Watercolor & Gouache: A collection of wildflowers

1. Welcome!: Hey there, I'm Jan of DJ Sweeney designs. Welcome to my studio. In this class, we're painting wild flowers. We use our wedge brush and the limited palette to paint these beautiful florals on a soft blue background, you can use these designs and techniques on so many things. Let me take you behind the scenes and show you a little bit more with classes all about. I first explain all the supplies that you will need for class. And then we jump right into practicing some strokes with our wedge brush, few pedal strokes and a few leaf strokes. We prep our paper for some quick and easy background washes. I love this moody blue color. One stride. We create six wildflower designs using a limited palette. By the end of class, you'll have a beautiful nine by 12 piece ready for framing. This class is designed for all levels. Some knowledge of watercolor and the wedge brush is helpful but not required. I showed you my process step-by-step in real-time with no voice-overs. And stick around for the last lesson where I show you some ideas and inspiration for your project. Are you ready to paint these wild flowers? All right, I'll see you in class. 2. Class supplies: All right, Let's talk supplies you're going to need for class. One inch painter's tape, size six wedge brush. If you don't have a wedge brush, you can certainly substitute a Princeton petals brush or a triangle brush. I would recommend the small size. You'll need a large round brush for our background wash, I have a size 12. Whatever you have is gonna be just fine. A couple of black markers and a couple of white pens. This is the Gelly Roll pen and the Signo uni-ball pen. I love these two. As for our paints, I have ash blue, gouache by Holbein, and permanent white also by Holbein. Then perylene, green, Winsor and Newton. If you want to use all gouache in class, that's fine. If you want to use all watercolor, perfectly fine too, or a mix like I'll be using. Grab a towel and old towel to dab off your brush. And then the paper I'm using is Arches watercolor, cold press paper, a 140 pound. Have some scrap paper to go. Let's see. Oh, I always feel like this is obvious, but your palette, water jars and then if you have bleed proof white, you can certainly substitute that for the gouache too. That works just fine. Alright, let's head over to the next lesson. 3. Practice strokes: Let's talk through some of the strokes that we're going to use all throughout class. The very typical common way to do petal strokes with the wedge brush. Got a couple of examples here. We'll go through this little by little, but as it's dry, I want to show you how I do that. You see my hand is way tilted over this way my hand is on the table. The tip of my brush is pointing in about the five o'clock position. I will land my brush and then just wiggle it around, keeping that tip always pointed towards the center. One petal stroke, just like that. I tend to start with this back petal stroke first when I'm making a full flower. Again, brush tip down, always pointing towards the center, staying in contact with the paper, moving it around. Then I either do this petal or this petal next, but it's all the same stroke. Can turn my paper if I need to. Landing the brush and wiggling it around. Now this stroke down here, I refer to that as the smile stroke. The way to achieve that. The point of my brush is about nine o'clock. I'm going to land my brush and just do a quick sweeping motion. Very quick, very gentle. The buds. All that is is one petal stroke. And then I just touch the brush to the page. You can make those as little or as big as you want. For these daisy, cone flower strokes. It's all pretty much the same. Very light wispy strokes coming from the center. And I'm just moving my brush around the page. If you've taken any of my classes before, you know how to make these leaves. But I typically start tip is down depending on where the stem is and where I'm placing my leaf, of course, but for this example, the tip is about seven o'clock. I land my brush gently, pull off the page. I come back to that starting point. Land the brush and kind of wiggle it around for that second smaller stroke. I do like to leave a little bit of whitespace in-between. You don't have to, if you don't want too, then these leaves. Lot of times I'm using the brush, this side of the brush or actually what I referred to as belly up position. When you see this yellow stripe, you'll know I'm using my brush and the belly up position. Obviously we'll talk through that as we're making our designs. But just to give you a heads up, if you've not been any of my in any of my classes before, this yellow stripe indicates the wedge portion of my brush is facing up. It's a kind of awkward feel to your brush, but you'll get used to it after awhile. And then I love making these wispy gentle leaves and stems. Let's get some paint. I've got my blue gouache. I'm going to use my largest well, be using that for our wash very soon here. Little bit of water here. Just flopping my brush back and forth, loading those bristles. I do have it fairly thick right now. It doesn't really matter the thickness of it. We're just going to practice these strokes. I do leave a chunk of concentrated pigment off to the side. Because the way to get this lighter edge, we're going to use less pigment and I'm going to dip the tip into this concentrated pigment for this darker center. Actually get a little bit more water in here. I'm going to dab off my brush. This brush holds so much water. Sometimes I typically dab on a towel or paper towel. And then I take just the tip, poke it right into that concentrated blue. Come over here. Tip is down at five o'clock, gonna land my brush. Wiggle it around. You can see how this darker center shows up here when you dip that tip into the darker blue, can even make this a little bit lighter. Sometimes what I'll even do once I flop my brush around, drag it off the edge, off camera, I will just dip it in my water jar to get a little bit of that pigment off, dab it on my towel, got to dip the tip back into that concentrated blue. Another petal stroke. By rinsing my brush, taking some of that pigment off, I get this nice blue light blue back petal portion of the petal. And then this darker tip area. Dipping it in my water, dragging the brush off the lip of the cup, tapping it a little bit, dipping it into the concentrated blue. Landing my brush. Keeping it always in contact with the paper, keeping the tip pointed towards the center. I can come on this side, do the same stroke. I didn't feel like I needed to reload. My brush felt pretty saturated and I feel like now it's drying out after that second petal, but let's just see what we get. Not too bad there. What I do is dip my brush into the water again. I know I've got some pigment in there. And then I go in for that smile stroke. The point is that nine o'clock, I land the brush and just do a quick sweeping stroke. Dab it on my towel. Sometimes I will get back in my paint depending on how my brush feels. A little bit too much there and then just add another one or two side swiping, sweeping strokes. Again, this smile stroke. Quick side stroke of your brush. Let's do one of these buds over here. Again as we do the designs, I'll talk you through everything that I'm doing. Just one petal stroke. Moving your brush around. I do lift it up the page a little bit to get some dimension here, a little bit of height on that back portion of the petal. Then I would just land my brush and touch it to the page. Now that's a bigger bud than what I would normally do. But just to demonstrate, let's do that one again. Just rinsing my brush and water, dabbing it on the towel without rolling it in the liquidy part of the blue. I'm just going to go right into the concentrated blue. And then just do one petal stroke. That's pretty light there. We might not be able to see that back portion. But sometimes I like to just have the brush loaded with water only and just dip the tip into the concentrated pigment. Now down here, the way I like to do that, this time I'll flop my brush back and forth, dab it on the towel a little bit. If this being the center of my flower. The tip is pointing maybe a down about eight o'clock. And I just land the brush and start making almost like little leaf strokes and just go around the flower. Lot of times this is different every time I do it. But I'm just utilizing this side of the brush. As I go around the flower. We could do smaller flowers up here at the front or the top if you'd like. But I tend to keep mine like this sometimes. Just kind of changes as I go. These strokes are almost like the smile stroke here. I'm just landing the brush gently into the page. One round and round where that center would be. Okay. We're going to go ahead and do some leaves, but I'm just going to use the blue for that. Don't need to get my green out yet. Many different ways to make leaves. This be in the two stroke leaf, I would say, I land my brush gently lean it into the page. Gracefully come off like you're coming off like an airplane. If I go back in for a second stroke, I go right back to this starting point. My brush is going to be a little bit more perpendicular. Land the brush. And just add that second stroke right next to it. I'm following the line of that first leaf. Do that again. Land the brush. Come off the page gracefully. Get right back in there. Just wiggle that brush around. For that second smaller stroke. I wanted to do leaves like this. That's just very simple. One stroke leaf can come down this way and do the same thing. If I wanted to add a second stroke, I go right back to where I started, land the brush and just wiggle it around. These are a lot of fun to do because you just get a little bit wild and crazy with those. Where it might take the tip of my brush, kind of wiggle it up the page. Then just some random light brushstrokes will do a lot of these when we're making our design. I love the look of that wilty, blowing in the wind kind of stems and leaves. Easy enough for a quick warm-up of the strokes that we're going to talk about or with all the designs in the class. If you have never used the wedge brushed before, I would take some time and practice these strokes first and really get a good handle on your brush and moving it and manipulating your brush for these strokes because I'm just bending, not bending. I'm twisting, rolling my brush sometimes and you'll see that all throughout class. Keep an eye on this yellow strip to if I don't actually tell you its belly up but you see this yellow line. I'm using my brush and the belly up position for just some quick leaf strokes to doesn't look like a whole lot of leaf strokes right now. But once it's together in a composition, you'll see how they look like leaves. Alright, I'll meet you in the next lesson. 4. Taping your paper: Alright, let's get our paper all taped up for that super nice crisp border. I'm just taking my tape top edge going right up to the top of the page. I like to do on one edge is put a little flap on it, makes it a whole lot easier to remove it. Next time. We're gonna do that all around the sides. One inch border. If you wanted to tape this to a board to work on, that's totally fine. I've done that and that is nice to do as well. Trying to get as close as I can to that. Sorry for moving the table so much. Making the camera shake. Okay, next up, I need one piece right through the center here. And then two down the side. I could maybe should measure this out, but I'm gonna guess and just go for it. Now, if I was doing this for a commission, yes, I would totally make sure it's very equal, very straight. We're just gonna go with our eyeballs today. Think that's a little low. We need to more probably need to readjust these, but let's just see. Make sure you've got nice occlusive edges. We will be good to go. 5. Background washes: Alright, tons of fun to do background washes. You want to have a scrap piece of paper. We are going to do a wash on this because as we do our petal strokes for the designs on here, we want to practice on this. Grab some tissue, your large round brush and your blue plenty of water. And we will get started a couple of different ways that we're going to do these. Some similar, some a little bit different, but a very quick and easy way that I like to do my background washes. Just rolling my brush in the blue. I'll drag some off. Then I'm going to turn my paper. I typically have the majority of the color on the left side. And then as I progress over, It's more of a dry brush effect. I don't want to go super dark with these either because our florals are going to go on top of those. The wash of course, and then sometimes it just looks a little too convoluted and you can't really tell if you've got dark florals on a dark background. Here's how I like to do it. Just take my brush and just quickly lay down the paint. If I need to go back in to my blue, I do but trying to work quickly. Then just pushing the brush to the edge for some dry brush effect there. Sop up some of the liquid on the tape here. I'll just leave that alone. All right. The other way I can do it sometimes as well that maybe you've done wet on wet. I'm not worried about having some blue on there already. Lay down water and then get right back in your pigment. Just some gentle strokes. I'm going to dab a little bit off my brush, keep pulling it down to go lighter. And then just walk away. It's so tempting to keep getting in there and overworking these. All right, Getting back in here are going to do the same thing. I'm going to do wet-on-dry. Start on this left side here, turn the paper so it's comfortable for you. And then just get on in there. You can hear that brush, just scrubbing it on the paper and I'm gonna get back in there right away and sop up some of that darker blue. Dabbed off my brush. As I just said, don't overwork it, but we've got a little time here. I am trying to get to the edges, so we've got those nice clean margins. Going to walk away. I love that dry brush effect. Alright, let's go down here. Now. This one, I'll do another wet and wet, tissue in hand and then I'm going to dab some areas out, lift some areas with a tissue, the hair off the paper there, whatever that was, some fuzz. And then get back in with my blue drop that. Then just laying down my brush, just my tissue paper. Actually toilet paper, not tissue paper. And just dab some areas out. Leave that one go. Another dry brush background. I'm rinsing my brush and water, dragging it on my towel. And then I'm just going to quickly get in there. A couple of extra strokes. They're just trying to cover some of these edges. Last one sounds kind of harsh. So I'm rubbing this brush onto the paper. I think it sounds worse than actually how much I'm really putting pressure on it, sounds worse than it is. Little bit more in there. Alright, then we're going to let these dry completely and come back and start adding our florals. Nope, one more thing I forgot, have to add practice page of a wash that we talked about. Alright, just make this one long wash or a couple of separate ones wherever you want it to be. Not overly worried about how this looks. Trying to match the colors a little bit. It doesn't have to be exact. Might actually grabbing another paper and have two of those ready to go and we'll see how much I use this or not. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't. But getting your water to pigment ratio between the white and the blue can be a bit of a challenge sometimes that's nice to have a practice page for that. All right. Now we need to let all of this dry. We'll get the tape off once it is dry and then start adding our florals. 6. Tape removal: All right, everything nice and dry looking good. Your paper probably did warp a little bit. We used a fair amount of water. That's not a big deal. What I do sometimes is just gently try to bend it back in place, lay it down flat, put maybe tracing paper over it, stack some books on top of it. Obviously, after all the florals are done, I would do that. I wouldn't worry so much about it now, but don't be surprised if your paper is warping a little bit. Typically happens anytime you do watercolor like this with a big wash like that. All right, let's get the tape off. Wonderful tape peel. Try to keep your paper or your tape flat as you're rolling it back. Sometimes it will tear your paper. If you just yank it right off there and really pull straight up with it, so try to keep it flat. Alright, there we go, looking good. Now we're gonna get our pallet full of green and white. We've already got our blue and we'll start adding our florals. 7. Wildflower 1: Alright, adding in our White, a good squeeze of that, as well as the green. Add just a drop or two of water for now. Again, leaving a nice chunk of very concentrated gouache in the corner. Same for our green. Probably have way too much green right now, but that is fine. I tend to do that. I just squeeze out more than I need, but that's okay. Can always use it in the future. Alright, so grabbing my size six, we're going to start up in this corner here and move across the page. Having our practice page here, let me show you how I like to load my brush. Now this is the part that can be a little bit difficult to get a handle on because loading the brush like this is going to be different for me. Going to be different for you depending on the humidity in your home, where you're painting and a lot of factors go into it. So I can't really say two drops of water and you're good to go. You might need more. You might need less. But I do want this white to be fairly thick. I would say that is cream consistency. It's fully loaded with white. I'm going to drag it off the edge a bit, tap it on my towel. Going to dip that tip right into that blue, that concentrated blue. And I'm going to go ahead and just do a quick practice of Petal Strokes like that. I like that. Now, I wish I would've done that right there. Sometimes it's hard to get the same thing that you do on a practice page. But I did that mainly to see how the thickness of my white paint, if I like that, if it was too thick or too thin, I think I'm going to stick with it for now. It is pretty warm in my house today, so you'll see me adding some more water. But for now we're just going to go for it, drag it off the edge, dip that tip in there. A little bit off the back on my towel. Try another one again. I think that's going to work. All right, so let's just do a floral. Couple of florals on this one here starting up in this corner. Wiggling that brush around. Now I'm going to go back into my blue, the concentrated part there. I went a little bit stronger blue in that center. Dipping it back in there again. I'm going to add this smile stroke. Now I'm going to leave that one alone for now. Going back to my water rinsing my brush. Really good. Get back in that white, fairly thick white. Drag it off the edge. A little bit on my towel. Same process. Looks pretty good and let's hurry up and get one down here. Let's do right here. Dip my tip back into that blue. You didn't see that but just add a little smile stroke. I felt my brush drying out a little bit. Now sometimes there's a little gap right there and I might just add another touch of the brush to the page. This floral is getting a little bit lost in there. Not a big deal. We can go back. Once this is dry and do it again. I'm not a big advocate of continually going over your petals. It just tends to really overwork it. Going to get into my green. We're going to go a little bit dark right off the bat. Then in a little bit, add some white to our green to layer on top of that dark. Again, this is fairly thick. Dragging it off the side. that's good for now. All right, so taking the tip of my brush, so I wanted to get the center. I don't want my stem over here way off to the side. I gauge it by my back pedal, imaginary line. And then I just come down, start drawing that in, painting that in same with it here. Imaginary line from the back pedal. Not going for perfect. You see I'm just using the tip, drawing in that stem. Then the fun part, starting to add some squiggly fun leaves. So I'm just using the tip and I just start randomly adding some lines. Maybe coming out here. I'm just trying to gauge where I want to add some leaves. I like to build up this area here underneath the florals with some thicker squiggly leaves. I might do a little V-shape here. I keep my stems a little bit thicker, trying to not overthink it. I'm just using the tip of my brush, adding in some leaves here. Very light touch. Do a thicker leaf. a double stroke leaf. This is where you'll have fun depending on where your florals are, where you want to add the leaves. But I always come off the side. Just think that looks so pretty. I try not to take up the whole square. I like to leave a little bit heavier on the left side, a little bit lighter on the right side. Just being very carefree. that Wildflower look where you've got stems and leaves just kinda sprouting all around, just gently framing your flowers. And these are just lines right now. I'm just doing some of these lines and then you'll see me go in and add just some squiggles. We're just indicating some leaves here. You don't want to overdo it because these florals are soft as it is. And even some of the dry brushing with these leaves. I really loved that. Let's leave that go for the moment. Now that's going to dry pretty quick. So what I'm gonna do over here, rinse my brush really well. That green really gets in your bristles. So you want to rinse, well, I'm going to scoop up some of this white and bring it over here. Rinse my brush again. Then scoop up some green. Mix those together for our lighter green that we're going to layer on top. Add water if you need to. This is gonna be the color that you want it to be. I tend to just go back and forth. Adding white, adding green. I just want to add another element of contrast. I get right back in here and then just some squiggly lines. Sometimes what I'll do is go right over this green here, this dark green. It's going to lighten it up right away. If I think, oh goodness, it's too dark. Get back in there with some of this lighter green. That is the cool part of just layering. Just using my tip. If you get in there and you lighten it up too much, you can get back in there and darken it up again. All right, I think I'm gonna let this one go as is for now. At the very end, we'll take a good look at all of our flowers and see what we need to add. We'll just let this one go with the paint. I am going to grab black marker. And what I like to do is just add some dots down here in this open area. Sometimes I leave it just as is, just to draw the eye in that center. I take my white pen. Sometimes add some white dots right over it, a little bit above it. Sometimes I'll leave it like that or take my Micron and add a little bit more interest to that center with some long graceful lines. And then walk away. Don't overdo it. All right, we'll leave it alone, will come back to it and let's move on to this one now. 8. Wildflower 2: All right, For our next floral, we're going to have just one flower in the center, will have a C curve stem and the floral is facing off to the right. We're going to use the same floral strokes. But what I like to do first with this type of flower, which I don't know what the name of it is, but it's a lot of fun to make. I just use my pen, I gauge where I want this center to be. Now you could certainly use a pencil if you don't want to go right in with a marker. But I'm going to go ahead and just kind of like the cone flower, but just add a little bit of that center to help my eyeballs of where I'm going to place those floral strokes then grab my brush. Same process. Getting it in the white. Dab it on your towel, dip the tip into the concentrated blue. Do a test stroke if you want. Think I want a little more white on my brush. I'm going to pull some of the concentrated white into this area that I'm working from. Pretty thick. Little bit better. All right, So I'm gonna start on this front part of the floral. Just do a stroke. I'm going to use couple strokes from this. One, loading of the brush. Dip that tip just back in the blue. Now I want the flower to curve towards the right here. I'm actually pulling out some of the strokes, kind of forcing it, forcing the eye to look that way. I'm going to rinse my brush. Same process, getting in that white, tipping the tip into the blue again. Try it or not, I do want to extend this out a little bit more. So here I go, going right over my petals, which I said before, don't overwork them. But I want that to be a little bit bigger. Now I'm going to do some really short strokes down here at the bottom. Still curving out this way, if that makes sense. And then I'm just landing my brush. Let me get that tip back in the blue. Couple of little smile strokes underneath there. I'm going to build that up some more. I want that to be a little bit larger. Getting my brush back into the white, dipping it into the blue. Let's see if that's too much. I can get a little more white on that. My tip back in the blue. Force this out a little bit more. Using the tip to kind of feather some of that blue out. I'm gonna get in my green and do the stem. The stem is going to come around that way. Because here's the middle of that bottom section. And I just go ahead and do the line first. Then I just start flipping my brush back and forth again. Watch where that yellow is sometimes because I tend to roll it and flip it and forget to tell you. But I'm working fairly quick. Light carefree strokes. I even get up into that blue and white I just laid down. so it doesn't look like the flower is just sitting right on top of the green. Kind of bleed some of that green up in there. Back in with some squiggly lines. We'll go ahead and thicken up some of these leaves in here. All right, Now I want to get back in the lighter green that we mixed up earlier. Do the same thing, adding some of that contrast in there. Just going to give the eye a little hint of something different there. Not too much at all. Put my brush down and grab that white pen. Then just add a couple of dots over this. Even maybe extended to the top part a little bit and even below. Again, if that's too white, you can add some dark on top of it again. I think I might do that once this dries get back in here while I'm just looking at it a little more. All right. We're going to let this one fully dry. Move on to this and we're gonna do some buds on this one. But just looking at this one, I might get back in here. I'm trying not to overwork it right now, but I might get back in here and add some more petals on top of this flower, but we'll see how it goes. 9. Wildflower 3: All right, We'll do a collection of buds over on this one here. And you remember that's just one pedal stroke with a little bit of the smushed brush on either side. Alright, let's get in the white. Keeping that fairly thick. Rolling your brush to load all those bristles, dabbing it on your towel. I'm going to sound like a broken record after awhile. Keeps saying the same thing. Let's do a little test. I like that. Rinsing my brush again, I'm going to try to do exactly the same thing. Dab on the towel right in there. Let's see real quick. Okay, we'll do that. Let's see. One a little higher up. Pushing right into the page. Going right back into my blue. Now I still have some white on there. I'm going to rinse my brush and I keep loading my brush exactly the same way. Sometimes I just leave it like that and don't do that extra push on the side. Go over this one. That a little more dramatic there and overwork this one to hopefully not overwork it too much. Rinsing my brush back into the white. It's drying pretty quickly. So I added some more water, pulling this back away from the concentrated segment of that. Dab, my brush, dip the tip. Just do one more. Maybe two. We'll see. Now sometimes with this white and white here, you can't really see it. What I will quickly do, dab my brush and then feather some of this blue out. Now this one's kind of dry, but with the idea and just extend it a little bit. Go over this one just a little bit more. Same with this one. Dipping my brush into the white again. In the blue, I can tell that this think it looks dry. I think it is dry and I just want to extend that a little bit more. We will live with that. We'll get back into our green. Can tell some of these are wet, but I'll try to be careful. So I'm just going to use the tip and pull down some stems. Then what I like to do is go around the side of these buds with some green. Just a couple of little lines. Indicate that the flower is not quite open yet. Trying to be careful because I do see that some of this is still wet. Get a little bit of a bleed in there. Not a big deal. Now these, I think I'm just going to do some long lines indicating the greenery. with the leaves I just don't want to get too busy with these leaves since the buds are really soft and gentle. You're just indicating some movement here. These wiggly lines. There's plenty of times my lines don't even connect and that's fine. I don't want to overwork this either here. I want to let these centers dry a little bit more than I am going to build up some of the greenery right underneath these little buds. Now, still taken my brush, I'm gonna get up in here a little bit further. Brushes belly up, just painting in a little bit thicker area. I don't want to cover up that blue that we just worked hard to get. But I will hug the greenery right next to it or right next to this side or to the side of it. All right. I'll do the same thing. We'll get back in our lighter green. What I'm gonna do is put a little more green in my brush. Grab some other white. Rinse again, get a little bit more. Alright, we're going to add a whole lot more. Could've, should've probably made a whole lot more to begin with. But that is not a big deal. Only using it sparingly, so it does not have to be exact. But I want to get it close. I'm not going I'm not to do too much on this one since we've got plenty of these darker squiggly lines, but I am going to get back in some of the real dark areas and just use this lighter green as highlight or for some contrast and just soften that darkness. Alright, let's let that one dry. We'll start working on our fourth one. 10. Wildflower 4: Alright, For this one, I'm going to add two cone flowers. Again like I did here when I added the black to help my eyeballs out a little bit for composition. What I'll do with this one sometimes is just go right into that white paint. Then plot out where I want to do my cone flowers. You could use pencil if this makes you nervous to just go for it. Go ahead and put one right here. Cone flowers, daisies, these all can look really pretty similar. This one will be facing out to the right with a stem coming this way. And then I add the other one here. Stem will come down this way. Certainly build up these centers more. But just for a start, you're getting the hang of this, starting with our white and then dipping it into the blue. See what that looks like. Pretty good. Alright. I will start with this but turning it. Let's see. Yeah, we'll just keep it like that. I start on the sides or sometimes in the middle. Let's turn it up a little bit. Sorry about that. Then I'm just working fairly quickly. Getting those initial petals down. Very light strokes, mainly using the tip. Softening some of that blue and these a little bit more. That's a good start on that one, let's work on this one. Get a little bit less blue. Maybe. Try that again. I'm going to have to reload, but let's just go for it. Definitely very light. I'm going to go over this one, but I just really wanted to just get the initial placement of the petals first. Going to collide like that, which I like that. Alright, so I'm gonna get a little bit more concentrated white dab, dab, then dip, and then we'll get back in here. Let's just see a little bit more white. Adding more white, but I'm going to probably go back in and add a little bit more blue if I just dip my tip, just kind of playing with it as you do these, I'm gonna rinse my brush, work on these petals down here. Getting into the white little bit of the blue. Can dip my brush back into that blue a little bit more. While that's still wet, can add some soft blue in there. I'm just really trying to define some of where these petals are. Some of the outer edges get back in the white. If I wanted to soften some of this blue. Again, try not to overwork these too much. Alright, let's just leave these go for a minute, let those dry. We can get back in the center here. Add some black dots, even extend it a little bit, make that little dome shape. Sometimes I'll take a little micron and do those tiny little hairs at the top. Let's see one little spot there that's bugging me that I want to add a little petal. See how this goes. Pretty dry. Here we go just to round that out and make it a little bit more even there. Okay, let's add some greenery. Pulling the stem down. Same with this one. Go up a little further. You know, the drill squiggly lines, add the leaves. Where do you want? Even some extra lines? We're making wild flowers. So this is just a field of pretty flowers and leaves just bending and blowing. Going to define where the stems are for both of these a little bit more. Alright, let's get in the lighter green. Do a little bit more, not too much. Sometimes it's so light, you can't really even tell. I'm going to add a little more white to this green over here. Really pretty light, not much of a difference there. Sometimes I will take that light green and go down one side of the stem. Other trick I like to do, probably a good spot to mention that taking your white pen, if you want to highlight some areas that way, I'm certainly do that. Just very subtle marks. I would get back in here. Maybe up by the bottom of that flower. Me just touching that, that'll take a little bit of that off. You could use the Gelly Roll pen too. But sometimes just a little pop of that white really helps it stand out even more. This spot right here, I've been eyeballing that. I want to add another and another leaf in there. I don't know why that spot was just bugging me. Caught my eye since we added some thicker leaves on this one, it seemed like it was left on its own there a little bit too much. Walkaway, Jen, walk away. Alright. Looking back at this one, what do we want to do with that, if anything? I do, I think I want to get back in on some of these petals. Try to gently pull out some more white. Is the fun part about class as you can just really go for it sometimes. Not a commission. Alright, Just have fun with this. Just adding little bit thicker strokes. Part of the reason I'm doing that, this background, it was all just kind of melding together. Wasn't sticking out as much as I wanted it to. But I don't want to overwork it anymore. We will let this dry and move on to our next one. 11. Wildflower 5: Alright, For this one, we're going to get back and do some of these florals like this that we did in our first one. I had to replenish my gouache. I was running out there. Usually, like I said, I add too much, but we're using a lot of this dip that tip tested. If you want to start up here, I'm going to go right back in that blue dip a little bit more of my tip into the gouache. Little smile stroke in there. And we'll leave that go. Load your brush. Next one we'll put up here. Angle it this way a little bit. Let's do one more right about here. Rinse my brush, reload with white and blue. Make this one smaller, little bit smaller. Have our stems turn this way. So we'll just come over here. Like a little V-shape. Under that bottom. They're going up their stems and then add a little bit thicker leaves on this one. At least for some of them. I'm just pushing the tip of my brush in a little bit into the side of the page. When I do these little leaves, not much pressure at all. Pulling this down a little bit, just trying to eyeball some of these. I just I love coming off the edge like that. Just some random lines just indicating that greenery. All right, let's go ahead and do these centers and then we'll get some lighter green on top there, grabbing our black pen. Little dots. Bounce back to this, see I'm all over the map sometimes. Just wanted to get some of these dots a little bit thicker. I start at the base and then I gradually go up, typically leaving one side a little bit darker. Back to the white pen. Still a little wet, so it's a little better. This one I think I will just leave as is. I won't add these extra little, extra little lines. All right, let's get back in now. Let's lighten some of that up. Here we go again. I got to add more green than more white. All right, just a little bit here. You could go a whole lot lighter on these and maybe, Maybe I'll do that once we're all done and we sit back and we look at it, that's really not a lot of contrast. So actually let's just do that now. And getting a little bit more white in here shows up a little bit more. Very, very light touch with the brush. Hardly touching the paper at all. Let's let this one go and we'll work on our last one. 12. Wildflower 6: Alright, almost done here, rounding out this last square, I think going to do some florals like this, maybe add some buds. I had a general idea of what I wanted to do with each one of these squares. But I'm kind of winging it a little bit as we go. Just what it feels like as we move along and what it looks like overall. Just trying to keep it cohesive to add a little bit more blue on that one. Keeping this same amount, the same thickness. Trying to alright. Let's do it down here. Like that was a pretty loaded brush. I can probably get all three strokes. Maybe this smile stroke, Yep, little bit there. Let's do a bud up to the left here. We'll do two. I'm gonna go ahead and put another floral up here. Right around this area. Getting a little bit lost on that side, there. Might need to add a little bit more blue, but actually it's coming together there. All right, let's get the greenery in here, see if we want to add any more florals after that. Hoping this area is dry here, looks like it. I have been surprised before using that tip. Forgot what I was looking at. Over here. Given your leaves movement. Sometimes I just look for open spots that I want to fill in, whether it's just a green squiggly line or an actual leaf, just trying to keep it balanced but not perfectly set. It can be a little heavier on one side, a little bit squiggly. On the other side, just you want balance but you don't want it to be perfect either. Not a lot of room up here on this one, but need a little bit more greenery. Alright, let's get lighter green. You see I tend to go right back where some of the darker green is. Get in there and lighten that up first or go over part of it. I don't want to go over all of it. Little bit more and then we better call this done. Well, I've got the light green. Get back on this one a little bit more. Let's add our centers. Now just keeping this very simple, if you wanted to add some color, other color in there, some yellow, some orange to make those centers pop. You certainly can. But I'm trying to just keep it really simple and just vary this muted blues and greens. Some of my favorite colors are these moody jewel tone colors. Go ahead and add some lines to this main one here. That one pop a little bit more. This one we can add a little bit. This flower got a little bit lost there, but it's all right. Let's see what else. Tell you what we're going to let this dry all the way. We're going to step back, look at it and see what we need to add if anything. Alright, I'll meet you over in the next lesson. 13. A few additional details: Alright, I'm gonna try and take some of my own advice and not overwork these petals. I am going to add a little bit darker greenery to this one down here. But as off-camera, I'm looking at it and I thought, Oh, I could do a little bit more here with this petal, pull this one out a little bit more. And I thought, no walk away, leave it alone. Let the painting stand as it is, except for this greenery. So I just wanted to darken up some of these because I felt like this one compared to these five. This one was a little bit too light and I'm not trying to get the greenery all perfect by any means. But I want to have just be similar. I think darkening up some of these lines will do the trick. Then we'll clean up some of the centers and we will call it a day. I don't know if I have more fun making the greenery or the flowers. Both pretty fun with this brush. See, there's things we lightened up, things we darkened up, then we went back to lighten up. It has been a back-and-forth day, that's for sure. Alright. A couple more things on these centers. I think I'll get in here a little bit more. This is where we run the risk of really overworking it. Definitely don't want to do that. These are very gentle, soft flowing flowers. We don't need to get so caught up in all the tiny little details. Add a little bit of white on this one up here because that's what we did on the others. So just keeping that a little bit similar to a little bit. I promise you I'm not going to, once we get done with class, I'm gonna leave it alone. I'm not gonna keep working it because that's not fair to you. I'll show you exactly what I'm doing. Alright, What do you think? Are we done? Are we done? I think we should call it done. All right, Let's go ahead into the next lesson. I really want to show you some different things that I've done off-camera and give you some options of how you can use these designs. 14. DON'T MISS THIS...Project inspiration & ideas: Alright, as I was preparing this class, since I love these colors, I love this technique and design. I made a bunch of stuff and I wanted to share that with you. Maybe give you some ideas for your class project. Certainly what we did in class, I would love to see that. But to take it a little bit further, some things that I did, move this off so we can see these one-by-one here. So this one I did on handmade paper, cotton rag paper four by six. Same way with a wash, same way with layering the florals on top. This would make a fantastic card or just to frame it as is this one, kind of like a larger size Polaroid but just taped my paper. This is also four by six. Can add some lettering down here. Use this as a card or just frame it as is this one. I did add some yellow on that one. That's the only difference that I did all of these. But I placed this on blue card stock just from my local craft store. Then if I wanted to write a letter on the back here with white pen, I could do that or calligraphy. It goes right into a square envelope. And then bookmarks. I always love the bookmarks. I did not even measure this. I just eyeballed this. I did which one? This one here, I did tape this and that was a little bit tedious and I thought, I don't need to tape it. So I just did the background wash on these and then layered the florals on top. I added some outlines, some micron outlining. Sometimes that makes your florals pop a little bit more if they start to get lost on your background. I could potentially do that on some of these, but like I said, I wanted to just leave it alone. Discovering new ways to make your florals pop is always fun. This one I just left plain. This one I added the blue card stock. Same with this one. Pretty, pretty bows, pretty ribbons and bows are always fun. And then I added some white on the back of this one. Make it a little bit extra fancy. Then the last one I did, I went ahead and I think this is about a four by six as well. I just did three in the center, taped it off, did exactly the same thing, and then get this in this frame here. But what a fun gift to give that to someone. I can't wait to see what kind of projects you come up with. I know you're gonna have all kinds of great ideas. Please upload those into the project gallery. Or if you're on Instagram, go ahead and tag me. I would love to see what you come up with. But thanks again for being in class. I hope you enjoyed painting these wild flowers, these moody blue and green wild flowers with your wedge brush. Alright, you have a great day and I hope to see you soon.