Vibrant & Spontaneous Watercolor Flowers: Learn to Capture Your Emotion

1. Introduction: Inspiration to create can come from the most simple things in life. Sometimes it is enough to just gather and arrange a bunch of flowers to start feeling strong emotions. Learning to express these emotions through watercolor painting can be a wonderful way to unwind, but also allow your inner artist grant and bid more wild than usual. My name is Jen, I'm a professional artist based in Slovakia, and this is my studio. I paint almost every day to be able to send my artworks to exhibitions and sell them. But the main reason that I started to paint more than ten years ago was to express my emotions. Process of painting with bright pigments brings so much joy and relief into my life. No matter how much stress I'm under. Painting always helps me calm down and notice the world around me in a different light. Observe it from a distance. But in my own way. Even though most of my works are portraits, I began to bring flowers into my studio, arrange them than paint quicker studies of them. After awhile I observe that my technique loosened up and I started to be bold with my colors. In this class, I want to show you this process of starting from scratch, arrange in your own Flowers, taking your own reference photo, and connecting with the subject in unique way. We will then explore different ways to compose the piece, do pencil sketches and color explorations to best suit the final artwork. You will learn basic Watercolor Techniques to make her process quicker and easier, which will allow for some more expression. As your class project, we will create a watercolor painting together from start to finish. And upon completing it, you will have a good idea how to apply this process in your own personal works. And I can't wait to see you in class 2. Class Orientation: Hello there and welcome to the class. In this lesson, I will go over the content of this class to help you navigate through a bit more efficiently. In the first part of this class, I will show you how I gather inspiration and create my own reference photos. You will not need to gather your own flowers and take your own photos to create your class project that is just essential that I will show you how usually I go about these part of my creative process in the studio. You can do something similar on your own when you have the opportunity. Second part of this class is the actual painting part, and you will need painting materials that we'll discuss in the lesson three. Your class project will be to create a painting from the provided reference photo that I chose. And to complete it, please follow along the drawing and painting lessons. We will create it together step-by-step. If you are a bit more advanced and you want to apply this process to another reference photo that can also be your class project. So you can take a photo of that painting and upload it down below. I have to emphasize that when it comes to join and painting classes, watching the videos doesn't translate into the actual skills. Lessons will help you understand the reasoning and the tricks behind the technique, but only your own practice and repetition will make you gain that skill. So please complete your class project. You will have lots of funding. So this class was not meant to be overly long, but I let the final length of the class to reflect the reality of the painting process. Because even spontaneous and quick paintings, they need to be made with some care. And there are some decisions that I tried to explain in real-time during the painting process. You can take the advantage of this particular class format. You don't have to rush your work. It will give you some space to paint along in your own pace. When you're done with your class project, please take a photo of it and shared with me and other students. You can upload it to the Projects and Resources tab down below. This way I can give you feedback and other students will also be encouraged to upload there. Feel free to write a few words about how your own process went and what did you discover. And lastly, there is a bunch of support materials that you can download down below, such as Reference Photos, materials, PDF, and more. As another be covered all the important information I will see you in the next lesson where we'll go through painting materials 3. Materials: In this lesson, we're going to go through all the materials that we're going to need in this class. Since this is mostly a painting class, we're going to need some painting tools. I'm going to be using some of the materials that I am currently using in my studio. But you can always switch those materials for something that you have available or what you're used to. You don't have to use the exact colors when it comes to paper, you will always do great if you can get 100% cotton paper for watercolor, preferably with some texture, cold press is my preference. I'm currently using the arches brand. This one is rough. I'm going to use this one for sketches and like these little thumbnails. And but if you have a paper that is 100% cotton, you will work a little easier because cotton paper can forgive some mistakes and it is generally a more forgiving material. Cotton tends to be more expensive. So if you have a pulp paper, that's okay, you can use that. We're not going to use too many layers of paint. Student grade paper will work as well. You're going to need a pencil. This is to be pencil. I'm also going to be using masking tape. But in this case, since my blocks are bound from all sides, we don't need masking tape. If you work with a block like that because it holds your paper, it will keep it stretched. I just use masking tape to create the white borders. It frames the painting nicely. So I prefer that this is more like for decoration then for necessity. However, if you are using loose sheets of paper and you're sticking them to the board and you're gonna need masking tape. I also have some spares, bits of watercolor paper. These are just cut sketches and paintings. I just use it to test paint so that I don't have to mess my blogs. There's a spray bottle filled with clean water. I'm going to use them to refresh my palette, to keep the paint moist and soft when it comes to brushes, I'm going to use two brushes for large washes. This is Winsor Newton, professional watercolor, synthetic sable. This is 2 " wash brush, and this is 1 " brush. You definitely don't have to have this kind of brushes. If you have a larger brush, either round or flat, it will do just fine. It is mostly for watering your paper before painting, the entire painting process, usually for me, involves these two brushes. Again, if you have round brushes or flat brushes, you can use dose. For me. These brushes are very versatile. I'm going to show you why in a bit. It's not even a brand is just something that is available in the country where I live. It's number 6.12. It's called simply TDD, but you will find brushes like this from multiple brands across the globe. So you just go into the nearest Art Supply store and ask them about brushes that are on the side because they're really great for flowers and for landscapes and even for portraits like for anything. Because when you have a brush like this, just going to quickly show you what is possible. You can basically do a flat line. It works like a flat brush, but you can also use just the tip to create really tiny details to basically draw lines. I really like when I use it on the side, how it creates the dry brush effect jar with clean water, even two jars if you can, because one usually is for cleaning the dirty pigment off of your brush. And then if you have a reservoir of clean water that will help you to rinse your brush and mix your colors always with clean water. So that's always a good idea. Paper towels or even like recycling my paper towels, even if they are dirty from washing my brushes, I'm going to dry them and then reuse them again. So paper towels are also when it comes to Watercolor, It's a necessity and a hairdryer because that will help you speed up the painting process. I really tried to go for minimal palette, but this time I use little larger selection because I don't know still at this time what I'm going to paint and which colors I'm going to need. So this sort of palette is very, very versatile. Some colors are not a necessity. You can mix them like the violet that I picked. You can clearly mix them from the ultramarine and read that I have here. And some are just the shortcuts like the green, yellow can be mixed up. You can be quicker if you know that I'm going to use more green in this painting. So the green yellow can be handy because I don't have to meet so much. So again, I'm quicker in my process. Payne's gray, even though you wouldn't be able to mix your blacks. We just these colors. If you have Payne's gray, you can create the Darks that are a little deeper and you can have a quicker process because mixing up the blacks that can take up a long time. This is a lemon yellow. I'm using really different brands, but They are all artist grade colors except for Van Gogh. This is students grade, but it has very good pigmentation, so I don't mind the doll using it in professional works as well. I'm not going to name brands because I find that no matter which brand are used, if this is a professional line of watercolor, almost always they will be pigmented and light fast. Most of them, you can pick any brand like I have shrinking horror guns, Mission Gold, I have Daniel Smith's and I have a Winsor and Newton professional pick something that you have specifically available to you in your country and you're gonna do just fine as long as the color is pigmented, this one is permanent, yellow deep. If you have palette that you bought as a pack, you probably real always have two yellows on your palette because one is cool yellow and the other is warm yellow. It's more of an orange. Yellow. You can use both because they're great for mixing. Then we have quinacridone, permanent roles, beautiful, rosy color. We're going to use that for the lease. And then I have Hierald read. So again, we have a cooler red and a warm red here. Then we have one blue. This is French ultramarine is very pigmented. This is the blue that we're going to use the most. And then I add it color that is not exactly necessary but will help us with some of the tones. This is the vendor by Van Gogh. Lavender is a Color that has opacity in it. So when you create mixes with love vendor, they tend to be a little, a little more opaque, little more Castelli looking. And I think that we can use that in the background. And when we paint some shadows, we can use this color as a base for our mixes. Another color that is not necessary, but I edited Anyway, this is purple color, it is bright clear violet. We can mix that color from ultramarine and parallel red or ultramarine and this red quinacridone rose. But I still have it on my palette when I'm painting flowers, studies are used it a lot. If you only have these colors, these 52 yellows, two reds, and ultramarine, you'll do fine. Like if you have only those, we can make anything we need from those colors, but these are additional, optional colors that you can add to be a little faster. So another gallery is this yellow, green, quite bright. I really edited to be quicker if I was to demonstrate and you can take the ultramarine, you can take the lemon yellow. And you can create something really similar in that mixture. This is a little brighter and I feel a little less transparent, like this particular color has a little bit of opacity as well. But again, it's optional if you have something similar, you can use it to be a little quicker. You don't have to make so much. And the last color that I'm adding is Payne's gray. We're at the end of this paper sheet. This is Payne's gray. So because this color is so dark, we can mix it with other colors, give it colorful undertone, and we can create the darkest mixes very fast because we have it like I didn't need into these green that we just mixed will result in a beautiful green that resembles Prussian Green. I like to have it on my palette because I don't have to mix anything. But besides these, you rarely need more colors to have a full palette for any subject it would miss maybe two or three other paints. Full list of all my colors and my materials including brushes, is available down below for download. You can find it in the tab, projects and resources. In the next lesson, we're going to grab some Flowers, get inspired, and take some nice reference photos for our work. I'll see if there 4. Gathering Inspiration & Taking Reference Photos: Lesson, we're going to look for some inspiration as we gather fresh flowers and arrange them. We will then create reference photos that will serve as a base for our watercolor painting. So I just got to hear some fresh flowers from the flourish. Sadly, I don't have a garden, so I have to go get the flowers and the Fleurus. They don't have to buy flowers. You can just find some outside. Or if you have flowers in a pot, then you can arrange those for creating your class project. This is not actually necessary to go pick your own flowers because you'll be able to download a bunch of photos by me to create this project and to work on similar paintings by yourself. Or this is just to show you how I usually create my own references. If I have the opportunity and some spare time, these are smaller flowers, then we have greens. Like here. We have large flowers. So I'm gonna put small violet flowers here. These are greens are very interesting, but also small red and yellow flowers that will give it some pop. And I will put the green side. These are the small violets, very beautiful. We have a bunch of colors here, and I can't use all them because it's gonna be a mess. So I have to pick which combination, like I particularly liked the combination of reds and some cools, like violets. They worked so beautiful in a arrangement together. Or there could be like yellow with the blues or violets. That one looks like magic. I'm going to grab lilies. Let's try to do some arranging now, Green's start to feel that arrangement with them. Since we have Lily's, we might get some of these violets, especially this one. Oh, and I loved the pops of red. I was wondering if that's not gonna be too much. I'm going to try to find something that really looks inspiring to me. Maybe not like either, that. Now the reds go into red. I want to use the read from both sides of the arrangement here and here. I definitely want to paint this. I'm always looking for large shapes, for middle-sized shapes, and something small to balance it everything out. Let's create some reference photos when it comes to light, right now we have some sunlight. Daylight coming from this window. We are very close to the window. We have some natural light. The colors always loop. The most natural under the daylight. Sometimes I photograph the entire arrangement from different sites, but then I go closer and I do more detail photos, try to search for some interesting angles. And mainly I always like squint my eyes a little and try to see all the colors and how they're balanced on the photo like this one, for example, when I squint my eyes, like I see three light pink shapes. Here is a sprinkle of red and there's a sprinkle of purple and that is quite balanced. Maybe we could crop it. So I'm going to now change the background for the black because that usually I liked it better. This angle is quite interesting. I'm still taking photos during daylight. If I take a photo from this angle than the lilies are not quite in the center because they're quite large normally, but they're like hiding a little bit. But I kinda find it interesting and I want to explore that. Let's try to rotate a little bit. Here we have a central lily flower. There's too much red now. Also there is like, I can't see the poppy this side. So I need to rearrange. I'm just going to play with disliked half the day, at least the flowers, they don't survive for a long time in a vase, even tomorrow they will be looking less good. So taking photos, it really helps me out because then I can work for many weeks and still have a resource of many reference photos to paint from. And it is still my flower, so it still will give me the vibe that I had today when I had them in the studio. So I'm going to play for a bit longer with these photographs and maybe I will rearrange some more flowers to discover different combinations. And in the next lesson, we'll go through the pile of reference photos together. We will crop some, will try to find the best composition that will suit our class project 5. Choosing the Right Reference: In this lesson, we're going to go through the photos that we've previously taken and select the right reference photo. So let's get started. I must admit, when we were taking the reference photos, I took about 1,000 of them. Obviously, we're not gonna go through all of them here. I'm gonna do a selection because I also did multiple flower arrangements and to preferences of those because flowers, they don't last as long. So I want to take advantage every time that I have some fresh flowers in the studio and Creative so forth references that I can paint and practice from throughout the entire month or even a couple of months. I created a selection. These are a couple of photos that I liked and it is the bouquet that we arrange together and we need to check them one-by-one and pick one that we are going to do the painting from. To create an interesting painting, you want to have an interesting composition, which means different shapes arranged in a format that makes it visually appealing. You usually need some large shapes. In this case, our larger shapes are the lilies. Then you need some medium shapes. I would call these a medium shape. Then some small shapes to add details and visual interests like small shapes. It could be these flowers, these tiny green things, and a bunch of details inside the large flower as well. So you want to have not the entire painting made out of small or a middle shapes. You want to have a nice variety of all three sizes and you don't have to pick the photo just like you did it. I always do a lot of pictures. And then I select, sometimes I select a crop like you can crop that image to have it framed in a way that makes it interesting. This image, for example, looks very appealing to me. There are some large shapes. These three, there are some middle shapes that are neutral in color, like the green is not the primary color of the entire composition, very close to the purples and blues and the small shapes, these tiny little flowers, they sort of go and create a way around the entire composition. It's like a sprinkle of violet and purples going around. I really liked this piece, and now I'm talking about shapes. But there is another thing that we also want to balance colors. We as painters, we don't have to try to copy the exact same colors that we have on the photograph. We can shift the colors ever so slightly. Or if I feel like the colors are not balanced, like I can add the purple or the loo or some color that I feel is imbalanced on a photo I can edit to my painting like this sprinkle of red. It looks very, very interesting. If I talked a photo like this, I would find it imbalance because the red sprinkle only appears in these corners. So in arrange some pops of the red here on this side when we are selecting photo and looking to create a painting from it, we need to look for both the balance of shapes and the balance of colors as well. There's a third element that we want to review, and that is some negative space. For example, here there are flowers on the photo, so they take the majority of the entire piece. There is a negative space that gives them more air. It is this triangular shape, I'm saying triangular, but that is a loose term like you can see that the shape is not exactly triangle, but this is a negative shape. Is that the shape that the background cuts from the composition. So there are no flowers here. Here's another negative shape. Here is another Bud Light, because this background was light, there is negative shape and these negative shapes are a little darker. For example, this one really cuts out the silhouette of the flowers. Here's also a negative shapes. So when we start to do sketches and pink, I'm going to explain further because there's this thing called negative painting that we're going to talk about that will directly referenced these negative shapes. But I'm starting to notice the composition that has some space. So my painting is not going to be like it doesn't give the Flowers enough room. For example, these arrangement, it looks really beautiful. You can see the pups of the colors are harmonized, but there's just not enough room for the flowers. There's not enough negative space. Here is just a little bit that frames the flowers from the top, but here is just a mess like this is imbalanced of shapes as well as I don't have enough negative space in this corner. So for me this is visually stressful. This part is balanced, is calmer. There is large shape, there's middle shape and some small shapes and some negative space giving them air. This is just a little too much. These are the things that I'm looking for. I'm looking for balance. The more photos you take, the more options you have. And sometimes you don't know which one will work unless you try it. And that is what the sketches are all about. We're going to do that very soon. Sometimes only when you sketch it, even though the idea looks like it's going to work as a painting. When you sketch it, you will discover whether it has some problems. This is a beautiful composition. When I squint my eyes a little bit, I see this sprinkle of violets and loose. It goes diagonally across the painting. Then there is a, also a, quite a balance of the light pink. The light pink is here and here is evenly distributed throughout the entire piece. This middle shapes are also quite balanced. I don't like that. They go same direction. I should have arranged it better, but I can slightly give them different direction in my sketch. These as a reference could work also Mrs. some negative space. So that doesn't inspire me very much. Again. I could use some space for the flowers, so that is not great. This one is nice when it comes to shapes and distribution of color, but I just don't like how these legal shape, I would say this puppy head, it is behind the small flowers. It doesn't feel right. This one actually is very interesting. It's a top view, so it feels like it is sitting on the ground. I really liked the diagonal. These are the large shapes. These are the middle shapes and sprinkle of the small shapes. And there's plenty of negative space. If I was gonna do a painting from these reference, I would definitely cut out here. This is the background noise that was not supposed to be there, but this would reference is also all about like you don't have to do a perfect photograph. You just need to find some ideas to work from. This one is gorgeous, really beautiful. Yeah, I feel like that's balanced. This one I feel stands out most of all, and I also feel like this would be the proper reference photo for our painting today because it doesn't show as many flowers, so it will be a little simpler for us. Maybe we will need a bit less time to create study from this. So this inspires me really strongly. There's this one large shape that is dominant in our composition, but it is not exactly in the middle ear, slightly off-center. I don't like how these center of the poppy head is off the photo frame. So when we are going to sketch this, we should bring it back in and draw this center here. When it comes to negative space, there's enough of it. And since light is coming from this side, we're going to have lighter background. We're going to have darker background here. We will be able to work with some light and shadow also going across that arrangement. I really liked these photo. Let's sketch from this one. I will save it in high resolution and I will put it down below in the files where you can download them for your project. In the next lesson, we're going to explore Tonal Values and create our first sketch. I'll see you there. 6. Exploring Tonal Values: In this lesson, we're going to explore Tonal Values on a reference and create a simple pencil sketch of this composition. Let's go. This is the selected reference photo. This is the Arches block. This is rough, hundred percent cotton. It is in a very small size format because I usually only use it for sketches and color thumbnails, this head is sufficient. We're just going to want to explore possibilities of this composition and try to figure out if it will make a nice painting. Just going to create a little frame. Every time I want to create a watercolor painting, I want to first explore Tonal Values and then just check if the color, harmony and color combination works for me because it's one thing to see a photo. And I know that my painting is going to want to represent my feeling and it is gonna be an impression, not the exact copies, just a rough idea. Sometimes composition as a photo, it looks great, Bob, when you sketch it out and you color it, then you will not get the same feeling from the sketch or from the painting. That is what the sketches and these little thumbnails are for. I want to also explain to you, Tonal Values represent relative lightness or darkness of our subject in different places. So there are light values and their dark values and their mid tones. You might have heard that term somewhere and we want to balance them out. Let's start with the shapes. I will reference the values once we have the preliminary sketch ready. So we have a large shape. When you start to sketch something or draw something, you always start with large shapes. Since there are large, their position is immediately obvious when a viewer is looking at the piece. So we need to address that first. Lily is gonna be our largest shapes, so I need to know its position relative to all the other spaces that we have available here in this painting. So I know that it will end here. This is gonna be the edge. It doesn't go exactly to this edge. Also hear it leaves out quite a space, so it can't go any further than this. There is like a triangular negative space here. See I sketch the triangle and then I have the position of these two pedals, right? It is much easier sometimes than to sketch the pedals that escaped the negative space between them. And you will find where the petals are. Your is also like a little triangle between these two. Also have to pay attention to these triangles here and here. I think we have the lily. Now we continue adding middle shapes. This one is the one that will probably find a little easier. This one, I don't like how cut out it is. I'm going to move it a little bit. I'm gonna make it smaller just a little bit. We'll add this top. I will add it here. We don't have to pay much attention to the exact Stoltz and positions, but you can emphasize some things if you want just to make sure that the viewer knows that this is a really good. We have one more middle shape and that is this one. That's the profile view of the lily. It's gonna be one pedal. Here's another pedal. One large, 123 middle. I think this is pretty balanced. There's one more meat shape that is, this one. This part is a little empty. It has a bunch of branches and some leafs. We can sketch them out a little bit. So now we can finally pay attention to the small shapes. I want to sketch all those tiny blues and violets. You don't have to be precise because even the way we will paint is not going to be that precise. We don't want too much detail, we just want the color to pop. And it's going to be obvious to anybody who is looking at the painting that these are tiny little flowers, even without you being too literal about the details here. Here you just little bits of the flowers. Here's gonna be sprinkle of red. Maybe sprinkle of red here and here. This is the sketch. We have the shapes here at. We don't have the tone yet. So now we will try to give these composition some Tonal Values in order to see if that we'll look interesting to the eye. So I mentioned the Tonal Values. Let's try to be a little more specific. So this is gonna be the lightest Tonal value. When there is light, we're going to leave out the white paper. White paper is the whitest white. You're gonna get. Everything else is going to be just a tad darker This is technically a midtone, the next value a little darker. This could also be a midtone like it's a scalar. You can split it. You can do for values, you can do six values, but it's always going to be between light and dark. This last one is gonna be the dark cast, depending on the composition. But you want to have some variety of Tonal Values in order to make the painting interesting, let's assign the values to these composition. And we'll see sometimes it is easiest to start with the darkest. Here. For example, the lily is not going to be dark. Lily is gonna be in these two values, is gonna be our center, that flower, the lightest part of the lily is gonna be almost white. And there's gonna be some of these Tonal value. Lighter mid-tone is going to represent the shadows on the lily because that object, even though it is very light when it's in shadow, it shows some like midtone show some value. Here is going to be some tone, here is gonna be some trauma. You can observe the photo. What helps me is to squint my eyes to see the photo a little bit blurry so that you see that this area on the lily, It's almost completely white. And here is like a mid-tone. And here is also just be, the mic term. Here is mid-town, here's mid-tone. This also is almost completely wide here, suddenly drawn in some meat on here. Okay, so this triangle around the lily is going to have first the darker mid-tone. And then there's some parts that are completely black, near black, like we're not going to paint with black, but we're gonna make it very dark. These contrast between the light and the dark here in the center will help our painting to be readable. The viewer will immediately be able to tell volt is our interests. There's some dark tones here. There are some detail also is going to be very dark. Let's find those parts that are really dark. Insanely dark is also this corner. This can be light mid tone here because there's another Lily. There's also light. But since this is our center, we have to make it so that around her, There's not too much contrast and others matches around this one. Okay, so here's gonna be mid tone. We need some definition, but not a lot of contrast. Here can be pop of color. And these, since this will be blue, they're going to pop a little bit. These two shapes are going to be midtone. Maybe we could do like a highlight because because they're round shape and this one will have shadow here. This one will be mid tone, but also shadow here. So that it shows that it is round here. We want the blue to be in mid tone, but between the blue, one Darks to shine. So I'm gonna clean this sketch a little bit. So I'm just going to squint my eyes at it and look at it from larger Eastern so that I can see if it's balanced. It's not yet all the balanced. Like there needs to be more definition here. It more drama in this center. This is the preliminary value sketch. I think I'm gonna love this composition. I like it very much this way. So for me, this is a harmony and balance between the darkest Darks. You can play with it as much as you want, as much as you have time. For me, this is quite balanced. I have a focus, my largest contrast here around the center, and this will be more like mid tones and a sprinkle of light here and there. I encourage you to do this kind of exploration with every composition that you're going to paint because it will really help you to see what's working, what's not working, and it's a great preparation for the color. You're going to be much more free when painting. You don't have to figure out everything during the painting process because this kind of sketching, it doesn't take a lot of time, but it will get you familiar with your subject. In the next lesson, we're going to plan our colors and paint a small watercolor Thumbnail. I'll see you there. 7. Creating a Color Thumbnail: In this lesson, we're going to explore color and create a Color Thumbnail. Let's go. Just like in the previous lesson. In this lesson as well, we're gonna do quick sketch of the linework. We already know how to do that. So on get started and should take me just a couple of minutes for you can not already prepare your palette. And one brush and probably just gonna be using this smaller brush size six, because for this size of Thumbnail is gonna be enough. There's one color that we need to probably start with. This is the permanent rose because that's gonna be the color of the lily. We need the green and maybe a hint of yellow because that's gonna be the undertones is not a lot of that color. You don't see a lot of yellow in this composition. Also, we have pyrrole red here. The parallel ray is beautiful, vibrant red. It's darker, but if you want orangey tone, you can mix it with one of your yellows and you will get something like this, bright and intense orange and these pure pyrrole red we're going to use for these tiny little hints of, I liked the pop on the darker background, that is our warm pallet. And then we also have cool palette for cools. The ones that are most obvious is this blue, but it's purple blue. So we have ultramarine on our palette, but we're not going to use it directly like this because it's too blue. You would do, well if you grab this ultramarine and just give up little bit of this permanent rows in it. And this is the undertone that we are going for. So I still, I want blue, but I want it a little with a hint of purple. So the basic green that we're using is this one. But when you mix it with the purple, you're gonna make something like olive green. I just mixed it with this. So the green mixed with ultramarine made a little bit more purple. And when you mix purple in your green, you're gonna make it more gray. So this is grayish type of green. I'm gonna grab that base green and I'm going to use bit more ultramarine in it, you get more saturated green. And now into this mixture, if you want to add a bit more Payne's gray, you're going to really get a beautiful dark green. If I dilute it in water, it looks like Proustian green, beautiful greens. Okay, So I played with colors enough. One more color that I want to use is this law vendor. But I want to create shadows with it. So most sand, I'm just going to mix it with other colors and when to use lavender as a base at just a hint of green. I'm gonna get something like this. I love that color very much, but I want to add purple in it. I find this color quite interesting. A bit more red I just added, I'm just experimenting right now. Yeah, something like that. And I'm probably going to use it here for the background areas. This is how I normally get familiar with my color palette. I tried to explore, mix it before I start painting, because when I start painting, especially the wet-in-wet technique, There's not a lot of room to think about. Watercolor goes where you better have a Color Thumbnail already and you better be at least a little bit familiar with which color you want, where I want to Wet this entire thing, just clean water. This is not a special technique. We're just going to color everything. So we want to start with the Quinacridone Rose. You have to dilute it with more water in it, make it watery. So I just place it into my painting where I see the rosy color present. It doesn't even have to be distributed well, I just want to know where that color goals. So it goes here. Maybe now just more saturation goes here. Here. Just a little bit here. There is no more roles. I don't think there is, but we could just balance it out. We could place a little bit here just to balance it out. Now, a hint of warm yellow and maybe mix of lemon yellow and yellow. It goes here. And here. Then I see a pop of it. Here is just the pops of yellow definitely goes here. I see a lot of yellow from the side view. There's more yellow here. And then we have the green Green, yellow, red goes here, that the green is sprinkled in the bottom of the allele here. And here I see just a bunch of like a sprinkle of green. Sprinkle of green here. Papers already more or less Dr, going to grab a darker green and oil basically draw the branches with it. We need orange. So I'm using parallel red and I'm going to mix some yellow in it to create bright orange. And orange goes here. Pyrrole, red, clean. Now, because you haven't talked about these red sprinkles. See it doesn't have to be precise. Like you really can be loose with this Sketching process because you just want to know the color distribution. Maybe it wouldn't hurt if replaced a couple of sprinkles here, we have all the warm colors represented. We can now start adding the blue. I'm thinking whether I should first add the background or the blue, but I'm just gonna go with the blue. So I want to find the ultramarine. This is the ultramarine and we said we're going to add a bit of the roles, permanent roles in it to make it look less blue, more purple, but still blue enough. Let's end. That is why we don't even have to Sketch to properly, because we're just going to paint these dots. It is not going to be exact. I'm sometimes you can dilute the paint a little bit more because those that hit the sun will be a little lighter and those that will be covered in shadow will be a little darker. So that will affect the color. There should be a sprinkle of the blues on this side as well, just little bit. There's gonna be some details. The details will help to create a Color Balance so we can add some sprinkles. We can start finalizing everything. And at the green, I already have the greens mixed here as I was playing with the mixes couple of minutes ago. So I'm going to add the green here. Just where there's shadow. I'm going to end. Blooming into this. Blue makes a great shadow for the green item whenever you paint it, here is gonna be. Maybe we could do that. Highlight Payne's gray. I'm going to use to add these Darks. Here in the center. Here is gonna be dark. This could use pops of yellow and greens, also framed like the lily flower. I'm gonna use the advantage of my hairdryer because it's too wet to add more background. So I'm going to drive this. Now. I'm going to grab love vendor. So I'm going to create like a grayish base from the lavender and that will go in this corner. But here I'm going to leave behind the orange. I'm just going to paint around that Flower. Really liked a lot. What is missing hopes of red? I think the luego great. And now I need to create that really dark, final greenish color. So I'm going to create that color from the Payne's gray. We'll add some ultramarine in it and some yellows, just like here. We need to frame that Lily with that final paint. Again, we don't have to be 100% precise about the shapes or anything. This is just like a preliminary sketch. We just want to see if the colors are working in this composition. This is to black, so I'm going to remove some of the pigments so that it still looks like watercolor. I want it to be more watery, bit more transparent. Here we're going to separate the tiny little flowers. And here again, we are framing this shape. Since the middle shape. And I'm going to end up with more lavender so that I can get some areas more grayish. Basically, I'm improvising about the color here because what is important is the Values. So we need not so much dark here, leaving some parts of the color behind the previous color. Here as well. I'm going to squint my eyes now, maybe here in the center of the lily, we need some more contrast. We said that sometimes there can be too much contrast like here. This is part of the composition that can't be too bright. So we're going to delete down a little bit here. We also going to imply the light and shadow just a little bit. So I don't know how long did it take me to finish this colorful Thumbnail, but now I'm going to observe, usually I observe from a distance because when you're sitting down, look at their Sketch or the painting, you lose the objective, look and feel. So you need to take a look from fresh perspective. So I usually prefer to put it somewhere and step aside when I squint my eyes, I need to see clearly what the main focal point of my painting is. And I think I've accomplished dead like this color has the most saturation and it is also light versus the dark backgrounds. So it kinda stands out even from afar. But I don't think there's too much harmony yet between the background. Like there's too much noise. I don't know what I've done wrong, but maybe we could go about it like this. Maybe we could reduce the amount of these red distractions. So I'm just going to leave out a few here and there. I like it a bit better. Now also, I'm going to grab bit of the fresher green. And that fresh green will definitely help my painting stand out even here, like I said, that this lily scream too much but it fall behind way too much. Now, I made these middle parts a little too dark. When I do the actual painting, I need to make sure that they, especially this one, that it is a little bit more light so that this area isn't entirely in the shadow. So that's something else. Apart from that, Lily stands out a little bit. Two or three of these tried to find the perfect balance, but I personally don't like to waste all that much time on these. I like to reserve some level of exploration for the actual painting. In the next lesson, we will get familiar with basic watercolor techniques. I will see you there. 8. Basic Watercolor Techniques: In this lesson, we're going to explore some of the basic Watercolor Techniques. So let's get started. Watercolor is a very expressive medium, since we want to create vibrant, spontaneous watercolor works, we more often than not want to work quickly, especially we want to leave watercolor some room to create its own special blend of color. And these tiny little accidents give these medium a specific character. If we want to, we can have control. So I'm gonna show you which techniques and how to work when you want to have control and when you want to give Watercolor a bit more freedom. We usually start with, the more expressive, the more free techniques is called Wet in Wet. And that happens when you first Wet your surface. I'm just going to show you here on a very small size and then you grab some paint. You tried to paint in it. Let's try to add a few more colors. The flower is rosy, but you want to put it all inside the wet wash. It will bleed, the colors will bleed. That is not necessarily a bad thing. The colors, they create, these blends that look very natural, they look very beautiful in a way you still have control of some sorts is just that these edges, it is blurry or soft. So this will help you create backgrounds. This will help you create beautiful merges of color. Imagine that you have a flower petal. Here is my flower petal. I started with Wet background. I wet the surface is nice that I have a line there, but watercolor isn't gonna care. I'm going to start with that rosy color. You have seen it when we were creating Thumbnail and that paint around everywhere in this stage, I don't really have to care that the color is ignoring the borders because in this first stage, you can just leverage from the ability of the wet paint to create beautiful blends. So you can add Rosie undertones. You can create green undertones here in the base. You can even grab a thicker pigment, put it here. Anyway, let it bleed. This will create length of color that will be really gorgeous. You wouldn't be able to get that effect if you are trying to control everything and this paint that were left your edges, we're going to take care of that later. So Wet in Wet is one technique that you want to practice. Some tips. You can't do pools of water. If your water stance everywhere, you're gonna get these effects. In my opinion, they're interesting and beautiful, but you might only go for them at a specific time to prevent these. It is a very good idea to tilt your board because when you have a tilt, when you place paint, it will start to slowly run down. So that also creates beautiful effects. You can use the sprinkler to create these Moody looking blends of pallor that look beautiful. I usually, I will just remove them with my brush like this so that there is no, no excess water, especially not when you leave the painting to dry. So this is what Wet on Wet is all about. Like you really have to play around with this. Some people, when they want to relax and paint, they seek control. Watercolor is never about controlling 100% of your painting. You can have some control, but watercolor will never look great if you control everything. So the second technique is Wet on Dry. And it is basically when you work on a dry surface like this one, on your work on a dry surface, you can have these strokes of watercolor paint. This is blue, one, green one next to it. If the strokes touch, then you have Wet in Wet effect because then again, you have to Wet strokes that are touching. So you get the bleed here. But if there is dry paper next to the stroke, this edge will stay sharp. It doesn't blur. If you want it to blur, you will have to use the sprinkler. Like here. You can add a bunch of strokes. So this gives me full control like here. I have full control over watercolor. It doesn't bleed anywhere, it stays here. So that is how you do details. Everything in watercolor painting is about finding balance between the Wet on Wet and the sharp Wet on Dry edges. So I'm going to dry this so that I can show you how to create second Layer. Now, I use the hairdryer to dry the first Layer. And now I can show you how to create some details in a second Layer, like if you want to create some shadows. Now I'm painting on a dry surface. Yes, there is previous layer of paint, but It doesn't really matter because it is soaked into the paper now. And the second Layer is basically being created on a dry surface now. And you can grab more paint. And you can do some details so that you can develop that flower petal a bit further. Sometimes you can use a technique that's called dry brush. It is also used on a dry paper and that is when you get rid of the excess paint on my paper towel. And then I drag it on a textured paper and it creates this effect. I try not to overdo this effect, but this is really beautiful. You're not familiar with wet on wet and wet on dry, which is quite straightforward. If you know these two techniques, if you practice them than developing your painting is mostly about just thinking when to use them. For example, in our composition, we definitely need to use Wet on Dry here. This is the central of our composition. We want sharp edges here, so we need to work Wet on Dry to get these sharp edges. But between these colors, we want blends that are created wet on wet and wet on wet blends are beautiful in the background as well. So you just need to strategize to know which parts we want to keep a bit more sharp and which parts you want to blur that next watercolor, a lot more FUN, at least for me. Then there is one specific aspect of watercolor painting that you really need to practice this a little bit harder, but it makes her paintings so beautiful. And that is called negative painting. Thank you already saw me using that when we were developing the Color Thumbnail. And the negative painting essentially refers to when we paint an object like this flower petal, I want to paint it, but I painted by painting the background around it. When I paint the background here. Now, maybe I want to get rid of these edges. You want to use the sprinkler to get rid of these edges. And you only want to keep these edges sharp. So now we painted the pedal in a negative way, which means that we painted a darker background in order to, for the pedal to show what God doesn't really have a white paint like. You can find white opaque watercolor. But the main idea is that whenever you have whiter parts are lighter, lighter parts of watercolor painting. You leave the paper behind like you don't paint the white with white paint. You leave the white of the paper behind. I use the negative painting technique here to paint all those triangles that I told you about when I paint the dark negative shape here, and I painted here and here. There's another triangle here and here, I am negatively painting the lily that is here. This technique, it doesn't come naturally if you're using Watercolor for the first time, it didn't need some practice. It needs some getting used to. It makes their painting so beautiful. It is what allows us to do wet-on-wet washes in the first Layer and then just use negative painting to clean up all the edges that in the first Layer, the paint ignored them. You just grab a sheet of watercolor paper. You tried the oldest techniques I'll do play with color just a little bit. That will help to warm up your hand for the actual painting process. In the next lesson, we're going to create a sketch for our final class project. I will see you there 9. Class Project - Sketch: We are moving towards finishing our class project and in this lesson, we're going to create a sketch together. So let's get started. This is the block of paper that I'm going to use. This is Arches watercolor paper. It is cold press 300 GSM. It is 100% cotton. I want my painting to be in a portrait format like this one, just like my reference photo and the thumbnails that we did. And one important note before we start to sketch, even though the sketch will be Loose, I like to stand. I don't like to sit down when I'm sketching. I'm standing even while painting. And that is because I can see my sketch, a little bedroom when you sit down and you have your drawing board flat on the table, it tilts your perspective a little bit, and that's why your proportions don't have to be accurate this way I have more control is just the tip like it's not for everybody. If you decide to sit down, then you can use a box or something to tilt your board. This way you can see more accurately even when you're sitting down. The way I sketch on a watercolor paper is about the same like when we were creating the thumbnails. I look for the negative spaces. It really helped me out that I already sketched these composition two times because I can know what I'm going for already. So I'm going to leave this here as a reference. There is another triangle here. Would like to see a bit more of this petal. Here is the central like details. More about the individual petals later, we need to build the composition first. So now I'm going to sketch the Secondly that is being shown from sideview on our reference photo. Here and here. Just for the record, you can erase on a watercolor paper, but makes sure that the eraser that you're using is gentle. This one that I have this dust free and it really doesn't destroy the texture of the papers. But I'm still not pushing the pencil into the paper too hard because that would cause these referrals inside the paper and we don't want that. So with watercolor paper, you need to behave a little bit more gently. 12 and then the two secondary shapes. This one here. You can be rough and expressive with your sketch. You don't need to be 100% precise even here when we are working larger. Actually, I forgot about the clean edges. That is something to remember. So I'm going to just tape. It is still not too late, like I didn't do too much of the Sketching yet. This is not a necessity, especially when you're working on a block like I am, because your paper isn't going to faculty. But I just want these nice and clean edges is great. If you are going for the edges to tape using masking tape before you start drawing because this way you will need to account for that little space that you're gonna lose. It's still not too bad, but I'll still do some corrections. Okay. We're continuing that was asleep that I just had. But that happens. This is the middle shape and Here's another middle shape. But we needed to reveal a bit more of this one. I already like this. This is the essence of my composition. Like this is the main organization of large and middle shapes. There's one more that we need to add here, very vaguely. And then the rest of it is just small shapes and lines that will represent the branches. So a couple of branches here. A branch here. That looks good. The last part will be to add a couple of these small shapes, purples, leaves. We don't really need to draw like it's just gonna be texture and individual brushstrokes that will represent beliefs. Sketching is like mapping things out. Like you want to map your territory, place, the main landmarks so that you know which parts you need to cover with your color once your painting When it comes to drawing and painting, really detailed paintings, it requires a different mindset to do that. And I think that when it comes to my own process, it usually frees me up for expression when I think like that. So I really try to loosen my lines and work more quickly and that will give me less space to overthink. And essentially it doesn't make my paintings look too stiff. So here I'm just mapping out some of the purplish bluish flowers, maybe adding some of these red elements and here as well, this is one that is red. And I drew one here and maybe just a couple of leaves. Okay, this is the sketch that we could work with already. Let's just clean it up a little bit. Any lines that are too stiff or I want to correct, I can erase just a little bit. But what I like to do, the end of the sketching process, I don't even mind that the lines are darker because that paint that I use is quite saturated. So I'm gonna, it's gonna cover it, especially when working with a crown that is a little darker, like we're going to definitely work with darker colors. But I will go over some important marks looking for those places are areas where contrast is the highest. Like here, here is very high contrast and I want to define them. So that's where my line is gonna be a little more heavy. Here also, just a little bit. Really do not care much about shading or like drawing all folds of these pedals because they're not really all that important. Maybe this one is a little more important, even though I don't want it to be too dark because that is very light in color. There is not a lot of contrast. Just be mindful of that. In places where you want larger contrast, you can allow to have heavier line. And in places are areas where you don't want the contrast to be too much. Just use your eraser to lighten that line a little bit. I think we're done with watercolor, needs to be fresh and your sketch should be fresh as well. So this is my final sketch. I'm also going to take a photo of this sketch. You will be able to download it from the resources down below if you want for any reason to use my sketch, if your own Sketch didn't turn out so well, or if you don't have enough time, you can just download it, then trace it to your watercolor paper and continue with this line works. I'm gonna do that. In the following lesson. We will continue creating our class project together and paint first Layer of watercolor. Let's go 10. First Layer - Wet in Wet: The next step is to do the first layer of our watercolor painting as spontaneously as it is possible. I do not work on the first Layer for more than 10 min, maybe 15 Bob's, I'm going to use as reference and the reference photo that we made, but also the value sketch and the color study that we did. So I will have both on my table next to my drawings so that I can see them. They can reference them if I'm not sure, I'm going to use these large brush for watering everything. That's going to be the first step, work in Wet, in Wet underneath my watercolor block, I have this ox to create a tilt, so the Watercolor Block isn't lying flat on the table. It is tilted and that prevents the water pools to develop and create these Watercolor accidents will still be able to get the nice bleeds between colors. Technique is not hard. It's challenge is in you not freaking out. People panic during this stage because they see the color is Ryan everywhere and it's just a large mass. However, in the second stage will be able to clean a lot of this mess by adding darker paint, framing that flowers. That layer is the one that will develop the painting into its final form. So no matter what happens here during the wet-in-wet stage, do not panic, do not throw your painting away. We will tie everything together in the next layer. So I'm just going to Wet everything. I'm usually really looking forward to this part because that is the most free part of my process, the next layer will be more controlled. So I'm really enjoying this one. I just observe the colors, what they do, how they bleed into one another. Large areas are the first ones that I want to cover when to use the spray bottle to refresh the paint on my palette. Make sure that your ends are prepared before you start painting. So this is the permanent rose, and I'm going to just cover some areas with it. So The Lily, it has some areas that are near white. This part of the pedal, these are the ones that are catching light. Then it is this area of this pedal. And on this one, it is this area. Why don't we were doing the study, the value study. We kinda marked these areas as very light, so I'm not going to really go into them with paint. This area will also be a little lighter. Now, I mixed a little more intense color, the same color, permanent roles. And I just want to add into the parts of the lily that seem to have a pop of color around here. This one has pop of color and you can just like added there, since our surface is wet, it is going to do it its own thing. The color will spread like it wants to. You can leave that. You don't have to control that. Here. Just here. It's just as you are like a Taking notes here. I'm going to read, read, brush, remove some of the excess paint, but other than that, you really do not have to control everything. So I'm not going to take this brush and I'll try to add a bit of yellow, maybe lemon yellow on my palette, mix it with the green and create this yellow green color. I am now going to edit where I see that color here is even pure green. Just like hints of it. And I see hints here. These veins on the petals, they seem to be this color, okay, pure lemon yellow goes here. And I mentioned that this area is going to be really light. I'm going to mix the yellow, wait, a little bit of the permanent rose. And that's the color of these parts. And I want to address this area because that's another area where that Rose is going to go. So here, here, little lighter note, so saturated, we're not going to put too much saturated roles color there, maybe just hints here. And just to balance it out, I'm going to put the hint of the rose color here, yellow, green. I need to water it down a little bit. And there's a lot of the yellow green here. Lot more since this is the flower from the side view. And for the smaller brush, I'm gonna grab more green. And it appears to have veins that are more green here on the reference photos I'm just going to address that. So I'll just go color by color and edit where I see it. The reference. Since we have green on our brush, we can go in and add the green to this middle shapes. These are the puppies. Appears to have a lot of the green here and the warm yellow that goes here. And you really don't have to be precise in this layer. We're just building a base. Look at what happened to our permanent roles like from this flower, it almost disappeared. So sometimes you have to check all the areas and go back. Well, so Watercolor, it never stays as vibrant and dark as you said when he's wet, it usually fates losing even 40% to 50 per cent of the intensity during the drying process. That's another thing that when you are painting with watercolor for the first time, you think that it screams, but when it dries, you'll lose all your colors and then you have to do another layer, like extra layer if you want some color intensity. So you really have to be fearless with your colors during the first Layer, I'm already keeping in mind that some of my paint will fade. Again. Here. There's no rules anymore. Me to go it more saturated so that it stays there. I want to go bright red now, this is the parallel red and I'm going to use the pyrrole red to draw few of these tiny little plants. And I had some red here, just a pop of red here and there may be here to just balance a little bit. Essentially, we are ready to mix this tool. We didn't do the orange stuff yet. So the red with warm yellow, we mix them to create orange. Maybe the, my tiniest brush, number six, and I will grab more of this yellow, green. And we'll try to add these parts here. Since my yellow disappeared from this one, we're going to grab pure lemon yellow and edit again. Even if that color bleeds, it really doesn't matter. The orange bits go here. And the yellow part, the yellow green part, it goes here. That I'm more yellow green balls here. And pure green starting to add the blue to make the green a little darker. And we'll go here. Now, it's time for blues. So we've got all the warm colors placed and we need to make some blues. Here. I'm going to add the ultramarine deep mixing. And since that tone needs to be a little more purple, I'm going to add purple, or you can just add a hint of the permanent rose to get the purple undertones. We don't want it to be this purple, we will need to be blue, purple. So I'm going to mix and balance out that mixture a little bit. Get the testing paper. This is the proper color, maybe a little bit more blue. So I still needed the blue, just warmer blue. That I think we already discussed that in the color thumbnails, but this is the normal blue color and this is in comparison, the blue that we're going for more available vendor when you water it down, not shiny blue, but the warmer blue, I'm going to paint that upper part is, upper part contains more dark blue. But then I'm going to grab the smaller brush with these yellow green. And I'm going to connect it to the branch here also. So this is slightly more detailed than what we did during the colored Thumbnail. Here also. Clean water, drag that paint with clean water a little bit. So we get the intense color and creating a gradient with clean water towards a little less intense. So it's watered down on this side and more saturated on this side. Because you always get one side that catches a little more light. I'm going to link it with the green and paint a branch. You have to leave them to bleed a little bit. That color needs to bleed a bit I really like how it turned out here. So lighter, darker. I'm being very loose with that color. So now I'm just working with clean water and on my brush There's still some leftover blue paint. And I'm just randomly adding blue undertones to my painting to just make sure that the color is distributed more or less. Like I wanted to be in a balanced way. I still need to grab that light green bold and draw these branches. We will do negative painting in the second part of the painting process here. And the negative painting will help that lighter branch to stand out a little bit more, but I just want to see where the branch is. My surface is already dry so I'm to the sprinkler, make it a little bit more Wet. We need to mix a bit more of that. Green that is darker, so we have light green here, so I'm going to use it and we'll add more blue into it. We'll make it a little bit darker with Payne's gray. When you add Payne's gray, it really gets this darker green undertone. So I want this green. And I want to paint just a couple of loose brush strokes that will look like leaves, right here and there. And now I'm going to add a bit more of the lemon yellow and more ultramarine to get a mixture that is slightly different undertone, I don't know if this is darker and a little more bluish. We do not want to go too dark yet. We're gonna go dark in the second Layer. So maybe this bud needs a bit more yellow. Here the surface is already dry. Just wanted to establish some green background. Here. We're going to work with that a bit later. This is already dry, so you can see that paint is forming harder Gs, but it was not the plan. It just happens when the wash dries more quickly than you work. One last color because I think that the rest of the colors we can add, maybe, maybe here just a bit of green. Rest of the colors we can add with negative painting technique in the second round. But there's one more color, the background color of this part, I need lavender for that base. So here's my lavender and it's a beautiful color. So I'm gonna make it a little bit more purple by adding the permanent rose, but I added too much. Let's experiment with a Color. So this is the color that I have, like snug bad, but I need something more grayish, not that saturated, so add a bit of the green. Let's see what the green does to this mixture. It makes it more gray, so that is what I want it. Now let's add a bit of yellow. Yellow really makes it more gray. You have to be careful about how much yellow you are adding. I'm gonna use it for this corner. I didn't want to do a wash here that is more free, so more water, it is supposed to be still a little Wet. Batteries drain very fast. Like this color, looks neutral. And I think that it makes even the roles stand out quite nicely. I'm going to add it here about the paint isn't that thick so that I will be able to do the next layer, go with darker color later on. Some adding more water here. We'll let the paint bleed and rundown little. I'm going around the blues. I don't want to spoil debt color. One quite important thing that we didn't yet get much color on are these Poppy heads. We still need to return there and use some of the brighter greens. Purposely let the paint bleed a little rundown. It doesn't matter, it will be fine even here. Don't worry about the mess Really. We will be able to clean it. And I think it makes more interesting painting than when you're not too precious. I am getting rid of the excess drops. Let's mix some of these green, gold or yellow, green and finish this. So we really need to paint, make them Wet. You can let them bleed, merge with the background. At this stage. Fine. Here in this area, you need to add more blue to decide where it's supposed to have shadow here. And we're going to do that here as well. But only to that part, like the other part that is facing light onto keep lighter. I want to grab love vendor. Because what I noticed and I really like lavender with a bit of blue on this photo is these reflections and hint of blue around these yellow color. I want to add that to my painting here, here as well. And now we have all the colors. I am really looking forward to the next part. In the next lesson, we will clean up the painting. We will add a few more areas that are more defined than this and you will see what will emerge. So I will see you in the next lesson. 11. Second Layer - Part 1: In this lesson, we're going to start painting second Layer and adding more definition to do central flower. So the painting has now dried completely. I use the hairdryer to speed up the process. When you squint your eyes at reference photo, you'll see that here there's a shadow, is not gonna be too dark, but there is a shadow, so we need to paint that. I also prepared some of these tiny little papers because I want to maybe reference a bit more rich color I'm mixing. We always need to start with a color that we already have there. So the flower is roles color. So we're going to start with a rose color, and I'm going to mix into that color, a little bit of that lavender. So that gives us this sort of gray color, but I'm going to mute it with a bit of green. And we'll probably have colored that will be better, that will more accurately represent the shadow areas. I think this one still be lighter. So let's add a bit more red. Yeah, that is the one that is how I'm searching for derived Color. Compare it with the reference. So I'm going to use this brush is the larger one. According to my reference, there is a shadow here. Right now we're painting wet on dry. So dry surface. And the shadow area is here. About. As I'm moving towards the top, we are adding a bit more water, creating a gradient. And adding a bit more pure, rosy color gives us a little bit of pop. And here there's a folder. So I'm going to only paint the inside of that pedal. And we'll add a bit of lavender to the places that I see are the darkest like here, here and here this area is now wet. I'm going to add a bit of the green because this color still, it goes towards some green here also there is a bit more shadow. This area. I'm just going to work them into the area. Alert the edges just a little bit. These little flowers that have these veins, but I don't want them to be too visible. So like very watered-down paint and you can do some of these, just a hint of them. You can see them on the reference photo. Rows we'd love vendor will help me to draw a couple of lines here. I keep on noticing these little things, but they're not too much detail. They are only suggestions of what I see on the photo. Now I want to continue here, so I go very, very carefully around this yellow part. This is the negative painting technique. There is more shadow in this area. And with that paint that I have on my brush, we need to also divide these parts of the center. The next petal here is where I see a bit more intense rose color. But here it moves towards love Andrew, like shadowy color. I don't think we need more. I need to step aside for a bit. I always try to move away from my artwork then come back and add what I think I missed. So I think I missed here a couple of these lectures that the Lilly has can do that with these dry brush and gives it more definition. What is essential when painting this flower is not to lose the lightness because it's still need to be very light. And that happens sometimes if we add too much paint. So be careful about that. Let's do this petal here. The shadow is a little bit weird because I see it here. This kinda like broken, little bit like that. And I see it here, vanish into roles like this color is Rosie, this color is a bit more colder shadow, and here is called the shadow as well. But I need to soften these edges just a little bit. I'm just going to do some splatters, random splatters with orange color because that is what I see on the reference. These are darker parts Of the lily is, are lighter, again, darker here. So this is expressive when you do it fast and you only do the point, like you only go for the contrast, go for the most important parts. Few more of these lines. I think that here in this corner and the shadow needs to be slightly more intense because when it dries like now, it dried a little bit and I see that there's not enough contrast because the color it faded, need to pay attention and maybe return to some areas if, if that's necessary. Here, it's just more contrast is needed suddenly. Luckily, you can still add. What is the problem is when you find out that you've lost the light, that is what you can't really repair that well in watercolor, it more dark and here we need more green. There's green. And then this is green dislike a green vein. And here, this is Rosie pretty much. Because I can't see what that contrast looks like. I'm going to grab a hairdryer and we'll draw this very quickly. Then I will step away from the artwork and see the contrast. Check the contrast. I think we're heading the right direction. So I'm using just a hinge of the Payne's gray. I don't want a complete like black tone, but I need darker tone. What I'm mixed just now is something like this. Maybe even a be the darker it more red in it, something like that. And I'm going to use it for creating these darkest parts, like when one pedal Touches the other, underneath, there's a dark beat that defines this pedal. So let's do that. I'm just gonna go around here a little bit around here. With clean water, we need to dissolve and control the edge of the final edge should be sharp on this side, but smooth on the other. So the dark heart, it doesn't go too much further. It only goes just a bit, a little bit. So now we can clearly see this pedal little bit more clearly than before. And this will negatively help us define these parts to make them stand out a little bit more. This part also. So I think that when I look from afar, now the entire flower starts to show some sharper contours. I'm going to mix some orange because I lost the orange here and we need to paint it again. So I'm going to paint this here one more a bit here, and then really dark part here in just like basically coping, drawing from the reference photo, the way seat. And this one is gonna be really dark. And now I'm trying to even use a bit of that dry brush technique. And here, this one shines. So I'm going to use a bit more of the yellow in the mixture, be the red. When you use yellow, it shows more light than the green. Yellow, green here. And this will be bright red. Just added more permanent rose here. I felt like the color faded way too much there. And here also, when this is going to dry, it's gonna be more pale. I don't wanna loose color. In those areas. This area I feel also supposed to be bright pink. Promise you, no matter how much time we spent on these Lily, the background will be much easier. So this is the center, the focus of our painting. And we really need to pay more attention to it than to other areas. And one more hint of rows here. Here is also shadow. So I'd like to paint the shadow here. I'm gonna use hairdryer to dry, and then we're gonna do Wet on Dry some orange sprinkles to get these crackled texture. And I think for the most part we're done with the center. And I'm just going to use my finger to create these tiny drops of orange paint. And that's, I think that's enough Internet class and we're going to finish the second Layer together. I'll see you there. 12. Second Layer - Part 2: In this lesson, we're going to finish second Layer of our watercolor painting. Let's now pay attention to other areas of the painting such as here and rest. I'm going to start with the other Lily that we're supposed to observe from the side view. So I'm just going to add a bit more of the really light roles color and we'll just do these tiny little folds. This is just Wet on Dry, basically drawing. And there's like more roles color in some parts of that pedal. So I'm just going to add that color there. And here I'm just softening the edge. That is all that the pedal needs. This is a lighter fold, and this is not our focal point. This part really needs to be Loose. This part of the flower has more yellow. Here. I can see more yellow, a bit of the yellow, green. So I'm just going to at a few strokes there. And careful about these edges. Like we don't want too many hard edges. This stem is gonna be darker green. And that is all that we need to paint. Really, not a lot me, I will add more orange to this part. Since we already edit some to the center. Then we have one green Part, a green leaf here, can add more paint and more yellow here. It's more of a orangey color and more defined that stem. No more than that is just like refresher of color. There is some blue parts, but I'm just going to add hints of blue. Grab some of that blue, and we'll see if it would be fine to add some of the darker parts as a second Layer to this blue flowers. But just to sum, not to all. I think that makes that form a little bit more readable. Not to all girls. There'll be a dark background in those areas and we will lose them if they're too dark. So we've got a secondary shape here and here those are the mid shapes. We need to pay some attention to them. And we will start with the green. I'm going to Wet this entire shape. And I need to add more love vendor. And here, give it some shadow. The shadow can be with hints of the rosy color. It could be lavender mixed with so rosy color because they are basically arranged next to the lily that the ink color will reflect. But then I need really, really dark green into migraines. I have a mixing Payne's gray to be able to paint here, this dark central part. And then around it, it needs to be more yellow here. And then with smaller brush blue color, I'm mixing love vendor with my blue and migraines there, these tiny little referrals that give it a definition. And that's a bit of the detail that we would like to include, gonna draw that here. So now we get to do the one here down below that Lily. Here is a bit of that yellow, green beat off the love vendor width below. Here. Here we want to paint negatively around the center. And now these referrals, whatever that is, it more dark because they're barely visible. But now the center, the central will be really dark. So I'm gonna use more of the Payne's gray. I'm going to paint the dark center. And now with green color, with a bit of the green color, I'm going to paint these little triangular going outwards. That is how I see it on the reference. This is how I interpret this shape. Darker shadow here. I quite like this blue, lavender color. So I'm going to use it even here in the shadowy areas. I think it will look a good against the dark background. We're very close to finalizing these painting, even though it doesn't look like that. But in a few moments when we add the darkest Darks, you will see how everything comes together. So just hold on. Just decided that although screens get a little bit boring. So I noticed that I can substitute the lavender mixture in certain parts of the painting or the greens and that will create some more variety. I lost those greens in some places in areas are lost the greens. So just going to create some more greens, you feel like you've lost them, you can enroll them back in. Here, I felt like the sum of the stems get even closer to yellow color than to the actual green. So I'm using that will now drive everything again. And I will see you in the next lesson. And in that lesson we will add the darkest Darks and will tie everything together. I'll see you there. 13. Darkest Darks & Final Touches: In this lesson, we're going to tie everything together. We're going to add darkest parts of our painting and hopefully finish these 0s. So let's get started. First, I need to figure out which color we want to use. I don't want to get these black like on the color study, but more like pollution green, that would be great. Or dark color that is more of a bluish Thompson to mix some like, I have greens here. So maybe we'd like to utilize these greens. I like to work with what I already have on my palette. And a bit more of that ultramarine into the mixture, more water also with more of this violet color. By the way, this dark violet isn't battle, so, oh, yeah, that could really work. Payne's gray. We'll darken it more even and that looks nice. I think it is up to me essentially to either go dark green. Our goal, dark violet, I think we're gonna go with this like dark violet. I think that will suit. So I'm gonna use the larger brush. Maybe we'll start here. Had dark paint here, bit more. Here. Probably need to switch brushes, can even shorten this paddle like that. Here's gonna be bits of green. And here I'm only adding water, like clean water. Because I don't want this triangle to be all-black. There could be hints of color still, but now our lily is nicely framed from this side. So let's Explorer. And definitely we will need to frame it better here. Like here. We're separating the puddle from this middle shape. And here I'm going to add the green. Here's the green. This is the negative painting that I mentioned that we already practiced in the previous lesson. And here I want to paint around like that. These are the pops of red that I wanted to include. So I'm going to paint around with them. Maybe just add a bit more darker red to give it some form because this red might look a bit more flat. So here, careful about the stems like we want to preserve these stems and I'm going to paint around them here. Here. Essentially, even this part really bring out these tiny blue flowers. I'm going to go paint around this. And here, I can use the sprinkler to create soft edges and let that color bleed. We don't have to have Darks everywhere. We can only use it strategically to frame some parts of the painting. Other can others can be left like that. I like the bleeding effect. We did not finish because from this side we still need to work some more. So here, here, the dark red. Just adding it from one side to show a bit of forum, I'm going to add a hint of green. And here I feel like the paint is a little too thick, so I'm going to remove some of it and we'll let it bleed out. I like this effect. It starts to look really nice, interesting. It's maybe, since this was a little bit Lighter than what I thought is gonna be going to add few more hints of dark, few darker areas. Just to emphasize decenter. This is going to do with the dark color, again, dark violet that we mixed. Let's a frame, few more parts of this painting like here. For instance. Remove the excess water here. Maybe we'll even drive these so that we can tell the board to the other side and let it bleed towards the other side. So I'm going to grab a hairdryer and we'll drag this really quickly. So this part is now dry, but it wouldn't be necessary, but I want to let the paint around the chores a different direction now so it is safer. So now I'm going to play around with it a little bit. I'm going to grab the dark paint on my brush again. And we'll kind of work around this space like here. We want to frame the upper part. It doesn't have to have full contrast like we can water down the paint a little. I'd like give this bogged a little more space. Here. Can frame this here also. Don't forget about this one. Here. Maybe we'll use some green in these areas. Okay, it's beautiful to watch how the paint bleeds. It will create its own. We just need to work on the contrast. So here we're fighting for that contrast again. Candlelight, the dry brush technique in these areas because it gives me more beautiful edge. Then if it's just a cutout of the silhouette of this flower here also just frames it more beautifully. And in this area, I really love the texture. I don't wanna destroy it. I'm just going to work very carefully. Here. We need to use the darkest paint. Again. See how it cuts that Lily creates a beautiful contrast around it. And here is it just needed. And here I'd like to use the sprinkler to get rid of the edges that are way too harsh. So we need hard edges here. And you can see how that works. Two, extra, the essence of this central flower. But in these areas, we do not want that same contrast. Otherwise, the painting will be unclear as to which part was our main focus here. The red was a little bit too much. And this area, I'd like to dull down a little too many things there. And I feel the same about another area. That one. I feel this is a bit more clear. Using the sprinkler in these areas for the same reason to get rid of the edges that are too harsh. Just wanted to soften that edge a little. And here as well, like I feel it is too harsh. This feels more natural. I'm going to dry these now because sometimes it's dangerous to leave it dry on its own. What I like it like this, let's preserve that herder will help us. So I tried everything and now I want to address some the final touches that I feel this painting would miss. And since these green color that I have here is sort of opaque, like it can work opaque LEA little bit. I think that it will allow me to add a few more details like here and there. For example here, painting wet on dry. Few more here. And these stems and like tiny little parts of the flower greenish, that are lighter, we should able to draw them, give it some hints of color here and there. Anything that would look nice? Make these. Here, I'm just adding dry brush texture, the light green. But when you use a dry brush technique, you can add hints of color that will make that entire shape to pop a little bit. Can use some water to dilute some parts. If I don't like, the final effect, doesn't always work 100%. So sometimes I like to cover up the other edge and feel more. Just pops. Few more hints of yellow. Since we added hints of green, I'd like to add hints of the blue as well. So I'm going to mix the type of rule that we wanted to use. This is the ultramarine with hints of purple to make it warmer. And I think we still miss a few parts. So we lost sharper controls, which isn't that bad, but just hearing there, it's fine to have some. Now I'd like you to live better. So it's just like these tiny little corrections to see what would potentially work. It is always trial and error. It doesn't like you can't be sure if what you're doing isn't gonna work. But creativity is also about exploration. So the more you explore, the more experience you're gonna get, you will know more intuitively what we'll work in your future paintings. I don't want to use any rights, but one other thing, I want to add some more negative spaces, some, again going to mix that dark paint between some of these stems. I really liked this effect. It's like washed out. There's light coming across and how it's soft. That is all very beautiful. But I just need to cut out just a few more areas between these stamps. And painting to Darks between the larger stems to make stamps stand out a bit more. Not sure if that's not going to destroy the light that having the painting. But just feel that I want to explore that. Sometimes it's better to stop. And sometimes I am willing to risk the destruction of the painting for discovering some new ways. So do not be scared to experiment because you will be able to really develop your technique and make it original by taking these risks and by experimenting more. Sometimes it takes a broken painting, like sometimes you destroy the painting in the process and that you can't be sorry, if you do, you learn something new, something invaluable when you are worried to take risks, that is, when you will never discover new ways. So you shouldn't be worried about that. I'm stopping now. I want to dry this. We're going to remove the tape together. I know I said we're gonna remove the tape, but I just wanted to do one more thing. And that is to do some of those splatters with blue color in these areas because I really love how it adds some more visual interest. And sometimes a couple of areas can turn a little doll when going for the wet-in-wet approach. So I think that the splatters are great way to enrich because they will add that lost intrest Immediately, even these light ones, I don't know if that's going to last ones. It is dry. If that's going to show as light, but that's all. That's all. I'm going to dry. And we are now removing the masking tape to reveal the edges, which will frame the piece quite nicely. We'll now just erase these bits of sketch that we had underneath the tape. Not a lot. And what is missing is the signature, so I'll grab my brush a bit of paint. So here is the final piece, final in front of us. Since I'm working with watercolor blocks, they usually only have this one side of the paper loose. So I need to cut the paper off of the block. And there goes my painting. I can continue with other study. And this is the final product. We have one more lesson to go through. And in the lesson, I will show you how to take a quick photo of your artwork, play with the settings a little bit to discover which parts you could have painted a little better. We will do some reflection about the whole process. So I'll see you there. 14. Reflecting: In this lesson, we're going to take a quick photo of these final painting and we will add it, it a little bit with our phone to possibly learn from mistakes that we might have done during the painting process. I'm not 100% happy with this piece. It is difficult to go back on a watercolor process when you lose light. I think that that was the mistake that I did here. I lost a bit more light than I wanted to preserve some areas like here, my original color Sketch had a bit more like sprinkle of light here and sprinkled light here. So that is something that I really need to be mindful over and I'm doing the next piece. So we can't try to do many corrections in the piece itself. But what we can do is to take a photo and check with our phone if the settings allow us to turn the contrast down or up and play with these a little bit. So I'm just going to take quick photo with my phone. And now here I have photo of the artwork. I'm just going to crop the photo. I mainly want to have not the white edges, but just to paint it Art of the painting there. It's interesting to see your painting in a phone because it is much smaller, so it is easier to make assessment when it comes to Tonal Values. So I can say that what I like is this bleeding effects. And I really liked the colors, how they distribute around the painting, but I lost light. I need to go to my settings and I want to try to play with them a little bit to add more light. This setting will allow me to go darker in the dark tones or to push the dark tones towards the middle tones. This is to match a few more of those darkest darks could be pushed towards the mid tones, and now the painting looks a bit more balanced. This is the light. Let's add more light. Like when we add too much, you see what happens. We need to add a little bit at bringing more light in, makes the painting glow even more. This is another setting that will help me play with the darkest Darks and push them towards the mid tones a little bit. This is contrast settings, so we can play around with it to see what is possible and it is kind of exploration and teach you a lot. It only takes a couple of seconds or minutes to go through these. Just maybe do a couple of these digital copies of your painting with different Tonal Values and you will see what visually interests you the most. Next time you're gonna be painting, you'll obviously want to reflect on that. But this kind of reflection became a huge part of my painting process and I believe that it really helped my paintings to stand out more. Another thing that I want to show you is how great it can be used. A black and white filter, it can show you and you can compare it with your value Sketch. How are your values are distributed throughout the piece? And I know think that this is that bad, like, I think this is quite balanced. I really like the lighter tones, the sprinkle of dark here. It really looks great in black and white. So that is some encouragement because I wouldn't change a lot in this piece when it comes to Values, I was on track about. What I will need to achieve is just to preserve a bit more light and whitepaper next time that I'm painting as well. This is the entire process that I usually go through when I'm painting spontaneously from a self-made reference in my studio. 15. Final Thoughts: Congratulations, You made it until the end of this class. I hope that you were able to learn something new and gathered inspiration for your future works as well. Before I say goodbye, I want to encourage you to take a photo of your class project and upload it down below. You can also write a few words about how your own process plant and what was your own experience. I'll be happy to take a look and leave you some feedback. I know it can be scary to show your work to others, but it can do so much for the community, encouraging other students to also share their work and get more feedback. You can also follow me here on Skillshare and get notified when I upload new class. Or you can follow me on Instagram or YouTube to see what I'm working on right now. And I will see you in my next class hopefully very soon.