Slightly different than usual Gouache - special technique Sunflower Summer Postcard

1. Introduction: Why use a regular, usual paint brush if you can create your own and can get a special effect in your Gh paintings? I have your interest. My name is Benjamin Alcoa, and I'm an illustrator, artist and art teacher from the Netherlands. And in this class, I'm going to show you how to wash paint. But as you probably have seen from the title, we're going to go wash paint in a slightly different way than usual while painting in the usual way with gash is a lot of fun, and gash is one of my favorite mediums. Why not take to a whole other level, Do a little bit crazy with it and create some brushes for great effect and change the whole outlook of your painting. In this class, we're going to paint a postcard, a summer postcard. And we're going to create a beautiful sunflower. Well, not in the usual way with the nice details and all the great colors and nuances. No, we're going to create a catchy different style with wash paint, different style. You may not even have a styling coach yet, and that's no problem. Whether you're a beginner, intermediate, or even in an advanced level of coach painting. This is still for you. Everybody can come along and follow me in this adventure with Coach in creating a slightly different than usual coach paint. 2. What do you need?: Welcome to this part where we're going to look at the materials we need to create this summer flower, this sunflower. We're going to use some unusual materials. And in this part, I'm going to just take you through everything we're going to use and the alternatives you could use. So let's start with that. You see the finished painting here. This is what we're going to create, and as you can see, very interesting flower. So how do we arrive here? Now, the first thing you see, we need some paper. There's some options you can use. I'm using a, we got to find it. Here is a glued block of regular watercolor paper. Cold press. This is very inexpensive stuff. It's glued around the four sizes. That's the first thing you can use. And if you use that kind of papers white. And we want to create a very dark background, so we need to paint that on it. Alternatively, what you could use is black paper like this. You could use it to black watercolor paper. This is very inexpensive stuff. If you want to use some more expensive black watercolor paper by a royal Tylan for example, It has a little bit more structure to it. I would say 300 grams. That is 140 L B pounds. Don't go under it. Yeah, this is the same. Don't go too light. Alternative Fame. What you could use is some black crafting paper, but make sure it is nice and thick. Otherwise it's not going to work. All right. That's the paper, that's the first thing you're going to need. We paper comes paint and I've got some paints. I'm using a quite limited selection of paint, Not even all of these colors I have here. I think I'm going to throw that one out. This is what I'm going to use. I'm going to use a white. You need a titanium or a regular white. That's up to you. Which one you have. Then we're going to need a black. I've got that too. I'm going to put in there a black. The next thing of course is a yellow. I'm going to use a lemon yellow. If you have a light, very light yellow, lemon yellow and a mid yellow, yes, please do use that. But if you only have one yellow like me, that is fine. The next thing what we're going to need is some green, a sap green. Again, if you have a dark green and a light green, I use them, but I'm going to use only one. I'm going to show you how to mix the pain. There will be a lot of mixing. The next thing is a burnt sienna. Again, if you have a lighter brown and a darker brown, that's fine too with it more colors. But if you only have the burnt sienna and that is okay, then the last thing, I have a prusi blue here. If you don't have any other blues and a prucan blue, that is fine. I'm using agent blue and that is a bit closer to indigo, I would say a slightly different tone. But a polution blue is fine. If you just have a blue, that is fine. And the only thing we're going to use that for is a little bit in the background. And if you look very well, you may see some slightly blue tones. And that's it for the paint. These are the colors we're going to use. The next thing we need is this sketch. The sketch you need to print on a paper, and there's various sizes applied so that it will fit nicely on a postcard. And we need that, but we can't transfer, of course, this to a black paper. It's going to be hard. We're going to use a little bit of a trick for that. For that, you need a white pencil, preferably a white pencil. If you don't have a white pencil, then what you could use as well is something like this, a white soft pastel, and there should be a white in it somewhere. There it is. A white soft pastel will do, or if you don't have soft pastels at all, let me take this out of the way. You can use something like this soft pastel pencil and then the white version. If you don't have that, you can use a very simple piece of chalk work to preferably a white colored pencil. Doesn't matter which brand, just a white colored pencil. If you don't have to pick some of the alternatives. All right, put this aside again. The next thing you need are two bowls of water. You can see here, one, we use forensic one to pick up clean water. Then you need something to put paint on. I'm using a glass tray. You can use a regular plate, one of these plastic things, there are a metal plate. As long as it's a plate where you can mix your paint on, I'm fairly, fairly large. Areas to paint on, so don't get something really small, it needs to be really thick and it needs to be nice to mix the paint on A plate will do too. This is a glass cutting board, Actually works great. Let's see. And then some extras you're going to need are some masking tape. I'm using a sensitive masking tape. We need a sister. The final thing we need, the final thing. The other thing we need is you need a regular pencil or a pen, or what I'm using is something like this, they call an eternal pencil. It's more of a graphite, strong graphite, almost metal pencil. It's still a pencil, draws something which is fairly hard, not a soft soft pencil, but fairly firm pencil or a pen would work too. All right, and then the last thing is brushes. Now we're going to use, as you can see, probably slightly different technique. I'm not going to show you yet, of course, how we do this and how we're accomplishing this. That's for the next lesson. But what you need is some paint brushes. Now the first, if you have it, you could use dear foot stip. Or stip. I've got a 38 fun and a 18 fun thick one and a, and a thinner one. If you don't have those, don't worry, you could use stenciling brushes. Those are these brushes, these are a bit too thick. The smaller you can get them the fine thick one, a medium one, and a really small one. Stenciling brushes, If you don't have those, what we're going to do actually, is then we're going to create our own brushes for that, you're going to need some old paint brushes, round paint brushes, something like this. And then I'm using around five. And if you have a thick round, like a 12545, that's fine, a paintbrush. And as you can see, we're really going to change the shape of it. The next thing we're going to use are some hardware brushes. Just you find at the hardware store just some painting brushes, regular painting brushes for your house. I'm going to use a brush, five. A small painting brush, a really old one. I'm going to use two. Here's the second one. This is a size eight, this is a size six. You could go smaller. If you find smaller than six, that's fine. If you have a little bit larger than 68, around ten is fine too. Just a regular brush used for painting. And as you can see, these are not the regular brushes anymore because we're going to change the shape of them to be able to accomplish this. And then there's one last thing you may need. If you have glued paper like I have, you need a regular table knife. If you want to speed up the drying process a little bit, you may want to use a hair dryer. Just simple head dry like this. Any hair dryer we'll do now brush, if you don't have old brushes, just get a simple set like this. Very inexpensive with a small brush, a medium brush. And if you have one with a large brush, that's fine, then you don't need the regular painting brushes. All the regular painting brush is really stiff and that creates some nice effects. All right, good. Last thing you may want to use is the photo, if you want to, of the actual sunflower that I used. Okay? And for the colors. But I've attached the photo with this class. But it's not an obligation. If you only want to use the sketch, that is fine. That's it for the materials. Now we know what we need. Next thing is we can start preparing our brushes and our paper. See you in the next lesson. 3. Preparing Brushes and Paper: In this first lesson, we are going to prepare our brushes and our paper so that we're ready to paint. We're going to make some special brushes for this class. And we need to prepare our paper in a certain way so that we can actually use it and make a postcard of it. Before we start painting, let's dive into preparing our materials. You see some materials here already. We're not going to use everything, but I'm going to take you through how to prepare them and how to use them. The first thing is if you have some dear food staples, they're called Staples. Or dear food Staples, they're basically brushes like this with a slanted site. You can stipple with them under an angle and you can use this to even paint a little bit. If you have a three eighth and a one eighth, something like that, the size, you're fine to go, you don't need to prepare any other brushes. The next thing you could use are some stenciling brushes. I got two of them here. This is a size four and a size six. Now, the size six will be great for the background size, 44. More or less the painting. If you have smaller like these, the smaller the better you could use those two. But if you don't have any of them, and what I'm going to do is we're going to prepare our own brushes. And you see I've already cut a brush, just a old brush I had into a dear foot stipple. It's about the same, cut an angle under it. And what you could use is an old brush as I have here. If you have a very old brush here, this is a brush. Five, that's a nice size. Smaller is good to just take your scissors, you go under an angle close to where the hairs are in the shaft. And you just cut in one. Go like this, and this is probably going to happen with yours too. You miss a spot. I got a little ball under here on purpose, so that I will make a mess on my desk. But you could use a bin to just do it above the bin. And there you go. This would make a perfect one, nice and sturdy. As close as you can get, not too close, then you don't have any bristles, any left that you don't want that I have now cut size five, that is nice for a larger one. What I got here are two just from the hardware store. Some regular painting brushes, some synthetic brushes. Either brand new I got open them. Here you go. The other one too, and I'm going to show you. There you go. I don't want to use them like this. If I stipple like this, they're a bit rounded. I'm not going to get nice stipples in this. Brush is going everywhere, I don't want to go. This one is even soft. I'm going to actually do the same thing. I'm going to cut these things into a foot. Slip under an angle relatively close. This might be a challenge to get those bristles. They're quite sturdy. I may need to cut them straight first to get them all off. There we go. All right, now I'm getting a strange brush I got cut it under that angle, see if I manage that. Well, if it's not perfect, that is actually not a problem. Now, this would work nicely. I got it too much under an angle. I'm going to cut it a little bit less under an angle. You could use a knife for this too. Of course, instead of some scissors. These are really static, these hairs. There you go. Now I've got interesting stippling brush, and this should work nicely. See, this doesn't spread that much, this will stay sturdy. I think I might want to have slightly more of an angle right there. If it's got a strange shape actually, like this, that doesn't really matter because that makes an interesting shape. But what I want to feel is I want to make sure like here's a little notch I want to get rid of that. Don't like that, I'm cutting that away so that no strange nudges. I'm going to do the same with this large one. Let me cut it straight. First, imagine that. Did you ever think you would cut your painting brushes? And this one should be pretty sturdy already. I think I've cut it slightly under an angle already, but I want to angle it slightly more there. I think this is good enough. That will work, right. That's the preparation of the brushes. I'm going to clean my desk a little bit, get rid of this mess. Now, I've got three of them, actually I've got four of them. This one to put aside. I want to have a small one for the details. I want to have a nice large one. This is a brush eight, painting brush eight, So not a regular brush eight, because a regular brush eight is not as large, just a painting for your house. And I've got a brush, this should be a six. Well, you can see they're close. Just somewhere in between and a really small one. So as small as you can get in the hardware store, I would get them a bit larger and then I would get an old paint brush or a really cheap one, like here in a set like this. You buy these four, what is it, $1? And you can cut this up nicely. The little one there, and that one. Then you cut two nice brushes too. And then a large hardware brush that would work. All right, so I cut my brushes, I'm going to clean this mess and we're going to move onto the paper. Now that we have our brushes ready, we can move onto the paper. Now if you have some black paper, you're almost ready to go. If you have postcard size, then you're really ready to go. Otherwise, you need to prepare your paper on the right size. I'm going to use regular what color paper in case you don't have black paper. I'm going to show you how to do it and what you need for this is either a postcard, you go, that's a postcard. And now we have a sneak peek already into the next class where we're going to do this or you need just a ruler. Now postcard is ten by 15 centimeters, or four by six in. You could measure it. Or what I'm going to do is I'm going to get my masking tape. I'm using sensitive masking tape and I want to tape nicely around it. So I'm going to go to this site a little bit or go in the middle. Yeah, I'm not going to use those scrap pieces anyway. I'm going to pull a piece and I'm going to put this on top of here. I'm going to align it with the top. There you go. And I'm going to do that on my site to put that paper here, right around there. And I'm going to align it with the other side so that it's a little bit straight. And now I'm going to take the rest. I'm making sure I'm aligning it with this side again because I don't think my postcard is completely straight. They go mind that I might end up with a slightly smaller one. That's okay. And I'm going to do the same here. Stopped in the wrong place. Well, I think around here is fine. And there's my postcard here. We're to go. If you have the black paper, you do exactly the same, tape it off on the size you want it to be. Then we're ready to go. Now I got a postcard size. We are ready to paint, but painting is for the next lesson. Now we've prepared, I was going to say canvas, but in this case it is just simply paper. And we've prepared our brushes and we're ready to paint. 4. Creating a Background: Get your brushes. Get your paper, get water. Get something to mx some, because we're on a paint in this lesson and we're going to start right away. We're going to start with the background. Now, I've set everything up already. I've got two bowls of water, one for rinsing, one for using, although in this class we're not going to use much water, so I might actually end up using them both for rinsing. I've got the brushes. I want to start with the largest brush, make sure it's really clean after cutting so that there's no bristles left. Sliding a couple of times like this, but not above your paper, of course, then you create a mess. I'm using a plate, glass plate for mixing. I'm going to use in this lesson the black. I might add some white to it, and I'm going to use a blue. For the blue, you could use a very light blue. I want to play a little bit with the colors, but I'm going to use the light blue, but I'm going to use GM blue, Pri blue towards the indigo. This is more indigo color if you don't have that. A prus blue is fine too, you just get a slightly different color for the background. We're going to use fairly wet paint. For the rest, we're going to use pretty much dry paint. Let's start the large brush. What I'm going to do first, I want to take this. What I want is a variation from light to dark. If I look at the sketch, if I can find the sketch. Here you go. Here's the sketch we're going to put on. Later on, the sketch is going to be like this. It fits right there. The light would come a little bit from this side. I would make D, where the actual flower is slightly lighter, pick a little bit of black. I'm going to wet this brush. And I'm going to take that paint I need for this bit more water. But as you can see, I'm right away. An interesting effect, and that is what I want. Picking up a little bit more water. There you go. This is what we're going to do basically in this class. We're going to use stippling methods to create some interesting backgrounds. This is really interesting. I'm picking up water again with this paint. There you go. Go over it again. I'm picking up water again each time I pick up some water. As you can imagine, what's happening is the color gets lighter and you get a interesting gradation from dark to light picking up water. Now again, this painting very differently from what we used to switching, I can hold here if you're only left or right, then you don't need to switch hands of there goes, that creates a very interesting background. All right, I want some more black. I'm going to look at the reference again and we'll say, okay, the flower is still about there. At least I want to keep on going with this. Picking up a little bit of water and some new paint. I'm going to do this again. I would say till about I've got one third of my paper left with nothing. Obviously, there's enough paint still in the brush to keep on going. I want to cover everything. Now you also see the difference between black. Now if you have a black paper, what you could do instead? You could take that blue and that white and mix that a little bit and start painting right from this side light and leave it dark right there. You could bring in some interesting variation in color there too. What I want to do is to keep going here on the there too. Over it again, I'll leave that to dry, make sure that pretty much the white is gone on top to all right. Now I'm going to take that blue paint that is lighter than I expected, which is often the case. I'm going to wet my brush, pick up the black mix, this with the black, basically create as you can see. A whole new tone with it and I like some variation blue in it. I'm going to go over here too so that I can get that color in and not suddenly have some blue somewhere. While cut black everywhere else and need somewhere of that blue at the edge. I really want to make use of that blue. I'm wetting my brush, mixing that blue nicely. There you go. Yes, that is what I want. Sure, I use that white for this one. There we go. Now this is fairly thick. Spread this out, that blue color. I'm here there. I have an interesting background. Let me move that blue into the black right here too. All right? I want to move it right there too. Now, depending on your Gh, this might either cover a lot or just a little. Let me add some black right here in the corner since I have some left. All right, there we go. We're going to take that blue. I've got now titanium white, but you can use regular white two just a little bit might I'm going to get some water. I'm going to mix this in with these two colors, the black and blue, creating an interesting gray. I want to add that to the edge here just a little bit. All right. Now that's that. Okay. I want to do next this now. I can leave this to air dry or I can take my hair dryer. And I'm opting for the hair dryer since that goes a lot quicker, putting it on the middle, heat to dry this. All right. That is dry enough so you don't dry your pain. You want to look at my background? I need definitely some black. Where's my black? Here it is. Bring down some more black. Wetting the brush. There you go. This is definitely thicker than before. Using less water, more paint. But I will spread this out. There you go. And I'm going this side got some more of mine as well. Do it here, right? That's better. Cover it with a second layer that I get a nice dark color behind my sunflower. And I'm going to get some of this blue. I think this might be well enough to get this in a little bit, not too much. I'm just dabbing it in the water so that I can get slightly more paint in it. I might want to go blue here. Get a nice variation. I can see a nice variation from the dark blue. And I'm going to get that white there with the brush. The color that is on the brush, I'm going to that in to the white and again, that nice thick paint on it and make a little bit of a transition between the colors. I think this is looking good, all right. In some white here and there. So that I can get a little bit of a variation. Pick up some of that blue. Do that around here. There you go. I think I've got a interesting background. If you don't like these colors, you could use purple with this, you could use pink depending on what your preference is. You could basically create any background you want. This is a nice background. This is a good looking one. Pick up some of the paint here and that it in here for a little bit more variation and I'm going to be done, this, is it good? I'm going to leave that too dry or well, I'm going to help it a little bit too dry and see how it dries up. All right. So that spot there is not totally dry. But it will dry when I'm cleaning my palate. And that's what I'm going to do next. I'm going to clean this brush. I'm not going to use this one anymore. So I'm going to clean it and I'm going to clean my palette since I want different colors on it. If you have more than one pallet, yes, just use that. Since this is the end of the lesson, I can clean all this. All right? And if you need to clean your water too, then please do so. I like this now. This is a nice background, this is not even black, but it has some variation going a little bit from light to really dark, and some little spots here and there with a different color. I like that. Now you can probably see that my paper is buckling a little bit. If I press it, you can see that I can press this a little bit, that's not a problem once we tear it off. If you let it dry and it's still buckled, you can turn the paper around and then wet it a little bit on the back and go over it with a iron ironing it, and then it will go straight again. But often if you turn it around, use the hair dry, it might straighten out to all right, but for the painting, it doesn't really matter that it's buckled a little bit. Well, that's it for this lesson. We've prepared our background. The next thing is we're going to paint our flower. No, we're not going to paint our flower because we have no clue where this flower goes. So we need to draw the flower first, and then we're going to paint it. I'll see you in the next lesson. 5. Transferring the Sketch: For this next stage, you're going to need a white pencil, the paper we've prepared. Or either the black paper, if you're going to use black paper. And you're going to need the sketch I've provided. And as explained in the materials, you're going to need a pencil or a pen also. Right. Let's transfer the drawing to our paper. To do that, I've got the sketch here. We're going to start with the sketch. I'm going to put my painting aside. As you can see, I've put pretty much everything aside, and you want to make sure that painting is nice and dry while we're doing this. Next step, It takes a little while to dry too, so it has some time to dry. What we're going to do next is the back of this, we're going to make all white, and I'm going to show you something for this. You could use a set in the materials, You can use chalk, you can use pastel pencils, You can use soft pastels. You can use a white colored pencil. And I think the white colored pencil works the best. And I'm going to show you that prepared a little bit. I've done, of course, some tests to make sure we've got the best one possible. And it's right here. As you can see. I wrote down what I used. Here it is. This is what we're going to do. I've transferred the back here with various materials. I can turn it around and can see what it is. This is just simple yellow pencil. We've got some pastel pencils here. We've got some chalk here, just a regular piece of chalk. Some soft pastel, which you can see smears a lot. And here's the white pencil. I've used various brands and it really doesn't matter which branch you have, it works fine. I'm going to use the white pencil because I like that the best, nice, crisp, and you don't smear it as this see, you can smear the Z and then it's pretty much on my fingers and most of it's gone. It's going into your paint. And this will stay where it is. And I like that I'm going to use the white pencil. But the alternatives are possible too. What I'm going to do with that is very simple. I'm going to color the back like I've done here for the front, coloring the back with the white. I need to make sure I pretty much know where I need to color. I'm going to take a pencil for that. Get a box till there. I'm holding it up a little bit so that the drawing comes through. Now I know that right here, pretty much in this box, there should be white. I'm simply going to color this. I know it's the flower is here. I'm not sure if you can see it. I doubt it. I can see where it's going down. This is what we're going to do, basically color the whole back. You can use short strokes, really long strokes up to you as long as you cover pretty much the whole back. Let me check. That goes well up here a little bit. We're going to transfer all this pigment to our black paper. In a minute they go, okay, I'm going to do this a few times. I'm going to speed this up. And I'm going over just a few layers so that I make sure that I get the most white on my paper. Before I speed up, we can say, well now you might never have used a white pencil actually, in your colored pencil drawing. Now it's coming in really handy. I think I've got enough on it. The next stage is we're going to transfer this to the paper we've prepared. Let me check that it's nice and dry. That should work. Now, I need to center it right now to hold a little bit to the light and make sure gets where I want. What I could do also, I could cut it out and that makes it slightly easier. Since I have a scissors laying around the brush, I might as well cut this out, leave some space for some tape. There we go. Now I can see pretty much a little bit better. What I'm going to do and where this should go on, the flower should go around here. I want it. That is pretty good. Let's check it. If I'm still on it, on the paper, right, I could cut it. Definitely. I'm not doing the sites close about the bottle. There you go. And then I know exactly how it fits in. That's nice. I don't want it in the middle. I want it a bit off to the side like this. That would be nice. And what I'm going to do next, I'm going to get some tape. I'm just going to tape it down just simply to make sure that the paper doesn't move when drawing on it. The next thing I'm going to get a pencil. You can use any pencil. You can use a pen for this. And what I'm using this pencil here, this is an eternal pencil, they call it. The only reason I'm doing it is because it's very hard. You can use a hard pencil boil point whatever you want. And we're going to transfer, I'm going to draw the major things, shading, that shading, I put there, the major things, not all these little dots, the flower and everything. I'm not even going to do these middle lines. Going to ignore those. Pressing fairly hard since I got it stock. See if you can see it. There's my transferred. I'm not sure if you can see it. Well, we'll see putting it back and I'm continuing. Well, I'm going to speed this up since you understand what I'm doing. Well, I do think I've got everything and I'm carefully loose this again. And there you go. There's my sunflower Right now I know where to paint. Well, that's it for this lesson. In the next lesson, I was going to say, we're really going to paint, paint it already. We're really going to paint the flower. 6. Blocking in the Flower: We've got a drawing, I've cleaned my palette. I've got my water again. I've got a brush. Various brushes, so I'm ready to paint. We're going to do the flower. In this lesson, we're going to continue stippling, as we've done with the background. We're going to do the flower too. Let's start that sunflower yellow of. We need yellow petals for that, we're going to use the lemon yellow. I've got the lemon yellow. Now if you have a mi yellow, I didn't want to take so many colors, but if you have that, you could use that. This is way too light. I want to preserve that light a little bit. What we're going to do is I'm going to take my black. It should be the black, going to put down a little bit of black. And I'm going to mix in some black. For that, I'm going to wet my brush just a little bit. Pick up some black. Pick up some of this color. Mix this in, there we go, create a darker blue. Let's see, Might be slightly too dark. Not a problem. Some yellow. Again, until I got the nice yellow I want, I think I can work with this. This will be my darkest yellow right away. And this I'm going to use as a base. So I've got this brush loaded up and I'm going to stipple in these leaves with this brush. And I already see what's happening with this rough brush. I'm never going to preserve all the beautiful petals. That is not the idea. Anyway, this is going to be some stifling, so you're going to get a total different look in the end. I need some water to get this paint going. There we go. I'm trying to follow them as much as I can and make sure you cover them nicely too, so that we won't see that white in the end. Later on, we're going to try bringing back some of these details. We still preserve the shape as much as we can of the sunflower that it obviously later on it will be a sunflower. And there we go. I'm now using the side of the brush a little bit, but I keep stippling. Remember, we're not allowed to paint in this, only the stippling motion. There we go. And that will basically be my first layers. May we add a little bit of water to get that paint flowing again? So if it dries too much, add some water to it so that it starts flowing again again. Now I'm using the side of my brush a little bit where there's larger parts. I'm just basically the whole of the brush for these petals that go over the heart. I'm using the side again. There you go. Now I definitely need some paint right here, picking up a little bit of water. Again, I need to add some petals right there. And there you go. There, there are the first layers now vols well, since this is slightly wet, we should still see that white a little bit through it. If you haven't done it took, you should see the white. If you don't see the white anymore, that's not a huge issue. All right. Right there we go, a little bit more there. And I think I've got the first layers of this sunflower, my dark color nicely down there we go a little bit here. Good. Well, we can leave this to dry. You're welcome to do that. We except I'm not wanted to dry yet. Hang on, I need some paint on this. Okay. So you can leave this to dry. I'm going to speed up. Otherwise this class is going to take quite a while. All right. That should be dry nicely. Next thing I'm going to do is do the heart. I'm going to use the same color, but I'm going to add some burned hanna to it. There you go. Take that brush, get some water. Now you could clean brush, but if that helps a lot with this brush, you need to thoroughly clean it. Then there you go. This is the heart to pick up some of that paint, stipple that into the heart shape, we're going to bring back. It's the nice thing about ah, we can bring back anything we like. I'm using the side of the brush again. There you go. And what we can do is you can keep that sketch you've made, you can put it aside, keep it handy, keep your eye on it for the next sections. All right. Well, there you go. The last thing I'm going to do is I'm going to use some green. I've got some sap green, that's a very light green. Put that down a little bit and with this brown color in it's still in my brush, picking up some of the brown, mixing that with the sap green to get an interesting darker green. See that is a nice darker green. I'm going to do start with it. There you go. There's the base of my flower. This brush won't need anymore. That is done for this section, so you could put it away, you can clean it, do whatever you like with it. Now, we've blocked in the flower, that's the proper term for it. We blocked in the flower, whole scene. We blocked in with paint. Now we know where the major parts are, the major colors. Now we're going to bring some variation tones in it, lighter and darker tones, to make it more interesting. Because this just, well, what does it look like? It looks like a flower, but something that we just put down. We want to make this, of course, nicer. And we'll do that in the next lesson. 7. Detailing through dark and light Colors: Welcome to this lesson. We're going to add some details to our painting. Let's see what we're going to start with. Well, let's take a look at the painting and then decide what we're going to do first, I'm looking at the painting and I'm looking at my paint. I see I have a lot of brown left. What? I'm going to use this brown, I'm going to take some white and it can be the titanium white. Whatever white you want. And I'm going to take this smaller brush, I want to wet it. I want to take that white and mix that in the black with the brown. Make a good mix. And you can see what happens, not all of it. I got nice something here. There you go. And I've got now a lighter tone. And what I'm going to do with that lighter tone, I'm going to do a little bit in that heart, in that lighter tone there. Now, if I re the light and the light would shine here, I actually might get some lighter tones around there too. And I'm going to stile them in, Bring in some definition. I might get a few lighter tones here and there. I'm just stippling it in. Later on probably going to bring back some leaves of them because I can still see them where they're supposed to go. That would be this is looking nice, isn't it? Simply like that. I'm want to clean this brush now. This brush, I can clean pretty well. I want now a darker tone. What I can do now is put some black down. I got some black still. Pick up some of that black and mix that in that brown that's still there. And I got a nice darker tone. Mix it in a little bit more. Here. There you go. Not too dark That is scratching because my brush is now very short. What I'm going to do is now I'm going to bring back basically this part here, this small part here. And I might do around this base here, a little bit darker tones to get some variation. But I'm starting with bringing back that part here. They go into the heart. And with the dark brown, bring back a little bit of variation here and there. And I think that is good enough for that flower. I'm going to clean that brush. I'm doing that in only one ball. I'm keeping one bowl clean and the other one, as you can see, it's getting pretty dirty. Let's see, I want to pick up some of that light can, but I want to squeeze out water a little bit from this brush, otherwise it's too wet. And make sure I'm going to add a little bit better. Right? There you go. And we're going to basically leave that to dry. And that will be my heart. Let's clean the brush. Now the tricky part comes, we're going to need that yellow back and I'm going to add some yellow to my palette. I'm going to have a damp brush pick up that yellow and I'm going to look at my drawing. I need to have my drawing pretty close for this part. I'm going to see where I want to bring some leaves back because there are now one clutter of leaves. I don't want that around the edges a little bit of the leaves and where I can still see a little bit of the drawing, I'm going to add some of them. This is going to be a very rough stage. It is not going to be a very nicely detailed flower. It's going to be not really abstract, but more of an impression. Now, you can already see right back that there are leaves here. I'm stippling in part two around the bottom. What I might want to do is bring back these leaves a little bit first, there you go. Let's check the drawing and some leaves right around there. Depending on your paint, you may need to pick up paint. Often see this brings already back some definition, however you can do it. According to the drawing very accurately, or you can do like I'm doing, just giving that impression again that we're having some leaves. And once the paint runs out, you can add a second layer, thinner layer. This should be some light here. Let's see, there's a nice leaf here, I can still see that. Want to bring that back? Pretty much like that. Let's bring back a few leaves, totally. Here's one, so that we get that impression of sunflower leaves. Let's see, here's a nice thick one too. There you go. And working as you can see, pretty dry for this. Let's do this one a bit more too. There you go. See. And now we're bringing back some of these leaves. Let's one here. Too few complete leaves. And the rest just around the edges. Let's see, there's one here too. We're stippling back our leaves. Let's see, Let's pick this one above it. It at the base here. There we go. And we're doing one here too. And when the paint is running out, I'm adding in different details there. There you go. Let's see, where does one go in here? We add that one in St. A little bit there. And we need to bring back one here, a really detailed one, detailed, really light one. I mean, pick up some paint and the rest. I want to deal with left over paint to get that effect. Now you get a nice effect if you have too much paint on the ones popping out, some of them really strong, the other ones a bit less, you smear of your paint. And then there's less paint on it, but it still give off a little bit of paint. There we go. Good. Maybe around this heart here a little bit. And add some paint here and there. Bringing a few of these petals really in front of the others by adding another layer of paint, like this one here. I think I like that some of these front ones here. I want to be a little bit more obvious. They all right, good. Let's clean the rush and let's get some green. We've mixed it up that very dark color there. Put down just a little bit of squeezing the water out of my brush gets. Fairly dry picking up this paint. And I'm going to add just a light color there. You have this nice dark color and you have this nice light color there. That's all I need for that one. All right. And I got to clean my brush again. The middle, the heart, I'm probably going to leave like this. I might add just a touch of yellow, a little bit wet, yellow here and there. The next thing I'm going to do go to take tower this off again. I don't want it much, but I want a little bit left. See you have now a little bit of yellow left. That's what I'm going to do with this. All right. The next thing is we're going to add a little bit of high light. At some point, I want some light yellow. So I've got this yellow, I'm adding white. I should have some yellow one here still mixing with some yellow, pale light yellow. There you go. And again, fairly dry at some of these edges give the impression of leaves a little bit. They go, see, now we're having the impression of leaves because we cut the free tones. Now the really dark, the light and the yellow light. Yeah. And the regular yellow see, and that makes it a lot more interesting were on this side too. Now we can bring in a little bit of definition to in these petals. This petal, I'm going on the top. That petal on the bottom petal on the top. And there you go. I don't want to do everything. Just some of them. See this petal ad edge, and then this one on top, perhaps a little bit there, and I want to do a few here. There you go. I like that nice. Let's bring in a definition petal here too. Very carefully. Maybe around this edge, there we go. For those little ones around here, those other ones there, I'm going to touch them up and add in a little bit of light color there. Now, we're going to clean this brush. There you go, carefully. Again, what I'm doing is, you see that pressing out the water like this. I don't want to do that on a towel because then it gets really dry. I want a little bit of wetness there. I'm going to get this white here, carefully there. I want some white. That's it, no more. There you go. And now I want to create a little bit of an edge around here too. Perhaps a few spots here and there. And slightly an edge, if I can manage that right there. There you go. Now I'm getting a little bit more definition. This might be slightly too strong here, so I'll adapt that simply away. I'm doing that here too. I'm left with a lot less go. I like that and clean that brush. I should have some black still some dark color here going to activate that with that damp brush and bring that edge back again. Nice, cool. All right. I had some black here and there carefully to bring in some deeper shadows, Just a little bit more definition to distinguish between some of these petals. Slightly better here too. I might even bring in a little bit of black to create a little bit of depth there. All right? I'll like this clean my brush, pick up some white. I'm squeezing it again. I'm going to pick up some of that white is here. And let's bring some highlights on the top of some of these petals. Like I've done there. There we go. I think I'm okay with that. Right, a little bit there. To create just some more interesting definition that we go. I think we're pretty much done with this. I'm leaving it like this. We have our slightly different than usual gouache flower now, but we need one more step of it's not a postcard, is it? Carefully, get rid of this tape. I need to determine what's the top. This one is the top. You could write F to the painting of that's on this one. Goes over that. That's two, then. This one is under it. This one we need first. Now, if you have regular masking tape and it sticks on the paper, what you could do is you could take the head dry, really dry the tape, and then it loosens by itself. But this is sensitive tape, this goes off. There we go. We've got our postcard. We could stick this in the frame as a painting like this. That's it. Now if you have paper like me, it's glued all around and you've never used it before. What you need next is a knife, just a regular table if kitchen table knife like this, somewhere on this paper, there's a gap. Either it's a gap, most of them have it. Either at the top or the bottom where you can stick the knife in a slide or it's one of the corners. And I know it's with this one, it is this corner, I'll show you that. See that corner is loose by itself. Always what you do is with the blunt side of the knife, not the shops, the blunt side, you just push it in, then it needs to grab hold of it and you start just pushing it like this all the way around. There you go. Depending on the brand you use. This one is cheap, it's letting loose easily. Some are really stuck and that's the way you get your paper off. Your glued pat there is our Don sunflower in a slightly different than usual style for sure Go style. That ends this class too. Now we're done. We've got a nice painting of this sunflower different than usual. Probably not a totally detailed one, but we don't want to spend hours painting. We just want to have some fun creating some postcards. And now we've got a lovely postcard with a nice summer scene on it. That's it. Next up is the project. So I'll see you there. 8. The Project: Well, thank you for being with me in this class and taking it and arriving at the project. What are we going to do now? We've made these brushes, and I only have one of them here. We've created various brushes, and we've only done one flower. So for the project, what I would love to see you do is pick another flower created in a similar style, this stippling style, bit impressionistic, not too realistic, but having some fun. And create another postcard. Perhaps not use the same background color, but look at the flower and see if you can find a matching color for the flower on the background. Create the background and then paint the flower onto it. You may need to sketch it or trace a photo. Doing it in the same way we've done. I would love to see what you create. That's basically it for the project. Well, enjoy creating another flower.