Peonies Acrylic Art Meadow

1. Introduction : Hi everyone and welcome to my class here on Skillshare. In this class we are going to be painting peony middle. We're gonna be using different materials to create this painting. We're gonna be using acrylic paint, different sizes of brushes. This substrate here, which is a hard surface canvas. Painting middles is a lot of fun and I'll tell you where you can get inspiration to help you create these natural environments that are full of wonder and are full of treasures and just lighten the heart with looking at them. If you are someone who loves painting flowers and nature and loved to paint metals as well. Then come along and have a goal and learn the different techniques you can use to create these beautiful scenes. Let's get started. So I'll see you in the class and we'll have some fun. 2. Tools Required: Hi everybody and welcome to today's class. In the class we are going to be creating a flower metal. And I just thought I'd show you some of the tools we're gonna be using for this class. I've got the colors laid out here, but you also need to add the white, white titanium paint. Black acrylic as well, or black JSON. But I've got here a fellow blue and ultramarine blue. I've got two different yellows, yellow and DPLL. Coke, Neil, red, orange, red. This is more of a pink red and then this is more towards the yellows, the reds there. So a warmer red, cooler red. And then we've got deep green, which is a cooler green, and then green which is a more yellow green, a warmer green. And then I've got a little spritz are here, which is really good to have to kinda keep your paints moist and also even the paint on your painting as well, moist. Blend in and also put some retardant in here to keep it from drying out too quickly as well. And then it got some I've got a pencil here if I wanted to start with the pencil, but you don't have to start just sketch out with a pen so that you can do though if you want. I've got a handful of brushes here. So this is a large flat brush. This brush is a size with this soon, Let's see, 25 millimeters or one edge. It's saying there for this brush, basically a flat brush just to cover more space on your canvas when you need to use it. To cover most spaces quickly. I've got a flat brush here, a smaller one which has a size for this quite small flat brush. So if you have any smaller flat brush, you can see the difference between them there. I've got to filbert are round brushes, which are sizes. This one, this came with the Moody's that I'm gonna show you in a minute. So stability with these. So I'll show you the collection of this. I've got these here, which are big, water-soluble crayons. Really good to have as well. So this brush came with that. So it's kind of almost a size four round or something or a sixth similar in that range. This is a size for x. We know this is a size four round, so this will be probably an eight or something like that. This is another round brush. And then I've got either a script brush or a liner brush. It's called that kind for going for stems and really detailed scribbling work. You can use this one for as well. Then the substrate. It is hard surface Canvas. So it's kind of like a paper at the back. And then it's on a canvas. Paper texture, paper texture. This is what I'm gonna be using for our middle painting. We're going to work on it, take our time and really enjoy the pool says building up the darks and lights and the layers and ended up in a result with an art piece that will be satisfied with. 3. First Acrylic Layers: Let's get started. First, we're going to layout a pallet of color. Then we're going to put this color onto our substrate. The first I'm going to put the orange red onto the palette. I'm going to put the Persian green. Then I'm gonna put the calcaneal read, kind of alternating the colors. There isn't any rhyme or reason to this. You can lay out wherever we feel comfortable. I'm doing it in a vertical way here. You could do it in a horizontal way, whatever you feel comfortable. And we'll use an acrylic in this class, so it's good to have a spread. So like I said earlier on, so that you can keep your colors moist. Actually underneath this palette I've got here, I've got a wet palette, but my wet palette is full of color and is quite confusing. So I thought I was starting with a fresh pallet for you here. I've laid that out with the orange, red, the Persian green, the ****, Neil red, the deep green. I've got phthalo blue there, and now I'm adding the mid yellow. You could use any yellow, you could use cadmium yellow, you could use pale yellow. It doesn't have to be this mid yellow are taser are quite good because they have such a variety of colors in the same tones. So I just like to use the different ones, but I do want to start mixing more of my own colors going forward. So this is an opportunity for me to do that because I looked at a lot of colors and usually we can get confused as to which ones to use. So I'm trying to pick at least two of each, but I like, I was going to add the ultramarine blue, but I decided to stick with the blue. For this class. I've laid all the colors out here. And now what we're gonna do is go straight in with an R, just dampen my brush. Is good to start with a damp brush because it helps the paint to flow across your substrate a lot easier. I'm just going to clean most of that water off with my tissue there or you can have a cloth. And some people start from the top to the bottom when they're painting on their substrate. But I like to just work from wherever I feel inspired, which is usually from the bottom of realized. I like to put the darker areas at the bottom and then work my way up. So there might be odd, but it's just the way that I do things. Also, the size of the substrate is nine by 12. So it looks like an A4, but it's actually a little bit bigger than that. Thus me using the splits are there to get some of that pink to move. But you could, like I was saying, use a palette, paper palette that you can buy quite affordably and Amazon, which is why I usually use, but for some reason I couldn't figure out where it was at this moment. I just used the paper. But you can see me mixing there my deep green with the orange red. And some of it is more green than red. But you get this variety of colors because it's not fully mixed in, in a block kind of way. I really like this approach of mixing colors like this, because for those who are just starting out, it's really a good way to see what your different colors can do. I know that people like to do pallets. Pallets know swatches. That's what I meant. Swatches of color is to learn what colors can do, but there's only so many colors you can mix together in a swatch. I mean, you will spend the rest of your life. This makes sense swatches. But when you're mixing colors on your Canvas or your substrate is a really cool way to experiment with what colors do. So I know for myself, I want to be mixing your colors. Really, really practicing that theory side of things so that I can be even more effective in how I use my color in my paintings. Here you can see the brown that I've mixed. And I'm sorry for the actual table moving so much. I had my camera attached to the table and I won't be doing that again. But yes, so we've painted quite high up all of these colors and now I'm just going in thinking about adding more greens. So that's me adding some of the Persian greens and Always have it in my mind that I am going to be using my whites if I wanted to get lighter, my darks. You don't always have to use pure black or white to lighten and darken colors. You can use other colors to do that. But I like to use my white because it makes things a lot more highlighted certain points. And it's really nice to see you have a color as it's saturated form. And then you add that white and it brings out something else as you see in a minute. As I'm putting this white down, you'll see that blue just sparkle to life. Obviously, this is me working with this metal that we're creating here. And going into now work on the lighter areas of the painting, which would be like the sky area. Because it's kind of working from the undergrowth, this metal to the sky. I'm using quite a big brush, which to start off with because that helps to cover more area in Canvas. But I will change through the other brushes I have as I go along. Here, you can see me using the edge of this flat brush, creating different kind of suggestions of stems of plants. Then adding more color and just trying to play my way into this foliage, into this middle. I think we can be quite stiff about things and think, Oh no, I can't fix that. But it's in all this kind of gestural mark making process that we end up discovering what our brushes can do. A lot of the time when I'm painting, I'm using my brushes because I don't always use the same brushes. I will deliberately use the entirety of the brush, like try and push it to see what it can do. It's like it's having to prove itself to me at that stage. I'll see how lightly I can use it. I'll see how dry I can use it, how wet I will push down and do all sorts of things with the brush just to make it kind of prove itself to me and to say, yeah, this is what I can do to kind of like to show off if you want. And think of different ways to do something that I could do with a smaller brush, but to see if this one is able to do it. So just that idea of play throughout painting and helps us to relax. While I was gonna do here is to show you how you can scrape into a painting. You can have a toothpick or this is actually like a barbecue Khabbab stick that I'm using to scratch into this painting and trying to create just some leaves, gestures of leaves in the background. This can add texture to your paintings. It's not that you will necessarily see it by the end, but you might see hints of it. Because everything adds to the painting. That's the way to look at it. You're never wasting paint or you're never wasting whatever you do on your Canvas because that's how you get your textures. It tells a story, it tells a journey. It really helps you to know what your tools can do or to experiment and see what kind of work and what might not work. Was really good to have all these techniques under your belt. Because as you keep on painting and creating, you're gonna have a huge selection of approaches in creating your work. Once we've let that dry a little bit, we're gonna go back in with a different brush this time. I'm just going to put these in the water to get them wet and then I'll clean them off. I'll clean off the excess Walter. 4. Background Floral Layer: It's really good to get your layers to dry before you work on the next layer. So this is mostly dry. Now I'm going in with this brush, which it's called three different things. It can be called the Script brush, a rigger brush, a liner brush. It has a variety of names. It's one that you can use for writing your signature and all sorts of different detailed linear work like I'm doing now. I am still not using it quite the way can be used chins if you really water down your paint. If you add other kinds of mediums like mid, really thin and mediums, you can do quite detailed thin line work. I'm going in and I'm creating this foliage with these greens in the background and working on my leaves. Again, I'm doing this quite fast, but for yourself, you can take your time and you can really shape those leaves if you want. I was just gonna say quickly in here that you can get a lot of inspiring photographs from platforms like Pixabay, pixabay or Pexels. There are different kinds of platforms that you can use, or apps or software that can help you to have inspiration of what kind of plants you could have in your middles. You could always also take pictures from your local garden centers to inspire you as well. Or park. So just even just going for walks and seeing what kind of trees are around. You can use in your plant work, your metal fluoro artwork, landscapes. So those are different ideas of how to go about getting inspiration for what to do with your metals or other floral work. For me. I get inspiration through the idea, the impression of when I look at plants and trees and that impression of different leaves coming through and the colors and the impact of light and dark and the areas that have shadow. The characters I tend to make because I think I have a storyteller thing in the background. So I usually make things look like stories. So the plants are gathering detailed story. Every painting I create, there is that whole idea of narrative going through them. That there is something that we're supposed to be learning about or knowing about or been exposed in the conversation that we're learning from that point in time. Anyway, getting back to the painting, I am trying to get the impressions here by using, by the Parisian green and some white grasses coming through. You can take your time and actually use this rigger brush a lot better than I'm doing here. Because this techniques where you can be very slow, the water could be a little bit more in your paint. And you twist and turn as you are putting these lines down to get different, different thicknesses and forms of lines and the shapes. I'm doing this for that impression of grasses come in through the light, catching it at different points. Once you've got as many of these down as you want, you can add other colors to tint the color slightly. So I think I've added here is some of the DPLL to make the green a little bit more warmer and more golden. I'm still adding these layers. So that's another way to play around with your colors is to add another color. Just a hint of a net changes slightly, but they're all still very close to each other. So when I'm putting my brush mainly in the water, It's more to get some of the liquid to help it move or flow better across the canvas more than necessarily washing it, unless I wanted to start with something completely different. But usually I hardly actually wash my brush to clear the color over. Here. I'm gonna go in with trying to make a tree. Because I have this idea of when I'm looking at in metal of little bushes in-between growing or like trees actually growing in the middle. So here I'm now going in and starting to add that. What I'm doing is I'm not making it symmetrical. Just straight down the middle. I'm putting it slightly to the right because I want it to look as natural as possible. It's like it's kind of leaning over slightly. It's peeking over into the conversation of the flowers is trying to hear what they're talking about. So I'm adding more red, more of a deep yellow and I'm trying to mix this green, I mean, this brown so that I can see it better against the background. With this, as I'm saying, it's always about layering. I am doing this for the class quite quickly. But you can go in with even more colors. You can introduce more colors and get that brown of that tree bark and the trunk. A lot more than I'm doing here. But you can still see some of the layers of that brown that I mixed in the background coming through. The impressions of the leaves, come in through the layers of the grass. And then now we're on this layer of making this tree. So this is how you go about building and building. And then this adenylate bit more deep yellow there to try and get that tree trunk still a bit more visible from the background. Just mixing it in until I can see the impression of a lot better. Then once I'm satisfied that the tree has made enough of its presence known, then I'll move on to the next layer. So now I'm trying to add some shadow with that blue to try and define the trees slightly again and add some areas of shadow. But you can always use a smaller brush for this as well. It doesn't have to be this same brush I'm using for this. But with the brushes, when I'm trying to get a line that is thinner, I press down a flattened the initial beginning part of the brush, that top end of the brush. And then you can draw a thin line like I was doing with the big brush at the beginning where I was using the flat edge. You can do that with these round brushes of filbert brushes as well. Now I'm going in and I'm trying to work on creating the peonies. Yeah. We start putting in the background for the peonies and start working on the layers. 5. Third Floral Layer: We're just gonna be working on the layers of this peony. Thinking about the details that are involved and add in a calcaneal, read and building the list till we get it to a point of where it's similar to appear in a, it's the impression of a peony. It's not got the full detail of a peony, but you can tell, but it's got that impression of it. I just want to give a quick apology for the noise in the background because it's blowing a storm is really windy where I am right now. So that's sometimes it's coming through in my audio. But anyway, let's just keep going with the class. Now add in some of that yellow, blue to the background to kind of give you a more highlight of the **** Neil or red so that we can see that puny a little bit better. And I'm just zooming in here so we can see it a little bit closer up. So I'm just going to keep on building those layers here and add in some more of the titanium white to make it lighter as I go up the layers towards us, just to highlight it. I'm now building the layers for the daisies I want to add right beside this puny, I'm letting the peonies dry. Elizabeth. I do have a heater gun, which I have not been using, but that can be useful tool to dry your painting a lot quicker as you're going along. I'm just adding the similar kind of background here and then building up the layers of this daisy. So you didn't see me just add in some of that Coke Neil read into that phthalo blue and then some of the Golden, the DPLL and some of the whites. I was trying to add some of this green that I've mixed here and make the stems of these daisies, but it wasn't visible enough. And so I decided to change tack and make that background darker so that I can come in later on and use a lighter color and it will show up a lot better. But I'm going to use this green that I've mixed any way up right beside this peonies up here and so that I can make them more visible again. With painting, what you can do is with colors, you can even make them, the environment around them lighter to make them stand out or darker like I did with the other peonies earlier on the bottom there. It's just a whole way of looking at what your requirements are. If you want something to stand out and it's in the lighter environment, you go even lighter with a color beside it. And that's what makes it stick out a lot more. Here I'm playing on that idea of the complimentary colors as well, the reds and the greens. So that's just the way to look at it as the complimentary colors and putting those beside each other and then using a variety of those colors. Not just the one kind of strong red or strong green, but you have a whole mix of greens and reds. Peonies here I'm now adding a lighter layer. And it's very rustic. If you were taking your time with this, you can do this a lot more in a genteel manner. But I'm just going straight in and I'm just giving you, like I said, that impression of what these look like. You can always use an even thinner brush like the rigger brush or as we call it a script brush or the liner brush. And you can get thinner lines with these. As I'll show you later on, I actually go on to scratch edit to these flowers to give them another kind of textural impactful. Application. I'm now adding the pink that I've been mixed in and add into the peonies around the areas of this middle in order to carry the color across the canvas and to make it more of a unified look, I used a lighter pink initially and now, and then I use some of the direct ****, Neil red. Now I'm mixing some of the DPLL in with that and creating another color, which I'm now dotting around the canvas. The whole aim of this is to create the idea of different sizes of flowers, different colors of flowers, and dotting them around the canvas. I just mixed in some of that myth yellow into that same mixture and to create a highlight for the color and put down before already, it's kind of like different, like a mix of yellows and marigold colors. And just trying to get this metal to look as sprinkled with pretty flowers as possible. So you can really take your time, use smaller brushes and play around with all the details on the petals and really take your time to build the layers. But here, the overall impression for this class, you'll get the idea of what is that I'm going for. And you can apply it for yourself and really take your time to build your own metal. But you can see examples here of how I'm making really tiny dots. And I come back into them and sometimes I'm fine with them. Sometimes I'm like, no, I think I'm going to just make this a bigger, bolder color and just playing around with that whole idea that when you look into like a forest and you look at the forest floor and you see all these different flowers you can have. Like snow drops are so many different blue bells. That kind of impression of a very dainty, very light speckled of flowers. That's the idea going for here. There's just to pause and remind ourselves that these colors on this canvas of all being created using what was on our pilot, the seven colors. So it's mixing and it's playing around and it's using the white titanium or white gel pen to add that extra layer of tone, tonal qualities of values. As we're working. If any area needed a darker color like I'm doing now. And he wanted to live in darker. You could always add the black. I'm adding this darker green so that I can go in later on and enhance that with some lighter highlights of the stems of the daisies. So that's why I'm now trying to do is to get that lighter element. As I said, you can let the layers dry. I'm just going straight in and I'm making sure that I'm not rubbing back and forth into the actual paint that I believed on already because I want the line to be visible as you can see here. It's always learning the techniques. If we zoom in now we can see those lines that I've added below. The date is to kind of hint at the stems. And I'm even going to actually add some leaves to this as well. So just to get you to see some extra foliage down here in the darker area as well. But yeah, this is looking very bright and cheerful and fun. That's me just going in and add an a leaf there. And if you saw this is with a filbert or a round brush. I'm making the tip quite thin and pulling it on the thinner side and then dancing it down to get that shape of the leaf. So it takes practice actually with this. So you basically have to pull it the thinner part then regulate. You can see my hand wriggle in there like that to get that design and just let it go at the stem. Just a built this layer as we go along to get the different designs. I'm just adding some more of DPLL and I'm gonna make a lighter green. And I'm going to be doing the same thing again and creating more leaves using that thinner edge. And then working with that thinner edge, you can see me doing that. They're flattening that a little bit and pull on it. And then regular in my brush. 6. Final Details : We're now coming up for the final layer and we are building these leaves and these textures. We are trying to make this piece look very, very organic. And you can use toothpicks and scratch into these leaves as well, like we're gonna do in the next segment soon. And to really build the layers, you just go around and look for areas which might look bear to you. And add these extra leaves and you can add different sizes as well. They don't have to be the same size. Another thing to look at is how the eye travels across the canvas, because that's what I've been trying to do with it. Like the yellow flowers if he can see there from the right to the left and the middle there as well. It's kind of carrying the eye across. Now adding in some of this lighter color I've mixed, which was that same green on my brush, with some white titanium paint and add in some white sprinkles, but not pure white so that it's not too jarring. It's been tinted with the green from before. So I didn't these, and thinking of that idea like I was saying before, of sprinkles of snow drops. So it was kind of like the flowers that are very tiny and speckled and given the impression of a lot of floral elements, but at the same time, not working in an inefficient way to create that same look, different sizes given a kind of organic, realistic feel for the plants. Putting them in areas that you can get the flow across the canvass. Looking in a kind of organic, natural way and just helping me I, to move across the canvas and to really appreciate the details it's seen. And so that's what I'm doing here with the colors. You can see how we've built up from where we started to this point. You take your time. You decide how you want to lay out your Canvas. You can try this version and you can get inspiration, as I said before, from Pixabay or Pexels, or go into garden center and see what's available at different times of the year and get an inspiration that way. And have fun creating all these layers. So I'm going to also work on the leaves for the tree. I will be mixing some of that phthalo blue in and some of the green as well. And really, really getting a deep green that I'm going to use for the tree leaves. Mixed in some of that deep yellow into the phthalo blue and white mixed before. And we're going to go in and start creating the same idea for the leaves. But we've been doing before for the tree, foliage, for the leaves of the tree, and different sizes, different areas just to give that impression of Movement and the tree. Using my pencil or a toothpick, you can use a toothpick for this. We'll just zoom in and we're going to scratch into these leaves to give them some texture. You can actually do very specific leaf shapes here. You could do the line and then the legs zigzags coming off it. But I decided to be quite abstract and the way I'm doing this, but a toothpick would probably be better once they are doing this on a dry layer as well. Because when you scratch into it, it will just show the color underneath. Whereas with me using a pencil, you can actually end up drawing. And you get that crossover of the lead of the pencil or whatever color in pencil you use as well, so to speak, is probably better for this, but because it's dry enough and I'm being very quick with this and not leaning too heavily, you can still get the hints of the colors underneath. I bet also decides to go ahead and go into the peony and to scratch into that as well, which is why I was mentioning before, because there's different ways to get texture, to get effects on your paintings. So I've just scratched into this here. I'm going to zoom in slightly just to show you what I've done. I am scratching into the paint that's still wet because I didn't use my heat and dryer. But this is different ways that you can get detail into your paintings by scratch and into them and get him that effect. Which is quite nice. Sometimes as well. I'm going to go in here now and use the woody which I mentioned at the beginning or I don't know if I did mention, but this is another kind of soluble, water-soluble tray and that you can use, you can use it to draw onto and you can use gesso or a titanium white mix into it and get colors just to set them and make them more permanent. A clear gesso as well or jail media. There's so many mediums he can use to set this color because it is water-soluble and it will move if you do not actually set it on your canvas. But it's a really nice crayon and selection of colors he can use to draw into your artwork. And that was me using the gold one there. I could have done more with it, but I mean, you can use your brushes as well, a wet brush on it and draw with that as well. So there's different ways to do it. But I wanted to add a different color because just show you how you could do that as well. So I use this Wudi, the blue one, to kind of add a different color to the pilot because I just felt that it was quite green and it would be nice with something else kind of given a pop in here. So I've gone ahead and used the woody, this as well. So this stability, Moody and the very, very handy to use as kind of like a watercolor idea as well. This is really our painting, mostly finished. I'm just going in here and now with different colors, trying to pull some areas out. Looking at the painting and trying to decide if I want some areas lighter or darker like up here, I could use some of my civilian with ease and I could make a different color with the blue up here. That's why I went ahead and tried to do. And if I didn't like that, I can always wipe it off with a damp cloth. Or I could add some white titanium and mix it in and they're very, very little amount just to set it, but then also to lighten the area. So this different ways to work on what you've created afterwards. And there's different tools and mediums that you can use with acrylic to really add to the result. So, yeah, this is the thinnest finished piece. I didn't say. It. Feels like we didn't just go through a whole process, but we did to get to this result. And I hope yours is similar or even more interesting than this one is. But go ahead and share your own designs and it'll be awesome to see what you create it. But take your time. Look for other inspiration on how to create firewall middles. And I will see you in the next class. I will hopefully have some more of these kind of floral classes for you. But please let me know if you have any questions and I will speak to you guys soon.