Watercolor & Ink Botanicals: Creating beautiful botanical art while you explore your materials

1. Welcome: [MUSIC] Hey, I'm Denise Love and I want to welcome you to class. Let me show you what we'll be doing. In this class, I have tons of fun things to show you and I'm pretty excited to be getting into some of the fun stuff we're going to be doing today. We're going to start off with yummy little practice pieces where we're going to practice with colors and botanicals and different types of botanicals where we draw on top of some watercolor that we did, and then we'll progress to little bit larger botanical watercolor pieces. Then we're going to do super fun, little bit larger pieces in squares where we just create a different little scenario, color wise, flower wise, practicing different techniques and flowers and botanicals and things that we might want to use in a larger pieces. Then we're going to move into great, big yummy pieces like these. They're so much fun. I do these in my art journal and then just come back and work on them as I think of new ideas and add pieces in that I think need to be added. Here's another one that I have done in my sketchbook in a different color way. I just find these so relaxing and informative. You learn so many things about the materials that you're doing and you get different inspiration off of different botanicals that you draw on here. I truly enjoy making these. We're going to start off small and get some good things under our belt, and then we'll end up at a little bit larger piece that you may or may not want to take out of your sketchbook and then frame. You may love it so much. There's so many things I do in my sketchbook that I take out and then frame. I do meshing out ideas and practicing and playing and letting loose a little bit and doing things that I might not normally do and experiment rather than being so regimented and afraid to break those rules. This is super fun class. We're going to start off small and get bigger. I hope you enjoy the different projects that we've got going on in here. I know I certainly enjoyed painting them while we were going through class and I'm pretty excited about it. So I'm looking forward to seeing what you create. Definitely come share those with us in the projects. I want to see what you made, what colors you used, what illustrations you ended up putting on your pieces because we'll put some pretty little illustrative pieces in there that you're going to love. I want to see what you've done so come share those with us. Welcome to class, so let's get started. [MUSIC] 2. Inspiration: In this video, I want to take a look at inspiration for the pieces that we might create in this class. Creating botanicals on top of watercolor paint is really very fun and relaxing. You can do this when you're sitting in front of the TV or when you go up to your art room to play. This is one of my sketchbooks and I've got a couple here that we'll look at, but I just like to create watercolor in the background and then draw stuff on top that I think is really pretty. It's a great way to experiment with your watercolors, playing with colors and combinations and seeing how things blend when you're working wet on wet or wet on dry. A lot of times I'll create big backgrounds of watercolor and little backgrounds of watercolor, just waiting for me to come along and then draw on top of them when they're dry. I have a bunch of different things I've experimented with here. In addition to big squares and big squares of color like these, I've also done some botanicals that I've drawn on top of the watercolor paint, which the paint underneath it, I really thought that looks so icky, and then when I draw on top of it, I'm like it's magically better. That's fun to experiment with a lot. Draw the watercolor on, draw the ink on top of it. I love doing that. Then these circles were super fun because it allowed me to experiment with different patterns and different colors and I was seeing how they blended and it's a fun little circle of color rather than a square. Then offers also playing with larger circles of square and drawing pretty things on top of that. I've had a lot of fun working with botanicals and they haven't all been perfect. I started off in this book and I discovered that I didn't like different markers when I was drawing on here. This is pencil. Then I like these Pigma pens, which are these Micron pens that are archival and they draw really nicely under watercolor and on top of watercolor. You can draw your botanical and then paint on top of it or you can paint and then draw on top of it. There's a lot of good things you can do with these little Micron pens. Then I did bigger layouts for the bigger squares that I was creating. Really just having an absolute ball mark making on some of these coloring some. How beautiful, some of these turned out even though underneath I thought I'm questionable about whether I'm going to like it, and then when I draw on top of it, I was like, oh, I love it. This class is going to start out in our sketchbook. I've got some books. If you don't know how to draw botanicals or you don't have any good ideas, there are a couple of books that I own that I have found very inspiring. This one, 20 Ways to Draw a Tulip and 44 Other Fabulous Flowers by Lisa Congdon is my favorite one because in here, she has gone and brainstormed and drawn 20 different versions of each flower or botanical, or leaves, or whatever it is that that page is focused on for you to then look at and be inspired to use in your drawings and your sketchbooks. This is the best book. It's really good for teaching you shapes and different flower types and what petals to do to make it look like each type of flower. I like a lot of these, a lot. This book I found very inspiring. I definitely encourage you. If you only get one book, this would be my choice. Some of these other books are ones that I've just had for a long time and I pulled them back off my bookcase. This one is called Illustration School: Let's Draw Plants and Small Creatures by Sachiko Umoto, S-A-C-H-I-K-O U-M-O-T-O. I'm sure I didn't say that correctly, so I'm sorry about that. This book is more about more delicate illustrations, but it goes through some butterflies and different flowers and their inspiration for how to draw those, which is completely different than Lisa Congdon book. I do like it too. It's a different style. It gives you some ideas. There's lots of good stuff in there. The third book I have as inspiration. I was into the Zentangles years ago. Zentangles are patterns and things that you draw on little blocks and you make just intricate, beautiful illustrations with. This one is in Zenspirations : Letters and Patterning by Joanne Fink. It's a fun book and it's not as filled with pattern examples as that book, but it's definitely got some beautiful things. Like look at those hearts, aren't those beautiful? The inspiration behind this entangle is you get more and more detailed and add patterns within the patterns and really get a lot going on. There are lots of illustrations in here showing you how to get some of those really nice patterns. Look how amazing that is. If you get to the point where you want to do more than just a leaf or a flower or something simple, you might get into pretty Zentangles on top of your watercolor. Because there's lots of ideas and pretty things in this book to get you into a lot more detail in your pattern drawing. This is a fun book too. If you only get one, this first book is my very favorite and most inspiring to me and the one that I will refer to possibly in class when I'm thinking, what is it that I want to do to add to my illustration? Hope you love all these fun examples that we've looked at for inspiration and I can't wait to see what fun things you create in class. Let's get started. 3. Supplies: [MUSIC] Let's talk about the supplies that we're going to be using in class. I do show you my favorite inspiration book for drawing botanicals and different ideas, and that's 20 Ways to Draw a Tulip by Lisa Congdon. If you only get one book for inspiration, this is the one that I liked the most, and it has tons and tons of very inspiring illustrations that you can practice on and draw on top of your watercolor pieces that you create. I love this book and I will be referring to this one when I get stuck and want a new idea on something to draw, this is what I'm usually looking at. Also, it's basic in this class. You want paper, you want watercolor, you want a pin. That is as basic as you can get. Now that being said, I am doing stuff in my sketchbooks, and these sketchbooks, I've done lots of fun, inspiring little things to practice and play and just mesh out ideas in my mind. I am using, for this particular book, this is the 8 by 8 Artesia books. It came as a set of two. I like working in more than one book because when this one's wet, maybe this one is dry and I can be working in this one instead. You can see here I've done lots of smaller botanical ideas and then larger two-page spreads just to flush out ideas and play and experiment. I do play in my sketchbooks quite a bit. I'm also partial to 140-pound cold-press watercolor paper. It's a little heavier than sketchbook paper. The sketchbook paper is a 110-pound cold press. This paper should react similar to the sketchbook, just a little heavier. You could do these in any size that you want, but I do find it fun to play in sketchbooks for the different things that I'm just playing with today. My favorite pens are the Micron pens and I have these common black and they come in different sizes. You just get one, I like the 05 size. It's a nice medium tip. Then these other numbers get smaller or larger depending on what that number is. I have a lot of those. I have discovered that working with the paint pens on here, not my favorite, so I don't really enjoy those. I do occasionally work with a larger paint pen. These are Faber-Castell artist pen and I've got golden silver. I don't like these as the drawing by itself, but I have found that I like to draw like maybe an underdrawing and then do an ink version right on top of it, so it's almost like an echo. This really is my favorite one. Then I do have some other pens I've experimented with. This decobrush. I did not like that ones, kind of smudged everywhere like this over here, it's real fat and smudgy. I think I've tried to sharpie. Just experiment and play, but my favorite pen to draw on these has been these Microns. Then if you have a set of colored pens or pencils, I do play in some colors sometimes. Then get those out. Pencils are a little bit less favorite too, depending on what the pencil is. This one I tried out and I want you to do this experiment for yourself. But in this book, I tried out different pens and colors. Like here I did the white paint pen. You can see how it really just sinks into the watercolor. This was that bigger brush pen that I said I didn't love. This one here was a pencil, and you can really see that the black pen, this one, the Micron 05, makes the prettiest Christmas drawing, so that's why I liked that the best. We also need just a watercolor brush. If you just want one watercolor brush, something in this size 10, this is the Aqua Elite from Michaels, which is their artists' grade brushes, and they're under $20. These are about $16-18 paintbrush. You don't need to have the best, you can get whatever watercolor brush you want to play with because we're basically spreading color and letting that dry. Just your preference, but I'll be using these and I have an 18 and 12. That's the sizes I like to work in and I like that they have a tip on here. Because if I do these larger spreads with just botanicals and mark-making on them, I like to be able to come back and do dots of color in watercolor and stuff and I like the tip on these. I'm also working in some colors that I have decided are the colors that I love. I've pulled them out of a Daniel Smith box of colors that I got off of eBay and a box of Sennelier that I had gotten years ago at an art market. The Sennelier box comes with a bunch of random ones. But what I like about pulling out the ones you love, now you're working in a color palette, it works for you, rather than an overwhelming color palette of all these colors. A lot of times when you buy a big set like this, you're not going to use most of these colors. Some of these I used once and I thought, I don't like that, and I've never used them again, so it's a waste. If you combine the colors that you like individually, that's really nice because I have a whole little bucket of colors that I've purchased individually that I like and I've got some of these from Michaels, which is their Grumbacher Academy brand, which is not the cheapest brand and it's not the professional quality. It's their grade 2 brand and I like those. I also have some Sennelier colors that I love, love. [LAUGHTER] These two colors right here, some of my favorite, which is the cobalt green and the chromium oxide green. That's over here on this paint palette. I love those two colors. Find the colors that excite you. If you get a couple of tubes of that color, you can make your own custom color palettes, like I've done on this ceramic palette here. I've made my own custom color palettes. These are those artist Grumbacher ones from Michaels are over here and then these Sennelier are over here. I've picked out some of my favorite made my own little custom palette. In class, I'm going to be using my little custom palettes of colors, but use any watercolor brands you want. If you get a little cheap sampler set, that's fine and these are really, really fun. You can see I've used these quite a bit. I had this one that I'd used a lot and I'd used up all of this one color over here that I loved. I bought another set that randomly didn't have that color in it. [LAUGHTER] But you can get a whole set of these, like Michaels for a couple of dollars. These are very cheap and I like to use them to make textures with when I'm making watercolor textures for my photography business, that's how I have these. I don't even treat these very carefully. You can see I have drops of color on top of other color, but they're really fun and make beautiful colors. If you just want to go with a cheap set like this, to have a lot of colors to experiment with, do these, I love these. Then if you get like me and get industrious and think I want all the colors from every brand. This is a little custom box of Daniel Smith colors that I got off of eBay for not very much at all. But you can see even with all of these colors, I've picked out the ones that I like out of this big bunch of colors. I didn't really need all these colors. And I feel like earlier on in my painting, I felt like I needed everything and then I got confused because I was like, well now I have too many choices. Whereas later on in my career of doing things, I have now decided I should pull out my favorites, and then I have a little collection of ones that I know work for me that I want to work with, that I love, and so this has really narrowed down and pushed me forward in my own watercolor playing and experimenting in work. Don't feel like you need every color. I've already done that. I've got every color from every brand, [LAUGHTER] it seems like, and this is what I want to use. Figure out what colors you love and start there. Just buy a few at a time. Or if you see a color that I'm using, I'll try to tell you what the colors are. They're between Daniel Smith's Sennelier and this little art academy, Grumbacher ones from Michaels, or this little set over here. If you see me use from here, it's Daniel Smith. Those are those Grumbacher. Most of these are Daniel Smith and there's one or two Sennelier that I have pulled out of that Sennelier box. That's all we need. Paper, brush, watercolor, and a pen. I know that was a lot of explanation to get down to this, but I want you to know why I picked things in addition to what I'm picking. Hope you have fun in this class, I'm looking forward to seeing what you create. I personally like working in sketchbooks to do some of these, so I encourage you to maybe play in a little art book. These are teases 8 by 8, I think is the size on these. Have been a really nice set and I like it and at the back, there's an envelope to put stuff in if you've got some stuff you want to carry around and keep ideas. I do all kinds of stuff in this book. I did these little abstracts in these, I flush out ideas for different classes or different techniques or different color things that I want to do. I really loved working in these because I don't have loose paper that I then have to deal with or big canvases that I don't know where to store. [LAUGHTER] Really fun. I think in class, I will mostly be working in my sketchbook. You are welcome to use loose watercolor sheets and I recommend 140 pound if you decide to do that. I'm looking forward to seeing what you create today. Definitely come back and share some of this stuff with us. Let's get started. [MUSIC] 4. Small color studies: [MUSIC] In this first lesson, I thought it would be really fun if we recreated something like this simple layout that I did, where we do some watercolor circles or ovals or whatever shape you happen to be interested in, and then draw some botanicals in there. Then I do like experimenting with this watercolor underlayer with leaves or flowers, or whatever on top of it. I thought it would be really fun if we used that as our inspiration for this first project. I'm just working in my sketchbook. Those Arteza 8 by 8, 110 pound cold press. Get any watercolor art book that you want to work in. I think I got this off of Amazon, but you can get them at the art store. What I want to do is experiment with some colors. I like how there's not one color here, they graduate into other colors, and so I'm going to show you how I did that because they really are very pretty. Then you might be thinking, well, what can I do with this once I learned how to do that? Well, you could do a round piece of art or you could also do like custom card that you want to send to somebody that'd be really pretty as the front as a custom piece that you're doing. What I'm going to do first is I've got my tub of water here and my watercolors, my two palettes that I love. [NOISE] Then I think I'm going to draw a leafy pattern similar to this one here on this side and then circles of watercolor on this side. Then we'll need to set this to the side to dry, so that's what we're going to be doing. I'm going to set that up a little bit so I can put this right here where we can see it. I am working with a medium sized brush to do this leaf side, and I've got some watercolor paper that I use as a scrap just to test color and to see how much color got coming out versus how much I want. I'm just going to be drawing some very simple leaf shapes and you might think, it doesn't look good as you're painting it on, but I guarantee you when you add the ink to it, you're going to love it. Because I would not say that I'm a perfect illustrator. I've drawn for a very long time from high school on up, but I wouldn't say that illustration is my strong point. Let's just draw a wavy line there for a stem but I still think it's fun to experiment and play in my watercolors. I still try it even though wouldn't say I'm perfect at it. It's just fun and it's easy, and once you do the ink drawing on top of it, I guarantee you'll see how much nicer these start to look. I'm just drawing a little stem and then coloring the leaf in. Just use these like occurring on basically. The color is going to end up going wherever it is that you put the water down, so you can basically draw with the watercolor brush and it'll stay where you put it. I do move my book around as I'm going because I find it hard to draw this leaf shape if I don't move the book around with me. [LAUGHTER] I move it around so I can get pretty leaf shapes. I'm not worried if some are darker and some are lighter. If you're more advanced and you want to do really detailed leaves, go for it, we're just going to draw on top of that with ink. I'm just trying to lay down pretty color to draw on top of. Because in my inspiration piece, you can see I was real heavy with paint and then real light and I was experimenting with how the drawing looked on top of the real heavy to the real light. [LAUGHTER] You could do something like that too. Start off with lots of pigment and go down just a little pigment and then see how does that look on top of each gradiation of that color. Then you can get to the point where you're like, now I know what I like to do with this technique. The more you practice and draw things like this with a brush, the better you get at it, so just play. First one might not be your favorite, but after you draw on top of them with ink, some of them I have rarely enough turned in to be my favorite. When I thought my hand does not so steady and I don't love it, or I used the wrong pen and if I drew on top of it with the micron pen, it became my favorite. Like this one, my hand wasn't so steady, but in the end is one of my favorite. It's just funny how that works out. Don't get discouraged with the initial lay-down of color. I just want you to use this as your first go experiment and then we'll see what we get from there. I'm going to stop probably right there. Well, let me put one more out here, it's odd. Then we're going to let that side dry for a minute. There we go. Let's leave that at that. Then on this side, I'm just using these big bulldog looking clips to hold my pages down, if you're wondering what those big clips are. On the next one, I think I'm going to use the bigger brush, so this is the Number 12. I'm going to start doing some circles of color and then I'm going to tap in a different color and we'll just see what we end up liking. I'm going to start off probably with this one which is yellow ocher. You can see it's one of my favorite color, I've used it a ton. Little bit of water in there. You can use your scrap piece of paper to see how much pigment you've got. I'm just going to draw a circle and then I might come back and dot in some extra color if it's real light. Then I'm going to pick a second color and that's a Daniel Smith color. Second color is this venetian red, which is another one of my favorite colors. I'm going to dot that in here too while this is wet and let it do its little spread thing and spread out and see what we end up with. Then I think I'll do a venetian red whole circle there. Let's just go ahead and draw another circle. You can work those around if you don't like where it sits. Then let's see what color that we want to mix in with that. I've got this color here, which is quinacridone burnt orange. Let's just see what that does if we tap in some of that color. Because I want these to be two tone, the two toned ones on our samples there are my favorite. If you want to do three tones, you don't have to stop at two, you could say, well, I think I want a third color. Let's see this is a sennelier color 623. I'm not sure what that is, I'd have to get out the sennelier box, but it's sennelier 623. Let's just tap that on there. These different taps of color are how I ended up with the pretty colored gradients that we have going in these circles, so I want you to experiment with those. You can see what is it that you think you're going to like. Let's do the third one. This is green gold, which is a color that I want to love and sometimes I'll put it down and I don't love it at all, [LAUGHTER] but that's not to say that we can't put other things on top. This is burnt sienna. I shouldn't have picked that color. [LAUGHTER] It's all about playing and experimenting. This is terre verte. Again, these are Daniel Smith colors. I'm not saying you're going to love every color that you create. What's nice with the wet on wet is we're mixing colors on top. I could turn this into a different color by putting these on top and then it turn out being a different color. Let's just go ahead and get rid of all that yellowy underneath, but then I might come back and put some more on top and let it blend in with that pretty blue that we just added. Well it's a blue-green that terre verte, which verte is green. Then let's see, what do we want to add to the green? I do think that looks pretty. I might like the ocher in the green, so let's just go ahead and see if we like that. Might want more water in there to really let those start to blend. Then let's look at these over here. I already told you what these two here were, but let me just grab my little tub here. I love this chromium oxide green and this cobalt green. I'm going to go ahead and play in that color. See, it's a real pretty aqua color, which is my favorite color. All over my house, I love mixing blue and green. Let's mix blue and green there. Then this other color that I really love is this pretty grayish color here. I'll tell you what that is. It's this light gray. All three of these are sennelier shades. Let me just grab that paintbrush and we'll start off with the light gray. I might put in, because I thought that color was really pretty mixed in over on our samples, so I might mix that in with this Daniel Smith venetian red. That's a lot. Let that spread around. Once your watercolors get wetter and wetter, you pick up more pigment. Let's go ahead and let those do their thing. I'm going to have to let it completely dry before I put ink on it. We can almost come back to this one. We might as well put our little watercolors out of the way so that we can draw. I will be right back when these are dry. This side's completely dry. We're going to let this side do its thing for a bit. You could use a heat gun to dry these, but I really like it when some of this real thick, wet part does its own thing and takes a bit to dry. Sometimes I'll move the page around and make those pigments move again. What I'm going to do is work on this side while it is dry. I'm using on this one, the micron O5, that's my favorite size to work on. I'm moving my watercolors out of the way so I don't paint on top of things I didn't intend to by sticking my hand in them. [LAUGHTER] All I'm going to do, and this is how I've done all these others, is I'm just going to draw right on top and follow the shape that I've already made. Then I'm going to put in some little leaf veins just by drawing some straight lines in there. I can do one side, I can do both sides. Another thing that I think is real fun is if you have a drawing and maybe the ink part is slightly to the side of your drawing. Let's take a look at one of those real quick. Here's another leaf that I have done almost identically to the first one just to give us an idea. What I like about the second technique, we need to draw it right on the leaves just like we have here, or we could draw everything slightly to the side of the leaf and let that color part look like a shadow. Like that. Two different options there. I'm going to go ahead and draw on the one. Then I will come back and finish that second one just to give you two different ideas of what you might be doing here. I'm going to zoom in a bit. I think I'm going to go ahead and draw my stem. I want the stem just to have several layers in there. Your preference when you're drawing, but I do like it when it's got the more than one layer on this because I made a real fat stem. Then you can be as neat or messy, or fast or slow. However it is that your drawing style is this is the time to play, experiment with different leaves, and different marks, and different lines, and just practice. The more you do, and the more things that you experiment with, the better these get. You might even get some leaves out of your yard to create a real leaf shape and look at the veining in it and try to create a real leaf rather than just one that we thought up. Different ideas for you there. This other side's still a little bit damp. I'm trying to make sure I don't put my arm in it but didn't get on me so I think we're good. [LAUGHTER] Really, the lesson I get off of this personally is I can see that my underwater color shape doesn't have to be perfect. It doesn't have to all be the same color to work when I draw something on top of it because then it turns what just really looks like an unattractive blob of paint into a beautiful colored illustration for me. I like that. It looks like you didn't paint in the lines look. It's what that is. It's almost as if you had the leaf drawing there and then you didn't paint inside the lines. I like that look. That's why I like doing pretty stuff like this. I like the color variances and the gradient differences. If you don't get much control over your watercolor as you would like, this is a great way to practice and get more control over your color because I guarantee, the more times you try to draw a leaf in green, you'll get and figure out how you got one that was so dark versus so light. You'll get a lot easier time there controlling your watercolor. Look how pretty that is. Let's take the second one and draw everything to the side of this. I'm not going to be really exact here. I'm trying to get my stems going. I'm going to draw everything slightly to the right. Let that color just seem like it's an echo or a shadow coming off of that. Doesn't have to be perfect. That's why I like starting in sketchbooks so I can experiment and figure out what works for me. What colors do I like? What pins do I like to draw with? That experiment where I did it on different boxes with different pins of color earlier in my sketchbook really narrowed down why I like using this versus why I don't like using some of the other options. Again, even on this side, I'm staying slightly to the right of whatever color I put down. I'm being consistent on both sides. You can see my drawings aren't perfect. I don't do a lot of drawing as compared to painting and things in Photoshop. I don't have the best handwriting and I don't have the steadiest hand when it comes to drawing because I don't play and practice enough. The more you do this, the better they get. Just to show you, you don't have to be perfect and you don't have to be like some perfect illustrator or drawer, have lots of art skills to be playing and practicing with this technique. Because then when you get the whole thing done, you're looking at the whole picture, not one specific element. That's really fun. Everything is slightly to the side and more like an echo versus everything right on top. I want you to experiment on this technique with both of those and just see how it changes your drawing because it looks a little different. Practice with your watercolor skills. Less pigment, more pigment, get consistent with how much pigment you can lay down within a whole watercolor piece. I think you'll get a lot out of this exercise. We're going to go from this to our little circles. Let me see if they're dry. [MUSIC] 5. Adding ink botanicals to studies: [MUSIC] This side is dry now we're ready to draw on that and I'm going to basically recreate some of the leaf things that I created on here to show you how I created those and they're fun to start with. But after you do that, then I want you to come up with a whole thing of circles of different things that you came up with. This 20 Ways to Draw Tulip book is a great book to look at for different illustration ideas. You could also look at Pinterest and I like Instagram a lot. I follow a lot of art accounts on Instagram. You can definitely follow some things to come up with some other ideas. You could look out in nature and see what's growing outside. If you've got some IV outside, maybe you want an IV line in here. Just experiment with that. This first one, I started with a gold pin, and this is how I knew that maybe the gold pin wasn't going to be my favorite because the tip is so big, but I really love it as an underneath layer or an accent layer. I'm just going to draw a stem similar to what we just did and I'm going to draw some leaves out here. I'm going to go ahead and draw my lines and my leaves just like that and I'm going to go ahead and do that for the whole thing. Let me zoom in so that you can see what we're drawing and move the book around if you need to so that you can get a really nice shape. You see how big and heavy this pin is compared to the little micron pin, which is what I'm going to be using to draw on top of this. I want this to be the underpainting or the underlayer, like we did on our leaf over here. I like this because it's an easy technique and you could do a lot with these. You could make these little greetings. You could, on the front of a card that you're sending somebody, this would make really cool custom card. Illustration, just a circle, pretty leaf, Happy Birthday. [LAUGHTER] However you want to do that. Congratulations, thank you. Whatever you want to say under that would be really beautiful. There we go. I'm going to start with that. I also like dots. I think on the underside of the leaf, I'm going to have some gold dots. I just think dots are pretty. I like doing dots in my mixed media, in my painting, all that stuff because they're whimsical. I think they're pretty, just an element that I particularly like. When you start figuring out what your style is, that's basically figuring out elements that you love and don't love. I love dots. I'm going to put those in. Then on top of this, I'm going to do the very same thing we just did with that and I'm going to draw right on top of this. Then you'll see there are little gold elements now become our background shadow element. I'm just going to follow exactly what I created underneath or close. It's just the gold will be shiny up underneath it. Look how pretty that is turning out. Let's go ahead and do this one here. Don't be afraid to turn your drawing to the whichever direction you need to go to get a steady hand. Wow, look how pretty that is, so pretty. I'm in love with that one. Let's go ahead and move on to the next one. The next one, I'm just going to do a leaf pattern without the undercoat on it. Let's just go ahead and draw our inspiration leaf here. Again, I'm just redrawing the ones that I had already thought of when I was playing with this technique for just myself. A lot of times when I think of things I want to do for a class, it's usually something I've been playing in and then I'm like, oh, I love this so much. Let's record that. [LAUGHTER] When I did art classes years ago, most of those have been retired, but I would start the class off not really knowing even where I was going and I pick out supplies and I'd say, okay, here's our supplies and here's what I'm hoping to create and hopefully when we're done, I've created that. Whereas now most people should be, if you're doing something like this, creating your samples and deciding what techniques that are going to work for you and saying, okay, I've got something I love. [LAUGHTER] I guess, experience and wisdom comes with age. [LAUGHTER] Because now I'm getting old so I can see the errors of my youthful ways. [LAUGHTER] This one, I want a different leaf. Then I'm just drawing a long leaf and align up the leaf, but I'm not doing the veining like I did in this other one. We might color one end to be a little darker if we wanted and you could shade the undersides of these if you want to pretend that they are leaves that you're seeing the underside of. We'll draw a little stem, maybe some little ones over here, with a darker leaf. Over here, maybe some little elongated pieces with a darker leaf. Didn't have to be perfectly colored in. I just want to imply what I'm creating. Let's do another one out here. Not pretty. Pretty, I like that one. Let's come down here and let's just make some really long pointy leaves. If you asked me why these plants are then I'm imagining, I don't know. [LAUGHTER] Who knows that this is even a real leaf? But that's what I'm saying, if you go outside, and maybe collect some leaves you could actually draw from real leaves, I'm drawing from whatever my imagination wants to create here. [LAUGHTER] On this next one, I played with the silver and so I'm still taking my inspiration and I had great big round leaves which I then came in and made some other little marks there. We're going to do that here. I just did the leaf and I just came back around just to get extra little detail in there. That really reminds me of some flowers I've seen on the Japanese lantern plants, I'm going to say that's my inspiration. [LAUGHTER] Then we're going to come back on top of that and give it a lot more definition. That way that silver is just the underlining. If your lines have a little bit of shake to it, I think that adds to our look on this particular plant, then I'm imagining that little bit of shake is pretty and adds to our design. There we go. I love that one. On this last one, I want to do a little tiny leaves, vine, so let's just get a fun shape going and just a nice little leaf there, maybe we have another little leaf coming off of that and I'm just going to do a little vine of pretty little leaves. See, works better if I moved the book around, I end up with some weird directions if I'm not moving all around but I'm trying not to move it off-camera for you. [LAUGHTER] This is a technique you could definitely play with this and how many leaves and what direction you want to go and how you want that to turn out, you can play with this little technique. That's really pretty. Then, I thought that it would be real fun to have some little white detail in here, so I did use my white posca pen and did a little paint pen action. I'm basically just drawing five lines to imply some type of flower. We could also do some little dots out there to add to the whimsy. I just think it's fun to imply that this was some type of vine with a little bitty flower. You can either maybe put a center dot in that if you wanted to, do something like that, which to me looks a little bit better even, so maybe a dot and five lines coming out of it and then maybe a few dots out there. Then look how pretty that is, super pretty. Now, let me pull this back. Now you've seen my ideas for different leaf botanicals and on this other one, the larger leaf that we did with the watercolor and beside the watercolor. I hope that this inspires you to create some of these to just get a feel for the drawing of them, different leaf shapes, different ideas, the mixing of different colors because some of these on this first example page that I had done are so pretty, I love this gray and this little bit of that the orangey one. That's so pretty, I moved paints out of the way so I don't get paint everywhere. But this averting red and that might be the yellow ocher or the Naples yellow. Because I have a Naples yellow out here from Sennelier that's really pretty. I think that's the Naples yellow and the Venetian red. That's one of my favorite. This is that gray, and Venetian red, that gray that I had over there on my custom palette. It's just the snowy, a light gray. That was really pretty. This was that same two colors that were up here, but a little differently and more red. Those are really pretty. Then on the ones that we did today, I really love that ocher and Venetian red again, that's my favorite, I seem to be drawn towards those colors, but I like this a little bit with the gray outside, I like the blue-green combinations. It's really fun to experiment and see how your colors mix. I did a wet-on-wet, so I want you to try that, make a big splash of color and then dot some other color in there and then let them dry and then just see. What you come up with and how you like them that's how you figure out what you like to create and you then start getting into what your style is because then you start picking out the things that you particularly love. I hope you enjoyed this project. This is really fun. I like doing these, and I will see you back in class. [MUSIC] 6. Larger leaves project: [MUSIC] In this project, we're going to do another little leaf design or you could do whatever botanical in this technique that you wanted to do. But I like it because we're doing a spread of watercolor and drawing on top of it. Let's go ahead and get out our watercolors. I've just got this page held open with a clip. I believe I want to work in this. Let's see. That's lapis lazuli. Why don't we use that? It's like an ocher color. What I'm going to do is just put a spread of color. It doesn't have to be in a line. It doesn't have to be all circles. But I'm thinking that I want to do these two colors. My terre verte, the Venetian red here that I like. For some reason I have terre verte on the brain. [LAUGHTER] I'm just going to draw a great big circle right here in the middle. These can have as much color, as little color as you want. You can come back in and add some color. You can get as fancy with this as you'd like. Then I want this to dry, so I'm going to dry this very quickly. [NOISE] I right something really dumb while I was drawing, and I swiped my hand across it to see if it was dry. I created these little streaks. But then I decided I like the little streaks. I'm going to leave them instead of redoing it. [LAUGHTER] Then after we get our watercolor in there, now we can go ahead and draw. I'm going to draw using the micron pen again. I might do an accent in gold because I thought it looked pretty on my original sample there. Then I'm going to do a little bit different. It's going to be a leaf, but maybe we can go up this way and then have a piece that comes up that way. Just experimenting and thinking outside. I might actually get this leaf to go off page. Let me zoom in a bit better. Maybe I'll move a watercolor paints out of the way so that we don't spread watercolor on everything. [NOISE] Then I'm just going to go through and make some nice big fat leaves. I think for this one I'll go ahead and do each side right here at the beginning. There we go, that's pretty. Now I have my initial drawing and I can go back in and decide what I want to do here. My initial drawing I actually just did lines on one side of the leaf, which I messed up a little bit here on the top one because I've put lines on two sides of the leaf. Pushes go ahead. There's no real reason why I just thought, let's experiment. Then, I'm going to come back and add some decoration here with my gold pen. I'm just going to follow the one side, maybe do some dots. You don't have to do that. I just think it's pretty so I'm going to go ahead and do it. I think it'd be fun if you just experiment with some of your techniques and maybe some of your pins, and see what can you do to add some interest. What's the next layer I can add to this rather than just stop at the ink? What else can I do? If we're just doing drawings like this where we want to emphasize everything with pins, we could come back with different colored pins. I'm choosing gold because that's what I like. There we go. That's pretty. We could come down one side of the stem if we wanted, but I really think that's pretty like it is, so I'm going to go for that. I'm going to try that. I want you to try a couple of different areas of color. Wet on wet. Let them merge a little bit, let that dry and then draw a botanical, a flower, a leaf, anything that inspires you on top of that, and you can be as decorative or as plain as you want. These are just real fun. I like the way the colors behind it react to things. Flowers would be real pretty in there. Just play and see what you can come up with. I'll see you back in class. [MUSIC] 7. Watercolor blocks: [MUSIC] For this next project, I really want to experiment with you with some squares. On this one, I did squares of different botanicals on different background color plays that I was doing with different colors. I did those and then I did these where I was doing different botanicals on the background, then coloring them in and this was drawing the botanical on top of a colored background. These two are colored in. I want to play with some squares and some ideas here with you. This is where you're really going to get some good use out of a book like this because this is where I did kind of come up with some different ideas for cone flowers, which I did cone flowers and all four of these squares. I want you to try that one page of the same flower, but how many different ways can you draw that flower? So each of these is a different cone flower illustration idea that I got out of that book and if you don't want to get the book and you want to look on Pinterest to look up flower illustrations, cone flower illustrations, and just see like how many ideas are out there. On this side, I just did ideas for different flowers to see what I can fill up my squares with. Then when I got back here to these other illustrations, this again was a cone flower and I'm like, what can I do with maybe some stripes in different cone flowers, and then the other three are some little variation of rows. Those are real fun. That's what I want to do today in the squares with this project is I want to take my inspiration from these experimental squares that I was doing and do some botanical squares. Let me get that out of the way that I'm going to sit it up there for my ideas. Because I do like to look at ideas and I'm going to work in my other book here and I have some white artists tape. You can use artist's tape or you can use painter's tape and I'm going to tape off both sides of this to have different things to play in. Just like tape. Because when you peel the tape that makes all your little boxes look like finished pieces of art and I love that. Peeling tape is my favorite part of the art piece, I believe. [LAUGHTER] Takes the piece from blah to wow, it elevates it immediately. I mean, it's amazing really. How much difference it is with the tape on it with a tape off versus if you did it with no tape at all. Amazing the difference you get. This is half-inch painter's tape. You can use I'm sorry, half-inch artist's tape. You can use painter's tape. I've got plenty of the blue painters tape that I like to use, but it's thicker. I wanted this half-inch. This is more like an inch and I liked the inch for when I'm doing least loose pieces of paper usually and I liked this half-inch in my art book because pages are usually smaller. Now not being real exact here if you want to be more exact and measure these off, so all your squares is the same size. You can certainly do that and I might do a cone flower spread. I love cone flowers. I love to photograph them. I love to see them out in the garden and so mine might be cone flowers and roses perhaps. I'll just show you how I did some of those in here and basically, we're going to start off with our watercolors. Let me just get those out from where I've stashed them and the goal here is to fill the square with watercolor. I think I'm going to fill a couple with, like in my book where I was inspired by those stripes on that last setback here. I might fill one with something like this because I loved it. I might leave one or two cleared to do flowers in it, dark in color. We'll just experiment there and then we'll have to let them dry. Then we can paint them. I think I'm going to start off over here. I've got these. This is Daniel Smith's rare earth green. I'm using the number 10 brush just to some a little bit larger to really lay some of this color down. Keep them light, not too dark and maybe I'll come back in here with chromium green oxide because I like blue and green and you can just experiment and play here with your colors. I like the blue a lot. I'm going to do blue down here. Experiment and play. Right now you're laying colors. This is how I actually came up with colors that I love and separated out my color pallets into things that I really, really like was by doing stuff like this, I'm going to use this terror Verde. Most of these are Daniel Smith colors. Look at that a little bit different. This is how you figure out what colors that you like. You do stuff like this, where you're playing with the colors and you're just trying to figure out what are these colors do. This is the Sennelier, a 659. I'm not sure off the top of my head what the name of it is, but it's 659. This one might be the rows opera because it's one of my favorite. Look how bright it is. Let's put that in with Daniel Smith, Ultramarine red. This is exactly where I experiment with colors and figure out which ones go together in the end, which ones did I like, which ones I don't like and why? I think those were pretty though. Let's come over here to this smelly light gray I believe. See I like that gray. It's a light bluish-gray almost. Get that in there. I might do this. That's a lot of colorless test out how much color that is. There we go. Loosen that up on our little spare sheet of paper over here to just see because these were very pigmented. That's Sennelier a color that I love so much. This cobalt green. It's a teal color, I love it. Let's just do another one over here. See if we can pick up some of this color off of our watercolor sample. These Sennelier colors though, especially when you're pulling them out of the tube and they're still pretty fresh with the colorway we'll use this green over here. I'll tell you what that is in a minute. It's that Michael's Grumbacher. It's one of these Grumbacher Academy colors that I got at Michael's. It's like here we go. Sap green. Look how pretty that is though it's real pretty color right there. Let's go ahead. What else do we like? I really like shades of red. This is one of those academy colors over here. No, it slows me down to tell you colors, but I hate to be using colors and not tell you what I'm using and then you like something. You don't know what I did. This over here, that one is the rose matter. Sorry, it's the thalo crimson, is this one, and that's the rose madder. I think I'm going to use those. We'll see how we like them. Look at that. Get some more water. I'm going to spread that color around pretty good. I like these when they're very watercolory looking, less paint looking so that what we draw on top of it it just adds to that very watercolory feel. As they dry, you'll like some of the lines and things you get in there. Let's leave one open for one of our little rose pictures and let's do one stripe. I think I'm going to use, let's do this green, which is the chromium green oxide. Way too much color. Let's go ahead and water that down. I'm just going to do some little stripes here. Maybe we'll do this blue, which is the rare earth green color. Those are Daniel Smith shades. Then this one is that Sennelier 659, which I think is Rose Opera. I just want that very vivid color over here. I like that. Now we're going to have to let these dry and we can start drawing on them. These are almost completely dry and these are getting there. Let me get my heat gun and I'll dry them for us. These are dry, so we are ready. I'm actually going to do a couple of cone flowers just to get started. I'm taking my inspiration from our 20 Ways to Draw a Tulip book. There's a cone flower page in here. I liked it because there were so many different ways to draw a cone flower. I picked out this one and I liked this one and I liked this one. Actually, when I drew it out though, I didn't love it. A good way to start was that one. There's the two that I was pointing out there, but that one I ended up not liking, so then I made it look like it's double exposure thing. In the end, it's okay, but I don't know that I love it. But it was a good way to experiment with all these different techniques and the different cone flowers to see what do we like. I did take my inspiration for all these flowers out of this book. I like to be able to share the book with you, like that, so that you can test it out and see what you like for yourself and come up with ideas, or if you don't see anything that you like in there, you can look around. Basically, what that was is some lines. You've got some dots up here on one of those, and then we're drawing the petals and you can make them as full. This is more like a cone flower basically on the way out. It's a little more as they're starting to wilt the other way and they're not full out, which I love flowers that look like that. Then I came out of here with a stem, and then I drew another one. Let's just draw another one. It's basically some lines coming out here with some just not perfect, not straight, a little more wilty looking on the petals like it's the last days. Some few little dots up here for the top and come out there with our stem. Look how beautiful that is. You can get as decorative or as plain as you like, but that was that one. I loved it. I'm going to do another cone flower. We'll just do a cone flower page [LAUGHTER] and I'll show you the ones that I already did and then I'll pick one that I haven't done before to fill in for that last one, but I basically drew a circle and then come back out here with some of these petals, some little dots out there, and then draw a little stem. Then we can add some leaves on here if we want. We've got a leaf there, and then came to the side and did that again. You can see how really doing this on top of the watercolor elevates the drawing. It doesn't have to be perfect, but all of a sudden it looks like something quite a bit more amazing because it's on this beautiful watercolor paper that you've got behind it, and all of a sudden, instead of just being a plain ink drawing on a white piece of paper, it's something amazing. It got elevated because of our yummy little background. A little stem. It's a little leaf. So pretty. Then this would be perfect if you liked to write things on there or put a word. You could do a word or a scripture or a quote. Perfect, right in there. This would be perfect to practice some of that, which I love. This third one is basically a bunch of dots in a circly little mode there, and then some petals coming off of that. I really like these non-perfect elongated petals because it seems to be my drawing style, not perfect petals. I'm sure as I get more into drawing, I used to draw, we'll do a little double stem perhaps, because I used to draw tons and tons and tons. When I was in school, I was in an interior design major and that was all drawing, but now I've spent 20 years not drawing and look how pretty that turned out though. My drawing skills are not quite what they were when I was younger, so I need to practice. [LAUGHTER] Doing stuff like this where I get excited to then share it with you is my working on my skills that maybe I have let go a little bit because it gives me a reason to come up here to my art room and play. Otherwise, I'd be thinking, why bother? What am I going to do with this? Doing stuff like this really gets me excited because I have reasons. Look how pretty that is. I have a reason to come up here. Let's pick one that I have not done. I'm feeling this one. It's a little more defined than what I've been doing. Maybe we'll try that with that little top on it. Let's set that right there. I'm going to start off with the head top because that seems to be what makes it easier for me. But I get up here when have a reason to come up here like doing classes like this. I just do so much more work and hang out in my studio so much longer than when I'm trying to do stuff for fun, which I don't do stuff for fun very easily. I always have to have some meaning or purpose behind it and then I feel like I need to be up there working on it. [LAUGHTER] Other people are better at just getting up there, practicing and doing things for fun. I do get jealous of artists that are out there designing for fun, but then I think that most people end up finding their reason for doing stuff after they do all this fun stuff. I'll sit up here now and I will play in the effort to eventually come up with a class that I want to do. I do allow myself a lot more play than I ever did before. Now this is a little different. This one actually is a colored flower. Well, let's do another one first. We might actually come back and add a little pink color to that because I picked a blue layer. You could come back and then play with watercolor on top of these if you thought that that would add to the drawing. I think it's easiest really if you start off with this middle leaf and then build out from there and do the leaves that are on top with some little extra detail and then do those leaves underneath. That really seems to be the way with this one for me, but just play with that and see what you end up with. I like those. I like that first one better. [LAUGHTER] Super fun page of cone flowers. I want you to do that. Pick a flower and do that one flower four different ways, whether you find those ways on Pinterest or some other. Then if you want, let's just take one of these and maybe we could just splash some color in here. [MUSIC] 8. Adding botanicals to our blocks: Since we painted that on a, I'm just going to pick out this pinkish color. It's too wet. But that'll dry in there. Just know that your watercolor is going to go wherever you set it down. It's not going to normally go outside that line. I'm trying to be real careful. Keep it inside of my leaf here. Drawing with it like a pencil. Then that color shouldn't be spreading outside the line because the color on top, I'm sorry, the color that we're putting this on top of is dry so we shouldn't get bleeding or anything. I'm using these like a pencil or a marker. Then we could do this other one, a slightly different color. You'll notice I'm not doing this with a huge amount of water. I think less water helps you get a little more control here of these. Have to be perfect either you can just imply color. You could come back in now and dot some other color in here, like I like orange. We could do a little bit of orange in here. Do right here, let that blend a little and get some prettiness in there. That would be pretty oh, yeah, that's real pretty, I like it. I know I'm silly, sorry. Then maybe a little tiny bit of green on this stem. We could have added some leaves. Oh, I like that. Look at that. Oh my goodness, that's going to dry and be really pretty. I like it. Let's let that do its thing. Let's let that dry. We'll put our little cone flower inspiration over here. On these I want you to be creative and come up with some new ideas. I really want to do like I did on this little stripe here. I actually did cone flowers there. Let me just show you my inspiration that I had already done. I actually liked these cone flowers. They're a little bit the similar. I'm going to go ahead and maybe do this one again because I love it. It's fun to after you do some inspiration, if you need to set that on your board behind you. Because you know, I do a lot of things up here on the board behind me I have a little cheat sheet of inspiration marks. You can have a cheat sheet of inspiration, illustrations and flowers. Like you could hang all these up on the board behind you that you're facing and just use these as future inspiration for art that you want to do. Let's do this cone flower. It had a little bit bigger petal and a drop on top. It's almost like a Black-Eyed Susan rather than a cone flower. Let's call these blackout Susan's because this is actually what these look like. Little detail there on the stem and then we have little stem that comes out. Maybe some little leaf detail like that. Look how pretty that is. That is reminiscent of Black-Eyed Susan. We'll call that Black-Eyed Susan instead of cone flower. Then I think I actually want to do another one. Let's go ahead and do another little oval for the head. Come off with some little petals that are rounded. Come down with the stem and maybe we have a little bit of leaf action. Yeah, I love that. Then maybe over here I'll do one that's off to the side, who actually forgot my little pedal details. I like some little lines in those petals, little stem, maybe a little bit leaf out there. Look how pretty that is, and when we peel this tape off, you're going to love just that little botanical in there and then how pretty would that be, a little poem or saying or piece of scripture? Really pretty. I think, I'm going to go back. I think since I'm over here, let's go ahead and just do an inspiration piece. I might use this one and this one for our roses because I like to these roses. The first one, I actually did like some little stems. Then I did this little swirly head, not real even, and made that look a lot like a rose, rose-ish. Then I just put some little tiny leaves off to the side, could look like thorns, but I just wanted to be a little tiny leaves. Then I did several of these beside it. You don't have to be really exact and sometimes the more sketchy look in these look the prettier they are. That's pretty let's just do another one right here. Look how pretty that is. In this we're going to paint in a moment. But before I get the paint out, I want to get all of our little ideas drawn. I really like this idea too, or I had a line, a little bit of rows. Then that could have had some leaves on it. That's real pretty and then I just offset those little flowers on that. Come back with a little line in there, some leaves. Some of this doesn't have to be hard at all. It's just getting creative with what marks and lines and stuff's working for you. We'll put some little leaves. Look how pretty that is. Now once we drop some paint on those, they're going to be pretty so let's stop with that one. In this fourth one, I actually want it to do something that looked a little bit like a pansy. We're going to come back and paint these roses in a minute. Now let's go back to our first inspiration page and I'll show you what I'm talking about. These right here look a little bit like a pansy to me. Oh, I got it open with the clip there. I actually really liked this one down here. That was real pretty. But I think I'm going to do maybe this pansy and maybe some leaves like this, just because that's what I'm telling today. The paintings, these are pretty easy. This is actually just a circle and then some lines with a dot coming out of it, so that's that little center stamen part. Then we can just come out here with an uneven leaf like that. Then I had five leaves go in on all of mine. But you can do four or five and then some petal detail coming out is what I'm going for on these. Just experiment with like a pansy look, you don't have to be perfect. You can even pull up some pictures of pansies and get a good look at what their petals really do and they overlap. Sometimes there are different colors and they're doing some different things. I'm being inspired by real pieces of flower. And then if we're inspired by those funny little leafy vine things which aren't part of a pansy, I know. But they're pretty, then we could draw some of those in there. Just some little vines with leaves coming out just for something a little pretty. That's pretty. Let's leave that there. Now, I like that. We could do one of the corner if we wanted or some little leaves in the corner. But I like it, I like this one over here. I'm going to leave that one and come back and show you what I did for these roses. The roses, you just want to pick a variety of whatever color rose, you're thinking you want to do. If you want to do a red rose, have three or four colors of red, and then just start dabbling it in. It's not really exact and I'm going to use more than one color so that there's some variation in my flowers. The first time I did these, I was like, I don't know if follow that or not. This might not be for me. Then the next day I went back and I'm like, oh, I love these. A lot of times I have to sit with a new idea for a day or two before I decide if I loved it or not. If you don't love them on the first go, come back tomorrow and look at them again. I'm just going to pick a different color of red. I'm not going to tell you what all these reds are. Just pick a variety of reds, is the go-to. They're reds or pinks. I'm doing red- pink. I could tell you what they are. This is rose opera. Oh, yes so that's 659 is Rose opera. That's my favorite. I love that one. Then this one and that rose [inaudible]. This is perylene Scarlett, this Daniel Smith. Then to make it really fun, I might come back with an orange. This oranges cadmium orange hue, and that's Daniel Smith and I just like all the way the colors blend. Because I'm doing wet next to wet, we're not going to end up with just one color on top of another. They're going to blend in and like another little set of shades which I love. This is messy kind of painting. This is not the perfect, make a perfect flower kind of painting that I'm doing here. But I liked the messiness and that's why I'm showing that to you. I like it like that. Then I want the smallest brush I got. Let's try this one. I've got the number eight. You can even get a smaller one if you like. I want to come back and paint the little leaves a little bit of a greenish color. I think I'm going to go with that. This Grumbacher Academy, which is that level two in the sap green just on the very tip. I'm going to come back and touch these leaves so that they are slightly green and you can do that in any color of green, but I'm just doing it in the sap green today. We can paint the stem too if we wanted, but I really just want it to be these leaves. Then there's one more thing I'm going to do on some of these. Here's a point too where you can then play with mixed media paint, these draw, these, do whatever you want. But now I'm going to take my medium brush and then we'll come back in here with some pretty splatter. You've got to be careful if you don't want everything splattered, you can hold your hand over it. But I think these are pretty widths bladder. You could hold paper over it if you don't want splatter on everything. But I do think these are pretty with splatter. These might be pretty with splatter too, but it might not be this bright pink or orange that I'm splattering, that I would want over there. Oh, look at that. These are so pretty. Then if you want to come back on one of these others and do some pretty splatter we could, like this might be pretty with some of this green. Then when that dries, that'll be pretty. Let's dry this and then we'll pull our tape off. Let's go ahead and pull our tape and take a look at what we got. This is my favorite part. Even if I'm doing loose pieces of paper rather than on a sketchbook or an art book like I'm doing right now. Even if I'm doing loose paper, I always tape it off because peeling the tape is my favorite part. I love to see how we end up with our finished piece after we peel this off. See it just elevates each little squares, so amazing how that works. Look at that, prettiest page of my sketchbook now. Look how pretty those are. We've got our four different types of cone flowers and we painted something and then we've got our four different things. We've painted on some ended, some splatter. How fun or those, this is the prettiest page. I'm so happy with this. I used to come up and play in my sketchbooks and everything would be ugly and I'd be mad not leave because I couldn't create something amazing. These two books, every time I come up and I come up with a class idea, then I've got some things that I'm working on I get excited, and then I end up with pretty pages like this. I get so excited to work in my art books again. Super fun. I hope you enjoyed this practice. I want you to do four squares and pick a flower to do four different ways to see what you can get. Then do four squares where you do something random like roses and paint them, do some splatter, maybe some multiple colors and just play with your different techniques, and try different botanical up here in this top square. Just see what you can come up with. Doesn't have to be a cone flower over here if you want to do four types of roses or four types of marigolds or four types of tulips. Whatever you happen to love is what I want you to do your four different types of, but I want you to see if you can draw it four different ways, like we've done here with these cone flowers. Or you can just try the ones that I've done and I think you'll love playing in this technique. I hope you enjoy this project and I'll see you back in class. 9. Larger watercolor piece: In this project, I want to do something a little bit larger and play and experiment with color, mark-making, and some ink and drawing that we do on top of the watercolor and the mark-making, and here's where you could get into other supplies. You could play with pastels, you could play with colored pencil, you could play with colored ink pens, you could play with your micron pen, you could play with the gold pens. I've got lots of different things. I also like to play in my mechanical pencil, so I'll do marks with a mechanical pencil. This is the time that we've spent building up to some yummy fun abstract pieces. Here's one where I did blues and greens and that green gold color so super fun and I just experimented and I played with different materials and mark-making, different pins to see what I'd like the look of and there's some color pencil in here. I really like colored pencil on these, and then I like this color way here. I'm going to show you how I've paint some of these and then we'll let it dry and then we will mark and play on top of it, so lots of fun going on here in this project. I'm going to set this to the side. I do like to sometimes have them sitting up where I can see some other inspiration that I already did, so if I get stuck, I have new ideas. I have opened up our pages here. Maybe I'll go ahead and take a bull frog clip and clip each of these so they don't move around open on me. Then, I believe that I'm going to play in some of these Daniel Smith colors. I really love pink and orange and ocher. I love those colorways. That seems to be one that I'm drawn to a lot and I'm going to paint these just as abstract. I'm not trying to do anything specific. This is yellow ocher here and I want to just create different areas and swaths of color that we can then incorporate later in different ways with mark-making and stuff like that. I'm just going to go ahead and randomly paint swaths of color [LAUGHTER]. I like that word swath. There's no rhyme or reason or exact way to do this so you just got to play. If you think, I don't love that because there are several of these I don't love. I've done these before. Let's see, in this book, if they're in this one. There's lots of colorways in this book that I did not love. Like, I didn't love some of these, but I did love this for little ones, but I loved this one. But I wish the colors were more defined. So sometimes I did not like this one at all. I just wish I could tear this one out of my book. [LAUGHTER] This one I liked and it's real close to my inspiration piece because sometimes I will just sit, I think that's all I did big-wise. Sometimes I will just sit and paint backgrounds to then come back to later to draw things on top of. If you're not feeling like drawing today, but maybe you're feeling like just putting some color on a page, come and paint a few backgrounds and then save that top part for another day when you're feeling it. Because yesterday I came up to my art room and I was actually going to start filming this class yesterday and I was just not feeling it. I didn't want to sit and draw. I just wanted to paint some color. Actually, yesterday just moved paint around and did some fun abstracts, and then I got up from my table and went and sat on the porch because it was like 80 degrees and really pretty [LAUGHTER]. Let's see what that color was. That was Myan red. Let's go ahead and move this yellow ocher. Move these colors out as I'm picking them. Then I like this color. This is Sennelier. I don't have the color written on it, but it's 623. It's an orange color. Anyway, yesterday, sometimes you just want to come and just move color around. You just don't want to sit and draw or maybe you're just not in the mood to put all the effort in and you just want to sit and not think about it. I don't know that I love this color in here, but now we've got it. [LAUGHTER] This is why you experiment with your colors in something like this. This is Purlin Scarlett. When you get to big important pieces, you already know if you liked what a color did or didn't do. I want this purply color. Let's see if this is a purply color. I'll tell you right now, I don't remember what color this even is. We'll look at that. That's not purply at all, but it is Breyer. I really want more of a burgundy. Maybe this is the burgundy. No, that's more purple. I don't know what's more brown. If I don't love the way these colors turnout, I might go to that other layout and start drawing on it, but this is how I create those. [LAUGHTER] Always have myself a little, if I don't like this, I have a different background I can work on like I'm telling myself, you know, as I'm even working, if I don't end up loving what I did, you don't have to stick with it. This is that Michael's color, this one here. Let's just see what that is. I want it to be splotchy colors because in this one, the spot genus is what in the end made me love it when I added all the extra marks on top. Even if you doubt what you're getting, that color I just used was this rose matter. If you really love what you do in the end, you might do a little color book or color swatch. I always talk about in a lot of my other classes, my color swatch book. If you end up with some watercolor things that you like, add this set of colors to a color swatch thing that you can save. I really want a purply burgundy which I'm not seeing, so I might pull out of my box Daniel Smith and that could be some color I didn't pull out. This is a random box of Daniel Smith that I got off of eBay for cheap. Let's try this mayan violet. I want some violety color out there. Well, that's more purple than I was thinking. But if I put it on one page, I'm probably going to slap it in here in the other page. Let's try this garnet. We could test these colors out on a little watercolor piece of paper here before we put it on our painting if we really are concerned. That's the color I want. This is more dough. It's a Daniel Smith color. I think that must be with that color is on that big layout there. Well, maybe not. That still seems more red, but I do like it so we're going to go ahead and put that on there. [NOISE] I don't know if I love love it though so let's see what else we got here. I got this rod-like garnet. Let's see what color that is. Nope, not quite what I wanted. It's handy if you have a spare piece of paper out here. This one is quinacridone pink. That's a fun color. Let me put that over here. I like that enough to play with it. It's fun if you have a little spare piece of paper where you can test colors out. I like that one too. That's quinacridone violet, but it's very close to this color already used. Still not quite that burgundy shade I'm seeing over there. Here's quinacridone magenta. That's a fun color. [NOISE] This is ending up way more purple and way less yellow. Then I had in my mind and vision, so even when I use an inspiration thing, this is Naples yellow in Sennelier. Even when I have an inspiration thing that I'm going off, sometimes what I end up doing looks nothing like what my inspiration was, and I liked that too. If I'm looking at something an artist has created and I think I want to create one of those. Even when I go set out to purposely try to create something I think I'm going to love, inspired by that artist, I end up with nothing that looked like what I was initially inspired by. This is a crazy set of colors. Let me dry this. Even though I try, I might be trying to copy something because I'm like, I love that and copy it for myself, I end up with nothing like what I was trying to create initially. I end up with different stuff. It's just weird. That's how my creativity works. I would be a terrible forager because where I start and where I want to be and where I start and where I end up are three different things. [LAUGHTER] Let's dry this off. This is dry enough that before I put this away, I'm going to take my watercolor paint and make a few marks in here. Maybe on top of this purple, I want to try something. Maybe I want to try whatever this color was. It's a burgundy. Let's see what color that is. See if I did dots like a burgundy dot on top of that. That might be nice. I think that's what I want to do. I want to do some type of or some water dot on top of this purple. I don't really want it to be on top of the other shades, so I'm going to follow just the purple. It's not really a dot now, it's more of a line, but it's that line I like to draw in pencil. I really like lines of lines. [LAUGHTER] This is where I like that nice sharp point of this paintbrush, because I have a couple of watercolor brushes, these Rafael ones that I had gotten at it in art show, and they are more of a rounded tip. They don't come to a nice sharp tip like this one does and so I've decided that I really like this sharp tip sometimes, and sometimes I liked that rounded tip. Just depends on what I'm painting and you just have to play with these supplies at some point to even figure that out. Like how are you going to know that you like the round tip or the sharp tip unless you tried it and you played with it and you figured out, yeah, I really did like that. 10. Adding details to our larger piece: So I went ahead and sped up and made these little dots. I finished these dots rather than making you watch me all these, and then I added those little dots right there on the same color on this other side. Because I like it when if I'm doing this, it's going to be a pair, I want some repeating elements in my different pieces and I should do this right here, but I didn't, so we're going to go with it. I also like a little bit of color pencil added into that. I'm going to be using a colored pencil, and this is a set of colored pencil that I have legit no lying had for more than 25 years. I used these in college for coloring in renderings of rooms. I think I'm going to go with this Prismacolor orange. This is orange. I don't know if the colors are still the same as what they were when this box was purchased. But I'm sure that you can still get Prismacolor pencils. I'm just using a box that I've had forever, which really goes to show. I'm going to do circles because I like them on my inspiration piece. I'm going to go ahead and do that on this piece. I think I'm going to like that. You can see a little circle detail. You can do it lighter or darker, but I'm going to do it on this orange because I like it. But it just goes to show some art supplies never go bad. I have some mechanical pencils still from my art school days also that I can still use. They don't wear out. They're not like oil paints where they dry up in the tube and then you can't get the top off and use them again. There are some things that maybe you're going to buy once in a lifetime and a really nice set of pencils is one of them, apparently because when I sit at my art studio more than a couple of years ago, I pulled those back out of my school supplies, things that I had saved that I just had stored in the closet. I'm like, okay, time for these art supplies to be added to all the others. They sit on my table and I still use them and they do brilliant color on things. Let's go up here and do this. I love that. I do recommend a really good quality set of colored pencil, not the $2 set that you might buy at Walmart, but a nice grade of colored pencil, they are going to have more pigment in them just like any other art supply that you purchased and they're going to last you forever. This pack of 72, I always found had plenty of choices for anything that I needed to do with those. I still find that it has plenty of choices, so I don't feel the need to go buy any more colored pencil sets than the one I had which is funny because with oil paints and watercolors and acrylic paints, I feel the need to have every color in practically every brand. Even though I only like a handful of the colors after I get them. Maybe because there's already 72 colors there, there's enough to fill my color need. I have not. I know it. Just embrace it. I'm telling you I have a weird obsession with art supplies. Even before I could do anything with them, I just wanted all of them. Art runs in my family. My mother did stained glass. My aunt, one of my mother's sisters is a painter and she does the most amazing, mostly folk art painting. But if you hand her anything that you would want painted, she can paint it. She's got some amazing more serious landscape with horses and it typed gigantic pieces that she's given to her children. I mean, she's got such talent in the painting department that I've always been super jealous of all her skills and I want to be a painter. Painter doesn't seem to be the thing that was my thing and I'm getting old now and even after all the trying and practicing, it still isn't my thing compared to the way she does it. Photography is definitely my thing and that's the business that I run for my regular day job. The tool allow studio is photography business, and that really does seem to be my thing because I made a whole business out of it. I'm 10 years in at the point that I'm filming this and I still love it. This doing art things is a nice way to get a break from the photography stuff and do different creative stuff and fill my creative well with different things. I like that. Also like my paint pens, let's get the white paint pen and maybe do something with some paint pen. I'll fill in the creative in-between the photography creative things with some projects like this now and while I do love to paint things I create, I think my aunt does much better. Maybe we'll do some stripes. My other aunt did amazing things with yarn and did amazing things with cooking. I don't know, they all seem to have different talents and the photography, I feel like it runs in my family way, way, way back because my great, great grandparents were photographers back in the very early, late 1800s and early 1900s. They were on the forefront of that and had their own little studio and dark room. We have a more photos in that time of them out taking pictures, let's do some dots, and being silly and just getting things that we wouldn't have had any other way. I feel like that's where my photography talent or desire comes from. I feel like I can trace it back to them. Let's add some dots over here. But I really feel like I want to try every creative art out there and master them all. While I don't really master all of them, I have at least given them all a chance. I can knit, I can sew, I can draw. A little out of practice with the drawing, but I can draw. I do the photography. There's years that I was into jewelry making and blacksmithing, so I can do a lot of that. I have all the jewelry tools and at some point I wanted to have a kiln and do the silver clay and stuff like that. But I can only have one expensive hobby at a time. For years and years that was photography, and so now it's photography and art supplies. But I feel like I really don't want to jump back into the jewelry. I'll go broke. At this point maybe we want to add some botanicals and then see what else we might want to do. I really like the gold or the silver with the botanicals drawn on top of it. So what I could do is maybe a line of leaves. I really like our cone flowers. Let's go back to our cone flower inspiration. Actually, let's not do the gold. Let's just go back to the cone flower inspiration and I'm going to draw some of our cone flowers. Well, this is actually more of the Black-Eyed Susan inspiration. Let's go back to the Black-Eyed Susans. Sorry. Do that in this corner. Now you'll see too, when we were doing stuff at the corner and getting ideas, where that inspiration was coming from. It was coming from something like this where we can then add fine details in different parts. Maybe we'll put some little leaves in here. Doesn't really matter if that's the leaf that's on it. We're just going to get those on there. But this is the time to now draw from all the fun little square inspiration pieces that we did and get some botanicals go in here. Because you've already done some of those for practice, I feel like it'll be easier when you get to this piece to pull from that work you've already put in. Let's pull one of these over here, going off the side. There's a little bit of a method there for how we were progressing with the lessons here. In this art class, I want you to pull from some of those lessons for your inspiration when we get to this point. That's really pretty, I like that. I like it so much that we could do some more over here as a mirror of that. Let's do that. My grandmother, she was a sewer, so she sewed all the clothes for the family. My mother was in high school before she had any store-bought clothes. She liked to tell me that. My mom unfortunately did not pick up that talent so I had a little 1970s Buster Brown stuff going. I love this. I'm getting really excited here about this now with our botanicals in here. It does seem to be a lot of creative people in my family and I just love that. My aunt that paints has had a frame shop, she posted on her Facebook page recently that she's been in business 35 years. I thought that was pretty awesome. I thought, man, at this point, I don't know when you'll be watching this class, but when I'm filming this class, I'm in my 10th year business, and I definitely hope that I can think up enough ideas and keep coming up with yummy things to do so that at 35 years, I too could be like, I've been in business 35 years. That would be way cool. I'm loving those. This is a project too that you don't have to do everything all at once. I'm going to draw with my mechanical pencil while I'm talking. If you do a bunch of stuff and then you think, I don't know if it's done, but I'm not feeling working on this right now. I don't know what else to do. I do love extra marks at the pencil. I like holding the pencil farther out so these lines are a lot less manufactured or even more organic. If you get stuck and you think, I don't know where to go or what to do or I don't want to mess it up, I feel like I'm at a point where I'm just going to have to wait it out a little bit, that's what working in your art book is for. You can come back to these layouts over and over again as you get new ideas and you want to try new things, come back to it later. You don't have to do everything now. I'm going to pull out some pastels. Even though that probably wasn't in our supply list, at this point, I want you to feel free to pull out any other supplies that you have and play with them. But I like these hard pastels because they draw nice lines and they give me other color options. If you wanted to, you could color in your flowers like we did when we were painting. We could paint in our flowers. We could just come back with some more mark-making. We could draw with some of the pastels. I just like all the colors that are available in this Charvin set and these are the harder pastels which I like because they're different than the soft pastels for drawing and getting color on your piece. I do have soft pastels too that I love. See now, this is a point where we could come in and be making lines and marks and just doing some other stuff in a texture and a color that is different than a color pencil and it's different than the paint. You can tell there is a difference in what we add when we get into like a chalk pastel. I don't want both layouts to be exactly the same, but I do want them to have a cohesive feel with the same colors and same type of marks like that. I like it. We could take this and we could actually use it to delineate our drawings a little bit. Maybe we could add a little color edge to our petals. Even though these are inspired by black-eyed Susans, which are yellow, we are going to be inspired by whatever color we pick up. If you pick up a different color than your flower would actually come in, don't worry about it. This is a little more of an abstract, it's up to interpretation, you're just going for some fun. Let's do a little top here in orange. I like it. Who cares if it's not dead or on what it might normally be. This is my interpretation. Look how fun that is. Super fun, just another little layer of whatever inspired you in the moment. We could do some blocks of color if I want some more yellow in here because I didn't have enough. Put the color on that and spread it around and we get a totally different look on top of the paint. I've got some pretty gold leaves that I've drawn on my inspiration piece and that would be fun. Maybe I'll come right through here and draw different spots, I'm not trying to do the exact same thing on both pieces, but I do want to have it match and be a companion piece. A lot of times when I'm playing and experimenting and trying out different supplies, some of my very favorite pieces end up being the piece in my art book. Usually I don't paint on both sides of the page like I'm doing with this so that if I want to tear that page out and frame it or sell it or use it for something else, I can and I'm not afraid that there's something on the back that's just this fabulous that I might be giving up. Now we could actually get really detailed, maybe I add a few dots on one side, I like dots. I think I was in the middle of a thought, but now I forgot what it was. I like that. Then we'll just come do that over here. If you're afraid that you're going to make pieces that you're going to love more on your sketchbook than the pieces that you tried to recreate outside your sketchbook, if you do stuff on one side, then you know you can tear them out and use them. Because I like to get stuff framed. I don't have as many bills now that I'm older and I've paid stuff off and so now I take stuff to the custom framer and hang art in my house. Stuff that's my own art and stuff that's other pieces, especially here in my art room, I have quite a few things that I've had framed that I love and I'm going to love them for the next 50 years or however much longer I get to be here. Some of that stuff's worth framing up. Look at that. That's pretty. I've got two and I might do that in a different something, let's see. This is a calligraphy pen, but I do like its little tip and we could do some drawing with it. We could do, let's see. I've got this, I think it's a Holly Hawk is what it's supposed to be and it's too fat. But I'm inspired by that little line with some circles and a dot in the middle of the circle, so I think I'm going to do those out here, even though it's upside down technically, for the flower. I don't even care. I'm inspired by that Hollyhock. This is a piece that was inspired out of our 20 ways to draw. Where's my book at? The book I've used all through class that I was inspired by. This is 20 Ways to Draw a Tulip. It was one of the patterns inspired out of that book, I believe, on the Hollyhock page. See there, I like that. That's pretty. I could even come over here now and do that somewhere over here if I wanted. Like right here anyway. You could spin this whole piece right here, just being inspired off different illustrations of different flowers and fill your whole piece with different botanical and leaves and dots and things like I've done here. Look how pretty all that is. I don't know that I'm at a finishing place for this, but I am at a place where I'm wondering like, what should I do next? What do I want to be the next feature? This is a point where I might sit and live with this for a while and come back to this page in my art book later when I think of new ideas and I think, oh, I would love this on this page. You can continue working on these for quite a while. Before I wrap it up though, I do want to go ahead and peel the tape so you can get the feel of the peeled tape. Because I do feel and at least at a stopping point, I do love it. I like all the things that we've drawn in there. I might come back later and add some other stuff. But I think I might peel our tape off. Let me move my paint out of the way in case it's still wet. 11. Adding botanicals and other marks: Let me see where I started. Here we go. At least give you an idea of what it looks like, semi-finished. We'll call it semi-finished because I reserve the right to later. Maybe come back and add to this. If you'll pull your tape off at an angle away from your drawing, like at an angle this way, I find that it's less likely to rip or tear my paper, so I do very carefully. I know I'm going a little faster here. I normally go very slow and pull it at an angle, and then you're less likely to do any paper tears. If you're using anything on here like pastels, like I use those pastels, you're going to want to do either a finishing spray. Or put a piece of wax paper in-between here because when you shut this book up on itself, like you close it, the pastel is going to bleed on each side. To prevent some of that, I will take these out and spray fixative spray on it. I'm using the Sennelier Fixative for soft pastels. I will spray a couple of coats on these pages outside so that I'm less likely to have them bleed on each other. Then I have a big box that I got at Sam's of heavyweight dry wax paper, which is basically a deli paper. Then I will cut this down and then store this inside my book, but cut to the right size, and then when I come to that page, each of these hasn't bled on each other, if I've used pastels. Just a thought there. If you use anything, pen pastel, soft pastel, hard pastel, anything that charcoal, anything that would still smear, that's what you can do to not have that smear. But look how pretty that page turned out. I'm actually pleased. Now that I'm to this point, I like all the color swatch, the color splotches that we have. I like the red inspired, Black Eyed Susan botanicals that we drew on there. I like the marks. I like the hollyhocks, I like the leaves. I want you to try one of these bigger ones. They can go page to page. It can be without the tape, it can be with the tape. It's your choice there. But I truly have so much fun doing these and I'll just show you my inspiration. Like here's another thing on this piece that I didn't do that I might come back and add here. Now that I remember it's on there is a bit of scribbles. You could do some writing, you can do some inspiration writing. You could do a scripture. If you'd like scripture, you can do some scribble that looks like riding, but it's really not. That's fine. You could do other botanicals. This page, I love this page. Then the other one that I did in the blues and greens and I still feel like it's not finished is one of those where I might go back and revisit it again, but I like this colorway and it was fun to experiment with. Now I've got a third little colorway with different marks and different fun things. I hope this inspires you to do a little bit bigger layout and just see what you can come up with. I definitely want you to come and share these in class. I want to see what you've done. I want to be inspired by the colors that you came up with and the marks that you made and the flower illustrations that you created. I can't wait to see it, so definitely come back and show it, and I will see you back in class.