Painting Sunflowers in Watercolor

1. Introduction: Welcome to painting sunflowers in watercolor. In this class, we'll be painting some beautiful sunflowers in watercolor. Watercolor is the perfect medium that allows you to produce spontaneous and expressive paintings. On the go, we'll be using some special wet-on-wet techniques to slowly build details and softness. I'll go through my entire process in real time so that you understand my mental process as well as the exact colors and mixes that I'm using. It's easier than you think. So join me in this class. You'll see just how easy it is to paint some loose sunflowers in no time at all. 2. Materials Required: I want to talk a little bit about materials and we'll start firstly with the paints that you need. Now, I have a whole bunch of paints here, and a lot of these aren't required for this class. But I'll go through the ones that you will need or you need some variations of. The main one of course, is for the actual sunflower petals. Use a bright colored yellow, very saturated yellow, something like this here, which is basically Hansa Yellow, hansa yellow light. If you've got a permanent yellow, something that's even a cadmium yellow that does pretty well too. So something really nice and bright. In comparison, you've got these two yellows here, which more doubt and muted yellows like a yellow ocher. And the yellow ocher is actually pretty good as well. You can use that for some parts of the flowers that you want to just mute down a bit, you don't want them to be too vibrant. I actually tend to use a mixture of a more vibrant yellow, likely hansa yellow light or medium, along with the yellow ocher. And you get like a nice balance between them both. Apart from that, in terms of the other colors you use, I do use some brownie red colors. So over here I've got a bit of quinacridone, orange, and sometimes I mix that in with some of this color here, which is burnt sienna. I've got a little bit of raw sienna, burnt sienna, burnt umber as well as good, nice dark color that you can use and that's going to work well for the vase. For the background, I use a whole bunch of colors in here. So basically premixed purple also got some brown in here. I do use another color called GFAP, which is basically a granulating brown color for the leaves that do have a little bit of green and undersea green here, just a darker green even if fallow green, we'll do completely fine. Remember, you can mix up your purples and greens very easily. In order to mix purple, just mix a bit of ultramarine blue with a bit of permanent red. So usually a dark blue and a nice vibrant red works quite well. Now in terms of the brands, you can't really mix those up. So I tend to use the stuff straight from the tube. Now, I also have a couple of other paints in here. So this is neutral tint and over here it's a bit of lunar black, which is a granulating black. These colors are quite nice and they actually help to darken down any other colors are a little bit of darkness where you need, as you can see for the shadow, for the actual sunflowers seen on the right-hand side, we're really dark shadow. And when you've got a neutral trend like this or just a bit of black, it really helps to just darken that area down, get the maximum contrast available. But apart from that, that is really all that you need for this class. And they'll go straight through, talk a bit about brushes. So these are some brushes that I use. They are a combination of these mop brushes, watercolor brushes. They hold a lot of paint, as you can see, they have this kind of belly. I'm there like a belly, then holds paint and then you've got a nice sharp tip that helps you cut around shapes. I use this quite a bit. I also use some round brushes. This one is a number eight round brush, number six and number eight should be fine. And I also pick up this other brush here, which is basically a little flat brush, but it has a irregular edge cut on a, on an angle. So it's like an angled flat brush, I suppose. So these are the main brushes that you're going to need for this scene. And often people asked me how large that they have to be just depends on the bit of paper that you're using, which I'll start talking about now, the paper that I've got here is basically a little bit of cold press or medium textured watercolor paper. It's 100% cotton. I recommend that if you don't have that just makes sure that it has some texture on it. Cotton paper just tends to work a lot better in terms of application of different layers. It can handle the, the layering and a lot of water. So as I was saying before, in terms of the brushes, have a look at the bid of paper. You're using an A3 bit of paper here. So having some of these medium-sized brush is like this, work quite well because considering the shape of the petals, you can even just experiment and test on here. And you can see already that's about the size of the petals, so you don't have to be Something around with it. Maybe like a tiny little brush, something like this. And picking a brush that's too small and you're having to use too many brushstrokes. So that's essentially it in terms of miscellaneous materials, make sure that you have a cotton towel as well with you That helps to dry your brush. I tend to dry the brush down between washes and also to just to change colors. But yeah, in terms of making the brush dryer to get some dry brush effects as well, controlling the amount of water a separate town, or even a block of tissues or paper towels works well too. This is just a little container that I store water in. And that's it. 3. Preliminary Drawing: Okay, Today we are going to be doing this amazing sunflower still life. And it's a fairly simple still-life in terms of its early just flowers is a bit of the vase at the bottom. You've got a few stray flowers as well near the pot, but there's no oranges, apples, and stuff like that. I like that because we can focus mainly on the flowers and this amazing shadow pattern that we can see running to the right side of the pot. So let's go ahead and give this a go. And we've got the canvas, the, we've got the piece of paper here. And it sets in landscape. And one of the first things I wanna do is put out just a general indication here of the table. Okay, so we have a look at the tablecloth table. It's about a quarter to a third of the way from the bottom of the page. So again, just a simple line to indicate roughly where you want it to be. And what we can do is start putting in a little bit of that tablecloth pattern. I don't want to overdo it just a little bit of the white. As you can see there. I'm making it a squarish sort of shaving though it's not 100% squarish, but it is. There we go, Just a bit of that. I'm going to put in the pot. And the first thing we wanna do when we look at a pot is look at the general shape. And with this one, we've got a roundish shape and trying to get that. Having a look at how large we want this to be as well. We know that there's a flower, this flower just in the center, which is roughly around the same size as the vase at the bottom. So we want to make sure we have this flower in as well. We've put that in and just as a circle, just to start off with. And it's a bit tricky to see. Ok, and you can see just here I've made it roughly another circular shape, another one around here. Over here we've got a flower that's facing and always look at the simplified shapes that we can create from these flowers rather than looking at them just as flowers. Look at them as circular, oval. These shapes we can put in all the petals in that later, but roughly put in where they're facing. And you can see here that center part of the flower as well. I've just put it facing that left hand side there. Okay, as you can see, I've got little bits of petals and what have you just coming across like this. And we've got some just reaching out like that as well. So just putting a few in there. Not only that, but you've of course got this larger one, put that center part of the flower in. The vase is interesting. It's not so visible, but we can start just putting in a bit more, a little bit more detail on it. You can just put in the top of the vase kinda like that. The bottom part coming around like this. So remember this is, we're trying to get it in fairly loosely. Don't detail too much. But of course, the general shape of the vase that needs to be somewhat accurate. Okay. There is a handle here as well. We can see it just go up. Might have to zoom into the photo just to take a quick look at what's going on in here. It's quite difficult to see it really, but there is some kind of a handle here. And then it goes behind, like this, just behind that flower there. Okay. May or may not include it afterwards. But normally they do come up and then come back down along the edge there like that. Just put it in a quick indication like this. We see how we go later. Okay, let's start putting in some of the petals of these flowers. And I'm holding the pencil right at the edge, right at the end, so that I can just get more looser shapes in. You notice some of the petals and not quiet. So perfect. They curve around and then disappear off the back. That's, I think that's the point of some of these sunflower like scenes where all the petals are just going off on different tangents. The imperfection of everything just looks really interesting together. It looks more beautiful. I think when you have variations, rather than having everything all perfect, it looks more true to life this way. Okay. You can see the pedals just sort of come down almost beyond that vase. And this is interesting whether I want to put in. I'm not deciding whether I want to put in this hand or not, but I'll put in a little indication like that to start off, to start off with. You can see the shadows which costs directly underneath and to the right-hand side. So we've got a kind of a light source coming from the left. Okay, let's have a look. What else do we have in here? There's more flowers. I mean, there's one here right in the back. And of course, again, we just putting in some more petals and use your imagination as well. Don't feel like you have to make it look exactly like that reference. I'm using the reference of course, but I'm not getting bogged down with all the little petals and thinking I've got to make it look exactly as it appears. I think just having the flower's facing a few different directions. Okay, that makes it look quite interesting. We've got another one here, and we've got what? A giant one here. Get that in some way like this center part. Like that. These are this, the other petals from this other Sunflower. Okay. Just putting in a few more of those overlapping like that nicely. They're there. And then again here we've got these larger, larger one that just getting a few of these larger petals and holding that, holding that pencil like I was mentioning before, just on the end. It just allows you to create a bit more loose shape. I do just dark in the center of some of these sunflowers a bit, I want to add a bit more darkness to the center of them and let that kind of fade through the scene into the yellow. Just some more of these, not only that, but we've got some green leaves in here as well. Some little green leaves. I'll just add in a few indications like that. It's not a huge deal. It's a stem here and then we've got some like a flower here. You can't really see the top of it, but it's in there. That's one. We've got just some green leaves in there as well. A lot of the detail we can put in afterwards. But this stage is just a lot of planning and making sure that we've got enough space for all this, this flower here you can see it's just like coming off from this angle. And then we've got the pedals. So you can see just facing almost downwards like this. I like this one's quite nice. Bits. Those leaves and the stem peeled back here, another leaf there. And I'm looking at these leaves and really just making them quite abstract here. I think it's the pedals that matter most. Um, there's also another sunflower here. You can just see just behind there to the right side of the parts of vase. Another one here. Okay, let's put in another few petals here. This is gonna be good because you've got all this darkness here on the right-hand side. So now I can just start penciling in this tablecloth of little bits and interesting design, isn't it? I wonder if I can put in a bit of an extra design on there. Maybe like this. Experiment around something like this. Like a pattern maybe with a bit of blue in there. Thinking could be nice. Bottom of that vase that we've got a flower that's roughly around here. Just placed, again, putting in a few of these little petals. Like that. There is a few other petals, yellow petals just scattered along as well. Another flower that's here, more. I'm with it up. Suppose that bit of green stem and on it as well. But I like that they're these little petals that you can see them just fallen off and scattered around the place. I think that's quite nice. Having a few of those. You can see the tablecloth behind is actually you've got this white tablecloth, which I'm just simplifying down. But behind it this like a darker tablecloth that's a near like a greenish color. Suppose. Now the background is gonna be interesting. In the reference photo, you've got a lot of darkness here in a bit more light here. I want to play on that sort of that sort of color and tonal schemes so that we've got more lights on the left side indicating that light source and a bit more darkness on the right-hand side. We'll see how we go. I might change it up as we move along. That's it. That's the drawing. 4. Paint The Light: Time to get started with some of the petals. And I'm gonna be using a combination of a round brushes is a number six round brush. And I've also got a flat brush here, which is kind of a flat brush with an angled edge. Having a look at it under the camera, see just here on the left and normal flat brush will work fine. Just a little round brush. And what we're gonna be doing is we're gonna get in the yellow, all the yellow, the pedals, everything like that. I'm going to try and paint a lot of this wet into wet. The case is straight in there with some of these hands are yellow, Kanzi, yellow medium. It's a very, very light yellow as you can see, very vibrant yellow as well. We're going to need that for the sunflowers. And look at how I'm doing these petals. I'm starting in the center, like this. Starting in the center, and just working my way out to the edges. As you go to the edges, you pressing down harder near the center and then you lift off near the end. And that, as you can see, creates a little petal like effect. A bit of a tapering off at the edges, which is just what we want. I'm just changing up some of these as well to make them look like they're going off on some different angles. Okay. Few more here. I tend to start out in the center and work my way outwards, but I know you can start out here as well and just sort of work inwards. That's a bit more easier for you. Just feels more natural. Something like this. Remember to keep this very light. I'm using 90, 80 to 90% water in this mix here to keep things very, very light. Maybe go a little bit of that color. Where else do we have some more of these yellow petals? We've got some up the top here, for instance, it's putting in a bit of that color, going quiet, okay, at the moment, actually with this round brush, I sometimes like to use the flat edged brush because it gives me a bit of extra interests. Gives you just a little bit of different brushstroke in there so that it doesn't look all the same. It's just some little variation. I suppose this is a flower here. You can see it just like that facing towards the right. I'm just trying to get in all the yellow bits first. And I think if we can get in the yellow, That's going to make it a lot easier than to do everything else that the yellow is often a lot of colors and warmer colors like yellow, orange, I tend to get those in first. Because if you start using some greens or bit of blue after you find that it really starts to change the color of the yellow is you might start getting some green, some accidental greens. And we don't really don't want that. We want these to really appear quite vibrant. The center of this sunflower popped in a little bit of yellow ocher with the hansa, yellow. I'm just going to drop in a bit like that. Okay. Just remark that center portion. This one is well, I just want to put in a little bit of extra darkness in that part, center part of the flower. I also don't want it to mix too much with the with these, this flower on the right. So I'll let that dry for a second. And while that's happening, I'll just work a bit here on this other petal and look at that just trying to get in a few little sporadic, spontaneous brushstrokes. Lots of water in here. We're not trying to get details, we're just trying to get in the color and the general shape of the petals. Okay. A few more using that same technique like I was describing earlier, just starting out in the center, working my way outwards like that. Use another one. Yeah. More water. In this mix. Don't be afraid to use as much water as you need. And you're going to need to let this dry off a bit as well through the through the center. Later part of the demonstration. We've got enough time. A lot of this, funny enough, is going to be painted mostly wet into wet. Once you have all the petals. And the rest of it just becomes a cutting around game. So here we go. There's some more. Here's another one. Just now again, just trying to give a slight impression of these petals facing the left-hand side there. Okay. And there's a lot of green and things in here as well. I'm also extend that, that pedal a little bit like that. What have we gotten here? I've lifted larger space than I wanted, but perhaps I can put in another one here. Just a little indication of another flower facing to the left. Like that. That will just change it up. Touch here, just working around this one to get in this slightly darker center part of this flower here. Notice when I'm cutting around this one, I'm leaving some bits of white just to make sure that it doesn't flood completely. This yellow ocher, which is slightly darker, yellow, um, doesn't flood completely into the pedals. So much you can do though. Let's have a look. What else do we have? Of course, we've got this one here, nearly forgotten that one. Let's go ahead and start putting in a few little hurdles for this one as well. Maybe, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Here. See these little kind of wilted flower to the left, just a touch of color like that. I'm just picking up some little bits of petals and things that we can just pop in here. Like this. Can keep it, tried to keep it random. I've got too many just sort of clumped up in areas. Please. Even a few in here. Okay. Switch to this little flat brush now. I'm just having a look. What else can we do for these, some of these petals, I think looking pretty good. There are, however, a few smaller ones in here that I just want to indicate some quick color. Just some quick little color in there, like this. One. Some other petals coming through like that there. Now I do want to start putting in a little bit of darker yellow, which is really just a bit of yellow ocher mixed into the hands of yellow. And I'll try my best to just drip dropping a little bit. As you can see on the right-hand side of the petals, some of the petals near the center here as well. You notice just a bit of shadow and behind the other petals they just help to mark out the other ones. Touch and play it by ear here, just try to find the a little shadow or something like that in parts. Very subtle shadows. But they help to create a bit more dimensionality in the flowers so that they don't look like they're the same. The exact same color, tone. More so EBI and that's like a dark spot like that where I can I'll see if I can just get it to blend a bit into the, into the center of that flower. See that, that's just a little bit of blending there. Which is quite nice. Not only that, but the center of the flowers as well do have a bit of a darkness tool. So you can do this sort of thing here. This is just a bit of black that I've picked up off the pallet and just dropping a little bit there to help mark in the center part of some of these flowers like that. There's this one here that might have a little bit of darkness in the center. I just want to emphasize that. And notice how it's just all wet into wet painting and I'm just letting it seep into that spot. Okay. Another bit here. Like that. More yellow as well. Okay, maybe be here, here. Here. Let it do its thing. Okay. Where else could we potentially do it? Probably in here. But I do want to before I forget adding a little green, I'm going to pick up a bit of this color called undersea green. We can also just mix up something like a yellow and ultramarine blue to make ourselves a little more green here. Like this. And just putting in a little bit a color bit of that green. And the main point of what we're doing here is to get ourselves some of those indications of stems and leaves. Now I want to just be careful because I don't want it to be too dark as well. So make sure you dilute this mixed down so that you've got a lot of water in there. This is just meant to indicate some, the bottom part of the the flower that connects onto the stem like that. There we go. That's a bit of an indication. You've got some more here, e.g. that just picking out a shape or, or to a leaf like that. Here we know that there's some bits that just sort of join on to the flower like, like such. Just getting in a few little sharper bits and pieces. I use this green as well to cut around the flower to make it a bit more. You see this yellow flower here. I'm just using that to cut around it to bring out the details of it, of the pedals. There's another, could be another leaf here or something like that. Just again, using helping to cut around the shape of the flower, giving it some detail and sharpness and let it emerge in some areas. And another is I'll just let it, let a bit of white permeates or separated, separate to the flower. Let's have a look. Doing the same thing up here as well, just picking out another beat there, the B, another bidder is like the center part of that flower. That in some more yellow. If you feel like it's just a bit overpowering some of the green in there. I want the green to be more of an afterthought, not too prominent. Here's some more potentially little leaves and stuff. Maybe like a stem that comes up like this. They're cutting around these flowers as well. I think this flower ride in the front is like an important one to kidding, so prominent as you can see there. So I want to make sure that I've portrayed that one more. Obviously. The rest of it a bit more abstract up in there. Good bit more here. Again, this is all just with almost no paint in there. It's mostly just water. Very, very watery mix. You want to preserve that transparency of the watercolors. That's the only way to do it. And we also want to create extra contrast without darkness later. The vase actually has kind of like brownish tints further down, so I will add in a bit of brown. What have you. But before I do it yet again, I'm wanting to look through and find some potential shadows and things on the on the petals. Some softer shadows and what have you, if you think about it starting to dry and you want it to be a little bit more wet and wet. This is what I do. I just sort of spray the paper, a touch like that. That helps the some of this paint to come on a bit more bit more smoothly and melts in rather than, rather than a p is too sharp. A bit more. Looking at this, how symmetrical this says whether I want to just balance out this side with more flowers if there's lots on the left-hand side, That's another thing to keep in mind. Look at this one. Perhaps I can just indicate more of these petals and stuff like that. But that's something we can do later as well. I'm quite happy with how this is looking at the moment terms of the general details. Some more darkness in here. Let's get a bit of brown. A bit of this brown. I'm going to drop that in here near the top of the vase and we know the vase could it comes out like this. Maybe some burnt sienna would be nice in here too, just to give it more of a reddish feel to that, That's better, much better like that. I'm using a bit more darkness in this bottom part as well. Handle. The handle is quiet, dark again and I'm just going to blend that in with the vase again, it's probably not even going to be visible near the end. It seems easier to just even not to include it. There we go. Just a bit of this warmer color. I'm going to move down and just move at in a bit of this yellow ocher further down and a bit of this yellow, lighter yellow in here, just so that it blends nicely. I've just wet and wet effects Blending downwards like this. A bit more brown, dark brown that sort of cuts through there. Like that. Okay. Further down just to maybe light brown or something like that. Here. Oops, water in that shape of the vase. I'm just having a look at that to see how we're doing. Only that. But there's, I feel like we should, we should put in another few little petals here that just touch on to the vase. A bit. Shape of this obeys this. Be more brown or whatever at the bottom. Here we go. Basic shape for it, a little larger than in the reference. But it does the, does the trick. Just get this bit a little bit wider around the center. Okay, good. I think that looks pretty decent. Now, I want to put in a few little streaks of cerulean blue. This is something that's not present in the reference photo, but just a little bit here, like on the tablecloth running across the scene. Just a little experiment to create some coolness in the tablecloth. But I'm just skipping it over in areas like this as well, not making it too obvious. Very, very light. Wash, it's mostly just water. This one's a bit too dark, but mostly just water. Okay. Skipping over in parts as well. So not just drawing a flat, straight line with no broken edges and put a few little broken spots in there. Just realized, now forgotten to do the center part of this flower. Easily done, we can just drop in a bit of darkness to the right-hand side as we did. Not really that maybe he used well for this one. The smaller ones like that. Okay. Really at this stage, we are almost done with the lighter sections of this scene. Is just looking at putting in putting in some of the darkness next. But before I do that, I just like to fiddle around with the paints. As you can see here. I'm just dropping in some yellow and white to just hopefully you get it to merge and create some interesting patterns in here before we move on. Of course, having a look, what else do we have? Let's go ahead and work a little bit on this edge of the table cloth. I'm going to pick up some little bit of maybe just a cooler color that I have here on the palette. Same sort of color that they've used there, but it's like a, like a teal type of colors in it. It's almost teal, greenish blue color. Okay. Just to mark around the edges of this table. Okay. Most of it is just, as you can see. Most of it is just white. I'll pick up a bit of this greenish color. And as you can see, just dropping it in here. Being too careful with it as well. Just making sure that we've got a boundary between the white tablecloth and that table behind it. A little bit of that. There we go. I'm the front as well. Okay. 5. Paint The Shadows: Okay, so now time to work a bit on the background. And I'm gonna be using a small round brush as well as a basically a small mop brush. And then one of these brushes as well, which is again that angled flat brush. And I think I'm gonna be using a little bit of maybe brown and purples in this mix. So I've got a few different purples and you can mix up your purple as well from blue and red is mixing those together. But the reason why I'm using purple is because we've got this kind of obviously complimentary color scheme. We've got the yellow. And so if we put it in a bit of purple ish color or just the cool color in general, I think we can get a nice little effect. Here. I'm going to drop in a bit of purple up the top. It says it's using that small brush, small flat brush. And some of these parts may have already dried. I don't want it all to be completely dried, so I'm just going to spray off spray a tiny bit of water on there. I don't want it to run too much as well because these pedals should appear quite sharp against the background. But look at that. Just putting it in like that. I tend to do the petals. Cut around the petals with this smaller flat brush. Because the flat brushes has this sharp tip. And I find that I can get some more irregular, interesting looking shapes for the pedals when using it. But it's again a personal preference. Lot of water in here. A lot of water. But because this paint is naturally quite a dark color, the purple is quite a dark color. You've do find that even when you're mixing off a lot of water, it's significantly darker and that's what we want. We want it to be significantly darker so that it draws out the petals. Not only that, but we do have some darker bits inside these leaves as well, something like that. So I can just join a bit of that purple line in there as well. Okay, Good. I just cut around them leaves like that. More here. Here. This is gonna be quite a dark shadow at the base, so I wanna go slightly lighter here. So I can get much more of a contrast afterwards. Just literally slightly lighter section. Just a little purple ish mix. There we go. And you notice I'm leaving bits of whites on here as well. I'm in no hurry either. I'm just leaving a bit of this white on the page to create the little sparkles and interests, areas of interests. In that top section. Taking my time up here to just cut around these pedals and create some shapes. Sometimes I find the more fast and my brushstrokes in areas, the more accurate. It actually looks funny enough or just natural, I suppose it just rather than just too stuck on enforced. Okay. Once I've gone around and done that area, I find it's a lot easier now to just start working on these background areas and think about what other colors you want to put in there. E.g. I. Would like a bit of brown or some kind of light granulating brown color, which I've got some thought, which I can just add in there. Like a brownish color like that. Then back to the purple again, like this up in the edges. So that Around brown, this section further down like this. Blending this on with some light purple as well in here. More purple. These wet and wet effects just look beautiful. Really have to, I think for this type of scene, try to paint as much of it wet into wet as possible. Of course, these pedals are not going to look much like petals unless we create a bit of sharpness in there. For the rest of it. We have a lot of freedom to just add in whatever colors we want. Them blend together. Moving a bit over to the left-hand side now I'm just going to be picking up some more purple and repeating the same steps as we did in used on the right-hand side. Just a few more bits in pieces here to mark off the pedals and what have you. The other one there. Moving downwards, making here. When this flower here, I really want to make sure I've got enough detail in this, these pedals to suggest cutting around them a bit more gently. There we have it. And I'm also trying possible to create a bit more lighter background as well. More of a lighter purple. Because we've got the light source coming from the left-hand side. Soften off that edge of the pot. Look at that. And then it's all starting to come together. Once we've got that background in, notice, suddenly things are beginning to take hold. Mola, Ram brush to finish off this background. Bit of purple in here, maybe a bit of brown, That's something I've changed them here. I've I've not putting too much of that green, but I do have some greenish economic greenish brown color can work nicely. Essentially, you just don't want too much, too many colors. Otherwise, it's going to upset the harmony of what's going on. So when you're using colors, you want to make sure that those colors are also present in the subject, the central subject. So the green, I'm using a bit of brown, which is in the pot. More purple, darkness up the top there. That you could even put it in a bit of yellow ochre up there if you want something like that. Next to that purple. Okay. The backgrounds are great for just the abstract, abstract work. Only to think too much about it. Okay? We're good. The tablecloth is actually darker. I reckon. I'll just change it up to put in a bit of blue and not blue, but purple and green mixed together. Just to darken this off. And hopefully get it to melt into the background, to just don't want it to be to shop. There maybe a bit here at the base, the bottom here as well. I think that's drawn off nicely anywhere near the bottom, so I need to worry about that here. Okay. Right now, there are tiny little patterns on the tablecloth. While I let the background dry attach how just work into these areas? A little. Maybe just, this is just a little bit of black that I found on the palette. And I'm just going to drop in a few little indications of this tablecloth like the pattern of it, I suppose. Okay. Not too obvious, but just a few little bits and pieces in here. Okay. Look at these flowers and think to myself, there's any other details I'm not want to potentially add in here because it's a good time to start doing all this. Now if you go to another bit, little bits and pieces you want to potentially add on here or just e.g. what I'm doing here just indicating maybe some of the petals, a bit more details of the petals with a bit of neutral tint or a darker color just dropped in here. And they show the separation of the a separation of the petals. Again, I don't want to overdo it. But a little bit of this will be nice. Sharpness off in the background. Dark, little bits of dark as you can see in the background there. I actually, I'm really, really dark contrasts, e.g. here there's quite a dark contrast behind that flower and separating out these leaves in here. So there is certainly some of these going on and you're just trying to pick them out. A little bit of that petal, you could draw that one out of touch. Doing it in areas. This one here, there could be a little shadow running to the, which they re, is really like a little shadow running behind this flower. Being cast on that flower to the right. Something like that. Amazed at how it does make a difference to your final scene. Putting together and making sense of some of this chaos. Center of that flower again. Or you can just again, just go over that center part edge of this flower. There's like a bit of this that we could do too much, but drawing out that pedal and touch. Again. Just like this, adds a bit of texture to the center of this flower as well. Texture. More shadows and stuff on the right side of those pedals. And keep in mind that we will still, if you need, go back into it afterwards with a bit of whitewash to bring out final highlights and things. But, um, I tried to do most of this in watercolor, just cutting around, if possible, it tends to look a lot more natural and reuse the gouache is more of a backup and finishing rather than using it to paint primarily because after all, we are doing a transparent watercolor. We want that transparency to show through. So I'm just going through and looking at bits and pieces. Now, this, all these little bits of work that I'm doing here, It's essentially just giving me a bit of time to work out what I wanna do with this large shadow here. And the shadow for these flowers, a bit more of the detailing there as well. So take your time with this. I'd like to paint when the paper is also a little damp on the edges of what I want to paint because it creates just more of an organic flow. The bottom of this vase, I thought at one or just added a bit extra darkness. Again, there's this handle there, but I decided not really to emphasize it too much. What else do we have here as well? Here's another example where we, we've got bits of darkness inside the flower like here. We can just play around with adding a bit of darkness like that. I'm cutting around some of this green to that could be a leaf or something. That could be a leaf here. Stuff in the background is still drying off. But play around with that and darken off in areas as well. Can also just add an extra darkness if you'd like. And some of these spots. The great thing about when you're working with paper that is made of 100% cottons, that it's just so easy to work back into the previous area. The paper takes a lot longer to dry. And even when it is completely dried, you can still go back into it and create some extra details. Here. I'm just putting up, putting in a bit more purple up in this section. Just an interesting little bit of color like that. Again, this is all kind of abstract. You just, in a sense, playing it by playing it by ear. And thinking to yourself, well, do I want to make that a bit darker? Don't want to make it lighter. Do I want all this section to be really light? Perhaps I can put in an extra bit of darkness here like that. Help join it on a bit. Just thinking because we've got this big dark shape to that right-hand side. Perhaps a little bit of it flowing downwards here could be. Make it a bit more natural looking. Another thing you can, you can do. You can even put in a touch of the cerulean blue in here. Why not a little bit of cerulean blue? Because we have a little bit down there. Touch that cerulean. Love granulating colors. Cerulean being one of the main granulating colors that I use. Most of the colors in here like the brands, even the purple with a granulate, fairly well. More brown? Yeah. Okay. If it's too much, grab a tissue and dab off an area. Just having a look at what else needs to be done here. I think we are good to go for the shadows. I will start with the shadow on the right-hand side first. I think that's going to be easier because I'm expecting some of it to blend into the background. Some using some black and a bit of purple mixed together. Get a really, really dark color. It's really a dark purple. Let's start off here. We can see that shadow just sort of form. Bit off the wall like that, right? That their be afraid to go darker with the shadow. That we've done part of it already in a lighter color. More of this purple. Mixing it with black creates extra extra depth. But I do want it to be fairly watery as well, trying to keep that in mind. Extra bits like this. This is gonna be really quite a strong contrast. Some of it can just make that kinda come through like that. There can be a bit another PEDOT. There. There can be one there. Okay. Dropping in that color. A lot of this is as you can see, that the background is slightly wet. And so you're going to get a bit of this mixing into the background. But at the same time, you still get a good amount of sharpness in here. And I'm trying to replicate the shadows of this. The pedals. Casey, just see what I'm doing, just making this look a little bit more pedal shaped. Shadow just goes to the right hand side of the wall. Actually, there's quite a lot. They're moving downwards near the table. We're gonna do the table shadow at the same time as well. The shadow of the vase is what I mean. Moving down with you. We can just carry that further down there. This color for the shadow of the vase, I'm gonna be adding a little bit more brown to it. But I still want it to be cooler. But the little bit of brown as well. Here we go. Starting off like here. Not only darkness on that right-hand side of the vase to get it, let's sort this main part of the vase out first. Little cutting around to indicate the right side of the vase. And of course, these flowers, this one or this one flower here. Why not? You can just getting a bit of this already. Like that. Brown, very watery mix. I'm using so much water in here. Cutting around like that. I want that shadow here on the background to blend a little bit onto this one. Even if it turns into one big shape, that's better than having it looked too disjointed. Take your time. Maybe. I've got a bit of burnt sienna in here that might help. There we go. Let's see where are the shadows. So to start roughly, but here it just goes. It just goes directly over the top of the petals as well. More purple, the color. There's a sharper sort of shadow actually for these petals of the sunflower painting. So grade but we'll make do moving towards the right. That can also pick up a bit of paint. And we see some of these petals just dropped a bit of darkness to the right-hand side of it. And that just indicates a touch of them. Shadow areas. I'm keeping it fairly light still do. Like here. Here. Here. We've got this larger flower here that's got a darker shadow like this, going in the same direction as the other. The vase. So keeping consistent, of course, I don't want to add too much details into these air, into this area because I want the main focus to be on the vase and the flowers. So I'm just a little bit in here is fine. Like that. We can just work a bit on the vase and think, Hey, maybe a bit of darkness here, the base of it like that could help. Tiny bit here to indicate the bottom of it. That just using black paint. There's also a shadow underneath the vase. The vase but underneath the flowers. Yeah. So I'm going to mix up a bit of this brownish, darker color. Let's test it. Darker brown color. And I'm going to pick up and try to just get in a few of these little indications of the flower's petals and stuff like that here. The light source is coming from above to the left. Left and above. This is a bit of darkness. Extra darkness actually up here. I just want to save this as areas dried yet completely dried sign. It's difficult to get a super sharp look to those pedals at the bottom of this flower. Try just over here. Similar, still not completely dried, but look, I'm just gonna go ahead and do it. Don't want to fuss around too much. More brown in here, sharper sort of color, a little bit of detailing for the vase. I don't really want to overdo it here, but some something like that, maybe smudge it off if it looks too obvious. Sometimes I do just like to add in a bit of Something. Darkness here and there, the edges of the vase to help market out more. Find ways to sort of join that vase on to the tablecloth. That's tricky. To create a sense of continuity. In this scene. Indicating a few more of these petals maybe here just separations. Center. A few of them. It's almost like a dry brush. What I'm doing here is void is dry brush. And this will just add extra detail on so that it makes sense. These petals will make more sense. Especially this flower where I really want to make it look more detailed. I think that will give it a bit more warmth. Of course, it's going to lower the contrast of the flower, but it will give it more, slightly more detail, I believe. Ready, you can start seeing it. Come forth here as well. Just another layer to draw out the petals near the end of this large flower, that one. Creating extra contrast. Little bit of micro detailing on the edges of this tablecloth. Why not? Let's just draw out little edges like this. I'm using darker paint here as well. And the edge of my brush. Again, broken lines where I'm not too worried about the exact, they look interesting kind of pattern. Hey, I only want to indicate a bit of that pattern. I don't want to copy it exactly because it's actually quite intricate and I think it will actually start to detract if we're not careful. And a little thing that I'm going to do now, you will notice on the cloth is actually not completely white. These little bits of gray in here. So picking up a bit of leftover paint on the palette, really just water. I can go in and do stuff like this. Okay. I didn't know that. I'm here perhaps here. Yeah. Here. It's not completely white. It just gives it a bit more. I'm not sure the word for it but joins it. I find onto the pot into everything else rather than just having it completely white. More here. I'm going to leave a fair bit of that white on there anyway. Okay, just having a look. ****, does that appear? So far? I'm liking it. Thinking, what else can we do for this shadow? I mean, it's, I do feel it's just not dark enough in that region so I can while the paint's still wet, look what I'm doing. I'm just dropping in extra, tiny bit extra there. I'll get some neutral tint to help me out. Darkest color. I've got really that, but I thought I'm getting a few little petals here as well. Just integrate, increase the complexity of the shadow. Touch. It looks, it looks better actually that shadow can even make it go up a bit further, like here. I want to go overboard, but that the shadow here in the background, I want that to be darker than the shadow that's cast by the pot. And by adding an extra paint here, you'll notice that it's actually created a little bit of a lighter shadow here because the background shadow now appears slightly darker. So dropping in more paint. This, I believe, will just melt into the shadow down. So we are nearly at the end of this. Really close. Close. Now I'm just about adding in some small details if you'd like. Um, you know, e.g. that could be a stem of some sort. You could put in a stem here for this plant. This flower. They're green. Little stems and things cutting through and creating extra details. What I'll do is also pick up, I'll draw this all off and then go through and add in a bit of gouache that's completely dried now and final step. And this is something that you can either choose to do or what not. But I'd like sometimes to add in a bit of highlights. So I pick up a bit of white gouache, and it's just a bit of opaque watercolor mixing in with some yellow. What I wanna do is try to get in some of the petals that I've missed out, especially maybe down here at the base. It's a bit of opaque gouache and the bit of the yellow mixed together. If I can get something that resembles, going to be a bit tricky. Is quite tricky. A little bit here. Yeah. Even if it's a dry brush stroke, can Places does help. Trick is not to overdo it just a little bit in there. That softness or touch as well. Not too stuck on. Let me go a little bit of softening there. Can even just use white on its own. At times to bring out highlights on the flowers. Like you can go into the background and draw out extra details on the petals and stuff like that. I'm here, maybe separation there for the stem. Maybe maybe some green in here. Green. Okay, and we're finished. 6. Class Project: Your class project is to draw and paint your own sunflowers in watercolor. This can be the reference photo featured in this class or based on one of your own photographs. You can also refer to the skin drawing and painting templates attached below, which will allow you to trace the drawing if you choose to do so. I recommend drawing each scene. Free hand. Drawing is an important step in improving your painting skills. It provides you with an opportunity to compose and plan your painting. Once you finish the drawing, use the watercolors, steps, and processes included in the class demonstrations to complete your painting.