I will mix it on the palette, and some colors are more transparent, some are more dense, and you can see it by those little markings on your paint tubes or pens, I will tell you which one is transparent, which one is opaque. So see, this is too dense. Now I need a little water. So the round brush is the most universal one. You can make lines. You can make different shapes with it. It's very easy to paint leaves with a round brush, right? Basically two strokes. So it's good to practice. You know, take a sheet of paper and practice leaves, and we will be painting flower shapes, too, in one of the next lessons. So playing with brushes, experiment with pressure. I'm going to get some green just for fun. Can experiment with pressure again. Even just this could be a textile design, right? Like that. You can put it in repeat and it's going to be a beautiful all over geometric design. So we're playing with pressure, and we're always playing with angles. See, I ran out of paint, so I'm adding a little water, rinsing my brush, and I'm going to load my brush with green again and bring it back to my palette, mix it up. So when you're painting leaves, you can paint in this direction, right? Like that. Or you can do the opposite direction towards yourself, and it will look slightly different. And you can change your hand angle as well. And don't be afraid to let things touch one another. Because then watercolor will start flowing. I'm adding blue to my green. While this is still wet, I'm joining these. You usually need two hues to make a beautiful painting. You can also scratch with the back of your brush. I filmed quite a few small tutorials on my Instagram and Tik Tok, feel free to watch them if you want to repeat simple painting process and painting flowers there. So I just want to keep playing with the brushes. Always pay attention to the state of your paper. Is this still wet or is it damp? Is it dry? These I think are both dry. There's a little bit of dampness over here. I'm going to grab a different brush just for fun. It's my pointed filbert. I just want to paint something over here to use up my paper. I'll use purple. Purple goes with blue very easily. Colors that are close on the color wheel always look harmonious together. And another thing to pay attention to is if the color is warm or cool. You might not know all the pigment names yet, but it's good to know, you know, what a cobalt is, for example, ultramarine. But the most important characteristic is warm or cold because also there are so many brands and pigments these days. So what happens if I paint here? See, because this is wet, it starts flowing, and the mastery of watercolor consists of knowing how to control your waterflow in the artwork. So there's no harm in playing and experimenting with different techniques. Learn to make easy light lines because they look organic and nice. A pleasure to paint with pointed filbert is made for painting leaves and botanicals and flowers and things like that. Also vary the intensity of the same color. See, I didn't grab any more pigment. I just added more water over here and make it more transparent. And watercolor always looks best when you have a variety of transparencies, intensity. I ran out of pigment, see, this is not enough, so I add more pigment over here, but this is too dark, so I'm adding a little bit of water. And my brush stays wet at all times. It's not dripping wet, right? I think it's called thirsty thirsty brush. So I'm freestyling right now. I'm just painting leaves. This is very relaxing. And of course, you can use a pencil with watercolor. It is not super desirable because watercolor is so transparent and you will see your pencil lines. But it's okay. We will try both. We will paint something with pencil and without, right? So this is our pointed filbert, love, love working with pointed filberts. My brush is clean now, and I wipe it off and dab it on the paper towel and let it dry. I forgot to say something very important. I think I mentioned it in gouache. Don't be afraid to work with larger brushes. You do not need to paint everything with super tiny brushes. So size eight or ten is a good size. But again, depending on the size of the paper, size of the just try our script liner by creative mark and see what it does for us. I'm going to use my ultramarine blue, a beautiful, beautiful color because the script liner is so thin, it's a little challenging to load it. You need to rotate it at different angles to make sure it's covered in paint. And this is just made for painting. Thin lines, just like that. You don't really need to keep it, you know, because see, it's really not very good for anything else, just for painting thin lines. But sometimes you really need it, right? See, I got some splatter on my artwork, and sometimes it's an artistic choice, and you can do this. But this cannot be undone, so think well before doing this. See how beautiful it is here. So, watercolor offers a lot of unexpected interesting effects and possibilities if you know how to control it. And you will know how to control it, right? It's good to have a spray bottle, too, to have fun and, you know, spray on your artwork. The key to successfully doing this is waiting until this is not super wet because it will just blend in with wet artwork. So these are some of the interesting things we can do with watercolor. 19. Lesson 19 - Watercolor demo: floral lattice: We just had our freestyle session when we were playing with brushes, but now I want to do some small painting with a pre drawn sketch. So this is student grade watercolor paper. It is not very good quality. But because I'm making more, like, a sketch, I'm going to use it. So what do I want to paint? Let's see. What if we paint something like this floral geometric lattice? I'm going to use this beautiful Indian box with cards as a reference. I'm going to sketch it out with a pencil. The pencil shouldn't be too bold and too thick. It will be showing through watercolor. It's okay if it's showing a little. Sometimes it even adds interest to it. But still, we don't want to make two lines and make sure your eraser is good quality because you can ruin your paper. If paper is not quite good, the eraser is not quite good. This one is, I think it's paper made eraser. So always test, you know, how they say ironing clothes test in an inconspicuous place. The same applies to using an eraser. And I'm going to sit down because this is small and, you know, I'm not going to draw like this. So because this is geometric, we don't really need to repeat it many times. We have to decide, you know, let's look at this pattern. So we basically have this element that repeats, right? And then we have something inside. I will also try to change it up a little bit, right? I don't want to repeat it exactly. What if I do something like this? And I'm going small, so we will need to use smaller brushes. What if I experiment and you know, I'm changing up the shape. I don't want to draw exactly the same thing. And then we have these leaves going out of the flower. We have to pay attention to the curve, right? We have to decide whether we want them mirrored or not. And sometimes it's challenging, you know, doing it by hand. Trying to replicate this curve but reflect it, and I want to do, you know, slightly different leaf shape. Lucky procreate users, right? They can mirror it automatically. Well, but that's the beauty of hand painted artwork. We can mirror it in Photoshop again. So we already have our lattice. I don't know, maybe I should make them a little bit more organic like this, so they join easier. And then something should be inside over here. There's a little bouquet situation over here. It's going to be half dropped like this. There needs to be something. I'm going to fix my lines a little bit here. And don't rub this too much because it will smudge and it will ruin watercolor effect. But at the same time, don't freak out about being too perfect, okay? You're fine. I promise. So what should be here? Well, they have a little bouquet, maybe let's just kind of borrow their idea. Shouldn't be too big because it should fit within this lattice shape, right? Probably be about this size. What if we have maybe three flowers over here? Sort of like a little geometric number, and it's important to learn how to simplify things. Sometimes things look more complicated than they are. But I promise when this is all together, this is repeated, it will look interesting enough, and maybe we'll do two sets of leaves, something like this. I just wanted to show you how to sort of color this in color. And we could use multiple colors here. This is only three colors, right? It's blue, yellow and black, and it looks striking. It looks gorgeous. So I do not really need this line, so I can try to erase it, and there is some smudging going on. I will erase it, too. And so these elements are small, right? So I need a small brush. I'm going to use this silver brush number for black velvet round brush. I will start painting my you know, I have to decide which colors to use. So they have yellow and blue, and they are sort of, you know, opposites over here. So I could also use, you know, a warm and a cool color orange and green, maybe. Or I could do this all in one color. I think that would be probably good for us right now. We could have, like, accents, right? Let's make the flowers a warm color. Maybe pink. Okay? So I'm taking some red, which is called bright red. It's a little too electric for us. I'm going to dilute it with water a little bit, and maybe I'll even drop some brown into it to make it a little more earth tone. I'm using Sepia right now. Very carefully, with the tip of my brush, my pen is relaxed. I'm just coloring in inside. I'm not worried that it's imperfect. That's fine. It is hand painted, so I think we are right. Try not to be too sloppy, you know, make your edges clean. Ooh, that was an accident. Things can be fixed in Photoshop, but at the same time, we don't want to give ourselves more work than we should. And I want to make these flowers ink, as well, and I'll try to leave white centers. There is a hair on my brush. I want to take it off. I paint around the center, so I have a white dot. So we could use our pencil here as, you know, the line is black here, or we could even use a black pen later on and draw on top. You are the artist. You decide. So which color? I think I want to use, like an earthy green for these guys. And there is just a color in the palette it's called olive, so I'm going to use this color. A little bit more pigment. And, you know, I know I said, don't use them straight from the box, but this looks like a nice pre mixed color. I don't think it needs any changes, so I'm going to start painting now. So be careful not to smudge your painting with your hand. So here I'm mostly using a solid color. I'm still controlling how much water I have here. I might leave out some white veins for interest if I want to, and maybe I'll paint the center green over here. So while painting, I have to decide, do I want my colors to bleed or do I not want them to bleed? If I don't want them to bleed, I have to make sure they don't touch until at least one of them is dry. That was another accident happy accidents, right? Was it Bob Ross who said this? I have tiny Bob Ross figurine here that was actually gifted to my husband. You know who Bob Ross is, right? Bob's going to assist and inspire. So, see, we have some thin lines over here, and this brush is thin enough to paint them. So I painted it small. It's going to be a little bit challenging to clean it up in Photoshop. But seriously, there are only two elements, so we can survive. It's not bad. If I painted this entire sheet at this scale, it would be harder, but I think we can do this. And then, you know, we're pretty much done. Very simple, right? You could add darker areas if you would like. You could add, you know, a line. Could add more definition, if you want, make it a little more sophisticated and clean. I'm using the same color, but once I'm putting it as a second layer, it becomes darker. I still have enough water over here. I'm almost out of pigment, but I'm also almost done painting, so I think we're fine. Just make it a little bit cleaner, right? Or, like I said, we could use a black pen. And very often when I'm painting, I don't know right away if I will be using a line on top or not. Sometimes it looks really nice and clean and it doesn't need any definition. I always feel like putting a line is like cheating because it makes it better instantly. It's good to learn to paint well without using a then you can always add a line, right? It's always a choice. I think I want to refine my red flour, too, so I clean my brush really well, pad it on the paper towel, go back to my red. This has become too transparent, so I'm going to add a little bit red again and my sepia again. So this is a little bit darker, but that's fine because I do want to refine my lines a little bit. Simple patterns are very often super efficient and good looking. Not everything has to be complicated. Let something be easy in this life, right? Simple. And maybe a little more definition on these little guys. And see we are working with just one brush. We don't need to use a script or anything. A script liner is really when you have to have a thin and long line. If you just need a thin line, just the tip of your round brush is fine. The white center a little bit. I think it'll be pretty. What do you think? Maybe we could use a little filler dot around, you know, in the middle. I just got this idea, and I'll show you in a second. And maybe it could even be a third color, maybe, like, a more yellow orange. Something like this. And I could use the same brush or I could get, like, a stubby spot brush. And then we could move them. You know, I'm giving myself more work now. I hope you see what I mean. So this will be our element. Then it will be repeating into a lattice, and we will have flowers inside, and we will have this dot filler around. Yeah, see, the pointed tip is kind of in the way now, so I'm going to get a blunt brush. Use this baby Prinston velvet touch size zero, really small. Let's see how it works. Maybe it's even a little too small. I tilted a little bit, and this is just a filler, so don't freak out about it too much. Just dots, simply dots, but we are going to move them around, right? So what do you think, Bob? I think we're done here. And I will show you, you know, more complex projects in the next lesson. I just wanted to sort of give you a taste of how to use watercolor. 20. Lesson 20 - Watercolor Christmas design part 1: gathering referencing and pre-planning: Can you hear it? What is it? It's Christmas time. Creating Christmas designs is essential for surface pattern and textile design. There are so many different ways to portray Christmas and so many product categories that the artwork can be used on. And watercolor is also very well applicable to Christmas. We are also going to combine one more popular topic painting bird. Birds are an extremely popular motif. You can see it pretty much anywhere. I'm going to use this beautiful card for inspiration. And this is a set of postal stamps. Each one represents the state bird and plant. So, for example, I'm in Massachusetts, so for us, it's black capped chickadee. And mayflower, but we are going to be painting cardinals. These beautiful illustrations, and I will try to find the artist's name and include it somewhere are a great example of poses that we can use for textile design. Not all of them, but, you know, the most traditional poses are something like this. You can see some birds with wings spread. We are probably not going to use complicated poses like this. I totally understand why the artist would do this, you know, doing such a large illustration project, we want some variety and interest. But in textiles, you know, in fabrics, surface pattern designs, people normally react better to more traditional poses, you know, profile view and the view with spread wings, things like that. I'm also going to use this Brex catalog for inspiration. Beck is the company that sells Dutch bulbs. You know, Holland has famous for selling bulbs for centuries. And this is a gift catalog. And looking at catalogs like this is very helpful to see what kind of motifs are popular. So of course, it's a lot of flowers in here, the beautiful amaryllis that is actually now blooming in my studio. It's February now. So holly with redberries is a classic Christmas motif, and some botanicals and flowers have come to be very directly associated with Christmas. So you can see, you know, Santa Claus and elves and gingerbread, examples of, you know, Christmas motifs, snowflakes, fair Isle, sweaters. Pine cones and evergreens of all different kinds, furs, pines, junipers, and whatnot. Lots of redberries. This is a wonderful design. I think we're going to use it for inspiration as well. So we are going to be painting something like this, Branches with redberries and red cardinals. Here's another great example of a Christmas design. Wreaths, all sorts, right? This is a wonderful illustration for Christmas. Obviously snowmen of all kinds, Red Cardinals again. So in the United States, red Cardinals are birds that are very directly associated with Christmas. I am from Belarus originally. We do not have red Cardinals there, but instead, we have these beautiful birds that are called Eurasian bullfinch. They are also kind of associated. They're winter birds, you can see them in winter, so we are going to use those guys as well. So what I like this illustration for is the way the artist simplified the red cardinal. And another important point here, see how friendly this bird is. Red cardinals in nature, are known as angry bird, right? But in commercial design, we often make our characters friendlier than they are in real life, because we want people to have good emotions about buying products, with smiling birds or at least, neutral facial expressions, if we can say so. It's handy to have a book like this, you know, some kind of encyclopedia. So here you can see all sorts of flowers and animals and whatnot, rocks. So I found a cardinal for you guys. Here it is. So this is the way a cardinal looks like in real life. Very grumpy, right? So for design, we are going to make this guy a little friendlier. I know look at them. They're all grumpy, but for design, we are going to make them friendlier. And how are we going to do it by turning their smile upward a little bit. It's time to work with a sketchbook again. I want to have a rough plan of what I want my design to be like. I know I will definitely have a bird, you know, maybe one or a couple. I would have to decide, like, which direction I want them in, but you can always rotate them, flip them in Photoshop. So I want to have a bird that is seated on an on a bench on a branch, and I want to have, you know, I'll see maybe I have one profile bird and one bird that is sort of like this front facing. So and I will change his tail angle. So birds are usually the body, the head, the tail, and wings, the beak, of course. And sometimes you don't even see all of them. Sometimes you see the little legs, sometimes you don't should I say little feet. And I want to use a few different kinds of greenery. There will definitely be red berries. Maybe he will be seated on something like this, you know, something with red berries. And I could bet that I probably already painted this a few times. Of course, you know, this guy is not flying either, so he needs to be seated on something else. And I think I'm going to be using fur needles short like that. Pine needles probably with pine cones. They have long needles, and there will be a pine cone. Maybe this will be a pine branch. Holly is a signature Christmas plant like this. It's pretty much a must. It's very prickly. I work at a botanical garden part time, and trust me, it is very prickly. So this is not a final design. This is just my, you know, thought process, so I don't want the branches to overpower my birds. I could have, you know, a totally overlapping design, and I'm going to include a couple of pictures. You know, as I was researching this project, I found a beautiful hand painted design by Laura Ashley, which is a brand famous for their shabby chic aesthetic, which I really like. So many ways to go here, many things to do. So I want to have some pine needles, pine cones, redbrries, more redberries over here, and something over here. And remember, I was showing you this tin over here. Something like this, a camelas a beautiful flower, but not to every person, it will immediately ring a bell as a Christmas flower, right? Well this is really, really Christmasy over here. And I'm going to borrow, I think, some shapes from here. See? The beauty of this design is that there is a variety in leaf shapes, larger shapes, and smaller like this. There are white berries. There are red berries. There's this beautiful snow covered fir tree branch, really nice design, it's probably digital. So if you're interested in painting white berries, which obviously we can't paint white on white, right? There are three options. You would either use a premixed gray. Some palettes have a gray pigment, like this palette from art philosophy, or you could mix up your own gray, which would be if you mix primary colors, red, blue and yellow, you'll get a gray neutral hue and you can use it to indicate some shading, at least. Here, obviously, I use green. That's also an option. So see, there are some white flowers over here. And here I did mix up red, white, and blue to get. The third option would be to just sort of paint a white silhouette with a little bit of shading. And then on the computer, you would put a dark background behind the white berries, and another option would be to use white guash. But again, you won't see it against the white background, right? So in watercolor, we usually paint white objects by negative painting, which means painting around. You can see these flowers mostly because there are a lot of greens and reds around them and some slight indication of light blue, you can use blue as well instead of gray shading. Maybe I could borrow some ideas from here, too. I like the idea of having these large vignettes with, you know, leaves and red berries. I like the idea of having white berries, too. You can also have blue berries, you know, juniper berries are blue, so they are wintry berries over here. Oh, you know what I'm thinking? Bows are trending right now, so we could probably throw in a bow somewhere, maybe on like a wrench. So we would have to repeat it somewhere, I think. But we can do it digitally again. Now I have to decide what size I want to paint at and which brushes will serve me better, you know, to paint specifically, for example, pine cones. You can use a small pilbert brush. So painting those pine cone scales will be a joy using fiilbert brushes, not pointed, but blunt fil can be like a one stroke thing, two stroke thing leaf, and we will probably use maybe even some script liners for the needles over here. And I also have some motifs that I painted a couple of years ago, but I never put them on repeat. I will pull them up as references as well. We can use them, too. Some ideas of Christmas greenery. That's what I was talking about. I'll probably have something like this in my design. So pine cones with very simple brush strokes. Something like this is very easy to accomplish. So it's mostly, you know, if you want to paint botanicals, it's a good idea to learn to pay attention to shapes, you know, leaf shapes, flower shapes. How many petals? How are they located and things like that? More Christmas greens. These are all achieved by using different brushes. This was probably a small triangular brush that I tangle brush. I keep calling it triangular. It's a triangle. And, you know, this is just the tip of the round brush painting around the center, and this is the round brush probably like this. And these, you know, we will paint flowers like this in our following lessons where we paint loose watercolor floals. So in this lesson about the birds, I want you to paint with me in a traditional manner, which means, you know, we will make a pencil sketch and we will color it in slowly, you know, without stressing out. So see painted some birds previously. Very simple sketches. You know, these were done without pencil sketches, I believe, so I was just painting, you know, directly on paper. And you can do that. You know, it's a good exercise to sketch like this. But if you don't feel confident, that's totally okay, and we are going to sketch them out in pencil first. And even something as simple as this can make a good Christmas design, too. 21. Lesson 21 - Watercolor Christmas design part 2: painting main motifs - traditional method: So I'm going to start sketching my first bird on a branch, and I'm going to use the same Artisa paper that I used before, and I'm going to paint here. If you don't feel confident drawing directly, you can draw elements in your sketchbook and then transfer them using a light pad or transfer paper. That will definitely take longer. So I encourage you to try and draw directly on the paper. But remember, we're not going to press too much against the paper. I'm really looking at the silhouette of the bird, and it shouldn't be perfect by any means. Just a little plump body, and they have this little black area around their beak. And eye. And see in nature, you can't really see their eye, but we are going to exaggerate it a little bit. Like, see here, they added a white line around his pupil. We'll do something simple, you know, we shouldn't go too crazy. As it goes for eyes, noses and mouths, it's very often just a dot. We can give him a little smile by doing this, or we can just even leave it like this, you know, just a yellow triangle or an orange triangle. So and he's going to be sitting on a branch. You could indicate his little legs slightly. Well you don't have to. So I'm going for this, right? And he's going to have some red berries on the branch, probably something like this cluster of berries over here. And I don't even need to draw every single berry, just an indication of it. I don't even know if this plant actually exists. It doesn't matter, really. I hope no one's going to check. So I'm going to paint him, and then I will draw other elements. Because if I draw everything now, I will start smudging all over my paper, and we don't want that. I have to finish up his tail. Did you know that red cardinals are male and female cardinals are beige in color, like, sort of neural warm neutral gray. And what about his wing? So we will gently indicate his wing over here, and I will start painting now. I'm using my Sminka watercolors, and right now, I'm going to use these two brushes. So number four with a pointed tip and a filbert number eight. So his beak is yellow, and I want to start with it because once I start painting the black area, I don't want to contaminate my brushes with black, so I will do it a little later. A little orange. Be aware that this is going to be a color present in your design. So it's okay to have, you know, little beige here. They even made it red. I guess it's this color, too. So we need to remember that this is wet. So if I start painting my black, right now, they will bleed, and I don't want that. But I can start painting, you know, maybe the branch, the berries. I'll probably paint the branch now with brown. I want to make it a little bit darker, so I'll add some sepia to it. Remember about having enough water, very important. And remember to try to keep things transparent still, right? I'm painting with a tip of my brush now. So I think I can start painting his bright red body right now. So this red is a little bit too cool, so I'm going to add orange to it, and we get, you know, this more precise hue, I think. So we could even show some of his hair on top. I could play with the amount of water here, maybe make him a little bit more transparent in some areas because see, we have to show his wing somehow. Here, they use a slightly deeper red. The body is a little lighter. As I'm painting, I'm remembering about this because when this will get dry, you'll see the stark line and I don't want it. So let me finish his belly real quick, and I think I want to probably just make it lighter. So I will use more water with the same color. And if my brush is too wet, I pad it on a paper towel. It's a little bit too dark, so I want to add more color and blend it a little bit. And I'm going to paint his tail, too. So we don't want to use the same exact color everywhere. It's going to be boring. So I just added more orange over here. Let's look at his tail. This, again, doesn't have to be scientifically correct, just, you know, recognizable, so people can say, Oh, it's a Northern cardinal. I hope I don't hurt any ornithologist feelings. We can actually use the same yellow color as we used on the beak for his feet. And the cardinal is probably the hardest part of this design, so painting branches will be much easier. Maybe that's a little bit too electric so adds a little bit of this brown to it. But it just has to be an indication. It doesn't have to be super precise. So I'm going to add my leaves now. Oh, actually. I already washed my brush from red, but I could start painting the berries. But I think I will start with painting green leaves. I will use this beautiful color which is called permanent green olive. I could try, you know, a different direction towards the branch or away from the branch. And I want to use another shade of green, so I'm leaving some space. I will use this bright color called My green. It's important not to overdo. You know, this is already getting kind of heavy, so no more leaves here, and I will clean my brush very well, and I will try to use the same brush for berries. I will add more red, and painting it with filbert should be easy. Vary the amount of water for more interest, and I'm also going to use another shade of red, and I'll probably use a different brush. I'll go back to my pointed round brush because see, all these shapes kind of look the same. If I grab a different brush and a darker red, it'll be more interesting, I think. And we can let them bleed slightly. I think with berries, it's acceptable. You can even indicate some shine on the berries, right? Leave this white area over here. Watercolor is subtle. Very often, all you need is a spot, and you can tell it's a berry, right, but it's just a shape. I'm taking oil painting classes now, and the teacher always says, it's just shapes. You know, I say, Oh, painting cows and sheep is difficult. And he says, they're just shapes. Even portraits, you know, even painting faces is very difficult to me, but my teacher keeps repeating they're just shapes. So you could use this dark color maybe to bring in some texture to feathers, be careful not to smudge with your hand and always clean clean water. Of course, it's getting cloudy a little bit, but clean your brush on time. So I keep looking at my reference. We definitely simplified him quite a bit. So it's time to paint a black area where I will be super careful. I will load my brush with black. And I'm referring to my color chart which you cannot see, but it's here. So to see which color to grab, I look where they are situated. I'm loading my brush with black, and I need to be very precise here, so I'm sitting down, and I will start painting the eye and we can do what we did to the berries, you know, kind of similar and leave a little shine here. So this area is very easy to overdo, so you have to be careful here. And I'm painting around the eye, so we can see his eye. We don't want I know here you can't really see it. But in commercial design, things have to be very easily recognizable and comprehensible. I think he's cute. What do you think? So this is looking a little bit flat right now. I might add, you know, some veins on the leaves. I could, you know, add some detailing to his beak. You could outline the entire bird, if you would like with, you know, the tip of your brush and the red color. We could also show a little bit more detail on his little feet. I'm wondering what are birds limbs called? Are they called feet or paws or whatever they are. Okay, so we could add red to yellow, and then we'll get orange, and we could just have a couple lines over here. And we could give him a little smile. So it's not always appropriate to give a smile. You know, if it's like a sophisticated bedding design, you probably don't want any emotions on the birds. Ends. I think, you know, don't make them grumpy like this. I know it's unfair because that's how they are, and I actually like their character. And when I was in college, I painted a bird design with very grumpy birds I included here. But, you know, as I was working in corporate design, we were always told things have to be positive, things have to be uplifting. So, let's see. We could also add some branches over here. And even mixing it up with green, the same color, I'll indicate some lines on my leaves. Don't try to make every single spot perfect because it makes a design look constricted and forced, so it's okay to have slight imperfections here and there. I will probably add a little bit of outline to berries here and there, not every single berry, for sure, but a few, just so the eye distinguishes that it's a berry shape, not just a colorful mess. I don't know if this was a good decision, but now we kind of have to go with it. You know, an outline is not always necessary. You might think it is, but no, it's not. He does have some gray feathers, so we can pretend. What it is. When you have a clean line on the edge, it's easier to clean shapes in Photoshop, but don't let that restrict your creativity. Okay, maybe a little shadow on his tummy. I think we're good, right? So I'm going to let him dry, and I will move on to whatever next thing I have in mind, you know, it could be a branch or a bird. Let's see. So when watercolor dries and, you know, when guage dries, things usually change a little bit. Remember, I was going for two shades of green here, but so far, it's looking the same to me. So I want to reinforce this yellow green hue over here. And as it is completely dry, I can add another layer. Things will not bleed anymore. You will just have, you know, transparency. Oh, that was an accent. Yeah, that's I guess a scary thing about watercolor is that you can't fix a lot of things. So now I'm looking at this general shape and it's kind of clunky, so I want to make it a little bit longer. Yes, sometimes you unfortunately ruin things as you, you know, paint, but it's kind of fun to learn to fix them as well and see where the design leads you. So very often, you know, when I start painting, I don't know what it's going to look like. I have no idea. I think I will stop. I really don't want to overdo it. 22. Lesson 22 - Watercolor Christmas design part 3: Painting branches: Now, I want to paint this branch with pine cones and pine needles. And I know here I drew it in this direction, but here I actually want to flip it because I think it will look better. If I paint this branch parallel in the same manner, it will look too similar, but I will paint it in this direction like that. I'm going to paint a branch like this, but with the shape of pine cone. I hope this is not terribly wrong, but technically, you know, I'm a little bit of a nerd. Usually, I research, you know, if this is a pine tree, what does the pine cone look like? But I don't think that's what everybody should do. I think we can go easy on this. Even though recently, I saw some jokes about, you know, only red cardinals being on all designs means, you know, they're male cardinals. See, here we have all our conifers, and they are close to the beginning of the book because they're really ancient. So, yes, I guess having the sort of needles with the other pine cone. Oh, no, actually, we could do see Japanese umbrella pines, so this is what we're going to paint. So I will have, you know, this pine cone and I will have long needles in different directions. And we will erase the pencil later on. So it looks neat and nice. So something like this, it's a little empty here. Let's just start painting and see how it goes. We already have some brown on the palette, so we can continue using this paint. Very easy. Easy does it. But when we're looking at trees, it's helpful to pay attention, you know, the way the needles attach. Like, where do they start? Do they grow out of the branch itself, or are they on top of the branch like here? So it seems like they go in clusters, right? And I can start playing with my pinecone while I have brown on my brush, and we can use several shades of brown as well. You can use one shade if you want. I guess it's just my personal preference to use two shades of everything. I think variation just makes things look interesting. Also, you know, these scales are larger on top of the pine cone, and then they will getting smaller as we go down. It's okay to make some things touch. I always say that, you know, branches touch in nature all the time. And there will be beautiful watercolor bleeding. I think this says pine cone to me, right? I hope it does to you as well. Can add a little brunch. Maybe that wasn't even necessary. So if you want to remove something real quick, while it is still wet, wash your brush. Who is it dry and just lift your paint. This is called lifting and do it again. See. So warm colors are very difficult to lift because it has orange in it. You know, it's not lifting as well as it could. But I think you'll be fine. You know, when it dries, it'll be okay. So now I want to paint my needles, and now is the time to break out our script liner, this guy, the long thin brush, make it really wet through, and I want to have a dark green color. I'm still using the same permanent green olive. But again, it doesn't really matter which pigment it is, but I want to make it even darker, I'm going to add ultramarine blue to it. You can add a little bit of black to make colors darker, but it is considered that black dulls the color down. I would say, be careful with using black. You can also use sepia to make it darker or purple. I probably don't use all of them at the same time. Now let's paint our long thin needles. So when I painted this, I probably wasn't using a thin brush. That's why they look so chubby. This is not my favorite, but hopefully we can fix it on this one. Alternate the direction, you know, in and out, and I will probably also use another hue. So pine trees are very fuzzy, and some of the needles will overlap. Just make sure it doesn't look too messy, you know, and crowded. I'm running out of pigments, so I need more water and more pigment, again. As I'm painting, I'm looking at the general shape. Obviously, this is too bold now, there's not enough needles. So this is a big empty area. I have to decide what I want to do here. Maybe there will be another cluster over here, and maybe that's a good chance for me to use another shade of green. But the thing is pine needles are not really this color. A board mission, let's add blue to. I will add indigo, a very dark dark color, sort of black and blue. So my cluster will probably go this way. And remember, I mentioned one of the previous lessons. Don't let things touch with their points, right? So make this overlap, cross the other needle. Hey, I can rotate my paper because this is a little uncomfortable for me to paint at this angle, so I'm going to cheat and do this. I want to add a little branch as well. So, see, I got some splatter here. You can either try to lift it again with, you know, paper towel. I put it in water a little bit. But it's probably too late. It's okay. We can remove this in Photoshop. I'm running out of colour again, but I mixed up some more, and we'll actually probably cover this. Just don't want to bleed. Sometimes you want the bleeding and sometimes you don't you have to be in control, right? You have to decide what you want and where. So I added really a lot of indigo to my green color, so it's going to be darker now. So I'm coming back to my original shape. So you see, there is a big gap here. This is not cute. We need to fix it, so there'll probably be another cluster over here. And maybe even I'll probably just add a brown branch over here. I don't want to overcrowd it too much. And imagine there's, like, another branch behind the pine cone. Maybe a few needles. So I'm adding brown now to throw in a branch over here. My brush is too dry, so I'm adding water. So I don't quite like this gap over here. What could I do? I could add a little volume to my branch. Also cover up my unnecessary bleeding, right? Uh, just a little detailing. Not too much. I think it's fine. Maybe I'm just maybe, like, one needle over here. Just one transparent. That's the answer, too. I will add more water to my green, and I will add some transparent needles here and there. It's going to be a nightmare to clean it in Photoshop. Yeah, I didn't think of that. Let's be honest, but that's okay. We can do this, right? I'll show you how to do it. But this is going to be more challenging to clean than this, for example. Don't quite like how this looks over here. It looks strange, right? So maybe what I'll do is I'll add a little bit of color down here. Almost just water, a little bit of brown. So, you know, Is it better? And maybe a couple more needles? Yeah, I think that's a little more natural. Alright. As I was focused on my pine branch, I didn't notice that, you know, I painted it bigger than the bird itself. It's quite big. So when you're painting, it's a good idea to come back, you know, to look at all that you have on your sheet of paper and not just zoom in into one thing. But it's okay. Again, we can fix it in Photoshop. We can shrink it a little bit. And it's definitely better to have something big rather than too small. Now I want to paint a branch with a little red bow, so it's going to be over here. And I'm not super concerned about my pattern layout for now. I just want nicely painted motifs, and I can rearrange them in Photoshop. But at the same time, I do have it in the back of my mind. So I am thinking, you know, we have needles here. We will have needles over here. So a good balance. If you are thinking of the composition a little bit as you're painting, you are helping yourself later on. But again, you can, you know, take elements like this. You know, there's no composition here whatsoever, and you can rearrange them in Photoshop as well. So I will start with a bow because this is kind of the point. We already painted bows, right? And gosh, I forgot. So something simple. There will be a branch. Over here, maybe, like, a triple branch, something like that. Short and stubby. And I will continue painting with brown. And actually don't need this yellow color anymore, so I'm going to clean my palette so I have space for other colors that I might need. So I will start with my branch sort of to give myself visual direction. And you can have these cute little pine cones at the pine cones or fur cones or whatever they are, right? So I want to erase my bow a little bit, but I need to be careful not to smudge my brown paint. Could really just be a very simple bow. I don't have to show all the folds. Again, red and orange. You could probably have, you know, in some palettes, there is a really beautiful premixed red, which is kind of rare, something like this. This one is from another palette to a Christmas red. From Artisa I will make a very simple bowl a little more pigment. And I think it's okay to go a little dense here, a little more saturated, you know, but see this is transparent. We could show some dimension behind it, right? And maybe a little water. So we have some variety. I think that's good. And now I need something, you know, not as long as this. I could probably do this, but it's going to be too thin. So I want to use our long round Princeton brush number two. So we need another green, and, you know, painting a bunch of botanicals, you're often challenged with differentiating all the greens because we don't want everything to be one paint color. I already said that, right? So, so I just added olive green here. I can also add yellow ochre, which is an earthy yellow color. See it will make it a more natural organic green, and I will just go in and paint all the needles here. I think this is super fun. What do you think? See, it's getting a little repetitive, so I will leave some space, so I can add another hue and I have to decide what happens here, right? Do I have needles here? Maybe some? Oh, I got some brown in here, but it's actually okay. Just to make it a little more earth tone. So they all are about the same length. Now I'm going to add a little bit blue here. We have our hue variation over here. So as things dry, it's important to go in and evaluate and see, maybe something's got too pale and you need to add more darks here and there. Be watercolor is so transparent, we want to have some dimension to it. We don't want everything looking flat, right? That's why we are using several hues of green. That's why we are varying the amount of water Okay. I'm looking at the silhouette, you know, the lines. So this is looking a little strange. I think I need to fix this maybe even more. Needles like this, I think that's better, right? So the bow is now dry. I could go in and add a little shading to it if I want to. So it's not as flat. Maybe some shadow behind. What if now we do our centered number with berries in the middle? I hope it doesn't matter how many berries you're supposed to have here. And these pointy leaves, and I have to decide do I want to have one more petal? Maybe two. I think two will look a little more organic. And I also make sure I don't make them all the same exact weight. I think that's good. I'm going to use this pointed oval wash number two, masters touch brush, which is, you know, a small filbert to paint the berries. You can definitely paint the berries with, you know, a round brush or any brush whatsoever. I think it's just easier. This shape really helps with painting round objects. I'm using a deeper red, which is called Perlan maroon. I want my berries to shine a little bit. So the shine just has to kind of be on the same side because see if the light is coming this way. I mean, the berries are rotated, of course, but you'll have to remember where our light source is, and I'm adding a little bit of orange in order to give some interest to my berries, so I don't have just one hue for everything. I'm going to use this silver brush called cat's tongue, number six, but you can use any medium size pointed filbert for this, too. And you can also use around glossy, glossy dark leaves. So I'm using green that is called cobalt green dark. A little too much water. We could leave out some white areas. It will imply the gloss, you know, and shine. Time to switch up our hue a little bit. I'll add a little bit of this green, yellow sharp points. It's the essence of this plant, right? Holy. The ultimate Christmas plant, isn't it? Switching up the transparency a little bit, evaluate the general shape, you know, connect some things. This is maybe a little bit too fuzzy. I don't know if I want some green in the middle and maybe a slightly pointier tip over here. I think that's it. I would probably paint one more bird. You know, honestly, I would paint a few more elements, maybe, you know, holly branch like this and maybe another angle of this bird. But as an experiment, I will leave this as four motifs. I usually go with an odd number like five motifs, but I think I will give it a try and try to make a pattern out of four elements. Just always make sure you have a nice variety. If you have just one or two motifs, it might not be enough. It can work. Of course, you can flip and rotate this bird and you will have a pattern. But I think it will have way more interest if you have a variety of leaf shapes, a variety of branches, a couple of pine cones maybe. Another thing we could also do I think actually, I might paint a separate pine cone, you know, something small, because, you know, this is big, this is big, this is medium, medium, and we need something small. But what I often do is I pull something out in photoshop and, you know, make a little element, a filler. So I just painted a smaller pine cone branch, so we have a nice balance of sizes for our pattern. And we have five elements now and see, there is some repetition, berries, echo with a red bull, with a red bird, and, you know, we have a couple of pine cones. I also added some dark elements to my pine cone, but I might still play with this area in photo. Still not quite happy with it. Maybe what I will do, I will remove this leaky area in Photoshop and just grab a section of these needles and put them behind the pine cone, whatever cone. So as this is completely dry, I want to erase my pencil line because I don't think it adds any charm to this particular design. So I'm going to go over and erase it. And I might add some deeper areas because this has dried and become a little bit flat, which is natural for watercolor. So before doing this, you have to really make sure this is dry. So watercolor is a multi stage job. As you noticed, we have to wait until things are dry. We have to add more layers to it because it dries and becomes flat and light. So watercolor requires patience. So the line that is already covered with paint cannot be erased. That's okay. But, you know, wherever we do not need it and it's here on white paper, we will erase it. It will make the design look cleaner, nicer. There is a special brush to do this. This is mostly used, you know, when people are drawing with pencils. So it's a Davinci brush, but, again, you don't have to get it. You can always rely on your hand, right, and do this. But the reason we're using this brush is because we don't want to smudge our art. I want to add a little bit of depth here and maybe here too. So I'm mixing up my green and a little bit of indigo, really, really dark color. And maybe a couple dark spots on the pine cone, too. Pia and a little bit of black. Us a little bit. And just some definition, you know, because it will dry again, and it will go dark again. I think that's it. So here I put together another implied repeat for you guys. An implied repeat means that it looks like a repeat, but it is not an actual technical mathematical repeat. I included more information on this term in my introductory class. So see how reusing the same five motifs that we painted together, I created a pattern, basically. Of course, I made copies of them. First of all, you know, I scanned them. Them out in Photoshop, I deleted the background and all the little speckles and unnecessary pixels. And then I made copies of those layers, and I arranged my motifs in a harmonious way. So there are multiple ways to do it. And depending on the product in mind, you can have a different amount of white space. So this could be a tablecloth, for example, there is a term easy care, which means basically a plastic tablecloth, so I think this pattern could work really great if we space the motifs out a little bit more, we can get a bedsheet pattern. Another thing to consider is do we want the pattern to be two directional or four directional? And I also included in this in my introductory class. Another thing to think about is maybe using some kind of filler. So maybe some water platters, in the white spaces around the birds and branches, maybe some dots and maybe not. Again, it depends on the product that we are designing for. Another important thing is that you can actually sell designs like this. So it is not an actual repeat, but it does not necessarily need to so if you are selling, for example, as a studio, a print studio to large companies, you kind of are giving them an idea of what your pattern will look like, and they have people in house, designers who can put the pattern in repeat. This used to be my job at some point in my career. So even if you don't know how to make repeating patterns, yet you can already start creating commercial designs as an implied repeat like this. Hope it helps, see you in the next class. 23. Lesson 23 - Loose watercolor florals for fashion and more: In contrast to pre planned controlled painting that we did in the previous lessons, where we carefully painted every single motif in the traditional manner. Another option is to paint loose or free hand, usually without a pencil sketch. This is closer to fine art painting. It does take some prep and practice, but in the end, it's very liberating and even therapeutic. Both approaches are valuable and equally important. It's just two wonderful options that you can explore. It's not just the flowers that you can paint loosely. You can paint anything in this loose manner, right? It can be geometric shapes, medallions, paisles and whatnot. Also, it is not the only way to paint flowers, right? There are literally millions of ways to paint flowers. I just received a catalog today. There is a floral design on every other page. If not on every page, look at this beautiful loose floral, probably painted in gouache. There are, folk kind of florals. Flowers for embroidery, all these symmetrical compositions, this kind of Jacobean like florals. So flowers are extremely popular and probably a number one motif for fashion. And again, loose watercolur florals are just one option. You can always paint flowers in many different ways. 24. Lesson 24 - 8 keys to a successful loose watercolor floral: I would single out eight principles for a successful loose floral design. The first one would be knowing the properties of watercolor, controlling the flow, working wet on dry, and wet on wet and knowing what will happen. You know, for example, in order to get this flowy center, you have to paint the petals, and while they're still wet, you would be painting the middle in the brown, letting it bleed together and things. Second one is knowing brush shapes and what marks they make. And we had an extensive chapter or even a couple chapters on our brushes, brush shapes, and what they can do for us. And Brushes are a huge help in achieving the necessary shape. Number three is a very important principle of variety of petal shapes and flower shapes. And in order to study some flower shapes, it's helpful to look at flowers, helpful to look at books, go to botanical gardens, Lawrence shops, and so on. So Smithsonian Flora book going to help us get acquainted with flower shapes to see there are different leaf shape eaves are also a very important part of the design, not just the flowers. You can have only blooms if you want to, but usually some kind of leaves are present. And of course, all these marvelous flower shapes, I'm going to try to move the camera so you can see the variety. Some flower shapes are more common and expected in textile design, something like this. You can have blueblls as filler florals or as supplementary florals. You'll probably see less of these shapes or something like this. But it's also an option. This book also has some beautiful paintings. I like it because almost every chapter starts with examples of art, you know, floral art, and I'm greatly inspired by Chinese painting and things like this. And it also has to do with brush shapes. Absolutely gorgeous. Number four principle is still variety, right? Variety is the spice of life and variety is very often the answer to a successful design or painting. So the variety of flowers, sizes and angles. To study this principle, it's helpful to look at bouquets, flower arrangements, and florist books. So here are a few of my favorite books. I do buy a lot of books about flowers. You can borrow them from the library as well. So this is a whole series about different cities in bloom, and you can see, you know, different bouquets, flower shapes, colors, too, right? Color schemes. Oh, these are super inspiring. This little book, it's like an encyclopedia of flowers. And here you can see, you know, also flower arrangements. And this is also a great reference for palettes. These guys have written two books. They are very similar but different a little bit. And this one by em and Andrew Ingalls. You can see all the beautiful bouquets and interesting color combinations. But the next principle number five is knowing how to adapt them to textile design. Because, see, this is very asymmetrical. This is very boho and high end floristry. Textile design is a little more traditional. We usually don't have any crazy angles of flowers. And if you look really closely, you can see that in most textile designs, you see about the same flowers, right? You probably will not see something like this. It's an interesting flower, right, but we probably would not use it in a textile design. We would definitely use a fluffy dahia it would be a branch with some flowers and leaves, maybe some lemons, you know, seasonally appropriate fruit. This looks a little unexpected for textile design, right? So you probably would not use this flower in here. Ranunculus is very popular in textile design, but, you know, you might not even know the name. I think it's helpful to learn the names of the flowers. Gardener, I fully support you. Principle number six is using nice color combinations. Flowers shouldn't be too lifelike, right? Use beautiful palettes. But see, the greens are not so prominent in here. Green is only just one color of the whole spectrum. See, most of these designs use color palettes that are, you know, analogous. I mentioned this already. They will be just a small pop of complimentary color. And also the colors don't have to be lifelike. You know, your leaves don't even have to be green. They can be a neutral color. Don't forget about neutrals. Gray leaves or beige leaves look great or navy leaves, right? You can use your imagination here. The next principle is probably the most important. It's necessary to practice regularly and warm up before painting. It's not enough to only know the theory, right? Because you might know the theory, but if your hand and your brain are not used to painting this, it's not going to happen. And, you know, I wanted to show you this pile of paintings. So in order to get to this, which looks very easy, right, and minimalist, I had to paint a whole pile of stuff. Of course, it wasn't done in one day, right? But you usually start with studying a single flower, right, a chrysanthemum. These are my tiny tutorial paintings and, you know, simple compositions like this, getting to know your brushes, getting to know how the water flows. How can you paint a white flower, you know, using complimentary colors, small compositions. Wild flowers. And then, you know, you put it all together. So less successful florals. Roses me personally, I very difficult. Easy flowers like this. And remember, I spoke about the principles of variety. So you usually have, you know, some vocal flowers, right, your main flowers, and then some supporting flowers or fillers. Here I explored some navy leaves, simple flowers like that. This was practice, you know, I was practicing. But they can be put into repeat. This one I have already turned in repeat. I'll include it here. So I didn't mention there is also round paper. If you want to have some fun, you can paint on round paper. Here, I also used pencils on top of watercolor. So these are loose watercolor florals. And then in order to bring in some detail, I used watercolor pencils, which you can either leave as is, you know, because they're pretty thick, you have a nice bold line, or you can also smudge them gently with wet brush. So remember, I said we pretty much use the same shapes all the time, right? This large flower, anemone or whatever it is, the same shape with a little bit of variation in petal. Same flower, right? So here, it's a Christmas composition, right? We have the same flower, and we have some Christmas greenery, which is very easy to paint. Ranunculs painted with a tip of the brush or it could be a rose or whatever you want it to be. Some blue bells, right? Simple color palettes, nothing extraordinary. This is something easy to paint, as well. The same flower, right? Our daisy or whatever it is. What is it? Anemone, I guess, peonies or roses, and I will show you how to paint these these are some gouache flowers. So the last principle number eight, is that a lot of the principles apply to all wet media, watercolor gouache and ink. Of course, you're not going to have, you know, water color effects, your gouache paintings, something like this. But the use of the brushes, the brush shapes, the variety, it all applies the same way. And, you know, in order to paint something complex as this, we start with studying simple shapes. Simple shapes. Alright. We can do this. I also wanted to show you this highly embarrassing floral painting, and, you know, this is how I started at some point. What is wrong with it? It's very overworked. There are too many details here. There's a little bit of mud in here, right? This is what happens when you don't wash your brushes well. Well, it's busy, it's packed. The color is not particularly thrilling. It could also be used but I think, you know, something like this, you know, a loose watercolor floral is way more refreshing than a tight and forced flower painting. Also, there is not enough variety here, right? It's just the same exact flower all the time and the same exact green leaf. I think it's better to have at least three elements like these focal florals, this filler, blue branch, and leaf, and also this guy, right? Learn on my mistakes, okay? Don't do this. 25. Lesson 25 - Loose watercolor leaves: Are you ready to paint? So we will be painting different leaf shapes to warm up. And, you know, we'll be painting basic leaves like this. These look interesting too, things like that. I will be using round brushes, quill brushes, a dagger striper. You know, these are round brushes and a pointed filbert or cat's tongue. And you will see that you can very easily create interesting leaf shapes by using, you know, bigger sizes, smaller sizes, longer brushes, thinner brushes, thicker brushes, and so on and so forth. I will be using some student grade paper because we are just practicing. For now, we are warming up. I'll be using my St. Petersburg brushes. Apologies. They are written in Russian because it was a very long time ago, even before I became a designer. So I'll be using the greens. We just have to make sure we're not using them as electric as this. So in order to tone down the greens a little bit, you can use you can add some browns to them or you can add a little bit of yellow or a little bit of blue. Or we can have blue leaves as well or gray leaves. So paints gray is a very cool color that we can use from time to time. You know, it's not as dark as black. I will start with painting the most basic leaf shape. Even as simple as this, it already reads as a leaf, right? I like to paint two stroke leaves, or even if you press it against the paper like this. Oh, that was a little intense, right? So I like to do two stroke leaves and you can leave a little white line in the middle and experiment with direction, you know, down and up. You can make your leaf a little more fuzzy if you want. If you take the same simple leaf shape and connect it into a compound leaf, it will look very interesting, too. Working with the tip of the brush. Let's test out another brush. Number six round brush by creative Mark Mimi Kolinski. S, we are doing the same shapes, but because the brush is smaller, it looks a little bit different. You can do a single stroke leave C. This one is very pointy and thin and long. It creates a slightly different mark. Also, while the paper is still wet, you can scratch with the back of your brush, and it will create a line. Or you can come back later on when this is dry, making sure it's dry and add a thin line on top. So I would say, when you are adding lines, try to not do everything leaf the same way. So for example, here, we've added a line. Here, there is a white line already. Maybe let's do one more line, and this one I'm not going to touch because we are always looking for variety, variety of sizes, right? Bigger leaves, smaller leaf, variety of lines. Not all leaves are super successful here, but, you know, this is a nice one. These guys are nice, too, and keep these sheets that you paint, you know, as references. So if I want to paint small leaves like this, I will use a smaller round brush and just basically do the same. Now I'm going to use my dagger brush and explore what it can do for us. And I'm also going to use. I just want to use up this paper, and I'm going to add some yellow ochre or some kind of yellow to migraine to switch up the hue a little bit. So dagger brush can do different things. You can make interesting leaves with a too. You can draw with a very thin tip as well. You can explore different directions. Up and down, right, up and down. This looks nice. This one doesn't, right? So I would just suggest take every brush you have and play with it and see what marks it can give you. Dega brush can also go very wide, see? And we can create long leaves, too, if you want. It's always helpful to have some stems, you know, and long leaves. Just getting to know your brush and getting used to painting loosely and freely. And, of course, how can I not play with a cat's tongue or pointed filbert? I'm going to add some blue to my green. Very easy to paint leaves with it. See, I'm pushing away from the center. And you can create shapes that don't exist in nature. No one's going to punish you for it. Just make sure you're maintaining a good balance. It's okay to make some shapes touch as well. Don't be afraid, and I just added a little bit more blue. And I'm going to add a little bit more water to the same mix, so I have a slightly different shade and a very transparent cobalt blue. I think this brush is my favorite. So very often, I don't know exactly what I'm getting, you know, I have an idea, and I can look at my references, I can look at my botanical books, but there is a certain kind of magic in not knowing what exactly you are getting at the end of your painting. But, of course, you have to have some idea of what you're doing. What if I add another branch and say this is still wet, they're touching, and they are starting to bleed together, and I think it looks really great. So I'm adding ultramarine blue. And just whatever blue is next to it, you know, I don't get too caught up in pigment names. What I think the most important is, you know, whether it's cool, whether it's warm, whether it's a slightly different shade. Green consists of blue and yellow, and by adding more blue or more yellow or different kinds of yellow because, you know, there is a cool yellow, right, and a warm yellow, you can create interesting hues. So with a tip of the same brush, I'm going to load the brush with indigo paint, and I just want to create kind of like a filler floral filler leaf, actually. And it's just playing with your brushes, seeing what you actually like, teaching your hand to paint this and keeping these reference sheets, you can later on join them into interesting compositions. You can add some berries to it, if you'd like. Who's gonna stop us, right? Little dots. Things like that. Another thing I want to show is, you know, eucalyptus leaves are very popular in flower arrangements. So to paint those, it's very easy to do with a blunt Filbert brush. For instance, select Filbert number 12 or anything similar that does the job, and we will need another brush with a pointed tip, right, because this one painted like this. So I can use my number four round brush. We can reuse this blue color, even mix it with the indigo, it will add a little blackness to it, and I'm adding a little bit of paints gray. So this shape pretty much creates round leaves pretty easily. And I'm rotating the brush a little bit because, you know, in nature, not all flowers or leaves and leaves are facing us, right? We have some leaves that are turned. We have some leaves that are turned away from us. I think I want a darker stem, so a little bit of ultramarine here and never make the lines too straight because that's not how it is in nature. It's slightly curved. You can add some veins if you would like. But again, try not to overdo. Don't add them on every single leaf. Maybe skip a few. See, this doesn't look very nice, so I'm going to try to cover it up a little bit. That's okay. Even if things are a little imperfect, they still work, you know? And what I would do here, see, there's a green and a blue here. So in this guy, we can leave it like this, but I would probably mix up a very light green, very transparent green with a lot of water. And I would just add a few leaves in the back, just a couple, you know, so we have a little bit of variety. See, it's a little bit harder to paint round shapes with this brush. This brush was almost, you know, making it for you. This is very wet, so I'm going to scratch a little bit. But this can't be undone. Once you scratch it, you know, you kind of damage the surface. So you have to be very confident of what you're doing. Maybe just a few more round leaves. When you're painting for textiles, it's helpful to have single elements, too, so you can fill up the space better. Well, this looks a little bit like cherries, maybe another leaf behind it. They are bleeding slightly, and I think it looks good. We might want to wait till this is dry so we can as watercolor dries, it becomes lighter and sometimes it becomes too flat and pale, so we might add some dark lines when this is dry. 26. Lesson 26 - Anemone: You might be thinking, Enough leaves, darrha, give us flowers. Okay, let's paint our special Anemone flower, right? And you can have variation here by having five petals or six or even just four petals. It's still pretty much the same process. I'm going to wash my brush and clean my palette. It would be helpful to bring some clean water, as well. So the way this flower is painted will go. Boom, boom, boom. Towards the center. Boom, and boom. And then while this is still wet, we'll grab another dark color. Create lines like this and stuff will start bleeding here. And the brush we're going to use for it is a blond filbert. I think that's the best choice here because we want these to be blunt. But we will need a sharp brush for the center, round brush number six. I'm going to use the same filbert that I just used for leaves or we could take a bigger one, too. And let's take some turquoise color. Make sure you mix enough color because the petals are quite big. I just added a little bit of purple, so it looks slightly more natural. So when I slant my hand like this, This paper isn't very good. I don't know if you can see it, but I can definitely feel it. So while this is still wet, I'm going to take my pointy brush and load it with black just for fun and start making marks here gently touching the blue part. We could make another flower like this but add more water this time. So this is a little more transparent. And remember, don't paint every single flower at the same angle, right? See how this flower is facing this way. This flower is a little more straight, right? So I'm going to rotate it this time a little bit. I'm adding more water. I don't want my flowers to be exactly the same. I'll drop a little bit of purple too. So that the hue is a little different. And if you make these bottom petals a little bit smaller, it's going to appear as if the flour is turned towards us a little bit, which is good, too. I'll use the same pointed brush. But this time, I'll add a little purple to my black, the same process. We kind of, you know, we want a little bleeding, but we also want to have some sharp areas over here. We could add some leaves over here with our cat's tongue brush and green color. It's okay if colors mix up. They will look more harmonious if you are using the same so when we're adding leaves around flowers, it has to look organic, right? The leaves are growing from under the flowers, so you could have a stem, you know, if you want to have some vertical movement in your pattern, or I would probably do, you know, something like this coming from under. Touching, okay, too. Bleeding is pretty. And what a color. So see, this is getting a little stubby in short, so I'll add maybe another stem. So this way, the leaf is going downward, right? So I'll paint my leaves like this. And I will leave some space for another green color here because it's getting a little repetitive already. So I will throw in some yellow and add another leaf. Transparent yellow leaf over here, yellow green, maybe a little line here. So this isn't the pattern itself, right? But if I want to turn this into a pattern, I probably need a third flower because this is not enough just yet. So why don't we take the same brush? I'm not even going to grab the filbert brush and just paint another flower that is, you know, these are about the same size because I was using the same brush, and maybe we should make a slightly larger flower. And see, these are bigger. These are smaller. You could have, you know, full size petals as well, if you'd like. I'm grabbing my pointed brush, adding a little more black over here, and maybe I'll even use green this time. I'm still within the same palette. So it should work. And see, this is very dry now, and I could probably even add a little bit of dimension to it. Just a little bit, not much. Just a bit of depth. Alright? So we can already turn this into a repeating pattern, but there are probably not quite enough leaves. Maybe I will add a transparent one. Slightly smaller and maybe another loose leaf over here, so we can just use it later on in Photoshop. See, it's not hard at all, right? Do you agree? I hope you agree. It's surprisingly simple. It's just to know how to use it. Alright? And these are our anemones. If this dries, you know, if it's not good enough, we can add a little more depth to it. But see here on these guys, I didn't even add anything. I just left them airy like this. This looks like I used some kind of sharp brush, maybe even a triangle brush, with a very, very pointed tip. 27. Lesson 27 - Daisy: To paint this kind of flower, which is a daisy or a dahlia, the principle is the same. We'll be painting towards the center, and we are using long pointed round brush number ten, Princeton Neptune. Soak it very well in water and loaded with a color. I'm going to use a color called bordeaux. So we are going to paint towards the center. Sometimes you have this natural instinct to go away from the center, right? It's not a crime. Whatever does the job, so watch out. I made this a little too long. I think it's okay, but I need to be more careful next time. So fix the shape a little bit, and I'm going to use Amber, you know, dark brown to do the center. Here we go. We could do a black eyed Susan, right? The yellow flower with a black center. So let's mix up a nice sunny yellow color. Make sure we use enough water and maybe a little bit more orange, just a drop. You see, this bled really a lot. Which is okay, right? With watercolur, you have to learn to embrace what is happening. Again, I'm not planning a design right now. I'm just practicing my brushes and flower shape. So you basically have to pay attention to how many petals we have? How long are they? How are they located close to each other? You know, are they close? Are they not close? So here, I made some of them longer and some are shorter at the bottom, too. It's like the flower is rotated towards us. And here I'm going to use indigo, which is a bluish black. And I don't want it to bleed too much, so I won't go too close over here. I'll start the center first as this is drying a little bit. But then I will have to make them touch eventually. Just a little bit. I don't want it to bleed too much. Right? So it's a little flat right now. Maybe I'll wait until this is dry and add orange to my yellow and create some shadowing. So as this is dry, I will take a smaller brush and add orange to my yellow and just make a couple pedals. So don't forget that you can rotate your paper to be more comfortable to paint. I discovered this trick very late in life. Makes your life so much easier. I think it was one of the Skillshare classes I watched, actually, from Esther Peck, I guess. So here, it's very important to stay mindful because if you are thinking of something else, you'll just cover everything with orange, and we will lose our variety, right? We don't want to lose it with just a couple more lines. Easy does it very gently. Watercolor is gentle and airy, and we don't want to lose this feeling. I think this is a little bit intense. So I'm going to lift it a little bit. But now this is too straight, so I'll add a little more yellow in here. I think that's okay. We can stop here. So when choosing leaves for flowers, I usually, you know, Google. Like if this is what is it? Daisy or something, you know, black eyed Susan. They usually have leaves kind of like this. Of course, they don't have to be botanically precise, and mostly we are concerned with the aesthetics. You know, we want the leaves to look pretty, even if they're not accurate. But I think these flowers have, you know, leaves like this, like heart shaped leaves. You know, this brush is not very good. Job need something bigger, for sure. But sometimes when you are working with an improper brush, it kind of creates, you know, a new effect. Remember I said we use very conservative shapes. There's not as much variety as you might think. But I think these are still, you know, normal leaves. They don't look like out there too much. You can also pull paint down, see? So it's just important to have, you know, if you have several flowers in your design, it's important to have some leaf variety. So, you know, leaves are not all like this. And some leaves are rotated as well. Even some of the pink got into green, it's fine because they are, you know, complimentary colors, and it just creates, like, the shadow color for the green, which actually works for us. So see this completely dissolved in here, and we need to reinforce it a little bit. The brush is almost dry. It's like, very, very saturated right now. Just a little depth. I think that's it for this flower. There is a gazillion variations to this flower. It can be something like this. It can even be as small as this, and it's good to have some smaller fillers. Here's another one, right? Here is another one. It's all the same flower. Same flower. These are chrysanthemums. So you just make this a different color. You just make it smaller or larger, and you get a new flower, pretty much. So I was just painting off camera. I wanted to show that, you know, you make them smaller, pretty much the same shape. It's a different flower now, and it's good to paint in clusters like this, too. You can also duplicate them in Photoshop and have more flowers and rotate them slightly. This didn't turn out very well. See these are not very successful flower shapes. I mean, especially this one. This one could still work probably as, like, a little flower behind this one. So in this case, you know, when something doesn't look very good, you you know, you don't have to use it. When you scan it onto the computer, you can just, you know, forget about this guy. That's the beauty of having photoshop. Editing is a very important skill. It's not so much as, you know, nailing every single flower at one attempt. It's more of getting the right shapes, choosing the right shapes, and using the best ones in your design. 28. Lesson 28 - Peony: Uh, So maybe you are thinking, Enough daisies, darhaGive us peonies and all the beautiful fluffy flowers. Okay, here I come. So peonies are very fluffy, big, beautiful flowers. The problem with them is sometimes they can look shapeless, and we have to find some kind of shape to make them visually appealing. So the way we are going to do this, peony has this almost, like, a round shape. And then, you know, it's all like wrapped, wrapped petals over here. And then the petals start unraveling over here, going down. And it's helpful to have a bad, you know, like a peony bad. Their leaves are kind of like this. They can be like that, and of course, they can go in different directions, too. And the way we will be painting them is, you know, we paint this bow over here. Then using the tip of the brush, we kind of show some texture in here, and we paint these petals going down. Alright. This is kind of the same principle over here, see? And these are the flowers that we painted before, right? Same principle, towards the center. So I changed my water because we will be painting in pink, and I don't want green water to mess with it. I'm going to use the same brushes, the quill brush and the number six round with a pointed tip. So I want to make a pink color. I'll take some red with a lot of water and add some orange to it. Here we are. So I will start painting this ball, right, and kind of wrapping it up at the top. And now I'm ready to paint my petals below. So you have to be careful here. It's very easy to overdo. And now I'm going to grab my other brush and some green color maybe with a little bit of blue. I can start painting my stem. I don't want too much bleeding, so I won't go too close, and now my leaves. So you can look up, you know, on Google, like what peony leaves look like. I'm not sure. Buds can also be half open. I'm going to paint a green bud over here. And we can also do this. I'll let it dry because I don't want it to bleed, meanwhile, I'll paint another peony facing in a different direction. And to have some variation, I will add a little more orange to it and make it a little more saturated, and it will be facing in a different direction. And I'll make it a little smaller, too. You can add some dots in the center if you want, like here. And when this is dry, we can also add a little bit of shadowing here, like I did here. See, otherwise, it's just going to be a big blob, and we don't want that. We can even add a little while it's wet. Okay, so I think I can paint my half open flower now and go back to my greenery. I can have a few more leaves here. Beware of going too messy. You know, I know painting loose is nice, but sometimes it crosses the line and becomes way too messy. And I've gotten comments like this on my social media that it's too messy for their taste. Oh, well, this is a little too straight. I wish it was more like this. So let's let this dry and see how it looks. I think I'll probably add a few more lines over here. Maybe one more green bud, something a little lighter than this one. So my peonies are dry now. I think they're not bad at all. Maybe just a few lines over here to show shadow. Maybe I won't even touch this one. And maybe a few green lines here. I'm going to use my number six round brush, and we can make this color darker by using a warm brown and add a little more orange to it, too, or red. I'm looking here just a few more pointers, you know, just a little bit. Don't overdo it and maybe some dots as well. To kind of indicate the shape a little bit. So it doesn't look like a big blob. And we could add dots in a darker color, maybe, you know, umber, again, in brown. If we want, we could use yellow as well. I think I will use amber. Just a little dimension and depth. Maybe a couple of dots here. I know maybe this is not exactly what peonies look like. We have to make some kind of sense out of that giant fluffy shape. Alright, and maybe some greens. See, I just added my brown to the green and just a few lines. Maybe I want to make it a little more green still. I could also maybe add some lines over here. And we could darken this because it's in the shadow. It adds more volume. Ooh. That was intense, maybe just a little bit. Well, I don't want to turn them into poppies, right? We do need some shadows. I think we're good here. 29. Lesson 29 - Buttercup/Ranunculus: The next flower we will paint is ranunculus or a buttercup. It is made out of hundreds if not thousands of very thin layered petals. It's a beautiful flower, which can be a little tricky to paint, but I'll show you how to do this. So here are some buttercup references. We're just basically going to be using the tip of our run brush to paint the center, and we are going to hold the brush almost vertically all the time. Did we start painting with yellow or light green? And then we start bringing in the main color. And also, you know, this is our almost frontal look, and here the flowers are slightly tilted. So we do this by moving the center to the side or even down here, right? And then the lines will go around the center still. And the leaves an uncle has are kind of like this, almost like a brush, so they're not very welcome in textile design. So we would probably use some, you know, generic leaves with them. Alrighty. Let's get started. So I'm going to load my brush with yellow. Greenish yellow. The color has to be quite saturated because it's in the center, so we want to see it. And I'm going to paint with a tip of my brush, circular motions around the center, very gentle, and we don't need a lot. Now, using the same brush, we rinse it very well, and we load it with our main color, which, you know, we already started using red, so let's keep using it. And we want them to bleed a little bit, so I'll make them touch. Here I am varying the amount of pressure. You have to be very gentle here, and you stop right on time before you overdo it. Mine's looking a little bit force now because I'm not very comfortable. You know, standing, hanging above, trying to see what I'm painting. Well, it turned out pretty good, right? It worked. So let's paint this guy now. The principle is the same, but we're moving the center off, moving the center to the side, a little greenish yellow center, and we'll be facing this way. But, you know, a circle, when you turn the side turns into an oval ellipse. And maybe to have a little bit more variety, I'll add more fiery orange. See? Even here, like, this is transparent and this is dense. So there is always variety. So here we have to be careful with the angle. See? This is going to be small down here, and most of the bulk of the flower is at the top. The flower is rotated and facing the floor, I guess. Mostly working with a tip. All right. That's it. You can experiment with all the different colors. You know, they look beautiful when they are really soft and pink and blush. That wasn't the right color. I just want to use pink. So when you want to turn red into pink in watercolor, you just add more water, and this is a little too cool, so I'm dropping in a little orange again. And I have to go back to my center. I'll use a more golden green this time. Golden yellow. Something like this. And you can also make it smaller, see, like this. So let me use this color. I hope it's lighter. I want to have a pink one. So here you have to be really delicate so that you see these lines, you know, because it has so many petals. If you mix everything together, you will just have a pink blob like this. We don't want that. It's okay to have a little bleeding and mixing, but not entirely. You can make some petals larger, too, right? The way they unravel, kind of open up like this. All right. I don't want to turn it into a rose. That will be our next one. You know, they have a lot of similarities. So maybe some generic leaves with olive green. So this has dried on the palate, but I just added a little water to it. You know, this is the leaves that they have in nature, but they do make it look a little like Christmas. I'm going to leave it to you to decide which leaves you want to use. Maybe something generic like this. Alright. So I didn't do a little design here. So essentially, with the tip, you just start making these lines, thin lines around the center. That's what we do, right? Or if it's tilted, then your centers to the side, and you just kind of go around the center. And that's ranuncles. 30. Lesson 30 - Rose: The last flower I want to paint with you is the rose. So usually there are two angles that we paint the rose at. It's this, you know, fully open angle. Or this kind of to the side angle. This is the same as well, see? It's like the principle is the same. It's just those roses were so small. So I painted them as a cluster. They're called spray roses. And here are more, too. So here, you can see pretty well the shape of the rose, right? It's like a cylinder with petals going around it and the fully open rose is this big cloud of petals, kind of similar to peony in a way, kind of similar to ranunculus in the way the petals are swirling here, right? So our rose, you know, we start with a very similar center, like here. We basically usually paint a few petals, and then we kind of start going around like this. But this will be with a brush shape, so it's not exact. It's hard to replicate it with a pencil. I'll show you in a minute. Then the way it goes, see, the next petal goes kind of between the previous two. So it goes like this. They alternate. And it can be very sweet, you know, almost like for a baby girl rose, or it can be a little more, you know, flouffy and sophisticated like this. And this angle, you know, I said it's like a cylinder. So essentially, rose is shaped like this, and then the petals go around it, right? Basically, we're going to have, you know, let's draw this rose. So we will have some petals on the side. Then we will have an indication of this, you know, body of the rose, and then some petals wrapping around this body. And like I said, for me, personally, rose is one of the most difficult flowers. But we will make it work. They are very easy to paint and beautiful leaves, though. Usually like this. Alright. Are you ready? So it's better to have a brush that has some body to it. So this is too thin. We need this plumpness to create the paddles. So let's paint our roses. We're going to use a quill brush again or use a plump round brush with a pointed tip. Kia all our roses, even, you know, the smaller spray roses are here, too. I'm using my pink watercolor. It might be called oprah rose in some sets. This one isn't quite opera rose. Operos is super bright, almost like a neon pink. So there will be similarities to ranunculus. We start in the center. I'm going to paint this view now, and the center will be darker than the surrounding petals. We almost make a little triangle and then add a few more petals. And now I will start adding more water to my pink. And I will play with the pressure a little bit, sort of wrapping the petals around the center. You can add another shade if you'd like, you know, a little orange. But I think this is good enough already. And as for this guy, as for this angle, I usually start by painting the body of the rose, and then we have oval situation over here. And then you have some petals. Again, wrapping around the cylindric center. This can be painted in so many ways. It can be really, really simple, just like that, right? And you can change the angle slightly like we did here with this slanted guy, and let's add the greens, too. You can use the same brush or I'm going to take a smaller brush, this one. So roses very often have these pointy leaves over here. I don't remember what they're called sepals or something like that. I think they make the rose instantly recognizable. And again, you have to decide what happens here, how long of a stem you would like to include. I'm not going to make mine too long. And I will add a few very simple leaves. Here you can have stuff like this. A few half covered leaves, and we can have a full leaf over here so we can later on use it in Photoshop to it may be a little branch as well. All right. Oh, and you can always use buds, right? They always add interest do shapes, closed flowers. Alrighty. So it started bleeding over here. We can leave it like this, or you can lift it a little bit with paper towel. 31. Lesson 31 - Ways to approach loose florals: So here are all the flower shapes and leaves that we have painted. Take your time practicing these shapes. And as you see, varying the color slightly varying the size, varying the combination of these flowers, you can get an infinite number of floral compositions. There are different ways to approach painting flowers. It can start with a color palette. It can start with wanting to paint certain flowers. For example, this one, I painted in fall, and I really wanted to do a floral composition with mushrooms. And I added some fruit and berries here. This one started with a bouquet. It was actually a bouquet that I bought, so I painted those flowers together. And I meant this as a Christmas composition. There's so much red and green here and white as well. So these two were painted on the same day, and I didn't have any plan. I was just playing with my brushes and learning to paint the shape of the flower. I painted this first, and then I painted this almost immediately after. So it stems from the flower shape. And sometimes, you know, just playing with the brushes, just painting something for fun will bring you beautiful viable commercial designs. On the contrary, you can have a plan. Painting flowers, you almost have to adapt a mindset of a florist. As florists create interesting arrangements, they always think of what the focal point will be, and, you know, some flowers draw more attention than the others. So the same in textile design, these flowers are more prominent, right? And these are supporting players. And then these that we can call fillers are interesting and important, too, and beautiful leaves as well. Here as well, there's a lot going on here, but there are a few flowers that are actually located kind of diagonally. I work a lot on the diagonal, and this is not particularly a textile design, but it can be. I can put it in repeat, but a lot of the principles are the same for, you know, painting flower arrangements. And if you would like a separate class on painting floals, please drop a note. So here, again, some flowers are the biggest in scale, some are medium, some are very small, and this very often leads to a successful composition. Of course, you have options in terms of layout. Do you want to have fully all over pattern like this? Or do you want to have some space? Space is very important in textile designs. Do you want your flowers to touch and overlap or do you want them to kind of, hug each other in this way? Or, you know, when you are working with a large scale, you can bouquets or arrangements like this, and then small bouquets to fill in the space and even ditzy fillers like this. So these are not loose watercolor floals. I mean, these are, right? But these are more, you know, traditional pre planned. And I did a sketch in my sketchbook first, and I planned, you know, I wrote, I want to have a blush dahia here. I want to have a maroon, sunflower, blue anemones, a berry branch, and some tobacco colored leaves. Here's how I would plan what composition. If you already know your flower kinds, you can say, Oh, I want to have large rose here. This is an orchid. You know, I'll find this composition and show you how I painted it in the end. This was painted in gouache. And, of course, we did not cover every single flower in the world, right? But knowing the principles of using different brush shapes, you can paint all sorts of flowers. I believe in you. 32. Lesson 32 - Multi floral pattern painting: So now, using all the flowers that we learned to paint, let's create a multi floral composition. I think I want to have a couple roses. Then we're going to have, you know, these anemones. It's going to be like a mini bouquet, some leaves. So this will be my large scale, my medium scale flower, and maybe a couple uncle, and there will be some greenery over here and maybe just one peony. Maybe something like a fern leaf over here. Well, see, it doesn't have to be precise, right? But we'll let the brush guide us. Maybe we could have, you know, some side spray roses over here. Something like that. I very often decide on the color as I start painting. You can, of course, sit down. Sometimes, you know, I do think, okay, I want this to be blue and I want this to be pink and so on. Usually, I start with something that speaks to me, and then I sort of figure it out as I go. So I'm going to be painting on this watercolor block, and I just wanted to show you what a block is. So the paper is glued on all sides, and there is just a small area over here where you can detach the paper. So this is very convenient when you are using a lot of water. So it's not going to curl up. You know, as you're painting, you don't need to tape your paper, you don't need to use paper weights or anything like that. But when you're done painting when this is dry, you will need to take it off the block. And for this, you can use a palette knife. You would just put your knife in here and separate your sheet going around like this. Some paper manufacturers include this tool. I think it came with a round paper. You can use an exacto knife or this kind of knife, but please be careful because this is very sharp. So I think a palette knife works the best. I use this tool as well. My sketch is near me. I can't fit it in the frame, but maybe I'll include a photo somewhere or just keep in mind that I'm looking at my sketch because there is nothing here, right? You can jot it down with a pencil if you want to sort of help yourself, you know, guide across the paper. But I would suggest to gradually move away from sketching, you know, just kind go in. That's why we did our preliminary sketch, right? And that's why we practiced so long, and now I'm warmed up and ready to paint my flowers. So remember, we have two roses here, and this can change, you know, This is not like a final commitment. I decided that I want to paint a yellow rose. We haven't really painted any yellow flowers, and because this paper is bigger, 14 by 10 ", I'm using bigger brushes and a bigger palette. Still using the same watercolur though, and I need to mix up a little bit more paint, right? So I don't run out every 10 seconds. This is going to be my main color, and as for the centers, I will start with orange. See, this brush is so big, it took in all the water, all the paint, which is good. It's good for watercolor. Do you think I'm terrified? Because, yes, I am terrified. It's always scary every single time. And from the masters that I take workshops, they say the same thing. They are also terrified. So don't you worry, you're in good company. So it's very important to stop on time, right? And this is very high quality paper. So hopefully you'll see some difference. I can start doing the other rows now. This is very satisfying, though, you know? It is scary. I can mess it up, but then what? You know, I'm going to jail? I don't think so. Press, you know, against the paper and change the angle slightly. Add more water when you need to. I can use the same brush to paint leaves. And I'm looking at my sketch still just kind of to help myself out. I don't have to commit to it 100%, but I kind of already resolved some creative choices and decisions, so why not use your own sketch? So now it's time to paint my anemone flower over here. And I want it to be smaller than the roses, and I have to decide which color it's going to be. Maybe let's keep it blue just as we painted it, right? Maybe just a little bit lighter. I think we're going to end up with an Easter floral, which is not bad. Easter is coming soon. So now I'm using a combination of ultramarine and the color that is called bright blue in my palette. So now we are going to paint this flower. Do I want to have another anemone anywhere? Probably here? So I think I'll go with purple for the centers, and you don't have to change brushes all the time. You can keep using the same brush. I think it's just fun to change brushes. I'll add a little bit of black to my purple. So this is a little bit too much, so I'm going to lift it. And I can even add more blue if I want to. But try to minimize interfering with this, right? This is leaking too. It's okay. I think I remembered now that I wanted to have a peony here. That's right. So now I'm looking at, you know, what I have here, what is missing. So I think I do want to add a big fluffy peony. The composition's getting a little bit off, but it's okay because I will be changing it in Photoshop. So I want it to face this way, and I'm not comfortable painting in this direction, so I will turn it upside down. A lot of water because I want to have a light pink peony. Pink and a little orange to make it warmer. And I will start painting my center, painting around a little bit. And now the petals that are going down. I'm wearing the hue now, so I added more orange. I'm making sure the pale shapes are organic and not too forced, not overly sweet, you know, because we want to remain loose. I'm watching the scale, too. I want this flower to be the biggest one. Well, I think it's time for me to stop because I'm starting to lose the shape. So it's very important to stop on time. Alright. Maybe I'll add more as this dries up. And as I'm at my comfortable angle, I can add some peony leaves, and we already have this warm green in here, so I want to use a cool green. Not as bright, of course. I'm adding blue to it, and I think I'll use this color. It's turning out very springy, and I think it's fine by me. See, easy, easy leaves. Magic, right? This is because this paper is very high quality, and the brush is very high quality. Easy, effortless leaves. So let's turn it back upside down and see what is happening here. So we could definitely repeat these leaves somewhere, maybe here. It's okay that there is no peony here. It's fine. But I would probably, you know, use this pink color somewhere else, add like a half open peony or something like that. So now I need to think what's next. So we're missing some kind of small flowers, and I was also going to add these guys. Now, as there are more and more colors in this design, I have to be careful. I don't want it to look, you know, like a bright summer multi floral. I mean, you can. It's a choice. But I'm going for the Mother's Day spring vibe, Easter, something like this. So I want to make my ranunculus pink but deeper than this. Maybe I'll even use this color that keeps getting on my brush. It's a little too autumnal, I think, so I will brighten it up with orange. I think it should work? What do you think? Not too much. So these are not quite dry, so I have to be careful. And I'm painting this close. I want them to touch. I want this to look more natural and organic. They almost look like small roses, right? Who cares? And I'm following the principle of scale balance. So see, we have all these large flowers, and now we're adding smaller flowers. So what I didn't do here is I didn't do the ring center. Which is probably cute, so I'm going to do it. So I think this is enough. Things look good. And three, flowers particularly look good when you have an uneven number, not two. So as things are starting to dry, I can also add, you know, some dark areas on these flowers, possibly on roses. I actually like roses like this. I could add some depth to them, but I'm gonna wait for now. I don't want everything to look the same. I will add some lines over here. And while I have my pink on the palette, that's exactly what I will do. So we just have to make sure looks natural. So if you need to rotate your paper again, please do so. And I'll use indigo to add some stamens to my anemones, and I'll even add these, like, very precise shapes and dots. So when you have a balance of flowy shapes, watercolor washes and some sharp edges, it usually looks good because it's variety, again. So what else are we missing? I had some spray roses here on my sketch. I need to see whether I need them, actually. I think I have enough flowers. I would possibly add something even smaller than this, teeny tiny daisies or something like that. And maybe more greenery, more leaves. And we could probably use a neutral color because we have been using all the real colors so far. I'm going to use this small blunt Filbert brush to paint flowers like daisies. I have to decide which color they will be. Maybe I'll make them light blue so we don't go too crazy. So when using the same colors, you know, two blues, I have to make sure they're different enough. I don't want them to blend. So I will add a little bit of purple here. Maybe it'll be like lavender or periwinkle. I'm rotating my brush so I get interesting marks, and I also want to use a slightly different shade of blue here for variety. Variety is my favorite thing on Earth. We could add some centers to these small flowers if we want. We don't have to, right? But I would repeat these flowers somewhere else so I have more to work with. So I will add another section over here. Y. As I'm painting, I'm watching my general shape, how it's connecting to the rose, and the flowers are behind the rose, right? You could have a flower in front. That's possible too. Maybe just one more little flower somewhere. I'm looking over everything and thinking what is missing. I think we could have another pink flower, so I'm going to add it here. It is going to be a smaller peony and I'm going to cheat again and turn my paper around. I'm using a small filbert brush, Princeton number eight. Adding orange as I need and more water. So I want them to be similar but different enough. I think this is good. And we've used this green for peony leaves, so I will throw in a stem. Maybe I could have a little bud, too. So it's kind of empty here now, right? We could use a little leaf here as well. Nice tip. So I think here I want to add another one of those leaves. So I'm grabbing my quill again. And we could connect everything a little bit if we want to, right? We could have some stems. It's a bouquet, right? So things need to be connected. Anything else? Let's think. Maybe another one of those here. I think I'm going to stop now. So like I said before, you can wait till this is dry and maybe add some depth if you want on your flowers. But I am personally, as an artist, learning to stop one step short because I don't like overworking my designs. So I think I'm going to leave it like this. It is good enough. It has a nice balance of scale. You know, we have this giant flower medium, smaller, smaller and tiny. It has a good leaf balance, right? We have different colors. We have different transparency. We have different leaf shapes as well. Oh, we have to decide whether we want to add centers to these guys. Again, it's a choice. I think it will be pretty if we add, like, black dots in there, or we could leave it airy and breathy like this breathy or breezy. So as a designer, you constantly have to make these small choices. Let me think for a little bit. They will be easier to clean if they are connected because cleaning, you know, in Photoshop between these petals will be a bit of a nightmare. So I'm going to use a small round brush and just add black dots in the center. And I didn't mention that you can create flowers like delphinium. You know, if you paint these small and you put them on a branch and you paint like six, eight, ten of them, you can also create cluster flowers or whatever they are called. Oh, I forgot. I was going to paint some neutral leaves, right? I didn't do that. So just make sure your dots are also organic. They don't look, you know, too round. Dolphinium is one of my favorite flowers, if not the most favorite one. And I tried to plant it many times, particularly with the black centers. You know, that's how my friend's grandmother had it in her garden when I was a kid. But unfortunately, they don't survive in my garden. It's too hot. So all I have left to do is paint them, right? So I've added my dots. And I think I'm going to throw in a couple gray leaves, too. I think it'll make it more commercial, you know, more trend forward. So in order to get gray, I can take my black and water it down. I can add a little blue to it, but I think it's blue already. Maybe I didn't wash my brush very well, which I am guilty of, to be honest with you, I know I teach you not to use dirty brushes, but sometimes I do. I'm a rebel. Okay, so just some simple leaf shapes. My brush is very full of water. It's loaded very well. It's a pleasure to paint with good quality brushes and good quality paper. Again, try not to overwork it because as you start chatting and thinking of something else, you forget about your artwork, so make sure you are present. I made it more full than I expected. You know, I thought there would be more air, but you can always take stuff out, right? And remember I said, you never know exactly what the design is going to look like in the end. It's magic. The brushes take you on a journey. Watercolor takes you on a journey. I think we're done here. 33. Lesson 33 - Outro. What's next?: Mm hmm. I hope you enjoyed painting and trying out all the different art materials. Of course, these are not the only ways of creating motifs for surface pattern design. I'm also considering making a class about drawing for textile design. So leave a note if you are interested. Also, when practicing, you can repeat after me and also paint birds or Christmas designs. But of course, the class lessons are just examples and you can shuffle the topics and the techniques. So you can paint paisleys in gouache or paint loose free hand geometric designs and so on. You can and you should, I think. Now, what happens next after we've painted all these motifs and designs? Like I said before, we need a scanner to make a high quality scan and take our artwork to the computer where we will use software to clean up our artwork, make color saturation adjustments if needed, and put the designs in repeat eventually using Photoshop, Illustrator or other programs. This is something that I will tell you in the next classes. I shared information on the scanner I use in my introductory class. Some people also take photos instead of scanning artwork. It is not something I personally do, but it's also an option. Another helpful exercise for surface pattern designers is to observe patterns in retail and try to identify how they were created. You can go to your favorite stores online and in person. Department stores are a great place to start, as they offer a variety of different surfaces and products. In time, you will start noticing that some mediums are the most common, and there are some that we did not discuss in this class. Like block printing, for example. Also look at the social media of different print studios and see what materials they use to create artwork. Example, if you look at these two fabrics, see, this is most likely painted in ink. There are no watery washes whatsoever, but the shapes are fluid, see? So I'm guessing it was ink, very high pigmented, very solid, but still painterly and fluid. This could have been painted in ink, as well, or maybe, you know, some kind of paint, gouache or opaque watercolor. Definitely not transparent watercolor, right? The shirt that I'm wearing here, see, is clearly a watercolor design right here. Maybe even with a touch of pencils. Thank you so much for joining this class, and I hope you enjoyed it, and it was helpful. If so, please consider leaving a positive review so others can benefit from this class as well. In our final lesson, I will introduce your class project. 34. Lesson 34 - Class Project: I hope you enjoyed taking the class and had fun painting. Your project worksheet is attached in the class materials section. It is best to do the assignments after completing the lessons. For your class project, I suggest that you try at least two mediums with the same motif. You can use any reference sources that work for you. Take a photo of bouquets in a florist shop, for example, or use a coffee table book with flowers and create two designs, you know, paint flowers in gouache and in watercolor, for example. Which one or ones do you enjoy the most? If you put it in review, think about what kind of product can this pattern be used on. List three to five products. You can submit the photos or scans of your worksheets in the class project section if you would like to get feedback, have fun painting motifs, and don't forget to refer to class lessons if you need a refresher. I hope to see you in my next classes. While I'm working on them, check out my YouTube channel where I share lots of helpful and inspiring info for surface pattern designers and artists. Patterns are everywhere. Goodbye.