Painting Lifelike Watercolor Roses: Easy Techniques to Add Volume

1. What You'll Learn: If you've been wanting to level up your watercolor roses by adding volume to them, then you've found the right class. I am fond of painting roses loosely, but my old works look too flat. After lots of experiments and practice, I found a way to make my roses look three D without sacrificing the looseness and going to the fight of realism. And that's what I'll share in this class. Due to the complexity of the structure of petals, they can be a little bit intimidating to paint, but I'll break down the process in three simple steps. As a bonus, I will also share with you how I edit my reference photos to make them easier to use. So prepare your materials and let's get started. But 2. A Gift for You: I am fond of using a limited palette, so that's what we'll do in this class. I will demonstrate how I painted these roses using one, two, and three colors. Then you can follow along and paint or watch now and paint later. To help you decide in choosing your colors for a limited palette of two, I have created this pink and green e book, and you can get a free copy if you upload a class project and leave an honest review or by purchasing it from Superpeer with a minimal fee. Please find more information in the discussion stab. Now, please download the class guide if you haven't already, prepare your materials in art space, and let's get started in the next video. 3. Establishing the Form: Now, to make the first layer as simple as possible, I want you to think of a sphere when painting the rose. Let us establish the form by placing the shadows correctly, and the shadows are usually on the opposite side of the light source. So for example, this first rose, most of the shadows are at the bottom, so let us do that. I'll start with one color, permanent rose. Prepare two mixtures, a light one, and a darker one. Then draw an imperfect sphere. Start with the light color. As I reach the bottom, I'll load my brush with a more vibrant paint and complete this imperfect sphere. I can see some shadows here and some here. Let's do the same on the second brose. The shadows are again at the bottom. I will paint the upper part first with a lighter mixture and then load my brush with a darker one. Think of the silhouette of a rose when doing this. And for the third one, I will use three colors starting with yellow and pink. The shadows this time are mostly at the lower right, so I'll try and replicate that. I might need to retouch the second one since the light and dark parts aren't really separated. So there you go. This is how the first layer looks like. Now let's leave this to dry and work on the second one. 4. Abstract Shadow Shapes: But Now for the second layer, I want you to look at this edited version of the reference photo and focus on the abstract shadow shapes. If needed, you can also practice on a separate sheet of paper, and then once confident, do it on your painting. So to quickly show you how I did them, I'll prepare a stronger and thicker mixture of my color. This one is permanent rose, and then look at the shadow shape and try to replicate them. So I have this here. And I'll stop there. I only use the reference photo as my reference, and that's it. No need to feel constrained by it. So let's try recreating this shape on this one. Now, to add more complexity to our flour, let us kill those edges far from the center. So what I did is I rinsed my brush, remove the excess water, and just softened these edges. Now, let's go and do the same on the second rose. I used rose mother there. M Once again, soften those that are far from the center. This one looks like a tornado. So let's try and replicate that. Once again, soften some of the edges. Now let's wrap this up in the next video. 5. Lift, Darken, Glaze: Okay, for the last layer, we'll do three steps. Lift, darken, and glaze. Now, you'll notice that there are some petals that are lit, but we've covered them with a darker color. So what we'll do is we will lift those colors. To demonstrate quickly, here's my oval brush, rinse your brush, scrub, and dry it off. So by doing that, we are adding complexity to our painting. Let's try and lift some petal shapes over here. Looking at the reference photo, I can see that there is one over here. It's lit and one over here. You can also lift some parts here. And on this one, I can see one here, another one here. And on this rose, let's add a couple here and there. Now we darken. We have to make the center the darkest one because of the clumping of the petals. So for the permanent rose, I'll just dip my brush directly on the paint, add those dark parts. Don't go too far, focus on the center. Now for rose madder, let's add a bit of Hooker's green, and you'll get a darker version of that color. And same for the third rows. We'll mix hansa yellow, quin red, and a bit of sap green. For the final step, we glaze. Take your oval brush and practice how to paint these shapes. So we can add separation of the petals. For the first one, there is a dark part here. Make sure not to overdo this step, though. It's so addicting, I know, but make sure to stop yourself. Okay? On this part, I can see a really dark petal here. So let's reinforce that. So this also goes to show that loose doesn't mean fast. So take all the time that you'll need to practice your brush strokes, observing the abstract shapes, and putting it into the paper. And for the last one, this part should be darker. So there you have it. So 6. Claim Your Gift: I hope you enjoy the sweet but fun class and won't get disheartened if you didn't get it the first time you try it. Here are my earlier attempts, and you can really see that it took me some time before I get the result that I wanted. So get some brush mileage, learn from your experience, and share your work with us to inspire and motivate your fellow classmates. Then I will leave a feedback as soon as I can to complete the learning process. See on my other classes, and together, let's make this world a little bit more colorful with our artwork. 7. Bonus: Editing the Reference Photo: Right, I've shared with you earlier reference photos that I've edited so that it would be easier for me to show you how the shadow shapes look like. Here I have pasted the reference photo on Canva, and you can do it for free. The first thing that I'll do is I'll click on one of the photos, navigate over to edit, adjust, and then scroll down until you see saturation. To see the photo in black and white, all you need to do is drag this to the left until you get the value of negative 100. Now, if this isn't enough for you to see the shadow shapes at the center where the petals are clumping, then I have another reference photo here, click Edit, and then click on Filters and see all. You can try different filters here, but what I find to be very useful is this one, Capri see the difference before and after. Now, it really highlights where the shadows are and what shape those shadows take. Or you can also scroll down until you see X P plus. But I think this is only available on pro version of Canva. Anyways, this is how you can edit these photos. Now, if Canva is not for you, you can just type pasteurize photo and you'll see lots of websites here where you can posturize the photo for free. This is the first one in the results, so I'll use this one. Click hos File, upload your photo, posters level. Let's try four, which is what I use on my reference photo earlier and then press Okay. Now you can open the processed image and see if this will be good enough. Here, it's definitely clear where the shadows are and their shapes are. I hope you find this useful.