Scottish Wildflowers - Cuckoo Flower.

1. Welcome: Hi there and welcome to this second in the series of Scottish wildflowers. Now this time we are focusing on one plant, namely the exquisite cuckoo flower. Before we launch into that, I just wanted to introduce myself for those who are new to my classes. I'm Holly Thomas, and as well as creating classes for you, I submit designs for wallpaper, fashion, and bedding. I work with Art Cottage, Simon Ashby Studios, and Creative Journey. I've recently re engaged with music. I've done various collaborations over the years. My favorite being with my Pal and Stena from Freeze. One of the highlights was supporting Glen Tilbrook from Squeeze at the Liquid Rooms in Edinburgh. Another great night was the STV Burns special with Donny Monroe. Here I sang banks and bras. I worked as a session musician singer with N Light Band and Ron Ig, amongst others. Toured with my own band across Europe and the US. All the music that I used in my classes is either my piano pieces or it's music written by my partner, Glass. I hope it feels like a relaxed, chill learning environment for you. What do I have in store for you today? I have a soothing little study of the cuckoo flower. We're going to ease in by preparing a simple palette of earthly warm greens and dusky pinks. And we'll also be turning these into neutral tints with the use of white or a buff titanium. We'll have a warm up and then launch into our class project. We'll be creating one layer of water color and then practicing elevating our work. Finishing touches and what I call brush dancing. And don't forget, you can upload your project in our project and resources section or you could also share it on Instagram and tag me so that I can catch up with what you're doing. Now, on to the class. 2. Materials: Let's have a run through materials that we'll need for this class. These are mostly just suggestions. I'm trying to make it easier for you to use the tools and paints that you have already. We're going to use Hanna Mull Harmony. This is actually quite a large size. This is the 29.7 by 42, but you don't need one this size, because actually we're probably only going to use a third of this for the class also. It doesn't have to be this paper. I just happened to pick it up and remember that I liked it so much. It's a very silky hot press paper. And my second favorite after the Fabriano Artistico, we're going to be using this as well, but again, it was just on hand. Any sketchbook or even scrap paper that you have for our practice, one will be brilliant. We move over to brushes. I'm using number two, filbert. If you don't have a filbert, you can use a round brush for this class. I've got here a size two Acos, one of those travel brushes. We'll also need a liner or a very slender brush, probably size zero. This is a size zero Billy shoals, fine liner. I don't know if it's shoal or show. Move to paints. We're going to be mixing our three greens again, slightly different to the yellow Pimpernel class. I know a lot of you like the undersea greens I've brought in this class. We've got green gold. I've added the yellow here because if you don't have green gold or warm bright green, you can always mix the yellow with your under green. I've got here pure yellow by shrink in other makes and certainly with the Daniel Smith it's handsome yellow, we're using paroline red, but any red that you like, we're going to be mixing that with white. I'm using my trusty Dr. H. Martin's bleedproof white, But if you don't have that, you might have a tube of white paint or white gas. This is Daniel Smith, Gage, for mixing our paints. We're using we could also use something like buff titanium if you have something like that. Or a gray, very light opaque color. That's what we're looking for there. The perreline red, we're going to be mixing with the white and the buff titanium, and just seeing which one you prefer, finally we've got crushing blue. Now this could be any blue again, it doesn't have to be crushing blue. We're going to mix up another green with this. So we're going to with undersea green and our green gold that we've got a few greens to choose from. Finally, I just put in a pen because we are going to do some nice details to our painting if you'd prefer to use a pen rather than a liner. This is a pigma micron 01. You could go even smaller if you like. Just use what you're used to using pen wise. Something nice and fine and delicate. That's our material. Let's move on now to our colmixing. 3. Colour Mixing: Let's start off with a Colmis. Just a very quick one, really? I'm going to use some undersea green, green, gold, Prussian blue. This is for the leaves. And then you can either mix it because we're going for a slightly opaque look with some buff titanium or anything close to this could even be a gray or white and museum my step or white twitches and ph martins. Okay, let's just pick up a little bit of this. Under sea green sea lay it down quite thickly and then we can pull it out a little bit. Under see is a beautiful natural green and I know that a lot of you like it, so I'm trying to incorporate it into this class for you. A number got kind of quite a contrast because they've got all green and gold colors and Prussian blue. You don't need to have the same colors as me. Any greens that you would like to use for this class, you really need one blue. It could be a turquoise, could be more like a bunch, whichever one you have, beautiful color. Now we want to go just mix these two together under sea and our green gold, that will give us a mid green between these two, we'll get something like this, maybe a little bit more under sea. Then let's mix our Prussian Bloom either with this mixture of the two greens or you could use Prussian blue with O sea green. Prussian blue with green gold. Let's go with mix. It's a nice bright color, they like it. So now let's make these opaque. It's going to add a little bit more Prussian blue and more green gold. Let me show you what we could then do with the buff titanium. Let's go for green gold, a little bit of undersea green, bringing it over here and adding a little bit of the buff titanium. All that's doing is making opaque. If you want to do more of a brush stroke, you can actually make it quite let me show you this is going down quite thickly. Actually I think we might do that are goal with paint because it adds to the texture. And then if we pull that out, if we did that with Prussian blue and above titanium isn't that gorgeous? There's a variety of colors there already. What if we did it with the white? Let's go for this mix here now. This is what we've just pulled over on these two. I'm going to add a little bit of Prussian Blue, bit more green gold. I'm just going to add a bit more of that green gold. We've got another bright green that we can use. We've got the variety as well, between putting a lot of Prussian blue in this or just a tiny amount and more green. Let's do some white now. It's going to add someone to see green. First of all, pull that over here so we've got our opaque colors as well that we can bring into play. There's no prescription, as it were, for this. You just play around and see which as you like, I'm mixing green gold there with under green and white. I quite like using grays and buff titanium, lovely neutrils as well. If we go on to mixing the colors for our flowers, again, any red that you like. I have Prelin red. Whoops I came quite quickly. We're going back to undersea green. Just going to put some here. That's green. Again, I'm going to add a little bit more white. We're going into a fresh pot of water just to keep our colors nicely bright. That can be any white. It could be a white water color from a tube. It could be gach. Let's a nice first of all, bright, neutral pink. As all of these colors swim together as you're doing the class, you'll get much more enjoyment out of your colors because they all mingle. And you get colors that you wouldn't do if you were doing it like this. It's random. After a while, I like that. This is our pink and that's just a red and white. We're making this fairly opaque because we want control over the tiny little flowers that we're going into. Yeah, that's all right. Just add a little bit more white, maybe. I'm not going to pull that out with water because we're just going to use it as quite a thick form though. I think we're probably going to experiment with different values as well then if we want a darker pink. Now this is quite a delicate process because first I used to mix in quite a lot of green. You don't want green, you just want a slightly darker pink. I added more red there. I'm adding a little bit more pink. I just want to get something that's slightly darker, more red. Just keep going until you feel darker pink. That's a lovely, dusky pink, isn't it? Then we want the third one, which we're going to use accents kind of towards the center of the flowers, so we can add a little bit more green, a bit more red, a little bit more white. Let's just keep going till we get something that we like. If you think it's gone a little dull, just add a little bit more red. Yeah, so that's heavy on the red look, still got that slightly dusky field to it because it's got that green in it. That's our flowers, and then we might just put a few little highlights in. It's a little bit of white as well. 4. Practising Leaves - Brush Strokes, Values, Texture: Do wiggle and go into a different green. Of course it doesn't have to be a different one each time, but I'm just trying to demonstrate how many different greens we can mix. It's going to add a bit more under Sea Green, there under Sea green and white I like a lot. And to get this k, very natural look tip, belly tip, and then you can do that quickly. What I'm doing there is starting slowly and then a swift lift up of the brush. So swift, so swift, and you get this lo, dry brush effect. There's different reasons why this is happening. I'm using a small brush. If I used a larger brush, I wouldn't be getting that. But I'm using a small brush with a, a larger size leaf. You're going to run out of paint, which I love. We're also using that paint quite thickly, that also promotes this dry brush effect. The other thing that adds to it is speed. If you doing a really quick movement, you will get some dry brushing, if not with your first leaf, with your second or third. Let's try those again and we're going to try and get some movement in them. Tip and then up, tip, belly up. Now that wants me that my next leaf is going to be to dry, I did a little bit of water. The technique I used there, by the way, is I don't rinse off the whole of the color that I just used. I literally just dip it in the water. I don't swill my brush around, I just dip the tip of my brush then you don't lose all of this beautiful color that you've got on your brush. That's a really handy tip for just saving paint really Then that's going to be a wet, It may be, so I'm just going to take the tip this side, this is full brush. You can see you get quite a different shape. We can also do two swoops, the two swoop movements, and then out to the left. And then in using a slightly different color, because that always looks nice, then we're going for the tip again and we're going to go out right, not too far. And then just let me show you that a little quicker. You can also do that slowly. That adds a little bit of difference to your piece as well. So you can have some of the double swoop method. We can do very quick slender leaves that's quick, all the way through to the bottom where you hope that you'll hit a stem, which I don't always. It doesn't matter. No, it doesn't matter. That's a quick movement. Let's do that again. Very quick. Do just a tiny bit on your brush, so you get a little bit of width there in the middle. Let's try pushing a brush down slowly and then lifting it up quickly towards the bottom. You can go in either with this stems, with the vine liner. You've got quite a lot of different aspects that we can bring to this piece now. We've got the different greens, we've got different speeds, we've got different widths of leaf. It all adds to the overall appeal to work. 5. Practising Flowers - Gestural Brush Strokes & Slender Stems.: Let's start with our bright light pink here. We're just going to do little movements like this. This is similar to the leaf movement that we've just done. We're going out from the left into the center. If you want to try, you can go in from the right into the center. You can always either pull it up this way or you can pull it downwards. We can also vary the pinks that we use. You can always go in an add pi. Let's do that. Just see if we can get that variation in again that we've just got in with our leaves adding some light. A full book brush is really nice for that's the bush. Play around with your brushes. Some are firmer than others were wanting. Really a firmer brush for this, that also gives us some control. Starting off and finishing quickly like this, we can just do very quick movement, that's so funny. Shapes all going in another stroke, we can stop to that these different pinks. If you're using it very thickly, you can always go over quite quickly. You're having to wait for it to dry because we're using it like Gs. So we just want a little bit of these three pinks that we mixed. Keep going between the darker, mid, and lighter pink. And just keep practicing these until you feel you've got a Canoa technique that can bring to this. I'm starting here going outwards, but most of them are doing inwards. And it doesn't actually matter if you don't have four petals there at the end of the day, these are expressive movements. I'm doing much darker pink there. Then we can actually go in and add some little details. Let's now pick up our darker green and add it to this mixture over here. That's a bit dull. I'm adding a bit more red to it. I want to take the excess of your brush because we're using this almost dry. Then we're just going to add little details, almost little dots. There's not much of a movement there at all. Just a can of the mini me version of the larger patterns. And then we can also add the center. And again, just going to go one step darker, it's got a little bit more green on it and take off the excess. We want this almost dry, just enough for the brush to move a little bit and we just add centers to this is just literally one movement like this, very easy to do. You don't have to do it on all. You could do it like you just way, just press your brush down into the page. Then we could go in with a little bit of white. Why not We now, I'm going to just grab some out because I want to use this white almost neat. We want this very dry. I'm just going to bring in some little swoops. If I do that over here, I do it with a darker green. Secrecy, very tiny movement. Dots. Just little dots with maybe the slightest movement. These make lovely little flowers on their own, could be a hyde ranger head. Okay, little accents. Wherever you feel that you would like to add a bit of white, What that does, it gives us a bit of contrast because you're putting it next to that darker color and that enables both of these colors to work really well together. We can be a bit more subtle when we're doing the actual class, but I just wanted to show it a little larger and also just exaggerate the different shades of pink and white that we're going to use. Then all we need is to practice adjoining them up to the larger stem. Just waking this up. This is a mixture of green gold and undersea green. I don't want it too dark, it's probably lies to green gold. We just want to practice our little stalks. I find this easier to do it quickly. However, what you need to try to avoid is pushing a brush down, like you would with leaf, We're keeping just on the tip alone. Nice swift movements, maybe slightly curled, starting from the flower or leading up to a flower. These don't need to hit the actual flower, these are just expressive movements. Then we can start little details starting outwards and coming in the way. Or starting from the stem and going out dainty. Now what we could do is add some little leaves. Cookie flowers don't have these leaves right next to the flower head, but I think they just need a something. We can either do that by just bringing in a little sweepy, just slightly thicker than the stem. You can go over the petal, push down a little bit, and bring it in, trying to add a little bit of movement as well. Let's do that over here. If this is a normal stem, we would be doing tip down, tiny little push down and up again is a little bit fiddly, but well worth it. Tip little bit down and then up again. Depending on your brush, you will have a thermal brush, you need to push down a little bit more. You could have a really soft brush. Have a play around. See what your brush does and how it behaves. You don't need to do the just little details. You can keep the flowers just as they are. Let's try that from left to middle and then right to middle. Keeping our brush here a little wetter than the petals, but certainly not drenched because we're wanting to keep our control. These are very small movements. Any help that we can get will be gratefully received in again tip. I'm going down a little bit and up again might move that end bit. And it's got a little bit of a swoop to it that you can do from right to left as we've just done with the other leaf. I think it's because I'm right handed as well. I can't see what I'm doing. It doesn't help, but you get some interesting results. So you might want to try it up and down. I've got my hand off the table, but I'm holding it with my left. I have trouble with muscle weakness, and I can't use fine motor skills without help starting with the tip, pushing down a little bit and lifting up up. I would be starting down here, tip down, pushing down, and then up. Try all of these directions. Obviously, if you think of it as a clock, there's the in between times as well, you get some really lovely movement to it. Another thing is you can go a little bit further. Start with the tip and right down, and then you get a love and leaf shape. I can do that fairly easily. If you find that your brush isn't behaving as well as you like, add a little bit more water, just experiment with that. It does depend, really ultimately, on the brush and paper that you're using. This is my Fabriano Artistico. It's slightly different to the Hanna mulla, which is even silkier than this hot press paper. Then at the end of the piece I like to do, do this, actually add these flourishes and hardly anything. It's quite a dry brush, so I've got my paint and water on there. Then I'm going to take a majority of that off. I just small curved movements, I don't know why, but I think it adds something like a little finishing touch. You have to be careful not to do too many. That's what I tend to do if you're getting an effect like this, which I love, that's dry brush and you don't want to add some more paint and water on this mixture. But it's the, you probably can't even see some of these simple curved movements, just I call it brush dancing. It's like dancing with the brush on that note. Let's move on to the next section. 6. Practising Finishing Touches: I like to add some little details to my leaves at the end of the class. Just as finishing touches, I want quite a dark green here. I used to be afraid of contrast. I used to be afraid of using really dark and really light colors, especially next to each other. But it's actually quite a large and important component to demonstrating your water color techniques, but also just adding another layer of detail to your work. Just a tiny touch of water. I'm going from the base of the I'm just going to pull it through like that. My signature movement, if I was to have one, is leaving a little dot at the top. I don't know why I do that, but I quite like it like a little full stop. Let's do that very quickly. Again, we can do it out the way into the stem. I like to get a little curve. I don't worry about whether it hits the leaf or look, you can even add something here and it doesn't well adds to it. Okay. This is drying up, It's quite warm room. Adding a bit more wa, water to it. Let's do it on here. I often just go beyond the leaf at the top and below just to add it to any stem that I may have missed. You can see it's very simple. You can keep doing a few lines around it. You can draw a little leaf around it, outside of, so it goes round like this. These will just take a little bit of practice and you will create your own style with this. It can become a real nice addition to your work that's quite thick paint, but I don't mind lifting my hand off the page now. Got a little less control. But actually it can be really nice. See it's gone. Right bag with that leaf. I don't mind. I like it again. Come squiggly lines here like this. Squiggles, curves, full stops. Just have fun. You can add a few, one line, two lines. You can pick up a pencil if you have it and you can use a pencil or even a pen it to yes, this is P01. If you've got a final one, that's even better. You can just use your pen if you prefer pulling that through. You can also then do details on your stalk itself. You can add some little lines to that, puts a little shadow on one side of the stem. And that's enough to bring that to life as well. Just practice doing your own little movements. If you wanted to use pen on your leaps, you could actually just outline a few of your petals. I probably won't do this. I'll probably just stick with the paint for the class. But I want to give you a little options in case you haven't got a very fine brush to do this with. Also just put in a little dots. You can also add white. Let's use a little bit of this. Ch has dried up quite quickly. Want it too watery? We'll want it fairly thick. Obviously, I'm doing this a lot whiter. Just so you can see what I'm doing. I'm just pulling those through, just like I would with the darker colors. You can take your time over this and do it slowly. You don't need to worry about placement either where the lights coming from. Let's just make it intuit. I love this and it's so restful. I love this, man. We cannot just get to the doodling. So that's another option too, we just do on every year, these leaves, okay? 7. Class Project: Starting with our cuckoo flower, I'm just going to pull down a stem using our sites to fill that brush. This is a mix of undersea green and green gold and I've added just a little bit of white to it. So we're going to use those gestural brush strokes that we practiced there. I put different paints on my brush, which is always a lovely addition to other details that you might want to add. I've used the Prussian blue with the other green mix there. Don't forget, you can use a little bit of dry brush to add detail to just attaching those leaves to the stem. Bringing up a nice long stem there. I'm seeing the side of the brush and you can also start from the stem and pull your brush out. I just want to bring out some larger leaves towards the bottom. Mid speed stroke. It's quite to vary those. Let's go in here and use mostly undersea green. But I'm picking up other colors in my palette here. I'm just taking time over these because it's a very different feel. It's starting off slowly and then finishing quickly. It leaves paint at the bottom of the leaf. I quite like that. I have a play around. It does depend on the paper that you're using. That was a double swoop. So we've got a more ovate leaf, but we've also left a line in the middle. Just from the fact that we've done those two strokes, I think that's really effective, just pulling some gestural leaves now off this main stem. Just a little bit more fluid than the others. Let's go in now with a very dry brush. We're using their different greens, different values, different brush strokes, and different textures. We're going to pick up our pink paint now and start laying down flowers. Varying the values on our little flowers as well adds something to it. Also we want to use, and you can easily mix that up with a little bit of green. As I mentioned earlier, if you use a darker green, the undersea green, we'll get a darker hue. So we can vary our flowers, they can be pointing towards us, pointing to the side or upwards. So we've used our pale pink and the slightly darker pink to add some details. Now I'm going to add just a little bit more green into the mixture as we practiced and I'm going to add these little details. I'm just going to mix that with our pink mixture just to make a nice pale pink. And we're now just adding little highlights, very similar to our class that we did together with the yellow pimpermon. So picking up our liner again and we're going to add some very delicate little stems running off the main stem, just joining up all of our little flowers. It's a light touch with just the tip of the liner brush. Take your time over this because this used to really confuse me. I know I've said it before, but running stems into flowers is a little trickier. You might want to just do it the other way round and that's absolutely fine, just doing this little slender stems and then painting the flowers. I like to do it this way because it keeps it a little bit more random. Now, all our cuckoo flowers are all married up to the stems. I just want to do the same with the leaves. So we're just going to add some highlights and shadows. This is, there is more phase. Just go in and don't worry too much about where you feel the light should fall, just do it and just go with the instinct and the intuition of where you want to place the light. It's amazing how these tiny little details do take it up. Not really. I mean, it's amazing just like little gestures. But suddenly you've taken that step beyond just doing a flat water color. I have loaded the brush up with some undersea green. I'm adding the dark strokes next to the highlights. I'm just adding little details at the end of the leaves, the top of the leaves, just to give them a little bit of an accent and a few little accents to these larger leaves at the bottom. I really find this reps lovely. It's like doodling. And you're not having to worry about laying down the fundamentals of the piece. You can and mess around and add little accents here, there, and everywhere. The temptation is to do too much. I'm guilty of faffing around. Sometimes I need to just step back, take a look at it, maybe add just some little greenery to the flowers. Don't particularly have little leaves, but I just think it will look nicer for the whole plant to have this movement up into the flowers a little, a hint of green. Because after all, we're not doing a botanically correct piece here. We're just kind of trying to capture the essence of the flower. So take your time. Just add little accents until you feel it's finished. I do like this little bit of green that I'm adding to me. It really helps the little flowers come to life. This is just undersea green with a little bit of titanium, all white would do just as well. Just letting my brush dance across the page here. Hardly really making any marks. But I just little rough kind of dry brushing marks at the end of the piece. So I am happy there and I think we've reached the end of our cuckoo flower. Really happy. 8. Gallery to a Scottish Ballad: I made a foul. And now, keep it true, I'll never married be. For the only ain I think on will never think o'me now gane to a far distant shore. Their face nae mair I'll see; But often will I think o' them, that winna think of me. That winna think o'me. That winna think o'me. Gae owre, gae owre noo, gude Sir John, Oh dinna follow me For the only ane I ere thocht on, Lies buried in the sea. see, lies buried the sea...... lies buried in the sea.