Spring Florals in Gouache: Tulips, Daffodils & More

1. Intro to Botanical Illustration: Hello, and welcome. The spring has finally arrived and the flowers are blooming everywhere. It's really hard not to get inspired. I find myself drawn to all these fresh and vibrant spring colors. I'm Joe. I'm an artist and illustrator, and I'm passionate about nature inspired art. I love painting flowers, animals, and landscapes. In this class, I want to show you how to capture spring by painting four spring florals, tulips, daffodils, cherry blossoms, and magnolia flowers. However, if different flowers bloom where you live, don't worry. You can use the same techniques and apply them to paint your local spring florals. We will use gouache or watercolor and colored pencils to create a beautiful botanical style illustrations. We will go step by step through the process of sketching the floral composition, painting, editing details with color pencils, and finally digitizing our artwork and applying it to greeting cards. This class is perfect for any skill level. If you're a beginner, you will find this step by step process easy to follow. If you're more experienced, you will learn an effective technique to create a botanical style illustrations and preparing your artwork for printing. Grab your paints and let's get started. 2. Essential Materials for Painting: Hello, and welcome back. Let's talk about all the art materials we'll be using in our class. Let's start with paint. What I have here is the Windsor and Newton designer gouache, which I normally use, as you can see, my palette is very limited, and I advise a good quality student grade paint or if you can afford it a professional grade paint for your illustrations. It doesn't have to be Windsor and Newton brand. There are many other brands. So buy something that is easily accessible and affordable in your country. Another option is to use watercolor. So if you already have a set of watercolors, there is no need to buy gouache. We'll be actually using gouache the way I would normally use watercolor, so you can absolutely use watercolor paint if this is what you currently have. Now, let's talk about brushes. I'll be using these brushes. These are just ordinary round synthetic brushes. So these have a good snap in them. So a good size, I think I seven or eight would be great. And I also have six, and this one is four, but I'm not even sure if I'm going to be using this one because I try to use bigger brushes. If I was about to recommend any brushes, I would say, go with a bigger one than a really small one. In terms of paper, I like to use watercolor paper for my gouache illustrations. So what I have here is my favorite paper, which is watercolor or cold press paper. I pre cut it to A five size because that's what I'm going to be using in our class. But you can use a pad or even a sketchbook, if you have, if you want to keep your illustrations in a sketchbook. I just wanted to show you the difference. This is the hot press paper. And as you can see, it's completely smooth. It doesn't have any texture. So if you prefer your illustrations to be quite flat and quite smooth, and without any texture, this paper probably work better for that. However, I really enjoy the paper texture in my drawings and in my illustrations, so I'll be using this one. I also noticed that the cold press paper absorbs the water soluble paint better. Whereas the hot press, it's a little bit less absorbent. So the paint on the water tends to sit on the surface for a slightly bit longer. Another paper that we'll be using is just the ordinary computer or copy paper. Again, I pre cut it to the A five size. It's always good to have more sheets because we're going to be sketching, practicing, maybe testing color. So something cheap and easy accessible, it's also good to have on hand. In terms of painting palettes, I have this big palette here. I use this now almost all the time because it's got a little sealant around and it keeps my paint nice and moist and prevents it from drying and cracking and also has this lovely big space to mix my colors. I tend to mix a lot of colors. So for this project, as you can see, we're going to be just using mainly primary colors. I have two blues, but you don't need two. I have light one and dark one. You can just use these three. You can also use watercolor palette like this one or plastic one. Again, whatever you have on hand, we're going to be edding details with colored pencils. So now I have a bunch of polychromos obviously, we're going to need a sharpener. For sketching, I'm going to be using just ordinary pencil. This is HB pencil for sketching for sketching on the actual watercolor paper, these are water soluble pencils. This is graphite water soluble pencil again by Fabri Castle this is just the ordinary watercolor pencil. So if you have a set of watercolor pencils hanging around somewhere, like I did, pretty much any color would do something neutral, hopefully, is going to melt as you start using water and paint, and these pencil marks won't be visible. If you don't have water soluble pencils, just use the ordinary pencil and just try to make your lines a little bit thinner on our final painting. I've got a eraser, and of course we need water container with some water, and some napkin or paper towel to dry the brush off. If you'd like to digitize your illustrations at the end of this class, you'll need either a scanner or a high resolution camera, along with some photo editing software. I'll be using Photoshop, but you can also use Canva, affinity, or any other editing program you're comfortable with. 3. Inspiration & Photo References: One of my favorite parts of the creative process is finding inspiration. Whenever it's possible, I love to paint from real flowers, studying their shapes, color, and all the little details. If you have fresh flowers around, I definitely recommend sketching or painting from life. Seeing them in different lighting and angles can help you understand the structure much better than a flat photo. But of course, flowers aren't always in season, and sometimes we just don't have the right ones. That's when the photo references come in handy. I often use my own photos. Once I've taken in my garden on walks or at the botanical gardens. That way, I can choose exactly what I want to paint. If you don't have your own photos, there are plenty of great places to find great quality reference images. Websites, such as AsplashPexLs, Pixel Bay have lots of free photos you can use. Another amazing source of inspiration is the biodiversity Heritage Library. It's full of historical botanical illustrations. I also love going to our local library and finding inspiration in physical books. Looking at these can give you great ideas for composition and color. Whether you're using fresh flowers, your own photos or images from books or online sources, take some time to really look at the details, the way the petals fold, how the colors shift, the structure of the stems and leaves. All these things will help to make your illustrations look more natural and full of life. Now that we talked about gathering inspiration and photo references, let's move on to choosing our colors. I'll see you in the next lesson. 4. Choosing a Floral Colour Palette: Welcome back. In this lesson, we talk about choosing colors for our botanical illustrations. I want to show you my way for creating color harmony by using limited color palette. It all comes down to color theory, but don't worry. I'm not going to lecture you and instead, I'll share with you a simple and practical approach for choosing and mixing colors that I use in my own work. The method I use is based on mixing colors from just the three primary hues, red, yellow, and blue. The key is to choose the right version of these primaries to achieve the color you want. Let's take another look at some spring botanical photographs. This time, let's focus on colors and day temperatures. I see yellows, I see some soft pink, purples, and very fresh grains. The spring colors are often on a color side, and they are the type of vibrant pastels. Let's see how we can mix these colors using just three primary colors. When choosing colors for our illustrations, the main areas of focus are the flowers with pinks and purples and yellows, but also the greens for the leaves and stems. To mix vibrant colors, we need to pick primary colors that are similar in temperature. For example, if we want to mix a very vibrant purple, we would probably use a color red with a color blue. As you can see, it creates a wonderful purple color, very vibrant. If on the other hand, we're going to mix a warmer red with warm blue. The purple we will have look completely different. For this reason for this particular project, I chosen a color red and a color yellow, molaca lemon yellow, and this blue, which is cerulean or cyan blue, which again is a color blue. The reason why I decided to include ultramarine blue as well. Is to be able to create a darker tones when needed. Color value, so how light or dark the color is is also very important, if not even more important than color temperature, and having darker blue will help me to create more contrast in my paintings. Now let's go and test our colors. The best way to find your own color palette is experiment with your own paints. Different brands use different pigments and fillers, and the colors may behave very differently. We can't always predict how the color will look like by just looking at the label or packaging. So the best thing I can do is to encourage you to test your own colors. Let's see how we can go about it. Grab a piece of paper and something round that you can use to create a circle for our color wheel. It doesn't have to be perfect. It's just for us for our own purposes. You can even draw a circle if you're able to draw a perfect circle. And we want to divide it to roughly six parts. The easiest way for me to do it is go straight down, and then I'm going to go across and then across again. This way I have six parts. Now I'm going to use the primary colors I've chosen for my project. In this case, I've got here already my red on the magenta side of red. This is very intense color. I don't need quite as much, so I'm just going to dilute it with water and I'm going to fit in one of the parts. This is a gorgeous color, very, very intense. As you can see, when I add more water, it creates a beautiful pink color, perfect for our flowers. Let's go ahead and use blue. I'm going to use a gap here for our secondary color, and I'm just going to fill in this part here. I don't know what you think, but I just think that these colors scream spring to me already, even though I only have two of them on my paper. Now let's paint the yellow. Before you start painting with your yellow, make sure that your brush is completely clean as the yellow gets very easily contaminated with other colors. Again, very roughly, it doesn't have to be perfect. You can make your circle obviously smaller. I made it bigger for our class purposes. Now we can mix our secondary colors. I'm going to split the yellow to two parts and one part we'll have a little bit of magenta. This creates a beautiful orange color. Just look at this. It's so vibrant. Absolutely beautiful. Even though I am mixing the colors there on a cooler side, I can create the color that is actually quite warm and very vibrant. And to the other part of my yellow, I'm going to add my cold blue, and this creates a wonderful fresh green. Now, of course, you can divide your circle to more parts. You can have, for example, another two parts on side of yellow and blue and add more yellow, less blue, and then on the other side more blue and less yellow. This way, you can see what the color variation would look like and how many more hues you can create this way. Basically endless hues with the primary colors. Our final mix, of course, is this purple, which we already have, but let's just mix a little bit more. So we can fill in our part. It's not enough blue, let's just mix the blue, it looks more like a purple color. But that's exactly what I'm trying to say is that if you want the purple to be on the side of red or pink, you can obviously add more pink and if you want your purple to look cooler in temperature, you can simply add more blue This way let's demonstrate this quickly. Your color looks again. Different to this one. I hope this all makes sense to you and I hope I explained it well. I just wanted to quickly show you what the other color palette might look like. When I use the warm colors, the warm version of primary colors, the secondary colors look completely different. I think you can tell that this palette looks a lot more vibrant and a lot more spring like than this one. Now that we have our colors, see you in the next lesson when we going to sketch our floors. 5. Sketching Tulips Step by Step: Hello, and welcome back. In this lesson, I'll show you how to sketch and paint a composition with tulip flowers. I have a real example here, but of course, this is not necessary for you. You can use the reference photos you found earlier. I'll be just using the regular sketching paper here, the cheap computer paper, and regular pencil just to get a sense of what kind of composition I want to use for our final illustration. I encourage you to do the same. You can explore different compositions. You can decide to just paint one flower. I sort of think of bunch of three. I don't want to make it overcrowded, but I want to have some variety. So I'm going to try to show the tulip flowers from slightly different angles. So what I normally do is I try to fill in the space I have. So I'm going to just roughly sort of mark the boundaries of my illustration. I try not to leave too much white space. Tulip flowers are quite tall. I want to place the flowers towards the top of the page. So I'm going to start with the first one. And I think this egg shape is quite good. Another one might be facing this way. I'm trying to imagine how this composition would work and trying to make it pleasing to the eye. I want to incorporate a little bit of variety in this illustration as well. Then I want the third flower, a little bit lower down, but I don't want it to be directly below this one. I'm just going to move it sort of down and slightly to the side. Also, I imagine that this one is closer to me, so it might have a little bit more open shape than these ones at the back. I'm just going to start with simple lines. I like this one is very band. I just want to make a simple curve. Try to avoid straight line. In nature, rarely, we see those straight lines. I'm trying to keep it looking quite natural and another curve going down this way. So I think we have a good base here. Now, looking at this real flower but also looking at the reference photos, the leaves tend to be almost hugging the stem of the flower. I'm thinking I have this space here, so I definitely want a leaf coming here. Maybe I'll start from the top actually. I quite like this little curve here and it's probably going to be leaf of this flower. Just create that. Then how I'm going to shape this leave it should be thicker because it is towards the top of the flower. So again, just creating a nice curve and maybe hugging the stem here. I might as well just thicken it and to show that this is the stem. Also, I noted this kind of curving situation here. So I think I'm going to add this here. And also slightly on the other side. And this is going to add more realism into our final illustration. Now, this line is not going to be visible because the stem is going to be behind. And I decided that this stem actually is also going to be behind. I want to just show the this flower and this flower I decided is going to be in the front. This one is going to have stem coming out this way. Because it's slower down, you can have a smaller leaf. Also, it's nice to do some overlap. Again, it looks a little bit more natural and we can just finish it here. Now, what we're going to do with this flower, first of all, I like to create a real stem here. So we have this slight crisscross here, but we could eliminate it by just simply adding another leaf. I think we need to position it on the side as well. So I'm going to just simply go for it and start drawing it here. I quite like over the flower overlapping the leave scenario because, again, this looks more natural. And I will carry it to the bottom here. This criss cross, I'm just going to remove these lines and pretend that this leaf is actually on our side and the stem is hidden within the leaf. In terms of petals, again, I want to try to make it a little bit more varied. This one I want the main petal to cover majority of the what we see. So this is kind of like most kind of the outer petal that we see. And there is a line sort of here that I want to draw, and it's like a curve. Now, this one already gives us a perfect petal here. This one I want to show a little bit more of the outer petals. I think I might just see if I can create this smaller petal here, and then this one is the biggest one visible. There is a little bit of variety and there is a one picking up from here and maybe just a tiny bit of another petal here. And we can refine this shape a little bit. We have a slightly different looking flower. Now, this one is going to be interesting. I'll start with the one facing me here. Again, I just want it to be maybe like this. And this one here, we can see quite a lot of this one behind. And if I make this one slightly thinner, then I can possibly fit one more here, just peking out here. This one looks a little bit more round rounded shape. Not quite like it like that. I think I'm going to leave it like this. And then this line will be here. So this is the composition I'm going to be using, and I'm going to copy it to my main paper. I use the normal paper for sketching first because as you can see, I'm doing a lot of rubbing out and changing my mind. So I don't like doing this on the actual watercolor paper that we're going to be using for final painting. Use a light box to transfer my sketches onto watercolor paper. But if you don't have one, a sunny window works just well. Just remember to tape your paper to the window with some masking tape to keep it in place while you trace. Now provide a copy of the sketches in the resource material that you can just download and then you can print it yourself and then copy to your final watercolor paper before painting and just concentrate on a painting part if that's your preference. This is it for the sketching part, and I'll see you in the painting part, which is in the next lesson. 6. Painting Tulips with Gouache: Hello, and welcome back. As you can see, I've got everything prepared for our painting part. So let's go and mix our colors without further ado. This color, you'll see is very, very bright. I'm going to add to it just touch of yellow to warm it up. I'm just going to go and paint everything, making sure that the layer is quite thin. Yes. I completely forgotten that this color, you can see on a real flower is not very saturated here, not to worry. I'm just going to wet my paintbrush quite a bit, and I'm just going to pull this color out or you can just wet this area and then use your tissue and just press it down. You can see this color was very nicely removed from this part. So let's mix a little bit more of color we want to use. Don't worry if color is not exactly the same because in nature, you rarely have exactly the same. This one is a little bit warmer. It doesn't matter. Actually, it adds variety, and I think it looks very, very pretty. I'm doing the same thing. I'm just literally coloring in that tulip shape. Here I'm just going to remove any pigment from my brush and I'm just going to pull this color down so it's very, very watery. And very, very pale, just like in a real flower here. You can even go further and just even pull it out and make it more gradual. I'll add a little bit of pink again and do the same with our last flower. We just want to our aim is to just fit in the color at the moment, to the whole shape. Then we're going to refine it in a moment. Again, I'm trying to remember not to paint it all the way to the bottom. As you can see, I rinse my brush still having a bit of water and putting this color down, but a lot more watery than before. For now, I'm just going to leave it dry just a little bit. In the meantime, I'm going to mix our green. I've got our yellow. I'm going to remove it here just to show you how I do it. Again, don't be scared of the variety when you get to your green color. This is a very fresh, very bright spring green. I think that this part is a little bit darker, but that's okay because what I think is the inside of this leaf can be slightly darker. This is what I see when I look at the real flower. I'm avoiding painting in that stem because I want it to be lighter. But the inside of the flower can be a little bit darker. It's okay. I'll probably paint this part a little bit darker too. Of course, we're going to be using layers, as you can see, we just very much using the gouache like a watercolor. Okay. It doesn't have to be exactly very precise, but you might be a little bit more careful. With this one, I think I also want the side of this leaf to be a little bit darker. Then we're going to be mixing and blending with the other coral afterwards. This part needs to be again a little bit darker because it is underneath. H. Just a touch of water. You want enough water to make the paint flow, but not too much, so it's completely watery. Because this is underneath is going to also be slightly darker. This is quintan I'm just going to pull this color across here. Let's mix the green that is a lot lighter, more yellowy green. Let's mix more so we have enough. I want to add a little bit of blue. You want a yellowy green color. Now, this needs quite a lot more water. This is going to be very intense mix. I will just keep this as well and just move it down a little bit and make it a little bit more watery. This is a good color for stem, so I'm just going to go in with my stem and paint it. It's quite intense. Again, using just a little bit of water on a brush, I'm just going to pull it down. Now, this one can be, again, a slightly bit darker, so it looks different, so I'm just going to be mixing it. It's also underneath. This is very dark. Again, I'm going to add water dab it on a paper, and mix it. This is much better. This one is going to disappear somewhere here under this leaf. Now, I like this color and I'm going to use it here. This is the fold that we see here. It's quite amazing that we mix two of the same colors yellow and blue, and these colors look completely different. This one looks a lot more blue. What I'm going to do is I'm just going to cover it with this yellowy green. So it's a little bit more cohesive and it looks like a part of the same leaf rather than a separate leaf. This is our second fold, so that works perfectly fine. Now this leaf looks like it's a one leaf rather than made of two parts. At the moment, I just want to concentrate on this stem. I'm just going to paint it very lightly, should be quite pale. Now I'm going to use the same method I use on this leaf, but I'm going to use it on the leaves behind. Just to make the leaf look like it's the same leaf, I'm going to blend this hard line and paint over the darker part. I still want the pot to be darker, but I'm just trying to blend it together. If this doesn't work very well, I'm just going to again, add a little bit more blue to my mix. And blend it this way. The reason why I wanted it to be a little bit darker because I wanted to show the stem in front of the leaf that is in the back. That's why when painting this botanical style illustration, I like to use layers and I like to paint thinly. I'm going to use the same technique on this last leaf that we have here. There was a bit of a block here. Again, you can just use your brush to wrap it to reactivate this paint again and this way you can color it up. You still have one edge slightly darker. But now it's blended with the other color. And it all looks like a part of the same plant. We're going to slightly refine our flowers. As you can see on the real flower here that we have, you have this shadow when the leave the petals overlap. I can just add more pigment here because I can see more color and more intensity at the top of the flower. Then just to show that shadow here that the petal is creating, I'm just going to add it here. Now, again, you have the line. The line is actually lighter and then there is more pigment on the side. That's what I'm trying to do here. The line is here in the middle. I'm going to leave it unpainted, and then I'm going to I just rinse my brush from the pigment, try to blend it, and this line is therefore then visible and I need to drop it down a little bit, but no all the way to the end because that's when the flour becomes more pale. Again, you can rinse your brush and dry it off on a napkin and just pull with semi dry brush, this color down a little bit and this line. Okay. And again, the outer edge should be slightly darker than the middle so I'm just going to add this line. And already, this flower looks a lot more three dimensional that you was looking before. I'm quite happy with this, so I'm going to leave it alone. Now I can tell that this flower is a lot cooler in color. I'm going to add a little bit more pink. Again, I want the color to be more intense than the one we used, the mix we used before, which had a lot of water in it. Here again, I'm doing the same technique. I'm putting more pigment to the top. Then I'm going to drag this down. Where the shadow is, but only to a certain extent and then this one as well as good pigment on top. Then that line is here. Again, I'm going to make it quite dark here and on the other side. But I'm going to leave it unpainted in the middle. This way, I can blend this here. I also need a little bit more because this is the petal that is underneath. It's peeking through. I need a lot more pigment here because it needs to be quite dark. I wanted to show that this petal here is behind this one and also behind this one. Now, this one, also have this line here. I'm going to but the line is here somewhere. I'm going to indicate it this way. I'm going to rinsol the pigment. Going to remove some of the pigment here because I think it's too strong and I'm going to use it to fill in this petal a little bit more. I had a bit of a dry brush, so that's why I dipped it back in the water and by rinsing my brush and then drying it, I can now blend these harder edges because this should very seamlessly blend into the lighter part at the bottom. Going to remove the axis here. Now, this petal again need to be darker because it's hidden under. Especially the outer edge. Again, unraise the brush, dried it off, and I'm just going to pull this pigment across to blend it seamlessly. I'm happy with this. I don't want to mess it up. I'm going to leave it alone. I'm quite happy with the shape. We have finally our last tulip. It's a little bit more pink, but I add a little bit of yellow. As you can see on the white plastic, you can see more pigment. You can see there's more intense than the previous mix, which was a lot more watery. Getting the same principle, putting the pigment here at the top, and then I'm going to pull it down here. This is where the line is. Same with this petal here. Now there's the line here, so I'm going to again paint around it. Then I'm going to use dump brush to blend it all in and to look a little bit more natural. I must not forget that this needs to be pale, so I'm conscious of that. Rinsing my brush, drying it. So it's just dump and blending this pigment into the petal. You can also add more pigment if you feel that you've removed too much. Color now the bottom should be more pale. Again, I'm just going to remove it by wetting this area and using dry brush, trying to soak up this color to leave a little bit lighter bottom. We have the last part and this is the petal behind. I mixed a little bit more yellow this time. Because it doesn't have to be exactly the same. Again, I put the pigment at the top and then I'm going to drag it down. This is it for this part of the lesson, and I'll see you in the next one. 7. Adding Details to Tulip Art: Hello, and welcome back. In this lesson, I'll show you how to add details to our gouache painting. I selected several of the color pencils, and I thought that these colors might be similar to what we see here in this illustration. This dark color is quite good for this kind of darker flower, I think. Where the shadow falls from the petal, I'm just going to make it a little bit darker. This is also a good moment to refine our petals. This part of the flower and the petal is darker, so I'm just going to shade it down. And blend it down with the outer edge. Now, when you look closely on the tube flowers, there is these kind of lines on the petals very, very fine that go to the middle. So they sort of shape this way and they go to the middle. So I'm using the same sort of strokes as I was using with a brush, but with my coloring pencil this time. I'm just trying to show some of these lines they go the opposite way from this middle line of the petal as the petal curls behind the same situation is here. Again, I'm going to refine this edge. There's a little bit of shadow here. I'm going to show this and this is the direction of those lines. Starting from here, they go this way. And then they meet with the rest of the petal. The petal is here. Now, this area is probably darker, so I'm just going to add this shadow here. And same way here. I'm just going to add these lines I think that refines this very nicely. I can just blend this together because this is supposed to be quite dark as it's behind. I think already by adding the very subtle lines this suddenly looks a lot more like botanical illustrations that we see in a book sometimes. I'm going to do the same to the petals behind. I'm just going to add that shadow that is inside, and I'm going to do the same to the rest of the flowers. Now, this flower is a little bit different. I think this color is a little bit closer to this one. If you have colored pencils, if you have a bigger selection, that allows you to use warmer red, then you can do that. If you of course follow the same colors as I'm using here. Again, I'm just going to use this color pencil to add these lines. Now, this color is a lot lighter. I see if I have something similar. This is a little bit darker. These lines are not very visible, so I'm going to use this one instead. That already looks a lot better. I can add this darker color here. And these lines are close together and they just go all the way down. This color is a lot darker, so I need to be more careful with it. So just don't want to overdo it. I need to press lighter. If you have a color that is darker, just lighter strokes and don't press so hard on the paper, basically. The lines go this way and on this one, the lines will be going this way. Now, this tulip again is more on the purple side. I'm going to try with this color, but I might have to go back with a darker one. Again, I'm starting from the top and the lines are going to go this way. They go all the way down and the same here. I can just blend this color, it blends with the colors we used in our painting. Same here. I added to the top and now I just going to use this to create these fine lines. Let's move on to our stems and leaves. I have this green, which I think it's pretty much very similar color to what do we use for the paint. I need to refine this edge a little bit because I wasn't too careful when I was painting. And I guessing that the light, since this part is lighter, the light comes from this side. So I'm just going to shade slightly, first of all, underneath the ball of the flower, and then it's slightly on this side. So I'm just kind of guessing that the light falls on this side. I'm going to try to Oh, that's actually okay. Make the lines on the leaves. And I'm just going to draw them. Now I need slightly dark color for the inside. Again, I'm going to kind of refine this part, show that this is also kind of curling here. There's a little bit of shadow, especially if the light is coming from this side, then there will be a little bit of shadow under this fold. I'm just going to add this. Then just indicate these lines. If this is too light, I have even darker color here. So you might find that actually you need to use quite a lot darker colors of the coloring pencils that you maybe initially thought were suitable. That's what happened to me. I'm actually using the darker green. To show these lines and when the color is lighter, I just press less. The same is going to refine the stem a little bit, slightly shadow here, and then on this side, and definitely darker here because it's underneath this leaf. Which means that this part of the leaf also is going to be darker. The coloring pencils are great for adding this. We have the lovely light stem here, so I don't want to make it. But you see how I can just refine this shape, even if I wasn't too careful with my paintbrush. Then I'm just going to add light shadow on this side. All I have to do is add a little bit of those lines on this leaf. So I'm going to start with this color and see how I go. I might need to I'm just following the shape of the leaf. Yeah, this one is okay for the lighter part, and I might need to switch to the darker green on the other side. Now, this spot is definitely darker. And this is it. This is the final illustration, and I'll see you in the next lesson when we go into sketch and then paint daffodil. 8. Sketching Daffodils Easily: So let's begin sketching. I decided I want to draw and paint three daffodils similar to the tulips. So I want to evenly space them out and I also want them to face slightly different way so we can have some variety. So I'm going to start from the top one, and I imagine that this will be the top of our flower trumpet. I position it a bit like this. So this is going to be our jaggedy line. This is the trumpet going down. The daffodils are more complicated than tulips. But I'm sure if we look closely on our reference photos or on the real flowers, if they available to you, we can manage to sketch them. So I'm just literally following what I see here, and I see this petal coming here. I like this little upturn here, so I'm going to capture that. And then this petal sometimes it's easier to just capture the angle before trying to capture the actual curves of the petals. Again, this one is coming slightly like this. And then I see This petal here. This one is visible behind, very, very narrow because it's behind. And I see one more petals more it's more of it visible here and then it just hides behind this one. So that's our first flower. The next one, I would like to position like this. I'm just going to hold it like that. Hopefully I can do this with one hand and the other one used for drawing. I just wanted to be slightly below and the top of the trumpet here. Let me just catch this quickly. This is our jacked line of the trumpet the top, and I'm going to hide the other petal behind. Now, this one is the angle I see is there and then it goes down a very narrow triangle. Then I can see this petal here and the angle of that one is quite wide here. Again, sharp angle and a nice curve going down. There is a petal just poking out here. These ones are overlapping, which is quite nice. Then there is a one petal visible here. I will deal with the stems later, but I want to paint the last flower facing us around here. I'm sharing with you the process how I approach the sketching when I'm using the wheel flowers. But of course, you can just use your own knowledge or your own reference photos or your own reference flowers if they are available to you. So I'm quite happy with the position of the flowers, and I'm going to try to figure out how I'm going to position our stems and leaves. So this stem is going to be probably coming down around here. This one, the sepal will be here, bending downwards. I can imagine it's going to be coming out this way. And then this last the one facing us. I just don't want to create this tangent here, so I'm trying to come from As you can see, there is a lot of rubbing and thinking because I don't want it I think I'm going to position it closer to this one here. And we might hide some of the stems behind the leaves. I really wanted to have one of the leaves sort of bending and creating this lovely flow here. I think I might use this one, in fact. So this is it. I think I'm quite happy with this particular composition. I'm going to transfer to my watercolor paper, and I'll see you in the next lesson when we go into paint these flowers. I'll see you then. 9. Painting Daffodils in Gouache: Hello, and welcome back. In this lesson, we will paint our beautiful daffodils. So as you can see, I transferred my sketch already onto the watercolor paper. I also cleaned up my palette, but I just left a little bit of green because we are going to be using green anyway. And this is also a good time to change our water. So I only have one water container, and I decided I'm going to change it. So my yellow doesn't get contaminated too much with the magenta we were using before. I'll start with mixing a nice light yellow wash. I'm going to again, I'm making it quite loose with water, very, very light, like watercolor. We're going to paint the whole area of each flower. It's pretty much like coloring in at this stage. Making sure that it's quite light. I'm starting with the main flower here. But I'm not too concerned because I'm just going to coloring the whole flower area. This is lovely bright yellow. I feel that especially when you use the professional grade guash, you have these beautiful color intensity. So as you can see, I just cover the whole area of the flour, and I'm going to be adding some refinements later. I'm going to let this layer dry somewhat when I'm just coloring the remaining flowers. Again, I'm going to do pretty much the same with this one. Color I'm probably going to make this line a little bit jaggedy, but it doesn't matter because we're going to go over this part with another layer of paint later. I'm just coloring in the shape I sketched. At this stage, I'm just using the yellow paint as it comes from a tube. I didn't mix it with any other colors. It's pretty much straight from tube, yellow. And this way, I know that my yellow is going to be lovely and bright. And that's what I want for this illustration. I want this illustration to be very nice and fresh and springy. These flowers like tiny little sunshines. I just mixed a little bit more of paint with water so I can carry on with my last flower. And now I'm going to move on to mixing slightly darker hue. Again, I'm going to add the yellow. It might be called lemon yellow. It's the cooler side of the yellow. Now I'm going to mix in a little bit of that magenta. I don't want to make it too dark yet, but I want to add some shadow into the petals that perhaps are behind because these petals overlap. I decided that it's a good idea to make this petal behind a little bit darker. Of course, I have my handy paper towel here to mop up any excess. I'm going to do it a little bit to this petal because it's also behind. Basically, adding a little bit of shadow and blending with the rest just to show that this part is behind the other part. If I wipe my brush almost dry, then I can basically blend this area here. Of course, this area is going to also have a shadow here. I'm going to add this here too. Again, I wipe my brush and just blend it in, add a little bit more here. I think I need more shadow in this area here. This way, we can see which petal is slightly behind and which one is in front. You can even add these lines that you can just see here. Follow the shape of the petal. I just need to mix a little bit more paint because I run out of my color. So I'm just going to mix a little bit more. And just to show that this is the base of this trumpet, this one is quite dark. So back to yellow and a little bit water. Wipe it off, and then I'm going to drag it down. And this way, it looks a little bit less flat. I literally dried off my brush now, and I'm just going to pull it down a little bit. This time, I want my paint to be quite a lot more intense without quite that much of water. I'm just going to make another mix on the side. This is definitely too dark. As you can see, is very, very intense color. This is still too dark. I need to add pretty much all of this yellow. Now this is better. It's a very, very dark almost a gk yellow. So I'm going to load my brush with this color and I'm going to move on to the trumpets. Let's start with this one. The line is somewhat jiggy here just to show this part. Then I'm going to drag this paint down and show the shade the lines, the textured lines that are on the trumpet. Again, I'm going to wipe my brush, clean it, wipe it, almost dry, and then blend it. Let's make more mix. Yes, I probably need more yellow. I think this color is okay. It's light orange color. This one is slightly more open. I'm basically moving my brush up and down to make this shape. Then starting from the edges, I'm just going to pull down this paint. And I'm cleaning my brush, wiping it off. And I'm going to somewhat blend it down with the rest of the trumpet. I think I might need to add a little bit more paint here. And I want a little bit more here at the base. This part should be quite a lot dark. I'm just going to add more color because I can see as it it dried a lot lighter than I wanted it to be and I want to create some contrast between the petals and the trumpet itself. And now we have this intense mix, not too much water here and I'm going to paint the middle of this flower. Again, just moving my brush in up and down manner. I'm following the circle but showing that this is not even. Then when I look down, I can see that it's a little bit darker inside, but the color is not as saturated. I'm actually going to use a little bit of that green mixed in with the yellow that we had earlier. This is the color that I'm going to use at the inside. I just realize that I need to paint the underneath first. This is this part here. I'm trying to paint first. I'm going to leave it for a moment and I'm going to come back to it and the same for this flower here. I'll probably come back to this one as well and refine it a little bit later. I'm just going to add more yellow here. Touch of blue. Again, this mixes a little bit looser, a little bit more watery, and then we will refine our final colors later. There is the leaf that is going to go here. This spot should be darker, but we can refine it later. This leaf is just behind here and comes out here. I'm going to proceed with this stem here. I need a little bit more water, my paint dry already. Just a tiny bit darker. And again, I decided to sort of bend this leaf and let it turn. Can clean this with a towel. And perhaps tiny bit darker. Open this one. Behind. This leaf is creating a shadow. It's nice to add a slightly darker tone here. I am going to use this orange that I premixed, and I'm just going to add a little bit of that green from here, and that should give me more or less the color I'm after. I need to make it more intense and go back to it. What I see here is something like this. I'm going to add this saturated green, dirty green color to my petals just to make them look more natural because as I look at these petals, yes, my daffodil started to dry a little bit. It's just to refine it a little bit. This is what I'm after. Now I'm going to try to just drop in that shadow in between where the pollen sits, something like this. As previously, we're going to add details to this illustration with color pencils. At the moment, I'm just going to let it dry a little bit. I'll see you in the next lesson when we're going to add the details to this illustration. 10. Refining Details on Daffodils: Welcome back. In this lesson, we will add some details to this illustration with color pencils that I have here. Now, I just wanted to point out to you, there are some pencil lines that I can see quite visible on my illustration. So I'm just going to get round with my trusty eraser and try to at least remove some of them. It's obviously quite impossible to remove the ones that already been covered with paint. However, I think that sometimes they actually add a certain charm into the illustration. And since we're going to be edding the details with color pencil, they don't really matter that much, so I'm going to leave it as it is at the moment. But I just wanted to point out that if you want to remove some of the graphite lines, it's a good time to do it after you painted and everything is dry to touch. So I'm going to grab some colors, so I'm definitely going to grab orange, light green, perhaps one slightly darker green. I have some yellows here. Something like this should be enough, so you don't need a lot of pencils. I'm not even sure if I'm going to use this one, but let's have a look. This orange looks like a good color to refine our trumpets here. I might just add a little bit of shadow here and there just to indicate that this one is it might even need a darker color. I just realize I've got this very dark orange here, so I'm probably going to add this. I just want to indicate the shade underneath there. That's it. That's much better, and here as well. So I'm just literally going around not exactly everywhere, but in some places just to make this a little bit darker. And on the inside, a little bit as well, and certainly here. So this part will be needs to be more defined. Then I lost my shadow lines, the ones that are quite strong here. I'm just going to go back with the color pencil this time. This line, I want to be more refined as well, so I'm just going to go over this one and just a little bit more color at the base. I think this is enough. I'm not going to add anymore. Now I need something almost brown. This brown might actually work to just add a little bit of refinement around them pollen stems. So I'm just really showing that they there and the darkest part should be right in the middle, right in between of these. So something like this. I use the same color to refine this sapo here. So I can see it's quite dark here. And then it's got these lovely kind of lines. And it's very crispy and a little bit darker here. So that's fine. Now, this part here, I can see quite a bit of green here, and I didn't manage to edit quite with my paint. So I'm just going to help myself here with my light green color pencil. And I'm just adding this green color here. That's already better. And I think I'm going to do the same here. And this way, this petal is going to stand out a little bit more. That's better. And now with a darker green, I'm just going to just go there and here just to sort of refine. I think I want to show that this is the leaf that overlaps. So this is also a chance to refine the edges of any leaves. The ends are usually darker, so I'm just going to sort of blend this. And I'm going to do the same here, darken this tip, and then just maybe line in between in the middle. I think I have even darker green. I might try this one. If this one is a little bit more refined. Now, this leaf turns over and that line ends up here. I'm going to make the bottom slightly darker and I'm going to define the edges of that leaf a little bit more happy with that. Then this stem will have a little bit of shadow here underneath the petal, so I'm just going to add it here and again, refine this edge here. It's just a few little details, and I think this already looks a little bit more refined. Of course, I can add the line here and refine this leaf that is sticking out from this side. I just add a little bit of this color just to make it more balanced here. Now, with our yellow petals, this yellow is my darkest, I think, before I go to oranges, so I'm just going to try to use this one to refine these shapes just a little bit more I've already added this line with a paint, but I'm just going to follow the same with the color pencil. So just and the same here. Follow the shape of the petal, the same on this flower here. So it's curving this way and then this way, this petal is turned, so we need to go down this time. But very similarly, I just want to indicate that this petal is behind, and this one is in front. A few lines here. So notice that I'm moving my pencil or trying to move my pencil to follow the shape of the petal. And I'm happy with this. I think I'm going to leave it as it is. And we're going to move on and sketch the cherry blossoms. In the next lesson. I'll see you there. 11. Sketching Cherry Blossoms: Welcome back. In this lesson, we will sketch a composition for our spring floral blossoms, tree blossoms, similar to these ones in the style of cherry blossoms. I think I want my branch to come perhaps from this angle here, and then we will go down a little bit out. Perhaps finishing somewhat here, and then I want another branch coming this way and shape like this or perhaps even going like that. Now, this part will be a little bit thicker. I want this one to be the main branch, so I'm just going to thicken up this line a little bit. This one will be a little bit thinner. Now, I noticed that at the end of my branches, that's where I see the leaves. I'm going to just quickly sketch. They only just emerge. These are not very big leaves. We don't have many leaves on the trees yet. They tend to be the smaller kind. Then they are also occasionally visible. Somewhat in the middle coming up from the sort of something like this, perhaps, and it's time to decide on our flowers. We have some flowers perhaps coming from the main. I think it's easier for me to sketch them as a circle and ovals. The ones that are going to be facing us are going to be circles with the middles here. The ones that are going to be facing sideways, perhaps here. They're going to be ovals. Something like this, maybe a little bit bad here, and I would like another facing here, perhaps an oval here and another circle here. Let's make this one like this and then another one here, and then another full flower. Here. Of course, we also have these lovely tiny buds that we can add. I don't want to make this composition too busy. As I can see, these flowers are quite sparse, so I'm just going to add a little details, obviously, that can be added later. And perhaps perhaps move this a little bit further out like this. I'm quite happy with this composition. Let's just refine our flowers, our petals a little bit. These type of flowers have usually five petals. These ones are quite simple to sketch. The petals have a rounded shape and they don't have very sharp corners, they rather round. If we look straight up, we probably see where the pollen sits, something like this. They basically little dots little marks. Let's make our petals nice and round and there should be five petals on each flower. It's easier for me to concentrate on the ones that are facing me directly. First of all, and then I'm going to refine the ones that are facing the sides. We have this one as well. They're just like little short marks and perhaps some dots and then beautiful round petals. So it's another flower here. Now, this one is perhaps going this way. Actually, I want to make it more like this. In this position, the petal here will be looking like an oval. The one on the side also like ovals coming out from the ends of this oval. The petals behind are going to be looking a lot more fuller than this one. Then behind this front petal here, we can see the pollen. You can make a bad the buds are covered partially by the tiny sepose then we see the end of them. Again, the same leaf or sepora and then round the shape here. We've got another flower here and here I think I'm going to make another bud. Again, this petal here is going to look like an oval going this way. Then these are going to be ovals and then behind are these larger petals. We see the pollen coming from the middle of the central petal here. This way we have a nice sideways facing flower. I might even add one here just a small one. This time we're painting a lot more flowers and the smaller flowers might even do a little leaf here. Following the same principle. Very simple. This is our bud here. The couple of leaves. They can overlap this petal here, and our final central flower here, nice rounded pets. Series of short marks, slightly curved and then a few dots that indicate where the pollen sits. This is it. I think I'm quite happy with this composition. I'm going to copy it to my watercolor paper, and then we can paint it together. I'll see you there in the next lesson. 12. Painting Cherry Blossoms: Hello, and welcome back. In this lesson, we will paint our beautiful cherry blossoms. As you can see, I already transferred my composition, my sketch onto the watercolor paper, and I'm ready to mix my colors. I cleaned my palette. I added ultramarine blue to my palette as well. I also replaced my water so it's nice and clean. And let's start with our flowers. I'm going to wet my paintbrush, use some water, and a little bit of that magenta color. This color is very bright. I'm going to do something similar to what I did with our tulip. I'm going to add a little bit of yellow. It's now very orange, so I need more pink. I just need a lot of pink with a slight warm from the yellow. This color looks very good to me and I'm going to use it. Again, the same principle. I'm just coloring in the shape of the flowers. This color is very, very dark, so I need more water. I'm going to dilute it quite a bit. This petal is very dark, so I'm just going to press it down. And continue with the rest of the pets. I need quite a lot of water in this mix. When my brush is dry, I can soak up the excess of paint. I'll do the same with the flower buds. I'm not worrying too much about the details at this moment. I'm just blocking in the color and I'm going to refine our petals afterwards. The color mix should be very light at this stage. This is our buds. Wow. Whenever you see the water pulling in into one place, you can just dry your brush and then soak up all the excess of water. So for our leaves, we need somewhat the saturated color. I still want to add a little bit of this magenta. I'm going to add quite a lot of yellow. And I'm going to try with this lighter blue first and see what kind of color I can get here. This is a very sort of dirty wash. This is a little bit better. So perhaps a little bit more blue and a little bit more yellow. To mix the green and then add a tiny bit of that magenta color here. This magenta is very strong. As you can see, sometimes it takes few attempts to get the color I want. Now, this is more like the color I'm looking for. So it's kind of very desaturated green. And I'm going to use it with quite a bit of water. To paint the leaves. We don't have many leaves in this case. It's usually the flowers that are the star of the show on the trees at the beginning of the spring before all the leaves become more prominent. And here. I'm painting in the same color for now, and I can always drop a little bit of the lovely magenta or maybe yellow even to some of them later. If I'm going to drop a little bit more magenta into this color, I can use it for the sepose our buds and also I'm going to use it of the branches. So I can see one here. And here. I'm using the very tip of my brush. Although I'm using a big brush, I just put the paint on the very tip and I use the tip of the brush to create these very thin lines of our branches. And here we go. Another T one. We can turn it into early to leave. It's not a problem. If you make a mistake like this, it's not actually a mistake anymore. That looks quite Natural. I'm quite happy with this shape, and I want to add a little bit of definition to this later, but let's just color in the rest of our beautiful branch. A now I want to paint the petals and I want to refine them a little bit more. I'm going to go back to our magenta again. I'm just going to add a tiny bit of yellow. Not adding too much water this time. I'm going to drop this color in the middle of the flowers. Just be careful. The ones that are on the side, this dark color is going to be visible on the side as well. Whilst the one facing forward, I wanted to be in the center. The same here. I just quickly want to add this color and then we're going to blend washing my brush and drying it off. As this paint is still I need the more intense mix. For this one. This paint, although dried still I can just drag a little bit of this color towards the pets. And let the color bleed into the petals a little bit. Maybe a little bit too much here, but we can mop it up with a dry brush, not a problem and blend it around here. When the petal is wet, we can just drop the more intense color again. Dry brush and blended with the patas. Sometimes you need to pick up a little bit more pigment. If you see any hard lines, you can just go over with sort of semi dry brush. That looks already a lot better. The paint dries very quickly, so it's important to from time to time, add a little bit of water if you can see the dried I'm just going to pick up some of the color, the tiniest bit of yellow. This is a lot more intense pigment here. I'm just going to add because this area is already wet because we literally just blended it. I just want to add a little bit more contrast and just add it just there and there and it will beautifully spread into the still wet parts. This can be also added to the sepals visible on the flower buds. This just adds a little bit more contrast and makes it a little bit more interesting. But I just want to make a slightly darker color for the branches. The best way to go is to use a slightly darker blue and this will look purple. Beautiful purple. But when we add our yellow to it, we should have a kind of purply brown color. Purply brown, magenta brown. It's a little bit darker than the one we had before. This way, I can just add some more definition and a little bit more contrast. I'm simply going over these lines again in some places. They don't all have to be this color. But here and there, I'm just making this branch a little dark. This is it for our painting pot, and I will let it dry now and I'll add the final details with colored pencils in the next lesson. 13. Cherry Blossom Details: Welcome back. In this lesson, we will refine this illustration further, and we will add some final details with the color pencils. So I selected few colors here. I have this kind of very dark kind of auburn color, and I have another one which is kind of like a dark magenta. I found a very dark saturated green as well. I think these three colors are pretty much what I need. If you have some brown, dark magenta or pink color or bug and color and a dark shade of green that should suffice, I'm going to start with my darkest color, and I'm going to define and clean up the lines of the branches a little bit. It's easier to do that with color pencil than with brush. I also find that I can do it a lot quicker doing it this way. That's why I very much like this technique of using gouache and colored pencil, watercolors and colored pencil. It also gives me this beautiful texture. Now, we need to add the pollen. So like in our sketch, I'm just going to make a series of lines. They like little semicircles. They like little curves, and then I'm adding few loose ones, almost like dots. The ones that are coming from the side petals coming this way. Some of them are longer Now, with this magenta color, I can refine the Petros a little bit. First of all, I'll clean up the edges a little bit. A some lines, some creases on the petals. I don't want to outline every single petal, as you can see, I'm going around them quite sparingly. I'm only refining the edges where I feel I need to especially on this side flowers that might be necessary. I'm just going to add a little bit variety here on the leaves perhaps making one side slightly darker, adding some shadows with the color pencil. Look at this beautiful texture here. The leaves tends to be darker as they come in from the stem. Then usually this is where the light hits them. They I light it towards the tip. You can of course, use your pencil to refine any shapes if they need refining. I think this is it for our cherry blossom illustration and I hope you enjoy process as well. I look forward to see you in our next lesson in which I'll show you how to sketch a beautiful magnolia flower. I'll see you there. 14. Sketching Magnolias Easily: This lesson, we will sketch our composition for beautiful Magdolia flowers. But before we do that, I wanted to quickly show you something that I found in this amazing book, which is all about anatomy of the flowers. So what's inside the flowers? Perhaps we don't normally see unless we obviously dissect the flowers we pick. So this photograph is what's inside magnolia flower? As you can see, this particular magnolia is still enclosed and is cocooned around in this shell. And it's surrounded by tiny, tiny, tiny hairs called bracts. Also, I learned from this book that the magnolia flowers doesn't actually have petals, but something called tapos which is somewhat between petals and sepals. So it's a little bit harder than petals. So I just thought that's quite interesting. And I just wanted to quickly show you because we don't normally see flowers in sort of this kind of view when it's cut across. But let's move on to our sketch. So let's think how we want to position our flowers. Again, for the composition's sake, I think always three flowers or the odd number of flowers works best. And I also want to show magnolia flowers in the different stages of blossoming. So I want one flower to be fairly open, one kind of emerging, and one perhaps as a magnolia bud still sort of with petals quite close together. I would like the main flower to be on this side, and perhaps slightly tilting this way. I'm going to just circle here that this is where I want this flower to be. And perhaps there will be a branch here and another flower coming this way. And this is, I think, where I want to position the flower that is opening slightly, but not quite completely. And somewhere here, perhaps even I create a little split here, and I'll show the kind of beginning of a leaf here. And then here as well. And then here we will have the magnolia with the petals and cloths, I think it needs to be a little bit larger, something like this. I kind of already thickened the stem, so this works fine. I can also create a little bar going this way, and that should do. Actually, I might need the space for the tapos so we'll see. We'll see if we put maybe a little leaf here. So let's start with our first flower. I sort of envisage I sort of imagine that this stem is coming out this way, and therefore, the center of the flower will be somewhat here. I would like to show a little bit of the pollen stamens, maybe some few stamens around here. Perhaps the temples are sort of curving this way. As they open, they are still a little bit bent. So we see that overlap here. And I'm thinking there will be a tempo behind there and another one coming this way. There should be another one and sort of this way. I'm going to create one behind, and there should be one around here. I also learned that magnolia flowers have depending on variety, but it can have six to I think 12 event tapos. I think I want this petal to come a little bit closer here. Yes, that looks better. And this pet will be a little bit wider. So as you can see, adjusting things. I think I'm quite happy with this open flower here. Now, I think I'm going to create this little bad of the leaf coming this way. I just want things to overlap nicely. Then I'm going to carry on with this branch here. This is a good opportunity to put another one of these leaves emerging perhaps. There's another stem here. And this is where our petal is going to be. So the petal shape is quie white at the top and then narrowing down to create sort of and then we're going to have those beautiful lines that sometimes the veins that we see on photographs. And this one I want to be a little bit more open. So I'm just going to add a few tapos here. Perhaps here as well. Then one slightly more open and perhaps we see it curving inwards. What I also notice that some of the tepos to start with are the ones on the very outside. This one is a little bit too big. I think perhaps I'll just make this one. We don't have much space here. I don't want to overcrowd things, so I'm just going to leave it, and I'm just going to add one on this side. I think this branch is going to go this direction. And again here, we're going to have the perhaps not as long. The sort of budding leaf and from here, we will create the the bud. And we only see as much of the flower. Usually, the leaves come very close at the bottom of the flowers. I notice just looking at the photographs. This is where we see these kind of green buds from which the magnolia leaves are going to emerge. So I'm quite happy with this composition, and I'm going to leave it at that. I'm going to copy it to my watercolor paper, and I'll come back to the next lesson where we're going to paint these beautiful flowers. I'll see you there. 15. Painting Magnolias in Gouache: This lesson, we will paint our beautiful magnolia flowers. I want my magnolia to be somewhat between purple and pink. I'm just using water to mix it all up and reactivate it. I'm going to create my mix around here. Because I want it to be a little bit purple, I'm going to add a small amount of this ultramolin blue. It's like a color side of pink. Again, using quite a lot of water. I am going to fill in my magnolia flowers. I'm just going to drag this color around. I'm just going to try to avoid this area because this is where I want my stamens to show through a little bit. If your color is already quite intense on the paper, you can just use water. I left my sketch lines quite heavy this time. As these flowers are a little bit more complex, I thought that that will make it a little bit easier for you to find out and figure out what's going on. Again, I am just filling in the whole shape first. Just color blocking everything apart from this area where I want the stamen to show later, something like this. The petals don't come to quite points, so they are a little bit rounded at the end. I'm just trying to round the ends a little bit. This one is a little bit sharper because we see it from side. I'm just going to leave it this way. My paint dries very, very quickly, so I need to add more water to our mix, and I'll continue this way. I'm just going to mix a little bit more of my very light purple pink purple color and make sure that I have quite a lot of water because I want this first layer to be a watercolor wash. Again, this is not a very sharp tip. It's actually quite soft. I'm going to fill in the whole flour. Here because I've got quite a lot of pigment, I'm going to use just water. This tip looks more sharp because we see it from the d angle. But the petals that are more in front of us, I don't want it to be ending in a sharp point. This one is okay to be sharp because it's on a side. As you can see, I'm pretty much coloring in the area of the flower. I'm just going to add this tapo here, just coming off the side and unfurling as it blossoms. I'm going to do the same to our smallest flower. The is still in a bud form. Again, this is the easy part, just to fill in the color. I'm going to take care of these lovely green buds of the leaves. I'm going to mix my very light spring yellow. I'm going to take some of this yellow here, move it to another area of my palette. I'm going to add this lighter blue. It's just because I know it creates this beautiful spring fresh green. I'm just going to fill in the leaf buds. They look a little bit like a bean shape, so they slightly wider at the top and they narrow down. Now I'm going to address the branch. I'm going to mix another color. I'm going to take this magenta. I'm going to add quite a bit of ultramarine blue, and this is very much purple. But I'm going to add yellow to the mix. This is a very nice color for the main branch. It's a tree branch. It's not a stem, and therefore, this part actually is going to be green later. I'm just going to leave it. Again, I'm just trying to follow this raggedy shape of the branch. I'm going to add a little bit more blue to my green mix and I'm going to paint this stem This kind of slightly darker green or more pronounced green, I'm just also to add a little bit of dimension to our leaf bads. And this way they look a little bit more t dimensional. I want to use yellow this time, so I'm going to take this yellow as it is. Actually, I'm not going to mix it with any other color, and I'm going to paint our stomach. I'm now mixing a slightly more intense color, you can see, maybe not as dark. I'll add a little bit more pink, and I need to add more and I'm going to think where the shadow would fall. So I want this petal to show that it's actually kind of curving this way, and this is going to be the top of it, so it's going to be lit the most. This color is a little bit too purple, so I'm just going to add a little bit more pink and dilute it with water. I'm just going to drag this color out Now, with almost completely dry brush, I can just blend this area. Now, another shadow is going to be here because this part is curving inside and the light is coming from this side. I'm going to create this hard edge here just to show that this is the edge of this petal. This is actually beautiful blending already, but I'm just going to wet my paintbrush, dab the excess of water and with a damp paintbrush, I'm just going to mix this color with the rest of the petal. Now this petal also has the bend and it's around here. I just about see it. I'm going to follow the same principle, dragging the paint down to the bottom of this petal. I want this petal to have more light on this side. I'm just going to wet this area, dry my brush and just mop up the excess of paint on this side. Wet where I have too much pigment and then dry my brush and wipe this sort of away from this area. That looks a lot better. Now, this petal also going to have a little bit darker shadow here. Gain wet, dp the axis of water and mix it with the rest of the petal or tapo. I'm going to leave this one quite light, but I'm going to add a little bit more color to the bottom. This part is darker, the middle part is darker than the outside edge. Just make it a little bit more round here. Actually, I realized that this petal is going to be lighter on the top as the sun or light will be heating it here and it will be more intense on this side. I just want to make sure that these parts are slightly darker and this part is also going to be dark. Painting white and wet. Adding the color slightly more purple now showing us the nice shadow. I decided to use it here as well. And whenever I feel we need a little bit more shadow. Now, again, the same thing with a slightly down brush, I'm just going to blend it with the rest so it looks a little more seamless. I'm going to do this on the special as well. Now, I want to somewhat refine our stamin. I'm just going to put this pigment at the very tip of my brush and I'm just going to create a gaps in between the stamens. I'm going to mix more paint, a little bit of my red and ultramarine. I'm going to add a little bit more water just to make the paint flow better. Again, I'm thinking where the light falls. At the very bottom, there will be a shadow here. I'm going to have the hard edge here because this petal is bending outwards. Now I'm going to clean my brush from the any pigment and dab it on my tissue, and again, just blend this together. Like so. This is our biggest petal and it's in the shadow at the bottom. There will be shadow just behind this largest petal. And now I'm going to clean my brush and I'm going to blend it. This bad needs to be slightly darker. I'm going to try to blend all the hard edges because this is our one whole petal. That's better. I just imagine that this petal will be very light and this one again have slight shadow to it. I have still color here. I just need to add a small amount of water. To define our last petal. Again, if the sun is heating this way, this petal here, the one little one behind is going to be in the shadow and this is going to be our hard edge. I'm going to wipe my brush off the pigment and with a slightly damp brush, I'm going to blend this in here. I think I'll leave it and we add some details with color pencils. I'll see you in the next lesson. 16. Refining Details on Magnolias: This lesson, we will add some details to our beautiful magnolia flowers. Magnolia flowers have these beautiful lines quite clearly visible. They tend to be more visible on the outside petals. So they're going to be very fine and they come in to the center. It's sort of this movement on this side and the curving the opposite way on the other side of the petal. These lines also help us to define the shape better. Using the pencils also gives us a opportunity to refine some of the lines and edges like this one, perhaps here. Just to separate these tapos more, I'm just going to add a stronger line here and just blend it. I'm going to do the same here. We can do a lot with color pencils, so we can use them to our advantage. I think this part of the painting is still quite a little bit damp, although it doesn't feel like it, but I can see I have some resistance when I'm using the pencils. I'm just going to add a little bit more definition here. And to the underside of this tapo here. Now here, I'm just going to strengthen that edge and you see that this create a lovely transition. Now, this tapo is curving this way. We have to remember that those lines are going to follow this way. Let's move to our lines. I think the lines are going to be slightly visible here. They going to follow this way. And this way. Now, this will be visible here. We can now go in and refine this area somewhat. I noticed that usually there is one line in a center that tends to be stronger than the other ones. A this urge needs to be refined a little bit too. I'm going to put my pink away and I'm going to concentrate on the green parts now. I think it just needs a very small refinement here and there. I'm just going to add a little bit more shadow on this side and here. Here and there. I don't want to outline every shape, but I just want to strengthen that three dimensional effect that we created with paint. I think this area also needs to be a little bit darker. I'm just going to add this with my coolor pencil. Refining this edge. And finally, I'm just going to add purely for the texture. A few Jacki Day lines here and there. But I think the color that I use the gouache is pretty good already, and I don't really need to add too much to it. This is it for our final Magnolia Flower illustration. I really hope that you enjoy this process as much as I did, and I hope I'll see you in the next lesson in which I'll show you how to digitize our hand painted illustrations. I'll see you there. 17. Scanning & Digitising Art: In this lesson, I'll show you how I digitize my illustrations. I use a scanner to transfer my illustrations to Photoshop. If you don't have a scanner, you can use a high resolution camera or a scanning app on your phone. I scan my images with 600 DPI resolution, but 300 DPI is also good. I select the TIF format for my files as TIF provides better quality. After I scan my illustrations, I open it in Photoshop. Photoshop is great as it allows me to remove background from the images in just a couple of clicks. But first, I need to duplicate my layer to save the original just in case I switch off the visibility of this original layer. If you scan it upside down like mine, you can go to Image, Image rotation and select 100 degrees. I use the new Object Selection tool in Photoshop to remove the background from my object. I like to work in a non destructive way, so I use a layer mask in case there's parts that I want to adjust later. I actually noticed that there are a couple of areas in this illustration that I want to adjust slightly. To remove the unwanted part of this image, I need to add this area to our mask. We need to do it by painting it over with a paintbrush in black. Select your mask if it's not already selected, then select a hard round brush and make sure you are painting in black. If white color is on the top, simply press X to switch to black. Now paint over the unwanted areas. I will make a few corrections. I will now apply the layer mask. You can do it by right clicking and selecting apply Layer mask. Make sure to save your image in a PNG format and also save your file as PSD so that you can come back and make further adjustments if needed. I will use my illustrations to create a set of spring flora greeting cards. I'll show you how to do this in our next lesson. 18. Designing Botanical Cards: Let's design and print our botanical creations. I have already opened a card template in Photoshop. I will include this template in the resources section of this class so you can use it and follow along. This is a template for five by 7 " greeting card. The red lines in my template indicate the area of the so called bleed. The margins are indicated in yellow, you shouldn't put any important part of your designs in this area. Everything in gray is considered a safe printing area. I added a few rulers to this template to make things easier. Let's place our design into this template now. I click File, Place, embedded. I choose the embedded option as my image will be automatically converted to Smart Object. I can now carry on transforming this image as I like, and I won't lose any pixel quality. I will now reduce the size of this image slightly and place it in the middle of the front cover. I also want my logo with a couple of links to feature on the back of the card, so I will place it there as well. Now it's time to think of other design options we might want to add. I will add simple lettering at the bottom of the card. Select the text tool and the area where you want the text to be. I want to use a script font as it matches the style of my botanical illustration. I will just simply type Magnolia for magnolia flower underneath to give it a traditional fell, but you can personalize it as you wish. Floor cards make perfect birthday, thank you or Mother's Day cards. Once you are happy with your placement, you can switch off the visibility of the card template and have a better look. You can add to your design by placing more elements if you wish, or you can change the background color. You can simply click on the background layer and add a solid color adjustment. I'm going to keep my cards simple and print them on textured paper. I will use my Cannon Pix Ma printer to print my cards. I'll show you how I go about it. I normally allow Photoshop to manage the colors, and I use printer profile for my computer display, which is calibrated to show accurate colors. In print settings, I make sure that the paper size is correct. I then go to printer options, quality and media and select paper type I'm going to use, and I set the quality too high. I save the settings and print my cohorts. I use the same process to create cards with all my illustrations. I can't wait to see what you've created. In the next lesson, I'll talk about your assignment for this class. 19. Your Project & Class Gallery: Welcome back. I hope you've been able to sketch and paint along with me or at least watch some of the lessons to get a feel for the process. By now, you should have all the tools and techniques you need to create your final project. And your class project is to create one or all four illustrations or even just a sketch. If you prefer to jump straight into painting pot, you can use the sketches I provide in the resource section of this class. Once you completed your piece, I would love to see what you created. So please share it in the project gallery. It's a great way to connect with fellow students and get a feedback. All you have to do is take a photo of your project, then go to the project tab just below the screen, and then follow the instructions on how to submit your project into the project gallery. You can also share your work on Instagram and don't forget to tag me. I would love to see what you created, and I would love to share your work too. So take your time, enjoy the process, experiment with colors and details, and we have one more lesson to go, so I'll see you there. 20. Final Thoughts & Next Steps: Congratulations on reaching the end of this class. I hope you enjoy the process of painting these illustrations as much as I did. There are many ways to use your illustrations and create beautiful products such as greeting cards, stickers. You can even use them as a motif for similars pattern designs for fabric or stationary. Thank you so much for joining me in this class. If you found it helpful, I would really appreciate if you leave a review. This helps other students to find this class and lets me know what you enjoy the most. And also, please don't forget to follow me here on Skillshare. This way, you get notified every time I release new classes. If you're interested in exploring more botanical illustrations, check out my first Skillshare class in which I go through the process of painting whimsical mushroom illustrations in very similar style. I'd love to see what you create, so don't forget to share your project in the gallery and tag me on Instagram. Thank you and happy painting.