Watercolor Basics and Tips for Beginners: Loose Floral Bouquet

1. Introduction: Are you learning watercolor, but find it to be confusing and causing anxiety? You try to follow all the rules, but can I get stuck in knowing what to paint? Well, I've created this class for you. I'm Tammy K, and I'm an artist, an art teacher, and also a mental health therapist working in Arizona. I love to paint loose florals, loose landscapes, and even sometimes some loose birds. Because of my mental health background, I love to mix self care in with my painting just to help you guys learn to relax, enjoy, slow down, and really learn the process of being able to paint without that fear and anxiety. So I recently published some classes on loose florals on scale share and you can find them in my profile. One of them mixes in concepts on how to let go of perfectionism in your art. And the other one is to relax and find joy when you paint. So I teach watercolor across a number of platforms and across social media. And one of the things I hear a lot is that students aren't sure how to paint outside the rules. You need the rules so that you can learn this tricky medium. But then it can be hard to let them go and no one to break them. Then the question is, what if you don't actually know the rules yet? So in this class I've set out to teach you guys step by step, those tricks and techniques that I have learned along the way in my watercolor journey. After that, we're going to put all the things together that we've learned to create a loose and beautiful watercolor bouquet. So this is what you'll learn. Why paint with watercolor, palette and brush care, Swatching, water control and color mixing. How to hold your brush types of brushes to use and they're marks And also watercolor washes, textures and leaf and floral brush strokes. So this class is for beginners who would like to learn the watercolor basics. But it's also for the experienced artist who may want a refresher on the basics and also want to learn how to loosen up and really just create outside the rules. So as you practice the exercises and the final project, I really hope that you get a new sense of creativity and confidence. Excited to venture out on your own, forgetting the rules when you don't need them so you can experience your own success. So let's get to it. 2. Your Project: For our final project, you'll be creating a loose and vibrant watercolor bouquet with lots of depth. Like this one right here, you'll be using the techniques and tips that you've learned in this class to build up this composition. You will learn to build up a loose floral bouquet with base layer of focal florals, filler florals and stems and leaves. Then you'll be adding in texture and shadow by using the wet on dry technique, which is also called glazing. Then finally, you're going to be venturing out on your own in the final piece as you get to choose the variations. So during this class, you're going to learn the following self care concepts. How to loosen up to create from your own experience and intuition. And how to know when to follow and when to break the rules. So for your final project, I'm going to be looking for the following two things. First of all, as always, I'm not looking for perfection. I'm looking to see that you did the exercises, you did the project, you completed it. And the second thing is I want to hear your story. Were you able to relax and enjoy, and did you learn some new things? Were you able to loosen up? How was your experience? So I chose this project for you for the following two reasons. First of all, because florals, in my opinion, are a really great way to start venturing out on your own once you start to feel comfortable. And also creating this simple floral project is going to help you build your confidence, which will really encourage you to continue to paint as you move forward with your watercolor journey. When you're ready, please upload your project to the project gallery so that we can give you feedback, cheer you on, and just overall support each other as a community. So in the next video, we're going to be talking about the supplies that you need for this class. 3. Supplies Needed: When it comes to the supplies that you need for this class, I will give you some ideas of things that I use and what types are out there. But the bottom line is to use what you have. All right, friends. When it comes to paint, we can go very simple by getting a palette that's already made, which has these little half pans in them. And that's just good to go. You spray it down just like it's sprayed here. And you reactivate the paint. Or you could purchase little tubes of paint. And then you fill up the well of an empty palette and allow that to dry for 24 hours. And then take your spray bottle, spray it down and you'll reactivate it and you can start painting with it. Of course, you need a spray bottle to reactivate your paint. It's just going to make your life a lot easier that way. When it comes to paper, it's nice to have a large piece so that you can do your bouquet and then whatever papers you want. For the practice exercises, it really doesn't matter. This is a Canson sketchbook and it is a very inexpensive paper. It's really great for your practice exercises and it keeps everything together with this ring binder. And then I've got the professional cotton paper for my bouquet. Now you can use this for everything. You could use this for everything. But the point is that you use what you have and you don't stress about it. So when it comes to brushes, I like to have three different sizes available. I've got my number 12 round, my number six round, and this is a 100. But you can get a number two just for the details. So the larger, first layers of color, the washes with the larger brush. Then for more details, you do the medium brush. And then for the tiniest details you do the small one. Now when it comes to your water, it's good to have two things. Like for example, two jars where you can do your warm colors and you're cool just to separate and keep your water nice and bright instead of muddy. Or you can do something like this, which has the two wells built in. And last but not least, I always have a paper towel. So when I'm using my brush and get some paint on my brush, I dab And that helps me control how much liquid, how much water I'm going to be putting on my paper. So in the next video, we're going to learn why we should even water color paint. 4. Why Paint With Watercolor: Why should you even paint with water color for me? One of the things is that it calms your nervous system when you are stressed out, filled with anxiety. Being able to do something with your hands that's tactile, and that also gives you something tangible that you can show. What you've done is a beautiful and rewarding thing to do. It helps you to see the world in a different way. It changes the neural pathways. If you're spending a lot of time in your stress hormones where you're thinking about trauma and the bad things that have happened. It gives you a beautiful reprieve from that world just to focus on something that is exciting to create. Then also, we have to talk about dopamine, because dopamine is the hormone released when we are doing something pleasurable. And when we get that dopamine reward, it helps us to want to do that same activity again, later on it reinforces that good behavior. So if you're spending less time in your stressful part of your brain and more time in the pleasure part of your brain. You're allowing your brain to heal and slow down from some of the things that have happened to you. And I've heard some people say before, well water color just seems too hard to learn or I'm not a creative person, so I really can't do it to that. I would say it's all about practice. If there's anything in life, music, gardening, studying to become a lawyer, these are things you need to do and practice to learn these abilities. It's not something that just happens. In the next video, we're going to learn about watercolor palette care. 5. Palette Care: In this video here, we're going to be talking about palette care. And it's definitely a lot easier than you might think. I get the questions over and over of, do you wash your palette? Can you use the paint over and over again? Does your palette get too dirty? But if we take really good care of our paints in our palette, we can end up using it for years. Here are some of my tips. As you can see, I have a variety of palettes out here. I did show you that it's very simply a spraying down situation and then you reactivate your paint. Whether you have a palette that you filled in the paints the way that they dry, it's going to be the same as these half pans here that were already filled and placed when I purchased the palettes, spraying them down. And I've got my brush here, I just grab the paint that I want. For example, this tiny little palette here. It's going to grab a little bit, I like to swirl around so that I can really mix that water in with the paint. If I just swipe off the top, I'm going to get a little bit of a colored water there. But if I really swish around, I'm going to get some good thick color, then I can just take my paper, whatever I'm using and add that there. Take off some of the water, get a little bit lighter value, take off more water, rinse my brush, and just have some fun play in your sketchbook. Now, demonstrating here, I've got my warm colors and my cool, so can see I'm not going to mix them together and get the muddy colors. But say, for whatever reason you don't have a lot of space like here. I wanted to add some red in here. But this blue in this screen, it's going to make mud. I can just simply clean that out a little bit with a paper towel. And I did mention that I don't clean my palettes. You can if you want, but that paint is still good, but you could always wipe off something. If you feel like you need some extra space, add in your red and you're good to go. Just keeping in mind the clean up is really up to you. But I think most people can agree that this is paint we can keep using over and over. And it's still going to be good for a very long time. Now, I will talk to you more about water control in one of our subsequent water control lessons. I hope that you feel encouraged that palette care can be simple. In the next video, we're going to put our palette to use and we're going to talk about swatching our paint. 6. Swatching Your Palette: In this video, we are swatching our palette. And it can be really fun to do because you get to see all the colors and the values, the lightness and the darkness of those colors. Which can get you excited about creating your own color palette for whatever painting you're doing. All right, so when it comes to swatching your palette, there's very few things that come close to how relaxing this can be. I'm going to grab by number 12. I'm just going to start grabbing some of these colors here. What I like to do is grab some concentrated color, Then clean my brush, I dab it, and then we just start to spread that out. And now you can start to see the different values developing there. I like to go really intense with that cream consistency and then we get really light when we add that water in there. If we keep our warm colors together, then we're going to blend them and mix them, and they'll meet in the middle and create some interesting blendings there. Let's do some orange. This is such a fun, relaxing thing to do. And then you start to learn about the different values, the lightness and darkness of different colors. I'm not going to do all of them today, but I encourage you to try this with all the colors that you have and just see how beautiful this is. Together, it's creating a little piece of artwork that we weren't necessarily planning on today, but we're just playing and having fun. And you can see some of that paint and water pushing other paint and water away, put some green in there. We'll start with that. And I don't really have a rhyme or reason to how I'm doing this. I'm just playing and letting those colors naturally mix. And I'm not worried about it can be such a relaxing thing to experiment with your colors. Sometimes you'll get some interesting color mixing that you didn't expect. For example, I'm going to go ahead and attach these together and then they're doing a little bit of mixing and creating a fun little color in the middle. If you ever feel stressed about this procedure, please don't remember. This is as hopefully relaxing as we can get. You're even creating a pretty art piece out of this. All right, let's add some of that darker blue. I said I'm not doing all the colors. There are some others that could have added in. For example, doing the black and the brown. But for the sake of this exercise, we're just trying to keep it really pretty bright. In the next video, we are going to be talking about how to hold your brush. 7. Holding Your Brush: The way in which you hold your brush really informs your painting style. Do you hold your brush really close to the tip? Do you hold it really far out like this, or are you a mid holder? Next, we're going to talk about that hold and how that affects your painting style. So when it comes to holding your brush, it depends on the brush. It depends on what you're painting. I have several brushes here I want to demonstrate. So, for example, this large brush here, I don't, I don't use this for watercolor. I have used it one time. It's not my go to I'm just going to like triple dip here basically. And I'm holding the brush, it's got this flat part here, just holding it loosely. Look at how fun that is, right? And you can kind of go thin marks. I feel like I kind of hold it like when I'm holding a fork. Then I've got this really long handled Filbert brush for watercolor. I don't need to handle so large, but the brush is great. I usually hold it in the middle. The closer you are to the tip of the brush, the more control you will have. If I'm wanting to do like these really controlled petal marks here that in I'm able to make some details and just really have a lot of control with the movements. Then if I want to go loser and I go towards the middle there, all of a sudden, you know, these movements are a lot looser. And loose could be good if you want loose florals, but can also make you feel a little stressed. Because you can't control the brush as well. I prefer to hold it right there in the middle, especially with these brushes too. I've got a 12.16 same type of thing. You could hold it at the tip and it's going to move and flow more. And maybe those are the kind of marks that you want. It just depends on what you are trying to make at that moment and what your comfort level is. I don't really think about it. My hand just tends to hold the brush wherever it feels comfortable for me. And of course, we've got this little tiny detail brush as well. Same type of thing, going really detailed, making some leaves that I want them to be just ever so perfect. And so I'm holding it at the tip. That's not usually how I paint for me. I like to hold it in that middle section, so you're going to have more wonkiness, You're going to have more movement and you know, that's okay. Just connect those here. And that's how you hold your brush. So now that we've talked about how to hold your brush, we're going to talk about how to care for your brushes. So they last a really long time. 8. Brush Care: So just like pallet care seems like it's intimidating, but it's actually quite simple also with your brushes. It is pretty simple as well. And if you take really good care of them, your brushes will last for years. So let's get into that part. I've got two waters here. Just to demonstrate what my brush. Grab some paint, We'll go with this blue. All right. So you got a dirty brush. What do you do so you can clean it in your well of water? Or if I have a faucet, I will let the water run in my hand and then I just swirl it around and clean it. It should be clean at that point. And then all I do is I simply reshape the brush just like this, so it has that nice point. And I let it dry just like that. Ideally, it would be nice to have them dry upside down like this if you have a holder, but it's not necessary. You don't want them to dry like this because the water will go into the feral here and loosen the glue. And then you're going to have a brush that's falling apart. If you can care for your brushes, this simply, they will last you four years. You don't need to use harsh soap. This is all I do, and it works really well for me. And now we're going to talk a little bit about water control, the thing that gets people really tripped up. 9. Water Control: Okay, so let's be honest. Water control is a difficult subject to talk about and to learn. And I get this question a lot. How much water to paint do I need? And I'll be honest, it depends on what you're trying to paint. So today we're going to be doing two different scales. The first one is a value scale. And you're going to be able to see the darkest of that color going all the way to the lightest value possible. The second thing we're going to do today is create this paint consistency scale. And we're going to talk about that really watery mix of paint and how you can add pigment to create a darker, darker version until you get to the thickest amount of paint that you can possibly paint on a paper. Let's get to it. That's a lot of peas, that was a lot of peas in a row. I've got my number 12 round brush and I'm just going to grab some of this paint that's already on here. So we're going to make a weak tea consistency, so it's going to be mostly water and just a little bit of pigment here mixed in. And this is going to be for those basic washes, so we'll just start adding that in. It's very transparent. Take off the hair if you have any very light. Don't worry about perfect eyes. I always trying to remind you it's not important to do things perfectly. All right. So now we're going to take some more water and we're going to start adding a little bit more paint. We're going to have a deeper color here. This is going to move on the palette still like the other one did, just a little bit darker. As you're putting that in your square, you can readjust it if it's not dark enough. That's looking pretty good. We have a lot more color here, a lot more vibrancy. All of a sudden, he's starting to see this color come in to be more intense like the original one. The other one is just like a really light version and it doesn't really look like it's related. All right, now that's our coffee. These are what I would use for those basic first washes. Now we're going to grab some more paint and we're going to look for milk. Now, milk, it's a bit thicker. Adding more paint still moves a bit. Pretty good on the palette. And it's got some nice vibrancy. So we are not doing this with precision. Look at that gorgeous color. I love that. We are just looking for, trying to figure out how much water to paint to do the things you want to do. So with milk, I would start to use this for that second layer of color. Once everything has dried, adding in the shadows and textures, it's really beautiful. Going to grab some more water, grab some more paint. We're going to go with the cream. Now cream is going to be very thick, that it's really not going to move too much on your palette, but it's also going to be able to be spreadable on your paper. You can see I'm just swirling my brush, grabbing a whole bunch of that color, and it's really not going to move too much, it's very opaque. All right, so there's my cream. I can really see how thick this is here. And this is also that consistency that I would use for the textures and shadows guys. I know that my lines are walk, if it bothers you, you can always measure out your lines. I'm just trying to get us to practice in a way or we're not going to be stressed about what's going on. Okay, so just easy going. Putting down the paint, not worrying too much about that final result. Now this color is not too much darker than this one. If you want it to be darker, you can always add in more paint. But I can definitely see that there's a difference here in the opacity. And I'm going to rinse my brush for the last one I'm going to dip in here. I need a little bit of water in my brush just so that I can move around, grab the thickest paint possible. And then I'm going to take my paper towel and I'm going to dab my brush to get some liquid off. And you're going to start to see some dry brushing happening where there's very little liquid happening here. And we're going to get the skipping of some of these areas of the paper. It's very thick, it doesn't spread very well, but it's going to be really nice for things like texture in a landscape, that kind of thing. We also want to do a value scale going from lighter to darker, and I'm going to demonstrate that with this beautiful turquoise, teal color. I'm going to grab my cream consistency here. Still spreadable. It's going to give us that thickest amount possible, the darkest color possible. So we're just going to make a mark on our paper with that beautiful color. Then we want to show how we can start to lighten. Value is referring to the lightness and the darkness of a color. So we're just going to dip into the water, squeeze you off the side, and we're going to make another mark. We're going to keep doing that, not a lot of science to this. Just play as we do this, you'll see we're getting rid of a little bit of paint every time we add a little more water, creating a lighter and lighter value. It's a whole bunch of fun. You can start to see how your values are changing. Just with this little progress, this little process here, we're getting really light. We won't be completely clear because my water is a little bit tainted. But you can get the idea of how you're able to change up those values with water color. All right, in our next video, we're going to be talking about the color wheel and color mixing. 10. Color Mixing: So this topic can be really daunting, honestly. There's like a lot of methods out there on how to mix the perfect colors, the perfect palette. Remember, I'm all about leaving that perfectionism behind and just playing, enjoying the moment. Within that, I'm going to talk about the color wheel. Today we're going to create two different ones, one with warm colors and one with cool colors. So confusing. Let's get into it so that it's not confusing any longer. All right. So today, friends, I want to teach you some color mixing basics. And instead of making it complicated, we will try to make it as simple as possible. Normally, we try to separate our warm colors, reds, oranges, yellows, from our cool colors, Greens, blues, and purples. And we have our primaries, which are the red, blue, and yellow, which all colors come from those three mixtures. But did you know that the warm colors also have a warm and cool version? The cool colors have a warm and cool version. For example, we've got red over here. If it's closer to that yellows side, you're going to have a red orange. If it's closer to the blue side, you're going to have a red violet. And vice versa with all the other ones. I wanted to show you guys how to make a color wheel that's pretty simple. That is made from warm colors, the primaries that are stemming more from the warm side versus the cool side. Let's just go ahead and get into it. We're going to start with our warm red. We've got this nice warm red right here, and we're going to make like a little bit of a circle blob right here, not worrying about perfect. That's our warm red. And then we're going to do our warm blue. So I'm going to mix a little bit with the blues. I've got a basic blue here. If I want to make a warm blue, then I'm just going to grab a little bit of my purple which has retinant to make it a little bit warmer than what I have on my palette. This is not scientific at all. At least the way that I'm doing this, this is going to be just for fun in a little experiment, just to see what we can come up with and how we can mix things and how they look different. All right, and then I did my warm red, my warm blue. And then I'm going to want to do a warm yellow which is my cadmium. And I simply dip into that and add that on my paper as well. All right, so now we're going to do a little bit of mixing. So I've got that cadmium yellow already on my brush. I'm going to mix a little bit of that in with my orange, red to create a really vibrant and bright orange. We'll add that right here. I'll just add it right out here to our little color wheel. That's a gorgeous color right there. All right, if I want to do my green color, I'm going to mix this purply blue with that really bright yellow. What I'd like to do is just grab some of that blue, bring it over and mix it together with that yellow, and see what we come up with. It's making a muted color, isn't it? Wow, look at that is definitely not green at all. I mean, there is green, right as we keep adding this in, but it's a very muted color. We'll add that one in as well. If we were to add more yellow, we could brighten that up just a little bit. Again, these are not 50 50 mixes and I'm just going to, sometimes you don't get it quite right. So let's go ahead and take this one that has more yellow in it, we'll add that in. It's just an odd color, isn't it? Adding a little bit more blue in there? That's pretty muted. So these two reacted in a way that's maybe the most pleasant. It's not bright like this, but it is a variation when you mix those two together. Okay, And then we'll take some of that purply blue, and we'll mix that together over here with the orange color, orange, red, a little bit more blue. We have our purple. That's pretty subtle as well. So we've got some bright orange here. Really muted here. A bit of a muted purple as well. Maybe a little more red. You can change that up. Again, I'm not trying to be perfect with this. Nothing is 50, 50, but we're just experimenting to see what these colors do. Let's go ahead and do the opposite of that. We're going to have our cool red. I'm just grabbing my cool red, and I'll make my little circle over here, circular shape. And you can see how different that is to this one over here. Now we're going to take our blue again this time instead of adding purple to make it more of a warm blue. We're going to mix in a little bit of my turquoise, which is a bluish green. We're just going to add that in just to change up this blue that we have be, cause it's important to see how different colors, different shades, different mixes affect other colors when you're mixing. This is just for fun. I'm not going to be too worried about the combinations. Sorry, that got painted off screen there, there is my new blue that I mixed and I'm going to grab some of my lemon yellow and add that also to my paper. Let's see the combination we get when we do this cool red and then we start to mix in a little bit of that cool yellow color. I'd like to start here and gradually add in more of my color until I get a mixture that I like here. It's definitely more subtle. It's a nice orange. Is not as intense, but still really pretty. We'll add that to our color wheel here, and that'll dry about one shade lighter. Now we're going to take our blue, we're going to add our cool red to it, and we'll see what kind of a purple we get. Oh, that's really nice burgundy color. You can see we're playing around. We're not taking anything too seriously, not taking ourselves seriously. The world is playful and fun. A little more blue in there makes it more of that color right there. A little bit darker, similar to that in a way. The last one is our green. We are going to mix up. Let's do that greenish blue again for our cool blue. Then we're going to mix in some of that lemon yellow and see what happens. That's really bright. Look at that bright green, That's wonderful. I love that color. Definitely more intense than the first one here. The last thing I want to talk about would be complimentary colors. If you look at the color wheel, the colors that are opposite, red and green. And then we have yellow and purple, and then we have blue and orange. Those look really good together, Red and green, they complement when they're next to each other. But if you mix them together, they're going to create mud. Let's take some red, we'll just put that on the palette like this, beautiful. And then we've got some green, and they look so nice next to each other. But what happens when you rinse your brush and then you just try to mix them together a little bit. All of a sudden you get this muddiness in the middle. Right? There you go. But if you were to take, for example, a lot of red and just a little bit of green, you can utilize that combination to mute your red down a little bit. But it's still going to be pretty interesting color. For example, put that right there. It's muted down. It's not muddy yet, because you have added a little bit, just to desaturate a bit, we'll added some blue right here. The opposite of the color wheel would be our orange, grabbing some orange, adding that in next to it, They look really nice together. Then you grince your brush, dab it, not too much liquid. If you try to mix these together, you're going to see that same effect of muddiness. Okay? But if you were to, let's see, Take the orange, blue color and then a little bit of orange, a little bit of orange mixed in it's going to desaturate and still create a color that's really pretty. All right, let's do one more. The last two that are left, we have purple. Do a little bit of purple here on our paper. Then the opposite of that would be yellow. I'll des grab my academy. I'm yellow right now. I'm not worried about whether it's cool or warm. Just playing right now, cleaning my brush, dabbing it. Then if we mix these together, we definitely see a lot of muting happening when we meet in the middle. But if we take our purple color, we add just a tad of this yellow just a little bit. We have a muted purple. Muted colors are really nice. For example, if you're painting in the fall and you want a nice fall palette, this is a simple way to do color mixing. Hopefully this makes sense and it can be a fun little practice for you to try. Now that hopefully, we've simplified this idea of the color wheel and color mixing, we're going to talk a bit about watercolor techniques and washes. 11. Washes and Techniques: When it comes to creating background washes, such as in a sky, a landscape, or maybe a background in a floral painting, there are several different ways that you can create this nice light wash of color. I'm going to show you those right now. There are several washes that we can do to add some interest in creativity to our paintings. First is a flat wash. It's just very simple, just that really thin paint, weak tea, or maybe you're using a coffee and we're just going to put that same consistency, that same value all over our space. Maybe it's just a flat sky that we want to create or could be really anything. That one is simple, done and done. The next one is a graduated. I like to use a nice dark blue to start this out because we are going to create a sky. We would start with a very dark amount, a dark value of this color. Then we're going to start rinsing our brush, and we're going to try to bring that paint down as it starts to get a little bit lighter with that water. And then rinsing your brush again, just like how we did with the value scale now, we hardly have any paint there. Some of it's going to run down, but we have the dark that starts to get a little bit lighter and lighter until it goes to very light or nothing at the bottom. The last wash is called a variegated wash, and we're going to start with a nice red color. Let's just think of like a sunset, for example. This one is not about value changes, but it's actually more about just going from one color to another. Like maybe an Hombre situation or maybe Hombre, the values as well. I don't know. Al right, the way variegated is the official name. Now I'm going to rinse my brush. I'm going to grab some orange and make sure it moves around. And now I'm going to add that to where the red was. Continuing down and just going and transitioning from that red to the orange color. Filling that in cleaning my brush. And then the last thing is grabbing some yellow, pretty thick concentration of this. I want it to really show up. I am somewhat staying in the lines or trying to, you know, we can be a little civilized some days, sometimes. All right? And then you've got that transition from red, orange to yellow. For the last two. I want to talk a little bit about wet on wet versus wet on dry. Wet on wet, We're going to grab some of this pink color here, a little bit more water, and then let's make it a little bit lighter then I'm just going to make a flower, dabbing my brush. Just take in the brush and swooping some petals around. It's okay for the same value. It's okay if they change. They're different. That's all wet. While it is still wet, we're going to take more concentrated pink and I'm just going to poke in that color and let it spread out. That is the wet, un, wet technique, just adding some interest and texture while things are still wet. I'll rinse my brush. I'm just going to grab some black. Now, just to stipple in a little bit in the middle. Some of this might spread as it touches the wet. That's okay. That would be the wet on wet technique versus the wet on dry technique. The wet on dry, we're going to do a little bit of glazing for that. I'm going to grab my red, pretty light value of red. We're first going to put that on and then we have to let it dry, wet on, dry. These are interchangeable. You will see in a moment with water color why it's so interesting. Because when you have two layers down, if you allow them to dry, they're not going to blend together if they're both wet like this one will. But that bottom color is still going to influence the top color. Okay, so now I'm going to grab some green and I'm just going to paint over that first layer. As we do that, you're going to see now red and green are opposite on the color wheel. When you were to mix them together as wet paints, they're going to create a muddy color. But if you do the glazing, you're not going to get mud. But you're going to get a muted version of the bottom color. You can see because we're using really light values. You can see, you can see right here where there's the green and then where the red is. And then you can still see some of that red coming through the green. This is glazing. It's a fun and unique technique. If you don't use something that's going to make mud that's opposite on the color wheel, Then you're going to enhance whatever colors down that first layer versus muting it down, like in this situation. So now that we've talked about some techniques for watercolor washes, we're going to start learning about watercolor, leaf and floral brush strokes. 12. Leaf and Floral Brush Strokes: Leaf and flower shapes can be daunting and difficult too. But we're going to practice some easy and simple ways to do them, just as a nice little warm up as we're getting ready for our final project. When it comes to floral brush strokes, a beginner might think, okay, to do a petal, I need to actually paint out that petal shape. Which you can, Adding a curve shape. Adding a curve shape, right? And making that petal just like that. We can take off some of that value and do another one that can be a pretty flower. There's nothing wrong with that at all. Add a little bit more paint here, but just getting those, all the perfect size and shape and machi match and all that can be a little bit daunting, stressful. All the things we can just add in a little bit of a yellow middle. Two, of course it's not just all that white space and let it just mix together. I like to use a brush, like a Filbert brush that already has that roundedness and it's just going to make life a lot easier for me because I don't have to draw in those shapes for this flower. I'm holding it loosely, I'm just adding in a petal like this. And then I'm twisting the brush, adding in a side, little facing petal, taking off some of the paint. Just curving things around, making them really light and loose. Moving my brush so that all of the petals are starting from the outside, coming in. Then all of a sudden I've got this really beautiful floral. And not a lot of effort, I love a Filbert. For that reason, we can take our original brush and I can show you how I like to do a side facing flower. So I'll just grab this. One is my favorite color for making poppies. We're just some shapes using the belly of the brush to inform the shape of the flower. And look at how easy that is. Take some green, connect that with a stem, let that flow, and that's totally fine. Okay, If you wanted to do a simple bud, grab some of that same paint. I would just take the belly of the brush, press it, and press it over here. And you can make this one thicker if you'd like, just for a bigger bud. And then just take your smaller brush, grab any green that you like, and you can add in your stem, just like so. And even a little bit of a leaf or something like that as well. And very simple, easy way to create some nice buds. When it comes to some simple leaf shapes, I'm going to grab my green here and just a little bit of red to chill out that green color. I'm just going to take that brush. I actually like a lot of water. I'm just going to do a little sea curve shape like this. Draw it out slow one on the other side. Then let's take off a little paint. Let's do a second one right here. And then a third one. Of course, we're going to connect that all together with a thinner brush. Just a little bit of a line here that was too little of paint, little. Then we can connect here, then here, and over here. That's a very simple way to do a leaf. Since I've got that smaller brush, I'm going to grab this turquoise color. We can use the belly of the brush to help inform our leaves. I'm just going to angle it, I want it to be rounded, so I'm going to have this belly be at the top. And I'm just going to pre, I'm going to press and press like that and I'm just going to keep going up a little bit farther, like a fern maybe situation. Then we can do the same thing with our larger brush too. A little bit more concentrated paint. We've got a bigger mark here. Take off some of the paint, squeeze you off the side, Lighten up our value, take off most of it, dab, boop. Then we'll take our smaller brush, once again, we're just going to put a line up the middle and connect everything together. Leaves can feel complicated and daunting. But with a bit of practice, not only are they soothing, but you'll figure it out. It won't be too hard any longer. Everything is about practice and being patient with yourself, Taking your time, it'll come to you. All right? I hope you enjoyed painting leaves and some floral shapes with me. Now we're going to start working on watercolor textures. 13. Paint Textures: All right, so for textures in your watercolor paintings, that is typically done in the second or third layer, or fourth fifth, whatever amount of layers you want to do, although you can do them as your first wash of color. And it's going to give you some depth and some shadow, especially in the florals that we're painting today. There's really a lot of options when it comes to this watercolor medium and how to create these textures in your compositions. I'm going to teach you six of my favorite ways to add texture to watercolor paintings. The first one is creating blooms. I'm going to grab some of this beautiful red paint. This is something that people think is a mistake that beginners will make. Where you will take your lovely watery paint, you will add it to whatever you're painting. Again, guys, I don't worry about staying in the lines. If you need to measure out your squares before you do this, go right ahead. But using them as a rough guideline. And see I went over the line, it is what it is. All right, so we've got this lovely thing here, and then we're going to grab some more paint, and then let's say this isn't dry yet, we're like, I just want to keep painting. So we go ahead and do that. And then we add in some more watery paint here. All of a sudden we're going to start to see these little blooms coming out. What's happening is that first paint is being pushed away by the second paint, and when it dries, you're going to see little cauliflower shapes. To me, it's a fun texture, I actually enjoy it, some people don't, It's a preference thing. I'm actually going to do a second one here with some lighter paint because I feel like these colors are so similar. I can see the bloom. But it's going to be harder to show up on camera, just we can do a second example, grabbing some more paints and a darker color. And we're just going to add in right here, you can see those blooms are forming, pushing everything away. The next one we're going to do is stippling. And you could take a big brush, you could take a small brush, and I'm going to grab some lovely dark blue. I'm just going to make these little dots, for example. You can use this in the center of a flower texture on a wall, really for whatever you'd like. Tiny dots, light pressure, bigger dots, heavier pressure. Then you could even take a larger brush and do the same thing. Let's just use the same color here. Now I'm going to have some larger spaces I can press down more. This is the idea of stipling. It creates some pretty texture and some fun little marks. All right, to do dry brushing. Going to grab our color, really thick paint like we've done before. Just find that butter consistency, dab on your paper towel and start to make your marks. And you're going to see all this beautiful texture because your brush is running out of paint. It's quite beautiful. That's it, That's all that one is for scraping. Let's see, Take a color, let's take this orange, red. We're going to fill this in. Scraping is just what it sounds like finding some type of object I like to use, like a credit card or something similar that can be really helpful to make some beautiful and fun marks as well. First, we will fill this in. Just take your trusty scratching tool and you can just start to make some interesting texture and lines through that. I've got some black paint on there, that's why that's showing up. But just another way to add in some texture to the ground or maybe some grasses in a landscape. If you press really hard, you're going to scrape some of that paint away. Splatter is very simple in that you just take some pretty runny paint on your brush and you tap it. I probably won't stay within this box and that's okay. We're always looking for ways to just relax and enjoy and not worry about perfect splatters. A fun little texture thing to add, especially when you're making florals. The last one is adding salt for texture. So I'm going to paint the space here, let's try an orange. Get that paint on there. When we add our salt, the salt is going to do similar things to what you get when you do blooms. When you're adding extra paints, like a lot of paint or water on a wet surface, a wet painted place, it's going to push away that pigment and that water and create these cool little textures and blooms. I've just got a regular pink salt here. You can use any type you want. And you just put that on there, allow it to dry. And then I will show you this in a moment. Well, in a few moments when this is all dried up. Okay, so this is dry, we can take off the salt. I'll just show you the texture that's left behind. It's quite a lot on there. All right. Everything has been scratched off. You can see there's some very interesting texture on there. If you were to use a darker paint and then add salt, you would be able to see things a lot differently as well. Sometimes the salt will push that paint a lot and leave a very light version or value of the original darker value that's there. Now that we've worked on these basic techniques to build up to our painting, the final project is here, and we're going to start off with our focal florals. 14. Final Project: Focal Florals: Your focal floral will be what the eye focuses on first. It's typically off centered to give a bit more interest to your painting versus smack dab in the middle. And I usually like to use a paint consistency of weak tea or coffee. So we're going to spray this down. I'm going to start with my number 12 round brush. This is the composition that we're falling. But because we're supposed to push the rules and figure out when we want to break them, when do we want to change them? We're just practicing that today as you know. I'm just going to grab some of this peach color and I'm going to double load it a little bit of this other peach or this other pink. We're going to start right in the center, which is another rule because usually you're supposed to put them to the left or to the right of the center. And we're just going to go for it today. Why not? Because we can, breaking the rules as we're doing these little scrubby marks, we are doing like a marigold. I'm not trying to cover up all that space. I like to dip, take off some of the paint and leave some white space in between. Just makes for some very interesting petals. We're just doing these scrubby marks and working pretty quickly. Not worrying too much about it, but just going in the middle, you can do those things. Just play, And you might find some techniques that you hadn't considered before when you do stuff like this. Let's do a second one. We're going to do one here and one here. We'll get this nice yellowy color go in, same type of thing, little scrubby, scrubby marks, just like that. Just going in that circle, eventually going all the way around. You can press with the belly of the brush too and then dip, lift off some of that paint dab and continue on your way. These focals, they're just fun and different than the original. So you can really play around. Now if you want to do different colors than what I'm doing, certainly go for it. Of course, you can copy what I'm doing as well. If that feels more comfortable, I'm going to grab some orange, and we're going to do this one more time. It's not too orange. Let's grab a different orange. I'd probably grab the same yellow. There we go. I haven't seen pink marigolds before, but we did them because you can with art, you don't have to follow everything. There you go. Just scrubby, scrubby marks, letting that paint spread like water color does so well. And then you've got those little light marks too, with white space in between, so you can see the different petals that you've got. All right guys, Next it's time to add our filler florals. 15. Filler Florals: With our filler florals, the idea is to fill up some of that white space in our bouquet. And to add some more interest with some different shapes and different colors and also different sizes. All right, now we're doing the filler florals. Here we've got our composition just broken up into different sections of color. One of the rules is that we should be able to zigzag through different colors because our brain lights go back and forth. We've got some yellow here, we've got some yellow here, but we can also group those colors and it's going to be okay. So we're just going to play with that. And you can see we have these evenly distributed, but that doesn't mean that we have to do it like that. So I'm going to get the medium size brush number six around and I'm going to grab some of this really beautiful yellow here. I'd like to do some larger flowers, some longer flowers I should say. And I'm just going to take the belly, just like we have here. And I'm going to press down just like so to create those floral marks. And then I'm going to do some more here. And then of course, we will use our green to make some stems to lighten it up a little bit, maybe a few more over here. Even that way is fine too. While I'm doing this, I'm giving you permission if you want to change up some of the colors or where you put things in the composition or the shapes, the sizes of things, be my guest. This is your turn where you can start to experiment and enjoy that process. So now I'm going to choose blue, but I'm going to go with this lighter blue here. Maybe this aqua, it's a mixture of those. I'm going to start by just adding, taking off this little hair, tiny little marks here. Because I do want to then spread this out with some clean water. And I want to do several here. So I'm not following that composition rule that's trying to distribute color here, here, and here. So that if there's blue here, then there's blue here, then there's blue here, and you zigzag through. We're breaking those rules because we are advanced enough, right? We've been practicing that. We know somewhat what we're doing, what we'd like to do, what we'd like to see. And we're just not going to stress about those rules. I'm cleaning my brush, dabbing it, and then just spreading some of that color out to create lightness and darkness. Guys, now we're grabbing some of that red color. We're going to just take the belly of the brush and just create some interesting little marks going downward. And then we'll connect things with a stem, taking off some of the paint. These are like little heart shapes guys. Pretty simple. We'll do some of that over here as well. We'll see over here, just to have a lot of fun, this part, the belly is creating that rounded top. If I were to do it this way, we'd have a pointed tops. All right. So we're going to leave that for now like that, but I do want to do some lighter ones here. It's like, it's for Valentine's. You guys, let's do some peach, peachy florals as well. The peachy ones, We're just going to do little marks, that's really pink scrubby marks, just like that. When you work fast, you don't overthink and you can just put those marks down pretty quickly and hopefully enjoy that process. A little scrubby mark here, do some dots, some Abs, and one more right here. I think that'll be it for the fillers for now. Let's see how that goes. Okay guys, in the next video, we are going to be putting in our lovely vase and our stems and our leaves. 16. Vase, Leaves, and Stems: Our leaves tend to be in those cooler shades of maybe blue, gray green, if our blooms tend to be in warmer colors, not always, but that's going to give a really nice contrast between the warm and the cool. Then of course, adding in these lovely filler parts is going to create a nice composition with our bright florals that we already put in. Finally, adding in a simple vase is going to keep the attention on the florals and that the vase itself. All right, now it's time to put in our vase, which I'm really excited about. I'm going to follow basically what's here. We have a variety of blues. Just grabbing various ones here. Mixing, dabbing my brush. So we're just going to go around where the flowers are because this will be the flowers are just draping over. We're just going to curve around. This is sketchy vase. Okay? I'm using sketchy techniques like this just to roughly sketch that in, just like I would if I had a pencil. And then I'm going to clean my brush, dab it, and just try to go along the edge of where I've painted. This is I'm going to do a little bit of a rounded shape here. This is the bottom of the vase that you can see through the glass. We'll add some stems later to make it really fun. Then I'd just like to add a few more blue marks here and there, reflections in the glass. Whatever you'd like to do, you can paint it all in if you prefer to. It's also an option while we're at it. We're just going to do a little bit of a shadow. I'm going to say lights coming this way. We're not being too technical or anything like that, but I'm just going to add a little bit of a shadow from behind just so that our vase isn't like just floating, floating on our paper. And then I'm going to take some darker gray and just pop that in, especially right behind where it's the closest to the vase. Clean, damp brush. Spread it out, just like that. Now you can take a dagger brush or surround brush, and then a really skinny brush, you can do the stems with me. And this one has a really nice skinny part. It just makes it easy to do all the connecting. All right, so I've got my nice green color, dabbing it. I'm just scrooching this a little bit. I'm going to start connecting things with my stems. Now my stems, I like them to be sketchy, and I like to arc those thin stems out and over to the flower. We're going to do another one here, then it's going to come up like this. Let's do a third one, all right? The main one right here, and then the little guy right there. And I like to put some little other stems. Maybe we can do some more flowers or some leaves here. We need something coming out over here as well. There we go. Grab some more of the green for these guys over here. Then over here we have a main stem. These guys just curve over and connect. All right, do the same thing over here, connecting everybody to that main stem. Nice and easy. And then this one is definitely draping over our vase, But that's okay. We can still connect everything nicely. Just like that. All right, and then let me roll up my sleeve. Then here we've got some stems that can be a little bit thicker so you can press down if you want like that. And then this one is going to have some type of a stem happening in there. And then you can do some little, tiny little branches if you want to criss crossing where things are connecting inside the beautiful blooms, which are just a bunch of tiny little petals, tiny little flowers hanging out, doing their thing. Add a little bit of that in there too. But again, be very loose. This is not something technical. We're just playing, grabbing some of this really light green color. And then with the sap, just double dipping on my brush. We're going to create little connectors where these flowers connect with the stem, just like that. All right? Connecting those together with some nice lightish green marks. Really pretty. I don't know what kind of flowers there are, but they are, but they look like clovers in a way, to me, just the shape that they have already. I love using a dagger and watery paint because I can just start to go in there and start to like scrub some leaves onto my paper. Let's get a few more scrubby little leaves on here. This is just one of my favorite ways to do leaves that take off some paint. We're just trying to fill in some space, right? Just making these little marks. Just dabbing your paper and they don't have to be perfect in any way. They could be smaller. You could double dip your brush. You can just do little dabs like that just to fill in some of the white space there and play. Just have it be a fun experience, you go to a number six round. As we continue with the painting process, I want to experiment with just doing some leaves like this. Little tiny marks like we did with the flowers. They are great little fillers. They just really help with any of those spaces that needs a little bit extra. Just like here, we've got some places where we can add some leaves, simply they don't have to look a certain way. We do want to enter stems before we move on, I'm just going to add some in. We can connect them from the top fatter ones, thinner ones. We can even make them different shades of green. Some of them could have some dry brushing happening because we're running out of paint on the brush, criss crossing thicker th. That's good for now. Okay, our composition is almost done. The next video is going to help us learn how to create some texture and some shadow in our floor bouquet. 17. Texture and Shadow: This texture and shadow creates really nice dimension that helps your floors pop off the page. For this texture and shadow, I like to use either a milk or cream consistency. And this texture just helps to take a painting from flat too fabulous. And then in the end we're going to add just a little bit of splatter. I'm actually going to grab some of my fluorescent pink because why not? This is where we can really get these flowers to sing, to shine. And so you grab the colors that you like that sing to you. We could do some thicker lines here and some thinner ones too. Just really depending on how much texture you want to add to this floral. I say less is more. Let's just move on to the next one. I'm just grabbing darker values. You want it to be really dry, to not wet. I dab my brush darker values of the paint, whether it's the same color or a different color, just to add in some really pretty texture and shadow. And you can darken up the center too, if you'd like. But again, sometimes less is more, so I'm just going to keep it like that. Pretty simple. The yellow, the yellow is doing pretty good. Scrub, scrub, scrub, dab on my brush. And I'm just going to add a few more marks here. Just makes it more of an interesting flower. Dabbing it and then just adding little dabs, little tiny marks. A few little big marks and then some tiny marks. You could do a different color. You don't have to stay within that warm family. Do what makes you happy with your paintings? I just want to go with a little bit of blue for these guys. Some tiny marks, sometimes a little bit more on one side than the other. It's going to look really cool, really interesting. But I'm holding the brush really loosely and just sketch sketch, creating some fun textures. I do like the sketchy look. I've been saying that a lot. Grab a little bit more dark. Now we're adding some dimension and defining some things that weren't quite defined before that first layer. And you can even just do like a bunch of different marks here, kind of going around. And last thing I want to do real quick is just add a nice little splatter to our composition. So taking some blue paint and just tapping my brush around to create some beautiful, magical textures. So as you can see guys, there's similarities to these two compositions, and yet each one is very unique. So I hope that you took some creative liberties with your composition as well and made it unique, made it your own. And I'm really excited for you guys to upload your final projects to the project gallery so that I can see how you decided to either follow the rules or in some cases, break the rules and what that looked like. And most of all, tell me what your experience was like, guys, because that's the most interesting part to me. Okay guys, we have finished our final project. I'm so proud of you. And in the next video, we're going to talk about how to keep going from here. 18. How to Keep Going: We have learned so much together. The next time you sit down to paint, here are a few things to keep in mind. First of all, if you don't know how to do something, first, learn the rules, then. Second of all, once you know how something works, use your intuition. For this case, example would be taking a reference photo and changing some things as you feel comfortable. The last thing to keep in mind is to follow your intuition. Paint with your heart. In the next video, we are going to hear a little bit of my final thoughts. 19. Final Thoughts: All right you guys, you've done it. You've finished my beginner watercolor course and we've even painted that beautiful, loose watercolor bouquet. So here are some of the things that we learned in this class. We learned about ways to take care of your palette and your brushes. So we learned to work with paint consistency and value textures, brush strokes. We even learned about different types of watercolor washes. We've learned about how to hold your brush, what brushes are out there, and what are the marks that they. We've also learned what the watercolor rules are, so that we know how to manage this really tricky medium. And then we learn strategies to help you work outside the confines of the rules. Basically, when to follow them and when to break them. So this is what I hope for you. I hope that you can feel confident now that you know about all those little pesky rules, to be able to paint. Not only consistency with confidence and just knowing that you can start to break out of the rules and to know when to do it and when not. And what I really hope for you is that you're not going to feel stressed painting anymore. You're going to be relaxed and calm and be able to find joy no matter what you're painting, no matter what you're learning. And also, please leave my class in review so that other people can read it and understand what the class was about and what your experience was. Thank you so much for being here with me. I really appreciate it. Happy painting, happy mental health. And I'll see you soon in the next class.