Transcripts
1. Welcome to Scottish Wildflowers: Cleaver, Yellow Pimpernel & Wood Forget-me-not: Hi, I'm Holly Thomas. I just wanted to spend a few
minutes introducing myself. I am a school shared teacher
and have been since 2020. But I'm also a surface
pattern designer. I submit designs to
Creative Journey Art Cottage and Simon Ashby Studios. I'm lucky to live near the Bell Haven Bay
in East Lothian, the lowlands of Scotland. This is white sands
over the winter, beautiful sunsets and the
famous Bridge to Nowhere. My favorite castle
is Hales Castle. We have quite a few
of these in Lothian. Hales is a bit on
the spooky side. I really love that. We also have some of those
beautiful walled gardens, this Laburnum March
flowers early summer. Absolutely. Right. We also have heath land up
on the Your heroes. I love it up there.
It's so wild and has such a wealth of
wild life out there too. Then I have to finish with
my favorite woodland, this is Fox Lake Woods. Moving on to our classes, I like to experiment and
I love class development. I love creating techniques
to share with you, from soft florals
through to printing. I run Etsy shop and this is
the photographic side of me. I love nature photography and just playing with
different formulas. I'm also a musician and this is what I've
done most of my life, rediscovering art only recently. Music books written
for the passes is either by me or my
partner, Jazz the glass. Today we're going to immerse ourselves in Scottish
wild flowers. I feel the sentence of the day, this class is tiny, details make a whole
lot of difference. I'm going to do
studies of leavers, yellow pimples, and
would forget lots. I'll take you through
from taking off your page, practice wrongs. At the end of the class, you'll be left with four
little studies which you can then go on to make into cards
just to frame as they are. Don't forget school, Share
has this amazing community. If you'd like to upload
your art for this class, you can do so the submit project in our projects and
resources area. So let's get started.
2. Materials: Okay. If I take you
quickly through the materials I used
in this course. I'm starting off
with the Artistic and Fabriano Artistico. This is hot pressed
and it's 57 inch. I love this actually, and I use it a lot for ideas, but I also use Jackson's
as well, Five by seven. It's more affordable and I like it as a
paper. It's great. That's a hot press tube. We're aiming really for the smoothest paper that you have. I understand it's
expensive buying in things and I'm
always trying to find alternatives for you have a
play around with papers you already have in and just look for the smoothest
surface that you have. Now going to brushes, I'm using a round brush here and I demonstrate that
throughout the classes. This is size to escoda
travel brush, love it, absolutely it just beautiful
petal shapes and leaves. Then I'm going a little
bit unusual here in using an eradicator brush, which is usually
used for mistakes when you want to lift
water color paper. This is by Billy Show. I think this is the
size to as well, that has a cab to the top here. I would say this
is a cross between a straight and a
filbert shaped brush. Anything like that
have a play around with either a round brush, a filbert, or even a flat brush. We're going to be
using some washy tape. I use this, which is a thinner washy
tape if you don't have that usual usual tape. If it's thicker like this, because this is a
very small surface, I would suggest doing half
on the page and half of you just go around that and you can stick this down or
you could stick it to whatever's
underneath right paint. I used a green gold. If you don't have green gold, use any of your favorite green
and mix some yellow to it. I have perylene red, one of my favorite reds, Nearest red to this
very red that you have. Just try and mix the much and so that you're not having
to buy in new paints, we're going to mix
a brown together, which I also did in
my class daisy days. If you don't have a burnt umber, which I also show use of, you can mix these three
primary colors together, heavy on the yellow
and red or heavier, so that we get a
nice warm brown. Those are the main paints
we're going to be using. I got a new gamboge there, but I also use pure yellow quite a lot
for these little dies. It's such a bright
yellow cheerful. I have some white paint
here is not necessary. It's only if you want to add tiny little Do highlights
to our va fruit. But you could also use your
white gel pen for that. We'll be using our Pigma micron. This is 01 Pia we're going
to do to doodling last. So that's going to
come into play, that is it material. Let's move on now to our
little practice run.
3. Practising Cleavers: Stems, leaves & fruits: As I'm going to go into color mixing later in our studies. I'm not going to go
through that now. I'm just going to concentrate
on brush strokes. I'm actually using the
Jackson's pad here, which is a lovely
papers hot pressed. I'm picking up my
choice of brush. I'm going to show
you how to use both. This is a size two round brush and this is the eradicator, which I take to favor when I'm doing small
dies like this. Let's start with the stems. There are two ways
of doing this, actually using it like a pen. Using the edge. But I'm not going down
into the brush to, I'm just going to pull
those out very gently. Like this, I actually like a few little breaks in
the stem because it gives us the opportunity then
to bring leaves into that section without
paint overlapping. Let's try that again. This is the way that I would use a pen. I prefer it, but we can also go in like this and draw
out some long stems. These are expressive movements, very quick and fluid, but you can actually do
that much more slowly. Size, just find the
brush that you prefer. Let's do this with
the round brush now, just dabbing off my brush here. Let's try the sideways approach. I actually use the joint in
my wrist to do this as well. It's great to do that because it gives you a formula almost that you can use time and time
again from the side again. Actually, I flattened my
brush here accidentally, but that might be a really
good way of doing it. You can always shape your brush before you go into paintings. And that's another strategy, which is really good
going sideways here. A, and I've got my
hand on the table. If you have trouble
with movement, this gives you some stability. Let's try above just a much slower movement. Just take your time. So
those are the stems. Let's go into doing the
leaves, which I adore. By the way, I've
not said before, I just love the
shape of cleavers. Plus they're fun kids love them. Right? I'm going to carry on
with the round brush again. I'm going to show you two ways. The first way is
a slow movement, the second is a faster,
quicker, expressive one. We're going to do,
take that crip away, the tip tip, which you will have done
in a lot of other classes. We'll take this
step, for example. I'm going to bring it into
here, Barely tip again. Let's try that again.
Tip, press down, flare, bring it up. These are very slow movements,
but very controlled. Now, if I were to do a swifter movement
with this round brush, it would look like this, and I want to work
on the same stone. Now, with expressive movements, you can get a lot more character because you're actually going with the shape of
the brush and just trusting how it's going to land. It might take a bit
of practice to get the style that you want
to reach your style, but you will get there. I just try it out with all sorts of different brushes that you have. Let's do that again. Expressive strokes. Let's swap over now. And I'm going back to this
very small brush size too. It is the same size
as the round brush, but a very different shape. And shorter, shorter
brush length actually is good for this class. But as I mentioned in the glass, you can always use a round brush or any other brush
that you have. Just use the tip to the
mid of the brush head. You're not using the
form flare of it, just a tiny tip down to half. I'm always trying to find ways for you to use things
that you already have because art equipment
is expensive, right? With my eradicator brush, I got to go over here, say
eradicate size to fill. But even a straight brush
would be handic'mj. Do the expressive movements. I could notice here, I'm
not really bothered about them going right to the stem because this
is an expressive style. It's not botanical and it's
not meant to be correct. It's our take on these plants. I don't really mind if
it looks a little bit all over the place is to
me that adds character. So those are the swift movements
you can see there that I'm just twisting my brush
as that is going down. If it's so much more life, let's do the slow movement. Now, as I've said, this is a soft brush that's
really great for this. Either look wonderful, you can choose what you
would like to do. How to do the stems, which style of leaf you like. The only thing we need to do
then are the little fruits. I'm taking off the majority of my paint because I want
control over this. I'm going to do with the
tip here of this brush, little circles of circles leaving a white space. And you can always drop in a
bit of a dark mixture here. Let's do those again, taking a majority
of the painting. Water off, nice little
circular movements, leaving a little white space, dropping in a little
bit of dark paint. I'll show you later
little details that we can towards the end of the class when we're
doing our doodling. So that's it for the leaders, Let's move on to our yellow con.
4. Practising Yellow Pimpernel: Flowers & Leaves: Moving on to our
yellow pim panels. They have five petals, almost star like I'm just going to pick up
some of the yellow, and that can be pure yellow or a new gamboge,
whatever you have. I'm going to pick up a
lot more paint this time. It's almost like
you would use Gage. Let's do some very
expressive little movements. Again, we're not trying
to be correct here, we're trying to do or
adopt a certain style. I'm doing little movements. First, you can use
a pull towards you, push away movement, this would be towards
me, to the side. And then I can start from
the center and go out. This is a push away movement. Now, this is something
that I use a lot. This movement I'm using, starting out with the
tiny tip of the brush. I'm actually going to
then move sideways. Let's do that again because it's a beautiful movement and it gives a much more of a
natural petal shape. You can see the movement
here is this way. I'm starting out flaring my brush and bringing
it up again, just as you would if you
were doing the tip, tip. But you can see the
difference here. It's a really lovely movement, if you want to adopt
that for this class. That's it. It's so simple. We're just using a push
down on the side of the brush and then it comes up again into a lovely petal shape. We can use those slow
movements that we've just done here with our tip, belly tip, and just
take our time. We're going to leave
a little white space in the middle for
our doodles later. So pretty then a
quick movement would be more like this actually. In some ways a quicker movement allows you to just
do it and not have the thinking filter on to mean because we often feel like everything has to be
perfect with this, we're just looking for a
very loose, gestural petal. Try these and see which you
would prefer to take forward, but that's pretty much
our yellow phone. It is that simple.
We're going to go in and do the centers and a
little bit of detail later, but this is the
basic petal shape that we're going to
be working with. Now for the leaves,
we're going to use the same brush strokes. Just getting a little bit of my green gold which we will be using later
in class as well. We have these two
leaves that are opposing and a stem
that runs down. Then these little
flowers come off that stem with more
slender stems. Let's do two little leaves. We're going to just do that little side sweep movement that I showed you, isn't
that gorgeous. Just brings out all these little shapes that
you wouldn't get if you were doing it very
methodically, if you like. I went out that way and I'm going to use
the same movement, starting here and
then layering out, coming up to a tip. Let's try that again. This is my sideways movement. Let me show you now
if you want to do it a more traditional way, which is the tip flow tip. If we have a little
stem coming down here, we can do a tip layer out. You can wiggle if you feel you're not
getting a full leaf. Let's try that again. Much using the flat part
of the bush to flare out. Now, not the side
from here coming in. You can see these are much
more deliberate movements, but there's nothing
wrong with that at all. Let's do those two things again, just on single leaves, tip sideways, it's almost
a triangular shape, and lift up to a tip. Let's try that again, and let's try the
other way as well. Tip flare. And up to the tip again. Tip flare.
5. Practising Wood Forget Me Nots: Flowers & Leaves: Moving on to our wood. Forget me, not flowers, they have this little
curly cue at the top. Later in the class, we're
just going to start with a pigma micron line or you
could use your dip pen. They're also referred
to as a scorpion tail, the scene in a lot
of wild flowers. Then we're just going
to practice what I'm calling flow a little dots. Then we can do a, we do random dots around as
well, which is gorgeous. Then as we come round, we're going to start
making little flowers. If we wanted a flower point
in this way, we've got 12. Let's look at that way, we do a whole flow
as we come down. If I go to the side here, this is exactly
the same movement that we've just practiced, which is that little side
sweep, tip down side. If you want to do that
the traditional way, it would be down, flare up. You do get a longer
shape with that, which is why I think
I like this sideways. It just feels a
bit more organic. Then we can start to do
five little petals of that. Let's try those over here. I'm going inward, outward out
again, and then sideways. But you can move
your paper around. Nothing wrong with that
one petal, two petals. So we just carry
on down this stem and we can dot and dash
wherever we feel like it. These are just more
rounded little petals than the yellow pen. You can also change the
value of the paint. These are quite light, which is a good thing
if you're going to do later because it
will show up a bit more as you have the centers and any pen details
that you want, we can do a deeper color. Just show you over
one of these petals. Again, we will probably want to put a little bit of
detail into these later. Already makes them look a
bit more lively, doesn't it? We can do in some darker shady over a petal or
in between a petal. If we do this quickly, this would be a dot
flower opening. A little bit more here. This is looking that way. A little one here,
looking that way. Carry on for as
long as you like. Botanically wood. Forget me Nots flowers
just like field forget me Nots flowers are towards
the top of the stem. One is just pressing
in paint here because it's very throwaway and expression for let me just show you one more
time and then we'll do the leaves put down. Flared up, right? And that's the straight
version you can do, coming back in the side sweep. This might take a
bit of practice, but stick with it
because it's actually a lovely brush stroke
to just carry forward. As for leaves in the class, we'll be using a mixture of burnt tuber or we will mix together out
of the three primaries. Don't worry too much about
color mixing at the moment. That's all included
in the lessons. A brown green, the leads
to the, forget me, not a larger in respect to the
flowers than yellow cypel. I'm going to start with the tip. I'll do a straight
version first. As in straight, not side sweep. We're just going to maybe wiggle it a little bit
and then bring it up. This is a very, very
simple movement. We almost start with a little
dot and then go like this. That's a lovely thing to do. Again, more expression
for way is like this. Tip flourish. Tip, tip, wiggle. I'm just doing this
anywhere at the moment. So let's try that again. Tip, down, flare, bring
it down, lift up again. Side swoop would be, so you get a fatter leaf
with a more irregular shape. Quick movements, again, that's would forget that. Again, we'll be adding details to the leaves as well later.
6. Practising Pen Details: Again, in the main lessons, I'll be going into detail about all the little doodles that
we're going to be doing. But let me just
show you a little signature move I do with my pen. When I'm going through
leaves like this, I like a quick movement
on the side of the nib side of the
B would be this. It just fine. Now you've got a bit
more control over it. If I was to concentrate
on this leaf, I would be starting here. And then I do a quick
movement through it and I do a little
dot at the end. That's just what I do. I thought you might like that we could do it the other way
around just to do like this. I love little dots, not on every leaf, but just the odd one. We can do a few lines of
one leaf if you like. You can take your
time do it slow way, You lose a little
bit of the fluidity, but it's just as enjoyable. And they can actually just
trace around the outside of the leaf again, swift and slow, starting from this
top or bottom. These swift movements are actually really
good to get used to because they are so character ful When you
do without thinking, you can just do a little
practice run with your Pigma micron
and some leaves before you get into the
main class, if you like. Let's now move on to
our first lesson, which is about taping off our page before we get on
into our wild flowers.
7. Class Project: Taping Off Our Page: Let's tape off our paper. I'm using quite a
narrow washi tape here. If you have a wider one or
a wider tape, seller tape, you could put half on
the page and half off, or you could just dive in and do your painting without
doing the masking. What I really love
about this is that the painting flows off
and through the page. Because you have masked
off that middle, it gives you an almost off
cut feel. I really like that. I often find off cuts of my work and where I've
spliced it and sliced it up and I love it more than the actual design,
you can measure. At this point, I
detest measuring, but it will ensure that we
get equal rectangulars. So at this point we're
looking at the pencil marks and we're wanting those to be in the middle of the washy tape. It doesn't have to be precise, but it's a really good guide. Then gently press
down on the tape just so that we don't have any water
color seeping underneath. I'm just going to whip
off these little edges. And now let's move on to our
first point which is plea.
8. Cleaver: Leaves & Fruits: We're going to pick up a
small fill bit round brush, whatever you have and under
a size two would be perfect. We're going to mix up a cooler green using our French ultramarine
and green gold. Just play around until you get a green that
you really like. We're just looking to knock
it back a little bit. Cool colors recede and
warm colors move forward. It's always lovely to
three greens, maybe. And that's my usual recipe. A warm green. A cool green. And then I like a kind
of a brownie green. I'm mixing some French
ultramarine perylene red and some of the yellow, and that will give
you a lovely brown. For a brown, you just lean a little bit more on
the warmer colors. I'm showing you this
just in case you don't, or a burnt umber or
any other brown. Then finally we've got our cool, our warm brownie green. And I'm mixing up some warm bright green with
the green gold there. I'll start by just
pulling out a stem. Now you may find that easier
to come at it from above. Or you could use your brush for stems more like a
pen from the side. I do love cleavers. I think they're just
so sexually beautiful. And you can pull these in
very quickly as we practiced, or you could try the slow
movement, or a bit of both. Try just to remain
loose with this. We're also trying to vary our greens a little
bit as we move along. Remembering also that we're trying to use the washer
tape and go over it, so each little section
flows the other. I'm just going to
show you how simple these little round fruits
are that sticky willow has. Just keeping things simple here. Sometimes there are up to eight leaves there also
little white flowers. We're just going to stick with a simpler version of
this beautiful plant, a circle or a semicircle, just leaving a
little white space. And then dabbing
in, if you like, a darker color, just on
one side of the globe. It brings it out and
gives it a little bit. And we'll go in later and add some final details to those. Now, I'm just going to bring another plant into the corner. We want these to be random, they don't need to be
straight or aligned. We're just looking for
some random placements of these so that each
little rectangle has its own character. I'm dipping into the cool, the warmer and the Brownie green add a little bit of
variety to each leaf. This is another thing
which is actually really important if
you're wanting to go that next step and bring your plants and
flowers to life a bit more. Let's just do a few of those gorgeous
little round fruits, leaving that little
bit of white space. Now have a look at your
page and see where you feel it would be
good to go in again. Yeah, I think I'm going to draw this one down from that
top right hand right tangle, Right down to the bottom. Going back in there
just for a bit of cooler, a cooler green. I'm loosening up
a little bit here and just adding accents. There's no need to be
botanically correct. We're just doing a little homage to these beautiful wild flowers. So I'm using those
swift movements, but you can take
your time and do the tip belly tip movement
very slowly if you like. Using my brush there
on the side again, rather than feeling I need to do a perfect line with my
brush held up. Right. Yeah, I'm quite liking that.
We've got three there. I want to maybe just add some warmer colors
in here because I realize I did loosen up a little bit and I used more
greens in the others. I just wanted to go back and
add some warmer color there. I'm just the side. Now the rush that
I'm using is more of a filbert shape
than a round brush. If you're using a very
small fill like this, going to use the
edge of the side of the brush and just using
that tiny little tip. If you're using a round brush, then you would go in and
just use the tip on gently. I'm not using a lot
of paint with those. When we're doing
a more dry style, if you like, we're going in with a lot less water
on our brushes. I just wanted to put
a little hint of a plant on this top
right hand corner. I'm just going to add final
little fruits to this one. Do a little, a curve here, you can do a whole globe. Just remember to leave a tiny
little bit of white space, although that's not
completely necessary. You do, you. Let's move
on to our next lesson.
9. Yellow Pimpernel Flowers & Leaves: Onto our yellow pimpernel. We're going to mix
quite a thick mixture, almost like a gras
consistency, not much water. Because we want control, You can always try this
out on a piece of paper just that you're happy with
the consistency of the paint. These pimpernel have
star like petals. They have five petals. We're just going to use
two small strokes for bugs and three strokes just to show the
direction of a flower. Then some flowers bearing in mind that we want these to be crossing over into
each rectangle. We'll keep carrying on with these random little
yellow flowers. I'm leaving a little
bit of white space in the middle of each flower so that we can fill
in some detail. I'm now just mixing
up a dark yellow. I'm going to add some little
accents to the flowers I've mixed together. There
are three primary colors. I'm just adding yellow back into it so that we get
slightly darker yellow. What I'm trying to get here
is like a mustard shade. I'm just going to try
it out on my paper. I felt the first one that I put down slightly darker
than I'd like. We're just going to
add these little hints of that mustard yellow. You can go over a little
petal that you've already put down or do little blobs
in between petals. And again, this is that
second step into water color, where we're adding little
accents and shadows. So I'm just dabbing
in this color. I don't feel I have to
do it with every flower. Moving on to the leaves, I'm going to use that
warm, the green gold. I'm mixing it to maybe
70, 30, 70% paint. The leaves of the
pimpernel are in pairs, a longer central stem. The flowers attach themselves to the main stem with
very slender ones. We're flaring our brush
a little bit more with these petals tip down, allow it to flare out and
bring it up again to a tip. You can use either a
slow movement with this or a quicker,
expressive movement. Whilst I'm doing this,
I'm just thinking about where the stems will go. By all means start with the
stems. That's more helpful. The reason why I do it this way is it's a little
bit more random and therefore looks a
little bit more like a wild flower out in nature. Do these tiny
little leaves here? Hardly a motion in that. So thinking about where this
stem is going to come down, and I'm starting with those two tiny little
leaves at the top. And you can put your brush down and give it a little
wiggle if you like. That varies the leaves,
which is quite nice. That's my sideways movement. So I quite often use the brush to the left
or to the right. I'm putting down the tip
of the brush and then I'm using the tip to the mid part of the brush to go out sideways. Then I'm doing towards me, again to me, to you, I think I'm going to
call that movement just to show you how you could use a round
brush for this. This is my Escoda
travel sized brush. You would use it just from
the tip to the mid part of the brush because the number two is still slightly too large, but absolutely fine
to use a size to. And we're not going to push right down to the
bottom of the brush, just the tip of these
tiny little leaves. And you can see there's not much difference in
the shape between the round brush and the small flat filbert
brush staking. Music
10. Wood Forget-Me-Not: Flowers & Leaves: So let's now start on our
wood. Forget me, nots. We're going to use our
French ultramarine and red that you like. I'm using Peine red. Keep mixing in the blue and the red until you get a
blue that you really like. We're looking for a blue which
leans towards the purple. I'll just try this on
my scrap of paper. Yeah, I'm liking that. I'm going to switch back
to my eradicator brush. Or you could carry on with your small round
brush if you prefer. You can do stem first
or flowers first. If we're going to go
in and do the stem, I'm going to use
my Pigma micron. They have this little
curl at the top which reminds me of the way that
ferns curl round like a whirl. We're going to be really
gentle here and almost just press some little buds
at the top of this curl. Very similar to the tiny buds and leaves that we've just
done for the yellow pimpernel. As we move down the stem, we're just going to allow
them to blossom out. The petals are very similar
to the yellow pimpernel, but slightly more rounded. The flowers on the
wood forget knot are towards the top of the stem. With just tiny movements, we can make the flowers
look as if they are facing either towards us, to the side or away. Another way of
doing that is to do little petals and then a
little wavy line at the front. If you wanted to start
with the flowers, then we can start to branch
out and really start to allow those flowers to
mingle each other's ******. So we're starting again with those little dots and
at the top of the scam, and as we come down, they start to open up. And don't forget, we can leave a little white space
in the middle of each of these flowers
because we're going to go back in and add
our little details. Another thing which
adds character is using the value of the paint. Don't worry about
any white ****** where we've not
added flower shape. Because we can always go back in and just do the odd little petal or leaf if you like. You could mix up
some darker blue and add some tiny little
dots around the flowers. Just shadows. So moving on to our next
lesson together we're going to create centers and stems
for our yellow pimpernel.
11. Yellow Pimpernel: Centres & Stems: We need a slightly darker yellow for the center of the flowers. I'm just going to use a little bit of burnt
umber to show you an alternative to the brown that we mixed with the
three primary colors. I'm just mixing some of this up. We need it quite thick
because we want that control. When we're going into the
center of the flowers, it's probably a 80, 20 percentage, 80
pigments and 20 water. So less is more and we're just creating these tiny little
dots in the center. You can just add a tiny dot to the bottom of the buds
as well if you like. The center of flowers don't
need to be overcomplicated. Sometimes it's just a little
dot or a little gesture of the center is enough.
I love this part. It's so restful not
having to concentrate, really, just doing little blobs. It doesn't matter
if you miss them, it doesn't matter at all. Okay, so now let's start to bring the yellow
pim panels together. Let's pick up our pigma micron. This is a 01 and it's brown. The reason why I
use brown is it's just a little bit more subtle, I suppose when I'm doing
stems and flowers, et cetera. But if you have black,
that's absolutely fine too. Or you could use your
dip pen if you have one. Okay, so we're
remembering here is that the flowers have their own slender stem off the main stem. I'm just going to add some little random
stems to these flowers. I'm going to bring
the main stem up and that goes in between
the pairs of leaves. What I like to do is just to add tiny little lines
through the leaves as well. If you don't feel you
have enough flowers, we can just add a
little stem and a blob on the end to
denote a little bud. Now that first one is a little straighter
than I'd like, so I'm going to try and make
this one a little curlier and you can always
add some little extra stems going off the plant. That's a little,
I like that one. Don't really have to attach
them all to the stem, keeping it very delicate. And I actually use
the side of the pen, so that brings out an even
finer detail from the pen. You can just carry on and decide where your plants
are going to curve, where you'd like to add
little stems coming into the main stem and
just build them up. My little signature move
is very quick movement. Pen with a little dot at
the end like a full stop. If you have some
leaves that don't seem to match with the
flower, that's okay. We can just leave them as
little elements on their own. It used to really freak me out trying to attach
stems to flowers because I never
knew where a stem should be going
to really get me. Just take your time over this. And like I said earlier, they don't all need to
be attached or match up because that's not
what we're doing here. We're not doing
botanical painting, we're doing this homage, Scottish wild
flowers and they're all flowing into each other and not being
contained by the page. Now I'm going to come back to that straight stem that I did
I wasn't fully happy with. Sometimes more is more. What I mean by that
is that if I add a few more flowers to this stem and make it a
little bit more random, maybe just add a few curly stems coming off that main stem. I think it will improve
the look of it. I don't ever cut
these things out of a class because we all
lose our way a little. And I think it's
really important to show when things don't quite work out the way you like. A few curvy lines later
and I'm much happier. Let's move on to
the next lesson, where we're going to add the stems to our
wood. Forget me, not.
12. Wood Forget-Me-Not: Stems & Leaves: Now we're going to
go in and just add some tiny little stems
to our wood. Get Inox. We don't need every
flower to join up, we're just putting tiny
little hints of stems. We're going to be adding leaves, so don't worry if it looks a little bit disjointed
at this time, and I'm still keeping
an awareness that I want these to flow into
each other's space. And I'd just like
to reiterate here that when I'm using
the pen in this way, I'm actually using
the side of the nib. And it's just a very
delicate pressure downwards. And that's it, really a
few little dashes and dots and let's move
on to the leaves. They have longer leaves
than the yellow pimpernel. I'm going back to
our burnt umber here and I'm going to add
it to the green gold. I'll just pull this
down so you can see. We don't want them
to be too dark because we're going to add
some details to them later. I'm just going to test that on our little
scrap bit of paper. I'm going to add a
little bit of blue to it that doesn't feel quite right because I want it to be different
from the green gold, just going back in and adding a little bit more
of the burnt umber. Yeah, that's better. We've now got
number three green. Our lovely warm brownie
green would forget me, nots have long overate leaves. I'm going to place the tip of the brush on the
page and then wiggle it a little bit down into
the belly of the brush and up again as we
get to the stem. Most of the leaves are
at the base of the stem, but we can add little
accents above. And the flowers too, you can go over other leaves or flowers that we've
painted underneath. But just bear in mind that
we don't want it to get too busy or have areas of this
where the eye gets hooked on. We just to try and keep
it a nice flowy piece. That is quite a skill I
found over the years. I do just stop every now
and then have a look at it. Have I done too much in an area, too little in another, if you like, you can add tiny
little blobs of green in between that curlicue at the
top with a tiny little box. It can get a bit confusing at this point be cause
there's a lot going on. Just trace with your
eyes where you see the leaves falling there
before you put brush to paper. As I like this color and
I've got some mixed up, I'm going to just
add some leaves into those little white ******. But it really doesn't
matter if they all look different because that's
what we're aiming for. I don't feel that
they all have to have the same amount
of flowers or leaves. They'll all have
their own personality and that's what's lovely about masking off these
little sections. I am in danger of
doing too much, so I'm going to stop right here.
13. Flower Centres & Finishing Touches: We finished all our
Scottish wild flowers, and now we're just
going to go in and do a few finishing touches. So, I'm going to get
my white gel pen, and if you don't have a pen, you could use a tiny
little Db of white paint. And we're just going to add one or two C curves to one side of the cleaver fruits and this will bring out its
full rounded shape. We're going to pick up
our pigma micron pen. I'm using the brown one, but you could use black. And I'm just making a C curve on the opposite side of the
fruit to the white gel pen. This just makes them look so
much more three dimensional. The first thing we could do is add a line along
the stem just on. And this again acts to make it look more three dimensional. Just these little acids
make a big difference. You could then add little
details to the leaves if you you can just move around slowly and look where you would like to
answer some details. It's not necessary for you to do all of them if
you don't want to. Just the odd little
detail is gorgeous. Now let's go back to our wood. Forget me not, and
I love this bit. We're waiting for this. We're just going to add a tiny.in the middle
of the yellow, which is the center of
the blue flower through. And do a way to your
heart's content. And again, you don't
need to do all of them. I'm just tapping in my pen because I was a
little impatient, so the paint was a
little bit tacky. The only thing to consider
then is if you want to add any more details
to the leaves. I think I'll add a few lines through the leaves of
the wood for get part. And I'm really happy there, so I'm going to stop now. They look very busy
at the moment, but I think once we've
taken the masking tape off, they'll start to have a
little life of their own. So let's move on to that.
14. The Reveal!: Now because I'm impatient, I'm going to take the
washer tape off now. But I would suggest just
waiting until the paint has settled down and you're
not likely to rip the paper. So let's have a look. Should have checked which one
was over which. Okay. That a Don't They look sweet. I absolutely love these. You can cut them up into little squares and put them
on the front of a blank card, you can frame them as they are. I think they're gorgeous
in this little quad Titch. I just think they're so sweet. There's a lot of detail in it, but I really feel that this is like a little homage to
Scottish wild flowers, particularly for me
as these all grow either in my garden or very
close by to where I live. I'm really happy that I've been able to
share this with you.
15. Thank You!: We've worked through lots of different elements to
discuss, including timing, brush control, how
much water to use in, oh, how to take that extra step by creating
lovely little details. And finally, learning about weaving and trailing
our elements together. I have my own mission statement when I'm providing
classes for you. And it has three components. Firstly, informative classes. Easy but effective, relaxing, because I like to create
a gentle space for you, reduce daily life stresses. And last but not least, fun. I do feel that we
learn best when we're engaged in a fun activity. Thank you so much again for
joining me Before I sign off, I'd just like to
give you another We reminder that you can upload your project in your
project and resources area. You can also join me on my Instagram page,
Holly Thomas Design. See you again soon.
Holly Tomas Design, Design Watercolours Printing Mixed media
