"The Golden Hour" Loose Floral Watercolour Study

1. Welcome!: Hi, I'm Holly Thomas, as well as teaching on Skillshare, I am a bedding designer. I love florals and in particular Scottish wild flowers. I live in a rural part of Scotland in the southeast along the coast. We're surrounded by woodland, crop fields, beautiful sunsets over Belhaven Bay and what I call the golden hour when the skies turn amber. Or a delicate peach or pink in the winter. The Golden sunsets were definitely an inspiration for this class. So welcome to the Golden Hour. Okay. Okay. I'm really excited to share this class with you. We're going to be doing this small study in our sketchbooks and exploring how we can create flows and blooms. We're going to be using just two colors. I'm using a flat brush, but I will take you through how to use a fillbt and a round brush. I'll be showing you how to mix greens and dark golds with blue and quinacridone gold. But you could choose your favorite green and your favorite yellow for this class. We're going to do a quick warm up with some brush practice. I'll be using a flat brush. But if you don't have one, I'm showing you here with a pillbt and here with a mop brush. You could also use a round brush. We're going to explore how to use just the right amount of water to pigment in order to create these lovely flows and blooms. We're going to practice making these really cute stems by printing with our brush. We'll start off by taping our page for our main project and creating these lovely little yellow flowers where the leaves flow into the petals. I've developed this class for beginners, but it's also for those of you who like to do regular studies in their sketchbook. And I always aim for my classes to be informative, relaxing and fun. And as always, you're very welcome to upload your project in our projects and resources area. I really enjoy the community side of skill share, and you're all so supportive of each other, and I really enjoy that can't wait to see your work. Let's get started. 2. Materials: So let me take you through materials. I'm using my half inch flat brush here from Jackson's. Or you could use a pillbert or a mop or a round brush. I'm going to tape off my study today, but you don't need to do that. I just like the crisp lines. And I'm using two colors, quinacridone gold, and in Dan throw blue. And this is a gouache. You could definitely use all gouache, all water color or all ink for this project. I'm using Bockingford hot press paper in this lovely sketch book, and I really love it. It's very thick paper with a lovely silky surface. I've got my little soap dish here, clean water. I've also got a cloth that will take a lot of water because we're going to be using that today. So I've folded it over a few times. So I'm just bringing back all of the materials we'll be using. And just to say here, you don't need to mix a blue in a yellow. You could use a green straight from the tube. I've got a undersea green here. So your favorite green and your favorite yellow doesn't have to be quinacridone gold. So let's move on to the next lesson together. 3. Colour Swatching: Let's just do some swatches here with our blue and gold. So I'm just going to put the Danthrme blue on one side and the quin gold on the other. Now, of course, if you're wanting to use just straight green from a tube and a yellow, you don't need to go through this process, but I wanted to show you how it can bring harmony to a piece when you mix two colors to make a third. So some fresh water there, and I'm going to just pull out some other blue. Starting with some very neat blue. And then just pulling that out with water. Then we're going to go into our Quin gold. And Quin gold is quite transparent, so you might need a little bit more paint to get a feel for what it looks like as a neat paint. So what we can do now is just to draw out some little squares, and we're going to mix up some gradients between the blue and the gold. So, on the left, we're going to put in fairly neat blue. Clean off your brush, and then we're just going to add a little bit of the gold to the blue. Add a little bit more. So we kind of veering towards the gold now. We want somewhere in between the two. And then we want to go in fairly heavily with gold with just a little green. And this makes that lovely burnt orange. And then finally, on the right, we've got our quinacridone gold in its neat form. And isn't it amazing how many gradients you can get from just two colors, and this is just five squares. So, there we go, and let's move on to our next lesson. 4. Brush Practise: So I'm just going to add a little more quin gold. And I still have some in Dan thro and blue there. So I'm picking up my half inch flat brush. And first of all, we're going to use the full brush here. Squeeze down a little bit and then bring up and a very simple movement. And then we're going to pull using the side of the brush. And we'll be using this brush stroke to create smaller flowers in our class project. Now we're going to do a brush stroke, similar to the top line. We're going to pull the brush through, start to twist round and bring to a tip. Let's try that again. Do part to twist. Pull up to the tip. Down twist. Then we're going to try a fillber brush just in case you don't have a flat brush. I'm going to use it in a very similar way to the flat brush. The full brush down along and pull up. Just as we did on the top line there. Then let's try that on the side of the brush. So you can see we can get some similar shapes to the flat brush. And finally, let's practice the twist movement up and twist towards the end. Down, pull along and twist. If you don't have a flat brush or filbert, you could always use a mop brush or round brush. And using a slightly different technique. Tip, belly of the brush and again. Tip belly of the brush, pull along and again to a tip. Let's move on to flows, blooms, and stems. 5. Flows, Blooms & Stems: So I'm going to mix up some fresh quinacridone gold. I remember because Quin gold is transparent, you will need to use a lot more of it to get a kind of a neat effect. Pull along the green, and you can see already how dominant the gold is because it's wanting to travel. Now, let me show you if we use a lot of water, there's nothing innately wrong with this. It's just for this project. We're looking to keep the character of each color. So you can see it all kind of blurs in together. So picking up the gold again. I want to show you just how we can add the stem below this. And we can see there that it just pools very slightly at the bottom of the yellow, and that's because that's quite a dominant color and it's not allowing the green to flow a lot. It's also because we are managing the flow by not using too much water. That's just what we're going for in this piece. If I show you again with a lot of water. There's a lot of water swishing around and you can see that from the large one at the top, right. So somewhere in between is what we're aiming for. If you're using a flat brush like me, I just want to show you how you can make easy stems. It's really fun, and it's also quite quirky. So picking up some green, I'm going to take the excess off because we want control over this. We're using the edge of the brush. And we're just printing it onto the page. It's so simple. I really love it. And we can do these little side stems. Aren't they cute? I could do this all day long. I absolutely love doing these see how simple it is. If you don't have a flat brush, let me just show you this really easy technique. Just a piece of card or a piece of paper and you just print it as you would with the brush. And it gives these imperfect lines, which I really feel lend themselves to this piece. If you wanted to, you could bend the paper to make curvy lines. As we've got these stems, why not add some little leaves to it. I'm just making that a warm green leaning towards the green gold, but still that mix between the blue and gold. I could do a study with these leaves alone. I think they're so cute. What we're doing there is a smaller movement of the larger leaves that we're doing in the main project. Push down and twist so earlier than you would with the elongated leaves. A. You can see here that we've got some little damp areas. It's not very wet now. It's partially dry. And if you drop in water to those areas, you get a more controlled bloom, so you could always do that as well in your main piece. So shall we move on to the main project together? I think we shall. Can't wait. Yes. 6. "The Golden Hour" Class Project: So I'm just going to start by taping off the page. I'm using washing tape. That seems to do really well. Then I usually run my finger around so there's no leakage. So we've got our two colors here. And I'm putting the end blue on the far left and the quin gold on the right. And that will give me space in the middle to mix. First, I'm going to mix a green. I'm taking a bit of the blue over, adding some gold. The great thing about these two colors is that you can mix towards the blue to make a teal color, or you can mix towards the gold and make this lovely, warm, gentle green. I'm going to mix two values of quin gold. I've added some water to the right there, and I want the other one to be a little th. So getting my brush ready, and I'm picking up some of the watery Quin gold. And pulling out that first petal just as we practiced. Allow the brush to fan out and bring it up to a point with that slight twist at the end. Adding the stem just so that it can flow very slightly into the base of the flower, pulling out two leaves, catching those petals so that there's a lovely flow of color. Slightly thicker Quinld now. And I've just mixed a warmer green there. And not all the leaves need to touch the petals. But it's a joy to see how it all flows together. So I'm just going to pull another petal out and just catching that leaf above. So, let's continue allowing the colors to mix together. I'm pulling in a flower here from the side because I like the idea of the flowers not being contained within the page. So I like them to just spill out over the edges. But adding a little bit more paint to the base of the flower so that the stem feels connected to it. I'm just going over the stem. Otherwise, there would be a big gap there, and I want to keep the continuity going. Ran out of Quinn Gold, so I'm just mixing up a green here. You can go back over your work and just add little bits and pieces as we go along. You can see that leaf is a lot warmer and that's because it has more green gold than the blue. That's going to flow into two petals there, which looks really lovely. I'm mixing up a deeper gold there as we did in our swatches. So this is gold with a little bit of the blue. A tiny touch only. And I'm going to put in some smaller flowers. And I'm just going to move my page around and add some stems and some leaves. We're just going to keep going until we've filled the whole space. And I'm going to do those shorter petals again. And I'm continually just mixing up what I need. I really want to get in on that petal there, 'cause there's so much god. So now I'm just looking around the page and seeing where there may be some spaces that need to be gently filled. So we're nearing the end now. And I'm just adding in some bud like petals. Adding tiny little stems and little leaves. It looks so cute. I've got one there. Stem and leaf. Just a final finishing touches. And I think we're there. Yeah, really pleased with that. I really love the choppiness of the petals using a flat brush like this. It's so characterful. So let me just take the tape off now. Ideally, you'd wait until it was all dry, but I'm too impatient. Taping off your page like this, just allows you to see your work as if it's framed. And the final reveal. I found this so relaxing. I hope you did too. 7. Thank You!: Thanks so much for joining me. We've covered a few things together, how to create our own palette with just two colors, and learning about the gradients in between. We've also practiced how to use water and pigment to create lovely soft flows and blooms. We've done a neat trick by printing with our brushes to create stems. And here we have it. To colors, one brush, and one gorgeous yellow golden floral study later. Don't forget to confind me on Instagram and Facebook at Holly Tomas Design. I look forward so much to seeing you again. Bye for now.