Watercolor Bouquet Leaves

1. Intro: Hi, my name is Colby, and I'm a self-taught watercolor artist. I am so excited that you've decided to join me today for my class all about watercolor leaves, particularly because leaves and I have a little bit of a messy history where I did not like painting them for a long time. It took me a while to figure out some methods and techniques that really worked for me. I'm excited for this class today, especially because we're going to be going over very specific leave styles like eucalyptus leaves, and this lemon leaf and fern leaves are always a favorite. We're going to learn several different styles of real leaves that you see in real bouquets. Then we're going to put them all together to paint a really cool wreath that is only made up of the leaves that we learned, that looks like this. If that sounds like something fun for you, if you really want to dig into the nitty-gritty details of what it takes to form these loose watercolor leaves that really exist in the wild, then take a shot with me and head on to the next video to learn about all the materials that you'll need, and then we'll get started painting. I can't wait to get started and to see what you come up with. 2. Materials: Before we start actual painting, let's gather up our materials, I'm going to show you what materials I'm using. You can feel free to go out and find the materials that I'm using or use whatever you have on hand because I'm sure you can create something beautiful with whatever you have. That said, let's start with paper. I'm using student grade and professional grade watercolor paper. The most important thing for both of these is that the paper is at least 140 pounds, which just means when you have a ream which is 500 sheets, it weighs 140 pounds. Usually the weight of the paper will be right right the labels so you can tell, I always, always, always use at least a 140 pounds when I'm painting or illustrating with watercolor. It's important that it's watercolor paper because watercolor paper is built specifically so it's heavy enough to withstand the damage that you're doing by putting water on the paper as much as possible. Both my student grade and professional grade are 140 pound paper. They're both cold press, which just means that they have a little bit of tooth to them, they're a little bit rough. My professional grade paper is Legion Paper Cold Press. The biggest difference between this legion professional grade paper and then my student grade paper, which is Fabriano, the Studio Watercolor Fabriano is what it's made of. Professional grade watercolor paper is made of 100 percent cotton, while student grade is made up of wood pulp, or just a combination of lots of different cheaper materials. The 100 percent cotton is more absorbent so it can withstand the water a little bit better and it also helps to bring out the vibrancy of colors a little bit better than wood pulp does. That said, professional grade is usually more expensive, which is why I like to practice using student grade papers so I'm going to be using both in this class. Next, let's talk about paint brushes. All of these are synthetic sable hair, which means that no animals were harmed in the process of making these brushes. Two of these are in the round shape and one of them is a mop brush so we're going to talk about that in a second. That's the mop brush, but these two round shapes are ones that are pretty familiar, I've used them before. The first I have a size 6 and this is Princeton Heritage Series, which you recognize by the bright red handle and the gold middle-class. I really like the Princeton Heritage Series, it's probably one of my favorite go to standbys that I use often. Again, this is a size 6, and then this brush is around size 10 also Princeton, but the series is Neptune series. I wanted to bust out this brush for our leaves course because the Neptune series of Princeton brushes are a little bit more loose, a little bit more like mop brushes. Technically these are both round shape, but the way that the bristles are put together, this brush can hold a lot more water than this brush can and it doesn't quite hold its shape in the same way this round brush does. I really like using brushes like this for painting leaves and florals because I think that it helps me lean into a movement with the watercolor a little bit more, but it is important to note that it does hold significantly more water so that can be tricky and which leads us to the mop brush. I thought that trying out some leaves would be a good place to demonstrate how I like to use the mop brush. The mop brush has the same characteristics that I talked about, this Princeton Neptune series does where it holds a lot more water as you can see compared to the classic round brush. The bristles don't come together and hold their shape in the same way, although this is professional grade brush, they're just very loose, which makes your painting very loose and you can get a lot of movement with water and a lot of cool texture this way but it's important to note that the extra water makes it a little bit tricky if you're not used to it. But I think that these can be really fun for painting big leaves, they're also really good for painting big giant washes but we're not going to be doing washes in this class, so those are other paint brushes. Next, let's talk about paint. I'm using professional artist grade paint today and I'm exclusively using Winsor and Newton today. I have in the past circulated different kinds of paint, but today is a Winsor and Newton day so you can paint your leaves any color. Honestly these are your leaves, your bouquet but I just pulled out some of my favorite greens I like to paint leaves with. Some typical greens that you see in lots of leaves are hooker's green and sap green. Hookers green is more of a traditional green like a more vibrant middle of the road, kind of green and then sap green. This is permanent sap green, has a little bit more of a yellowish tint to it so both of them are really excellent for typical leaves. Sometimes if you paint eucalyptus leaves or other leaves like lambs ear leaves, they have a little bit of a tint to it, like a blue tint or just a different texture. Some of my favorite paler green and more textured colors to use are this Davies gray, which it says gray but when you paint with it, it's more like a very light sage. Then also this terre verte color, which is also like a light sage, a little bit of a deeper stage but both of these are paled, more textured washes, then these two green, Hooker's green and sap green. I'll demonstrate all of these throughout the course. As we wrap up materials, I always like to have some kind of mixing palette, whether that's plastic palette, whether you have your paint on or this is one of my porcelain mixing bowls that I like to use a lot. Porcelain just washes off without any stains, a lot better than plastic does and it's a little bit of a smoother surface but plastic is cheaper, so either one works, but I have both for you here. Then as always, I have two cups of water, one that I always like to keep clean. I always like to keep some Q-tips on hand just in case I have to mop up some excess water and a paper towel onto the side of me to wash off my brush in-between painting sessions. I think that wraps it up for materials, gather all of yours. Again, no need to use exactly what I'm using but always helpful to note the tools that your instructor is using. Let's move on to the next chapter. 3. Warm Up: Movement & Grip: Before we start painting the actual leaves, let's do a few warm-up exercises first. I always like to test out, especially if you are going to be using new brushes, like this is the first class I've introduced the mop brush before, then I always like to test out my brushes before I use them on nice paper so that I can get a feel for them. Let's see what this mop brush can do. I'm just picking up some random greens from my palette. As you can see, this really watery. It's picking up lots of pigment. I am just messing around with the shape of this brush. Notice how much shape the brush is in, even after I pick it up the water just like the bristles move in this really smooth together way. Instead of me picking up my brush and moving the brush exactly where I want to, it's almost better to utilize the mop brush in my opinion by moving your hand and twisting the bristles to get a sense of the movement that you can make with the bristles and how far they go. Along those same lines, I'm going to now pick up my number 10 brush, which is pretty similar to the mop brush but it's just smaller, so that we can get some smaller movements here. When we're painting leaves it's really important, at least I believe, my leaf painting philosophy for this kind of loose style of leaves that are more like a loose representation of what these leaves are supposed to look like as opposed to very super, super realistic, the movement of your paint is very important. The movement of your leaves and the shape of them are very important. Some warm-up exercises that you can do are practicing use in one stroke going from thick to thin. See how on this stroke I started really thin and then I went really thick by pushing down on my brush, exerting pressure. Then I am lifting up to be really thin again. This is like a kind of movement we're going to practice a lot, this stroke where we're going from thick to thin, but as you do it, instead of just doing the typical thick to thin like this, I know a lot of leaves look like that, try also just moving your brush while you do it and to see what different kind of shapes you can make while you are painting. As you're noticing, when I'm creating loose movements like this I'm not holding my paintbrush really close to the bristles. I'm also not holding it like a pencil. I'm holding it a little bit farther up on the handle, and I have a loose grip. I'm one of those people who instead of holding my paint brushes like this where my pointer finger is on here and it rests on my middle finger, I hold it with both my middle finger and my pointer and I rest on my ring finger, but either way, I'm holding the brush with all three: with my thumb, my pointer, and my middle finger. So I have a decent grip on it. But it's farther up and my grip is a little bit looser so that I can let the movement of the brush be really natural as opposed to trying to force it in a specific direction, because with loose watercolors, honestly the coolest part about loose watercolor, that cold genre, is it doesn't have to look perfect. That style is great for painting nature, because nature is not perfect. When it comes to practice and warm-ups, I always would practice going, again, from thick to thin to thick to thin in one stroke and to see what different shapes you can make when you are doing that. Then just try practicing your grip to see what is the best place to hold the paintbrush for you. Notice how my paintbrush doesn't always stay in the same place. I'm not always holding it at an angle so that it stays at an angle. I'm moving around. I'm physically moving my hand and twisting the paintbrush around in order to create that kind of movement that I'm looking for. Almost moving the paintbrush going from an angle to the side to lifting the paint brush so that it's like 90 degrees or perpendicular to the paper. There are lots of different ways, and so I would just experiment with how you hold your brush and how you can manipulate the movement of your brush by manipulating it physically in your fingers while still maintaining your grip. It might be a little tricky at first. It takes a little bit of practice, which is why I think it's a good warm-up exercise. Don't be too discouraged if you feel like the first time you're trying this it's not so smooth in your hands, that's okay. The more you practice it, the more you're going to come up with a grip that works best for you. That's something that I've really found as I have looked at videos of other watercolor painters and watch tutorial videos like this. Everybody honestly has a different opinion on what's the best grip for holding your brush, so do what I did and just experiment with it and see what works best for you. That is my tip for movement and grip for warm-up. I would recommend practicing those things. Warm up your hands, warm up your paintbrush, warm up by getting to know the tools you're using. Let's move on to the next warm-up session, which is going to be all about brushstrokes when it comes to leaves. See you soon. 4. Warm Up: Brush Strokes: Welcome back. Now that we've practiced movement and grip, let's focus more on specific brushstrokes that are going to be useful as we paint our leaves. Now, if you've taken my Loose Florals class, my first Loose Florals class that goes over roses, and poppies, and cherry blossoms, some of these strokes may be familiar for you because I go over this specific leaf stroke in that class, but if not, here's a quick review. Like we practiced going from thin to thick to thin in one stroke, that's basically how you form leaves. That's one of the brushstrokes I would definitely practice, again, going from thin to thick to thin, and arching it like this creates what I like to call the crescent stroke. If you start at the bottom and start very thin and then exert a lot of pressure and shape your stroke to be in the form of an imperfect and rough crescent, that is one of the basic strokes that's really important for leaves. It's really important to, as opposed to just going from thin to thick to thin like that, go straight outward like that for painting realistic leaves or a more realistic shape of leaves, to put in a little more movement. They don't always have to be as curved, as arched as this crescent stroke, as these crescent strokes that I'm doing, they can be a little bit more shaped like that, that's fine too, but giving them a little bit of movement just makes them look a little more realistic, like they're rustling in the wind or something like that. That's the crescent stroke, and then there are a few other strokes that don't really have names that I haven't named mostly because it's just a lot of different movements with your hand, s but I'm going to go over them right now. The crescent stroke starts out thin and it ends thin, but sometimes leaves don't end in that point like that. A lot of the leaves that we're going to go over in this class actually like lambs ear and eucalyptus leaves don't end in that nice little point. One of the brushstrokes that's important to practice is practice moving your brush in this round shape. If you took my florals class, this is very similar to the teardrop stroke, where you start at the bottom of this circle right here, pretty thin, and then you put more pressure as you go up to the top and using your grip like we talked about in the last class, you move your brush so that you're creating this circle rounded top. Then once we learn to create the leaves, we'll learn how to fill them in so that they look like leaves and not like petals, like how they are in Loose Florals class. But having that nice rounded top is a pretty common way to create some of the leaves that we're going to practice today. That's another of the brushstroke that I would practice. I wouldn't practice doing it like a perfect circle because we're not creating perfect circles with these leaves, we just want a rounded top. Another in-between stroke to think about is instead of a rounded top is if you start with the crescent stroke and instead of this perfect circle top, it goes thin and goes into a tip but instead of being a very sharp point, it's just slightly rounded at the tip of it. That's another really common brushstroke that we're going to be using. The way to practice that is by starting at the bottom, wherever you start however be the bottom and start very thin, and then gradually get thicker, and then toward the top when you're practicing your stroke like this, you get a little bit thinner, but instead of stopping and lifting up at a point, you round out your leaf by coming around with the tip of your paintbrush and moving it back toward the leaf that you just did. You can do that in one stroke. I know it seems like how do you even do that without having to lift up your brush, and you don't have to. If you want to do it in different phases, that's totally cool too. But practicing moving from thin to thick, I'm going to angle my brush so you can see a little bit better, moving from thin to thick, and then going to thin again, but just rounding out that edge a little bit by moving back into the leaf is going to help a lot when we form some of our other leaves. That is the third brushstroke that I would recommend you practice. Just to recap, we have this crescent stroke which I talked about in my Florals class going from thin to thick to thin in this loose rough crescent shape, and then a modified teardrop stroke to make this more rounded shape of leaf, and then, this is also like a modified crescent stroke where you start a crescent and you get thicker but at the tip, instead of lifting up to be very thin, you just round out that leaf so that the tip is just a little bit more rounded. These are some strokes I would practice and they are going to help a lot as we go over our leaves, but for each leaf, I'm going to do an in-depth demo of each individual leaf as well and how to incorporate these different strokes into shaping our leaves. Practice these and then let's move on to forming the basic leaf. 5. Basic Leaves: Now that we've warmed up a little bit, let's just finish out our warming up sequence by using our now looser hands and fuller knowledge to form some basic leaves. By basic leaves, what I really mean is these leaves can look like a lot of different leaves. When you form loose leaves in a wreath or in a watercolor piece, these are mostly what you mean. I'm not giving them a name because they look like a lot, they're just like a generic leaf. To form our generic we're mostly going to be using that crescent stroke that we used in our warm up earlier. Let's dive right in. To form a basic leaf, first, I'm going to use the very tip of my brush to make a thin stem. The thing about loose watercolor leaves and loose florals in general is that we're not adding extra detail on top, we're not going to use a detailer brush very much to make these leaves look really realistic. Instead, we're going to utilize white-space and a movement and texture to mimic the details that we're leaving out. I'll show you exactly what I mean. To form this basic leaf, I've formed the stem first, and then on one side of the stem I'm going to do a crescent stroke where I started pretty thin and then went thick and lifted up my brush to create that thin point. Then on the other side, I'm going to do another crescent stroke, but instead of starting where the leaf is, I'm going to start just a little bit away from the stem and meet that top of that point with another crescent stroke just going underneath, and I'm leaving a little bit of this white space here to replicate the vein of the leaf of the stem that we're leaving out. I'm not going to go back in after this is dry and paint in the veins of the leaves. Instead, I'm utilizing white space right here to indicate that that's where the vein of the leaf should be. To paint like generic leaves like this, that's basically what the structure that I like to do. I always start my crescent strokes from the stem and leave my point up. I never start from the top and go down just because I find it's a lot easier to leave the vein where I want it and to get the point that I want when I start from the stem. It's important to note that my leaf isn't always going to be really straight, sometimes it can be a little more bent, I guess, it's better than that. That can just give it a little bit more movement and flow. You don't always have to do it all in one stroke if you want, like I did just there. You can go back and use your paintbrush to fill in the spaces or to shape it more the way that you wanted to. But notice how this leaf is a little bit more, looks like it's facing outward as like facing down, like gravity is pulling it down a little bit right here, as opposed to jutting outward like that leaf. Also important to note is that usually if you're giving your leaf movement and making it look a little uneven like leaves are supposed to look, then one of your crescent strokes is not going to be as full as the other ones. Usually, when I start with the top crescent stroke like this, the bottom one is often smaller and it's just a little bit smaller of a crescent stroke so that my leaf has that little uneven lilt to it that I think looks better. But it can be more even like this one if you want or more full. Some of them can be like perfectly full leaves, if you want, like this, and you don't always have to have this jagged edge. You can try to make it as smooth as you want. But I like to have the jagged edges sometimes because I think they look cool. This is how you paint a basic leaf. One more time before we move on to painting very specific styles of leaves. I start with the stem using the very tip. I'm using this number 10 brush, and you might have been able to see how much water comes out of this. I'm starting with the stem, and then I'm using my brush, I'm forming a crescent stroke. Then another crescent stroke, leaving just a little bit of white space to indicate where the vein is supposed to go. That is how you form basic leaves using loose watercolor techniques. I would practice these because when you have these down, it's going to be a lot easier to use these techniques to replicate more specific leaves that we commonly see in bouquets that we're practicing today. Practice these and then let's move on to our first official named leaf, the lemon leaf. See you soon. 6. Lemon Leaves: Welcome to our tutorial on painting, a loose watercolor lemon leaf. This is the first official named real-life leaf that we're going to practice in this class. In order to help us, even though we're creating loose styles, sometimes I find it really helpful to pull up a real picture of the leaves that we're trying to paint just so you can gauge exactly what the structure is going to be like. This is a picture of a lemon leaf branch of just a bunch of lemon leaves that might be in a bouquet. Right Right the bat I notice, this is generally the basic shape of those basic leaves that we are practicing. There's that point at the end. It looks like mostly they're even on both sides. One thing that I would note is that when I was practicing with you, I pointed out that sometimes I like to have the sides, like one side bigger than the other side and it looks like for the most part, these lemon leaves are pretty full on both sides. The leaf doesn't do so much bending often, as much as maybe the edges around do a little bit of bending. I want both of my sides to be mostly roughly the same size. But some of the edges, which indicates to me that this leaf might be a little bit thicker, it might be a little bit firmer than some leaves are little wrinkly. So I might leave some of my edges just a little bendy and not quite so, not exactly circular. Then if I were to paint like just one leaf stock, then it looks like they're similar to leaves, they jet out on both sides a little bit like every other one like that. This is something that I can paint. I totally have the ability and the skills to paint a leaf like this. Let's practice. I'm going to grab my brush and for this leaf I'm going to use hookers green. Because it looks like those leaves were a little bit darker and definitely like a brighter green, not like a yellow tint. I might even get a darker green if you have one but for the purposes of this class, I'm going to use hookers green. First, I'm going to just practice the leaf shape a little bit. I'm going to practice the stem I I know that I want it to be a little bit more rounded and full on both sides, but also have some of a little bit of curve on some of the sides to show that uneven roughness that we saw. I'm using my paint brush to paint this full edges, and then I'm just going to fill in that middle space that my paintbrush couldn't get in that single stroke. If also I noticed that my edges are a little too rounded, I'm going to come back in manually and change that and make them a little more rough. I also want to note that it's definitely in the shape of a leaf. It's not supposed to be like a circular shape like eucalyptus, which is a different leaf that we're going to practice later on in this course. If I find that as I'm shaping it, the leaf turns into more of like if I were to draw a circle over it, it would be pretty close. Then I just extended it down to the stem so that it's not quite as rounded as that. Let's bring back this picture to compare. Not perfect, but loose watercolor is not supposed to be. I'm going to practice a couple more and then I'm going to paint a stalk, just to get a little more comfortable with it. Just in general for leaves, my biggest advice is to paint so many of them. Once you feel like you have the technique down just to keep painting them. Now, I painted one that way so now I'm going to paint one this way, where I start with, and I'm going to just twist my paper so that my brush can go in the way that I want it to go. So I don't have to do some hand acrobatics in order to get the movement that I want, but so that my leaf can be oriented differently on the paper when I come up with the final project. I form the stem. Now I'm going to start a little bit farther down on the stem this time because I noticed last time when I started further up it was more of my inclination to make it really round in shape. I'm starting a little further down and I'm making my crescent. Then I'm going to start my second one. Then just fill in very carefully the spot around it and I have overlapped with that other leaf. That is okay. Then I'm just going to add some little folds in here. That's another one of my lemon leaves. Let's just do one more. Maybe going more straight up like that. I'm starting on the side, and then doing the other side like that. That was an accident, but I like it where my paintbrush didn't quite go up to this point. It looks like there's a chunk out of this leaf. But I'm going to leave it like that because that just adds some imperfection. This is painting a lemon leaf, and now let's paint a stalk of these lemon leaves. To do that, I'm going to use the very tip of my paintbrush to draw this stalk, and I'm going to pull up this picture again. I'm noticing, I'm going to paint this right here, not the whole thing, I'm just going to paint this stalk right here. I'm noticing that there's a leaf at the top and it's slightly tilted and then the leaves vary in shape and size as they go down, but they alternate on either side of each other and it looks like some of them are even touching each other. I'm going to allow that overlap to happen and with my loose watercolor that means there's going to be some blending happening with my leaves and that's okay. First I have a leaf that juts outward like that. I'm just going to turn my paper and use my paintbrush to form this lemon leaf at the top, where it's a little bit wider in shape. Now, I'm going to paint alternating my other leaves in different size. I'm going to make this one a little smaller, but still the same basic shape. I'm trying to move my paper also so that you can see what I'm doing. I know that's helpful. This is one of those cases where I'm letting one leaf bleed into the other one knowing that I'm in watercolor, and that is okay. That is something that I want. As I'm painting this stock of leaves, something to be careful of, I don't want all the leaves to be exactly the same color value, meaning the same lightness or darkness. Sometimes I'm adding more water to my paint and sometimes I'm having more pigment. I also don't want all my leaves to be exactly the same size. Sometimes I'm going to consciously make a bigger one like this one right here, and I'm going to have that overlap that little leaf a little bit like that. On the stalk of leaves you can also see that there's a little stem jutting out from this original branch. I'm making sure to paint that little stem so it doesn't get lost. I'm not painting my leaves exactly so they make a V, I'm alternating either side. But I don't want them necessarily to be like parallel the same distance. I'm going to make this leaf a little bigger because I want to add some diversity in there. I don't want them to be exactly the same distance apart, I also don't want the shape, all of them to be exactly pointing out in exactly that shape, so that they're all at the same angle. I want them to be slightly angled differently. Maybe this one I'm going to have pointing out just a little bit more like that. There's also, notice I'm leaving that space right there, that's totally normal. Leaving spaces like that just makes the stalk of leaves look more like it's real. This lemon leaf one I chose specifically first because it's basically just the basic leaf shape that we talked about. It's good practice to look at the movements that you're familiar with and that you're comfortable with, and see how they can fit in with whatever thing in nature that you are trying to replicate. That's generally just how you paint nature products anyway. But that's not a concept that really clicked with me or came very naturally to me. It's very important to me as I make these classes that I make it really obvious that, hey, you know the tools to make all of these things, it's actually not that hard to make a leaf look like it looks in real life. We just have to break it down in a way that makes sense. That's hopefully what we're doing here. I'm just about done, wrapping up. Notice how some of my leaves overlap. Some of them don't, I'm going to make this one a little bigger, I think. I'm going to have it overlap that one a lot. Then this one I'm going to have jetting up a little bit more and make it smaller. Like that. I'm going to do one more on each side, and then I'm going to call it good. There you go. There are our lemon leaves. Again, very basic structure of a leaf. It's essentially just what we learned in our prior class all about the basic leaf, but this actually has a name. Please practice lemon leaves to your heart's content, and then when you feel ready to move on, let's head to the next video. 7. Myrtle Leaves: Next up, we have myrtle leaves. I have pulled up this picture up here on Pinterest and as you can see, as you can tell from the size of this branch, myrtle leaves are a lot smaller than any of the other leaves that we've done. Honestly, probably about a third of the size, but it looks like the basic shape of these myrtle leaves. Sorry for the fuzzy picture. The basic shape of these myrtle leaves is about the same as a basic leaf that we did. We can do it. It's pretty symmetrical actually of these two crescent strokes with the point at the end. But they're a lot smaller and they come in like little clusters on this branch. I think the myrtle leaf branch will be pretty fun to paint and these are fun leaves to add. At the end when you're finishing a bouquet, you need to fill in some of these little spaces. They look similar too. We're going to have just a short section on what I like to call filler leaves of just botanical little shapes that look like leaves or something that would be in a bouquet to fill in some space. That's I think what myrtle leaves generally are good for when forming bouquets. Although don't quote me on that. I am not a florist. So I could be wrong. But because it also looked like those myrtle leaves were darker. I'm going to use my number 6 brush because they're smaller and then I'm going to use this hooker's green again. If you have brown, when we paint our stem, it looked like it was on a brown branch, so you can use brown to paint that. But just for forming these leaves, I'm going to use this hooker's green that I have over here. Knowing that they're smaller, first I'm going to demonstrate one more time the basic shape of the leaf that I think we're going for. It has a smaller stem. It's going to start right here and come to a point. It looked a little more symmetrical and full. I think that's the basic shape of a myrtle leaf that we're going for. Because they're smaller, I'm going to paint these again, but give you a nice side angle shot. Let's try this again, forming the small myrtle leaf. Then hopefully this closer up angle will help as you are painting along with me. I am going to paint the stem using very little pressure. I only want a little bit of stem right here as I'm painting these pretty symmetrical crescent strokes on either side. I'm starting on one side and coming up to a point. Then leaving a little bit of space between the stem and the leaf to account for that vein. That is my myrtle leaf. One thing to note for these leaves because they're so small, there isn't a whole lot of bending, there isn't a whole lot of twisting of these leaves. Even this little bend leaf might be, I don't want to say too much, but this is about as curved as you'd want to make these myrtle leaves. I would probably even practice. I know that I said earlier to not make your leaves straight. But for these tinier leaves, these myrtle leaves, I think practicing demonstrate without having much of a curve is probably going to be to your benefit to get them a little more accurate like that. One more time and then we will go back to our fuller angle just to practice painting the stock. I don't want it straight. A little more full and even on both sides just like that. Then what I'm doing now is I'm just pushing the large amounts of paint that I've put on here because I picked up a lot of pigment with this number 6 brush. It looks like this is the basic structure of myrtle leaves. Now the next step is to put them together on a branch in small clusters. I'm going to go back to full-size view mode for us to do that. Before we start doing our practice branch, I'm just going to pull up this example picture again. Let's just do, say like one of these has two little clusters. I'm just going to paint this branch right here. I'm going to paint these two little clusters that are separated on the branch to showcase what myrtle is supposed to look like. I'm going to use some burnt umber that I have in my palette here. But if you don't have any brown on hand, that's okay. You can still use green. I'm going to make the branch a little bit bendy. But remember, the leaves aren't going to be as bendy as I normally make leaves just because they're a lot smaller. There's my branch and I'm probably going to do a cluster of 5-7 in each one. I'm going to put one here and I'm going to put one here. Let's pull up this reference photo again. These two clusters don't look exactly the same. It looks like this cluster is a little bit tighter, whereas this one branches off a little bit more. That's the basic format that I'm going to use when I paint mine. Let's pull up some of this pigment on my brush and we'll get started. Here's one myrtle leaf. You don't always have to have that little whitespace in the middle representing the vein. It's okay if sometimes it's not there if you just get the full view of the leaf instead. Some of these leaves, we only got like a side view. I'm just going to do a little side view of that leaf because the side view of a leaf is just showing us a sliver of it basically. Maybe I'm going to do another side view, one just up here. I'm going to paint, I think seven of these leaves in this little cluster. Right now I have five, so I'm just going to do two more. Some of them can overlap, like over here. I'm going to make this leaf overlap. That's smaller one, and the same for this one right here. I'm going to have them overlap just so it looks a little more realistic. Maybe I'm just going to paint. I was going to do seven, but on second thought, I'm going to do a couple more, so I have nine here and I think I'm going to do one more right here that's overlapping this leaf like that. That's a cool texture there. Then just one more that's going straight up off the branch like that. That's one cluster, it looks a little different from the other one. But that's okay, that's one cluster. Now, I'm going to do one that goes a little more diagonally, a little bit further down on the branch. I'm going to start. The way to do that is by having two little stems to show how these leaves are jutting out from each other. I'm making sure to have them be basically symmetrical. Some of them starting from the branch, some of them starting from their own stem. Then making my way down and doing a side view one, move another side view one right here. Then having some of them go this way to show this diversity that we're going for. I'm going to turn my paper because I want to start from the stem. I also want the leaf to go in the other direction, like that. These are all very small leaves as you can see. Then I'm going to have another one going down like that. But making sure ends in a point because those myrtle leaves end in a point. Maybe just one more right here. There's my myrtle leaves. Let's see how we did. Not too shabby. Basically, to sum up myrtle leaves, we are looking at the actual leaf of a myrtle leaf looks very similar to the basic leaf shape that we practiced in that first basic leaf shape tutorial. They're just a lot smaller and because they're a lot smaller, they're not quite as bendy. The shape of the leaves are a little more symmetrical than bigger leaves would be because they can't move around as much. That's what we are focusing on and knowing that they come in little clumps like these, as opposed to being wild and crazy everywhere on the branch. Practice your myrtle leaves. Practice painting with a smaller brush. If a size 6 is a little too big, then you could move down to a size 4 or even smaller if you want, size 0 might be able to do, you'd probably be able to do a lot of pressure by using a size 0 brush. But size 6 is about as big as I would go for these myrtle leaves. Practice these and then let's move on to the next leaf. 8. Lamb’s Ear Leaves: Welcome back. Next in our lineup of watercolor leaves that go well in a floral bouquet, we have lamb's ear leaves. I pulled up a picture on Pinterest like I did for the last set of leaves, and just so you can see what a bunch of these leaves look like. It looks like these leaves are pretty thin, averaged to small sized leaves, but they have a little bit of a rounded end, so they're not a big circle. The leaves aren't a big circle, which means the crescent stroke probably will be able to work for the most part. But then remember how we practice flicking or turning our hands while we're painting that to create a rounded edge, it looks like that technique is going to be perfect for these lamb's ear leaves. This is another more blurry picture of lamb's ear leaves. Then I also pulled up one more. This stock of lamb's ear leaves is a slightly grayer color, more of a gray green color, and this is maybe a good time for us to switch up our color of watercolor that we're using where instead of using hooker's green, I think I'm going to use this Davies gray color. To demonstrate how to form the leaves, I'm going to use a more brighter green, and then when we paint our stock of leaves on the side, then I'm going to switch over to this Davies gray that more closely imitates this gray green of the lamb's ear leaves. Let's get started. Again, we're going to paint these leaves so that they're a normal skinny leaf shape, but with a little bit of a rounded end. Let's do it. This time I'm going to use my Number 6 synthetic sable brush by Princeton. Like I said, to demonstrate first, I'm going to use this hooker's green. We're going to start with the stem. Just a very thin stem like that. Then I'm going to form crescent strokes one on one side, and one on the other. But for the other side, instead of coming to a point, I'm going to just round out the leaf just like that, so that the edge of the leaf looks rounded, still like a tip. It comes to a little bit of a tip, but it's more rounded than before. That's one way to form these lamb's ear leaves by doing those double crescent stroke. Let's do that one more time. Then there's another way that we practiced in the brushstrokes section where we form it all in one stroke. I'm going to try that after I do just one more leaf. I'm forming the stem with the tip of my brush, and then I'm doing a crescent stroke on one side, and then I'm doing a crescent stroke on the other side, leaving just a little bit of space. Remember leaving just a little bit of space from the stem to mimic, let the whitespace mimic that vein that I'm not actually going to paint, and then just turning my brush so that the stroke comes up rounded. You can either leave this white vein in here. If you ever have some extra white-space, feel free to leave it at that some texture or you can just paint it in after you've already left it, and that looks like a pretty good lamb's ear to me. Now let's try making that lamb's ear leaf just with one stroke. I'm going to do the stem, and this time, I'm going to turn my brush and come back all in one stroke. It's a little trickier and if you try to do it on one stroke, you might have to go back to make the rounded end just a little bit less of a full circle. Because if we look at these lamb's ear leaves again, some of them do have just a little bit of a point. It's not quite like if you do these curved ones, then these curved ones look a little bit more rounded. But if we do them more so they're straight, it tapers a little bit at the end right here. The rounded edge still tapers like other leaves do. That's good to know, where if we do more of a tapered look like that, that's going to be accurate for those leaves. But we could also, if we want a leaf that's more bending down like being more pulled down by gravity, then we would maybe paint it more like this. Have it be a little bit wider of an angle. Let's see how accurate that looks to this leaf right here. Looks pretty good, as far as loose representations go. I like to look at these pictures whenever I'm painting real things in nature, I mean, sometimes it can be intimidating because you look at those pictures and think I'm never going to be able to paint that. But actually, what we're looking for, instead of super detailed instructions that we're never going to be able to achieve because we're not a camera, we're just looking for basic shapes. Taking away all of the little details, all of the color, I'm just looking at the outline of this leaf right here and doing my best to mimic that outline with my paintbrush and have that suffice for when I'm painting loose florals. For example, if I were to paint one of these folded leaves over here, then I'm not paying attention to the shading. These are loose florals and so I'm not going to go back in and make them look super realistic. That's not what this class is about. I'm just looking at the shape and how I can move my brush to mimic that shape, so let's say this leaf right here, it's a little bendy and I think I can make my brush do that. If I start with the stem, and I move my brush so it twists just a little bit here and there. Then comes to a little bit of a rounded point. We still want the point to be rounded and fill in the spots where maybe I went a little crazy. That basically looks like the shape of this twisted leaf right here. When we put all of these leaves together, your mind is going to trick you into thinking that it does look like a twisted leaf. I really love loose florals because you don't have to worry so much about all of the shading details, and how am I going to make it look exactly right. If you want to paint realistic florals, then that's what you would go for. But this class is all about loose florals. The shape and the whitespace are really the most important things that we're focusing on. Knowing that. Now let's paint the stock. Just a bunch of these lamb's ear leaves and I'm just going to paint one of them, but I'm going to paint them all in different shapes. I'm going to use this Davies gray to mimic that gray green picture that we pulled up on Pinterest before. I'm going to show you what Davies gray looks like. It's a lot more textured, and it's a lot lighter. That's why I did this hooker's green first. But it's this really cool gray color that actually a lot of leaves and bouquets tend to look like when we look for really unique colored leaves. I'm going to use this Davies gray to paint a stock with maybe 7-10 leaves of these lamb's ear leaves. First I'm going to do the stem. I don't always like to go up and down. Sometimes I like to notice when I've done these stems over here, I like to do it out a little bit of an angle just because I think that makes it a little more realistic. I'm painting the stem at an angle. Let's pull up my picture one more time. My reference photo. It looks like the leaves are pointing in all different directions. I'm just going to pretend like I'm painting one of these stocks, and I'm going to have some leaves that are flipped down. Some leaves that I can see all of them all the way. Some they're overlapping a little. Knowing that I'm just going to go ahead and paint some of these random leaves knowing that my guidance is the leaves will go everywhere basically. I'm going to start with a leaf up here. That's pointing down. Getting a little more paint on here so you can see a little better. Then filling in the spots that the paint didn't quite catch. There's one lamb's ear leaf that has the basic shape of a leaf, but it's just a little rounded at the end. Then I'm going to do a few small ones up here using the classic crescent stroke, rounded edge that we used before. For the first tries. Because I noticed in the reference picture there were some smaller ones sticking up at the top and so that's what I'm trying to mimic right there. The important thing with leaves and bouquets, especially the trending bouquets and the last five years, what makes them so beautiful and cool is how wild and crazy they are. Making your little branches of leaves not quite so uniform is really going to be key. Again, which is why loose leaves are so fun because it takes away all of the pressure of having to be perfect. I'm just going to have fun with this and not worry so much about being perfect. One of the best ways I've found to paint loose florals is to just, once you get the technique that you liked down that basically mimics whatever plant or botanical that you are trying to paint. Once you practice and drill so that your hand gets used to the movement. It's so important to just let loose and just go as opposed to trying so hard to make the leaves look exactly the way that you want them to. Because by letting loose and letting go, you're actually making them more realistic, making them look more natural. I'm even going to have some of these leaves overlapping on the stock because I noticed that some of them were doing that. Having my little rounded or pointed edge right here. Maybe over here, I'll do one that's twisting and bendy like this guy that we did. But making sure to give him that just slight rounded edge, and a little twist. It's okay to have some of the leaves overlap because they are in the painting. That's what I'm doing right here. Sometimes it's nicer to let the leaves dry before you overlap them, but other times it looks cool when you don't. That's what I'm doing right now. This is the whole process. I'm just going down the line, and honestly, I'm thinking about three basic leaf shapes in my head. This basic lamb's ear leaf that could be in any different direction. This thinner folded leaf where I'm only looking at the profile. Then a leaf that's a little wider and goes down more like that, like this guy in different widths, different shapes. That's how I'm going to finish that. I'm going to paint just a few more, and then we're going to move on to the next leaf section because I don't want to spend too much time in each video just painting these in real-time because that is valuable time that you can spend doing it yourself. But I also find sometimes it's helpful to watch instructors paint a few more leaves before you feel ready to do it yourself. Ellie sets how I felt when I've been learning new techniques, so that's why I'm basing all of my of my instincts off of me doing a little one. Maybe another bendy one that instead goes down or sideways like that. I always start from the stem if you notice. I never start from the tip of the leaf and that's true. I talked about that when I talked about basic leaf structure in that video. But just to reiterate, for every leaf that I do, I never start from the tip I always start from the stem. Unless very specific examples if the leaves are a lot smaller, but we will get to those later. I'm going to do one more here and then I'm going to be done with this little stock. Making sure it has a rounded edge because those lamb's ear leaves have that rounded edge. There you go. That is the tutorial for lamb's ear leaves. They are really cool. Add some cool texture to bouquets, and now you have them in your leaf bouquet arsenal. Without further ado, practice this to your heart's content, and then let's steam on ahead. 9. Eucalyptus Leaves, Part 1: Next up, we have an all-time favorite of a lot of people. These are really popular lately; eucalyptus leaves. Now, eucalyptus leaves, if you know anything about desert foliage, [LAUGHTER] they come in lots of different shapes actually. But the two main eucalyptus leaves I'm going to focus on both have this rounded leaf shape. We're going to do two of them; true blue and silver dollar. The first one is true blue eucalyptus, and these eucalyptus leaves are just a little bit more sturdy than silver dollar leaves. Silver dollar ones look a little bit more flat like the ones that look like they would flap more in the wind [LAUGHTER]. I don't know if that makes sense, but they also come in different kinds of bunches. These true blue eucalyptus leaves are often in this one stalk right here and just jot out on either side either, and so you're looking at it from a flat view or there's round view. It looks like some of them end in just a slight point at the end. Some of them are a little bit more rounded, and so where we can have a lot of fun with diversity with these true blue eucalyptus leaves. These are silver dollar eucalyptus leaves. As you can see, they're definitely more rounded than true blue, and the stalks are a little bit more crazy, it's not quite so symmetrical. We're going to do silver dollar and after we do true blue. The basic structure of both of them are the same just with some slight differences. With true blue, I'm going to use my number 10 brush. I'm going to use this sap green that I have to demonstrate first of all. But with eucalyptus leaves, I would also use this more sage color, which is called terre verte. I'll demonstrate that in this tutorial as well. But first I'm going to use this sap green. To form true blue eucalyptus leaves, we're going to practice that circle, circular motion that we practiced in the brushstroke section. I'm going to start at the bottom and then basically I'm forming a circle that tapers at the end. It's not quite a full circle, it's just a little bit of a point right here, and then I'm filling in whatever part needs to be filled in that my brush didn't catch. That's a very loose representation of this true blue eucalyptus leaf that we're trying to paint here. Some of them have that little point to the end. Some of them are slightly more rounded or tapered at the end. I'll show you what I mean by that. I'm doing this circular shape and some of the true blue leaves have just this slight point; the slight taper right there or more at the top. In a way, almost looks like a more expanded lemon leaf, but it's definitely more circular. Some of them end in this point, some of them are a little bit more circular. It's good to have that diversity. I would also practice that side view we talked about where you're just looking at the profile and you can form those leaves by doing that crescent stroke with the rounded end that we practiced with the lambs ear and in our brushstrokes. If you do that, that's going to show a eucalyptus leaf. Let's show you. A eucalyptus leaf at its side, or you could also do a little bit more at an angle like that. Still in the basic crescent stroke and just curving the ends and have a cross over the stem, like we see right here. Those are some of the different leaf forms for this true blue eucalyptus leaf. Knowing that, I'm going to take my number six brush now and just do a smaller representation of a stalk of this true blue eucalyptus leaf. Just pulling out some paint here because I want to show you what this terre verte color looks like. It's on a different palette than my other palettes. It is this color right here. Just like Davies gray, it's a little more textured and so once it's dry, I have to add a little bit more water in order to pull up the pigment. This terre verte looks like this nice, cool sage color. I'm going to use this color to paint my eucalyptus leaves. First, I'm going to paint. This true blue eucalyptus leaf is also one of those stalks that's pretty straight for the most part, it doesn't do a whole lot of bending. Knowing that, I'm just going to mimic that when I paint the stalk. I'm going to paint a stalk that's going basically straight up and down. Now, I'm going to do this circular motion to paint just a bunch of leaves on either side of the stalk like that. Some of them I'll leave a little pointed. Some of them I won't. I'll leave a little more rounded. They don't have to be exactly circular. You can have a little bit of a squarish circular shape. I think that the silver dollar ones definitely look more rounded. Some of them were even smaller like that. I'm going to have some smaller ones that overlap, some that go across the stem like this, like we saw. If you're thinking about a perspective wise, it's almost like they're jutting out at you. You can only see the edge of it, and then some that are at an angle like that with a rounded edge where I start at the stem, and then I just round out that leaf and come back to the stem. A lot of these techniques we're going to use for the silver dollar as well. The silver dollar are just slightly more rounded and have a little different composition on their stalk. But also important to note for the most part is that on these true blue eucalyptus leaves, there aren't tons of leaves on the actual stalk, and for the most part they're going in these two's like this, one on either side. Now I'm just going to do another little bendy one like that. Maybe two of these bendy ones together like this. Another round, and then I'm going to have this round one overlap a little bit. I'm just going crazy. If some of my leaves are a little bit wonky [LAUGHTER] or rough looking, that's also okay. I'm not going to do two all the way down just because I think looking at things that are exactly symmetrical in nature makes me uncomfortable [LAUGHTER]. I'm going to have this one skip, but for the most part this true blue eucalyptus leaf stalk should mostly be two going all the way down. There is my true blue eucalyptus. Now, let's do the silver dollar, head onto the next video. 10. Eucalyptus Leaves, Part 2: We have painted this true blue eucalyptus leaf and now we're going to learn how to paint these silver dollar eucalyptus leaves, which are very similar to true blue in shape. Notice how the silver dollar eucalyptus leaves are also very round in shape, Some of them are slightly tapered at the end, but for the most part they're pretty round in shape. Some of them even looks like they taper in on the middle. They come to a little form, like a heart shape in the middle. But for the most part, they're very similar to true blue. It's just when they're on the stock, the stock is a little less sturdy than true blue, and the leaves are a little more floppy and probably a little smaller it looks like. We are going to take that into account. First, I'm going to practice the shape a little bit, noticing the distinctions between true blue and silver dollar. Then I'm going to paint one of these stalks and it looks like there are less of the leaves that are at an angle and more of them that are just a bunch of circles overlapping each other. I'm going to keep that in mind when I paint these silver dollar ones. I'm going to use my number six brush again. I'm going to keep using this terre verte color because I think it looks really cool. For the silver dollar eucalyptus leaves, it's very similar to true blue, where we can do that circular shape and then come to a little bit of a point and fill in the middle that way. There were a lot more leaves that did look like this more rounded shape on the silver dollar stalk than on the true blue. That's good to know. But another variation on the silver dollar stalk I saw was with the leaves meeting in the center almost to form a heart. I'm going to keep that in mind and maybe do two pretty wide crescent strokes that meet in the middle like that and then fill in the parts that I didn't quite get. There were some of those silver dollar leaves that looked like this as well but had just this little meet in the middle right there at the end of the leaf. Very subtle, very slight. Then we also got a few side angle shots. Those ones will probably be very similar to the true blue, where we're just going to do a thin line mimicking the shape of the side angle like that. But for the most part, when they overlapped each other, we could see them flat like a circle like this. Now, I'm going to paint just a little branch of these silver dollar ones down here and try to mimic this reference picture a little bit. Instead of this whole thing, I'm just going to focus on this little section right here. It looks like it has four leaves overlapping each other with a few that are flailing [LAUGHTER] in the wind down here. That's what I'm going to paint right now. First, I'm just going to do my circular motion. Because some of them overlap, instead of doing all of these at once, I'm going to move on down below and then come back to the top to see if these dribble dry a little bit before I paint the rest of the top leaves. There's one right here. Then this one, I'm going to have jutting out a little bit more. Then the leaves that overlap these leaves just a little bit are the ones that I'm going to have that more of a heart-shaped top to it. But first I'm going to paint one more right here. Then I'm going to come back and paint two more leaves on top of that in just a second. But for now, I'm going further down. This one, I'm going to have that heart-shaped so there's one crescent stroke. There's the other. Then I'm just filling in the parts that I didn't get with that stroke. Leaving just a little bit of a heart-shaped indent in the leaf right there. I'm going to have another leaf sticking out like this because that's what silver dollar eucalyptus leaves look like to me. They're just sticking out of the branch [NOISE]. Then I'm going to go back up here and just add two more of these heart-shaped ones that are all layered on top of each other like a circle. All these circles layered on top of each other, I mean. On this one, I'm just going to have layered over here. That is my silver dollar eucalyptus branch. Now, according to the reference photo, oftentimes silver dollar eucalyptus branches have a lot of these little branches all put together and so they're fanned out as opposed to true blue, it's usually just this one stalk, lots of different stalks that are put together. That's important to note. To sum up, these silver dollar eucalyptus leaves, some of them have this little indent, they are a little more rounded. When you look at them head-on, a lot more of them are flat. You can see the flattened side of them versus eucalyptus leaves. Some of them have this little point and taper at the end and they don't have that little indent. They just sit on stalks like this and jut out and are a little bit more sturdy or less prone to bending on the stem. Practice use eucalyptus leaves, they are a lot of fun to add two bouquets. When you are ready, let's move on to the next video. 11. Fern Leaves, Part 1: Next up, we are going to talk about fern leaves. Fern leaves are super fun and they can be pretty simple. We're going to talk about two specific kinds. First, we have the Boston fern, which looks like this long curvy stem with two little long skinny leaves jutting out on either side. Then we're going to talk about the leather fern, it's a very similar structure, but the leaves are a little more detailed on either side. First let's dive into the Boston fern. Based on what we've already learned, we need to have this stem and then probably we wouldn't need to do two cresm strokes if we did just very small ones. But just starting from the stem, and it looks like the leaf start very small and then get bigger as you go down. Let's try practicing that. First I'm going to use my number six brush for this and I'm going to use some of this hookers green again. [BACKGROUND] If the stem is right here, then to form those leaves, I'm going to start from the stem and jet out like this. It's tapered at the end, not quite into like a very sharp point, but it is definitely tapered at the end and then I would do that on either side and this one of the only examples actually where I might even start not from the stem, but from outside the stem at a point and then use pressure to meet at the stem like that. The point of the fern leaf, this is just to practice the leaves. Again, I'll show you maybe a little bit bigger over here. If we start away from the stem and then start with very little pressure and then use more pressure to make the leaf a little bit more thick so that it's the thickest when it meets the stem like that. That's the basic structure and shape of these leaves that we're going to put on either side. The most important thing to make them look like ferns is to make these leaves small at the top and then gradually get bigger at the bottom as we are putting them on either side of the stem. Let's practice that right here. I'm going to draw a stem and these very thin leaves on either side getting a little bigger as I go along and they don't all have to be completely straight. You can put them out a little bit of an angle, having a little inconsistency, as we've talked about, makes things in nature look more like they belong in nature. But where they're not all either. Fern leaves are definitely slightly more consistent in their shape, then other leaves. This is what we're doing all the way down. Sometimes starting from the edge of the leaf and going towards the stem and sometimes starting at the stem, then going out like that. I think I'm making mine a little bit I think the leave can be a little closer, so I'm going to fill in a little bit more over here. I'm not really paying too much attention honestly to the shape of the leaf, I'm making sure that they're all slightly tapered and pretty straight like that. Then as we go down, the leaves get a little bit shorter but not nearly as short as up here. Just slightly. That's probably about as short as I would make them. That is a Boston fern. Having little tendrils, having little sprigs of these Boston ferns can look really cool in your bouquets and they're probably some of the easiest ferns to create because there's not tons of detail on the leaves that are jutting out from the stem. It's just the stem and then lines going across the stem. In this basically consistent but also jagged and diverse and diverse shape. That is the Boston fern. Next up, we're going to try the leather firm, which is just a little more detailed. Stay tuned. 12. Fern Leaves, Part 2: Welcome to part 2 of our fern leaf tutorials. In the last video, we painted the more simple Boston fern. Now we're going to look at the slightly more complicated leather fern. As we can see, the leather fern has the leaves that are jutting out are still pretty consistent and parallel. But instead of being more straight, these leaves have almost like mini micro leaves on them, so they're much more jagged. We're going to add just a little bit more texture to these leaves. But one thing to note is that there's one leaf that starts at the top like that. Then they start small at an angle and continue at an angle getting gradually bigger and bigger. Honestly, this looks like a little pine tree. Like we're painting a little pine tree. That can be a fun way to think about this leather fern. I'm going to pick up my Number 6 brush. In order to show you the detail, first, I'm going to paint an example of one of those little leaves from this view. Then I'm going to show you just a little side view so that you can catch the detail that I'm trying to get with these leather fern leaves. Again, on a branch these leaves are tiny and so we're putting a lot of these smaller leaves together, but I'm going to show you in larger size first. Honestly, the leather fern leaf will also, in addition to being like a Christmas tree, it's like a fractal, meaning the leaf is made up of smaller leaves. If we think about this leather fern leaf being made up of a lot of many ferns, I think that can be a fun way to paint this. This is like one leaf of this leather fern that I'm painting. I'm going from side to side and making these little details of this leather fern leaf in the same shape that it would be on the leaf. If we pull up this example again, we're basically putting a lot of these leaves onto one branch. If you look at the shape and structure of this leaf, this is a smaller version of the larger leather fern branch leaf as a whole. We're making the leather fern as a fern made up of a lot of smaller ferns put together in a pattern. I'm going to demonstrate this leaf for you again. You can do it. I did it a little bit messy and a little bit more loose in this version, but you can try if you want to make it even more detailed, you can do that if you want and go a little bit slower and make all of the details look exactly the way that you want to. But I like this messy or loose look. I'm going to show you this messy loose look again a side angle just so you can get that closer shot as we're practicing. Let's try practicing this leather fern leaf. Remember, this is just like one of the leaves that's going to make up the larger leaf. Let's try practicing that one more time with this closer angle so you can get a better look. I am first painting the stem. I'm using my Number 6 brush, I'm painting the stem. Then I'm remembering that I'm starting small and gradually getting bigger and bigger as I go down. I like this loose more abstract shape better than spending all of the time making it look exactly like it's supposed to. But you should do you. I would definitely recommend pulling up your own reference photo if mine is not sufficient. Just look up leather fern. But without further ado, let's do this thing. I'm starting very thin, jetting up and remembering that all of my leaves are mostly pointing upward. This is very reminiscent of my spear tree technique. If you've ever taken my loose pines class. I know that as I'm jetting up, I'm getting bigger and bigger, as I go down and I want it to be a triangle like that at the end. Then this is what joins the larger stem. It's like if this is the larger stem, then this is the leaf that goes with that leather fern. Now I'm going to paint the whole leather fern. I'm going to go back to full bird's eye view for that in just a second. To finish up our fern tutorial, let's paint this leather fern. Now, remember, the leather fern basically is made up of a lot of different ferns in the same structure. It's pretty similar to the structure of the Boston fern. But instead of the straight leaves, we're going to be painting these jagged leaves that look like little ferns. I'm going to paint my stock right here, my stem. Remember that these are loose florals. Just dot my way through. I think one good method of doing all these together is maybe painting these stems first to bigger and bigger and then to go back after we've painted the stems and fill in the shape of the little mini ferns that we're painting to make up this larger leather fern. Then if I've put too much space in-between, we can address that after we've already painted these little ferns. I know that they get bigger as they go down. Mostly these other ferns are at an angle. I'm going to stop right there. Now, I'm going to just paint in the texture of these ferns in a very loose style like that. But I still want them to be basically a triangle shape, so smaller at the top, biggest as we get to the stem. Just like that. I think that the method of painting the stems first is a really good way to maintain the shape of the fern. This could also be a fun way to paint a tree. As I mentioned before, this reminds me of some of the styles of my loose pine trees that I talked about in that class. But we are using this loose shape to form ferns. Ferns, especially if you like having the bigger stocks like this, you would probably only have one or two of these leaves in your bouquet. They're more like an accent piece, I think. But you never know. You could find a bouquet that's almost or made of ferns and you have to paint a lot of these. I'm starting skinny and getting bigger as I go down. For the most part, it looks like I'm starting from the side of the stem and painting inward. Similar to my spear tree technique in my loose paints class. Last one, I'm going to twist my paper a little bit just to get a better angle. That is my fern leaf. Let's see how we did. Again, loose representation. I didn't take the time to make the ferns look exactly detailed. But you can if that's what you would prefer. I forgot this little thing up here. Let's just do that. The fern leaves also have a leaf-shaped like this at the top. That's a little bit bent. There, like that. I think giving it that little bit of shape at the end, that little curve at the end is what helps make it look less like a tree and more like a leaf. Yeah, that looks pretty good, I think for a loose representation of this fern leaf. You can decide if you want to paint it a little differently than I did. But for the most part, it looks like the basic shape. It looks like it has some of these rough details, and it looks like a loose fern leaf that would look really cool in a bouquet. There you go. That wraps up our tutorial on fern leaves. It wraps up our series of tutorials on specifically named leaves. Last but not least, before we start on the bouquet or the leaf, we're going to do a brief video next on what I like to call filler leaves. Without further ado practice these fern leaves to your heart's content, and then let's move on ahead. 13. Filler Leaves: Before we start painting our final project, I just want to talk about one last leaf that I often use when I'm painting wreaths or bouquets. I like to call them filler leaves because honestly I'm sure some of these shapes have names or I'm sure that they might not even be shapes of leaves in real life at all. But I'm also sure that when I paint wreaths, sometimes I need to fill in some space in order to really make a wreath or a bouquet look just very full. So it's nice to have smaller examples of leaves to fill in those spaces. They don't have to be too complicated, most of them are pretty simple. I'm just going to show you a few different these types of filler botanical shapes that I use to fill in some space. Obviously, the [LAUGHTER] most simple form is to just paint like you're painting grass. Like you're painting sprigs of grass and that's jutting out of the bouquet or of the wreath and you can make them thin like that. Sometimes if you use your paintbrush to start and then lift off, then it can give them a nice taper at the end that gives just a more natural look to them. When I'm painting grass or little tendrils sprigs of grass, coming out of a wreath or coming out of a bouquet. I sometimes also like to have them cross over each other like this. I don't always have huge clumps like that, but if I do like three or four or five, then I'll just paint this grass to look like that. You can do these where you start painting on the page and then just like really in a quick motion, lift off your brush. I'm physically I'm painting and then I'm lifting my paintbrush off of the paper so that I get that nice natural taper. This is one of the easiest filler leaves to include. You can do it thin like that or you can just paint these lines jetting out. Sometimes leaves of grass are thick like that. My one suggestion to you is to make sure that they're not just straight coming out of the wreath or the bouquet that they have just a little bit of curve to them to make them look more natural. You can either do this lift-off version or paint these straight lines just with a little bit of a curve. Either way, as long as they're green, they're going to look like they belong somehow. That is one method that I like to use. Another method for filler leaves that I like to use is very similar, where I'll paint just a thin line like the grass, and then I'll make it like a fern leaf. Not quite like a fern leaf, but just paint these little rounded leaves on either side. Usually, my stock isn't quite so thick, so usually, I would do that if I had a thinner blade of grass and then just paint these little tiny round leaves on either side like a mini myrtle leaf, I guess. I talked about myrtle leaves can be filler leaves. But I just do little sprigs like this or maybe laurel leaves would be a more accurate name for what these are called. Again, I'm not a florist. I don't know. I use these as filler leaves like I told you to [LAUGHTER] fill in some space with different texture if ever, I feel like I need to fill in space. The last trick that I use to fill in space is especially when I'm painting wreaths I like to paint vines almost. They're not quite vines but imagine if you just had a branch of leaves that was twisting around all the other ones. So sometimes after everything is all painted, I'll go around and I will create a leaf that goes around the wreath, in a wavy pattern like this, sometimes making it so you can see the actual pattern and then sometimes going underneath whatever is in front of it like that. Then coming back to show that it's going underneath. Then occasionally, I'll do these little curlicues that come out of this little stem, ivy, whatever tendril of filler leaf you want to call it. I'll just have these little curlicues and some of them will have little leaves on them. Sometimes I'll put little leaves just sporadically. But I have found that especially in wreaths having some random places where a little bit of the leaf is jumping out at you like that, it can add just some fine texture, and it can put a little bit of whimsy, if you will [LAUGHTER], into your wreath if you don't already have it. You can come up with your own filler leaves, honestly, it's not too hard. You just use the knowledge that you have about leaves and botanicals in general. Meaning, you know that filler leaves probably should be small. You know, that they should have some movement to look like they're natural and that they're probably, for the most part, pretty thin to come up with your own shapes that you can use to fill in space. The nice thing about loose florals again, is that even if it seems like they're coming out of nowhere, that's okay because we're not painting very realistic floral wreaths here. We're not spending hours and hours trying to get the shading just right or trying to get all of the details just right. We are just trying to form basic shapes that look like leaves. With all of the leaves that we have painted in this class and all of the different strokes that we've practiced in this class, you have many of the tools that you would need to create your own filler leaves. But if you'd rather stick with mine or you don't think your wreaths need filler leaves, that's okay too. Either way, practice some of these filler leaves slash practice anything else that you think you might need before we head to our final project. Then gather your materials, including your nice paper if you choose to use nice paper for this project, and let's get started in the next video. 14. Final Project: Layer One: Welcome to layer 1 of our final project. First things first, let's talk about the basic structure of what we're going to be painting. We're going to paint what I like to call a crescent wreath, which means it's a wreath, but instead of being a complete circle, it's going to be in a loose crescent shape, so we're going to start close to the top-up here and then end the wreath a little bit to the side right here, and then leave part of it open just for the fun of it. We're not going to have it be like a perfect circle. But we're going to use, I like these plastic palettes for these bigger 9 by 12 paper, this is Legion paper, cold press because they're a really good size. I'm going to use this as a general guide to put down some pencil lines. I'm okay if it's a little shaky because it's not going to be exactly perfect and that's okay. We just want these general pencil lines to show us basically where the leaves are supposed to go so that we don't accidentally veer off into the page. Next, we're going to talk about the order of the leaves and then start painting. In general, when we paint wreaths no matter what you have on the wreath, you should go from big to small; start with the biggest leaves that you're going to paint because they take up the most space and then build the smaller leaves around the big leaves. Knowing that, I've listed all the leaves that we learned to paint today, and I'm going to use all of them in this wreath. You don't have to, but because we learned a lot of different leaves, you can pick and choose which ones you really want, but in general, the most important thing is that we're going from big to small. I'm going to start off with maybe one or two leather fern leaves, and then I'm going to do one stock of lemon leaves, and then do one or two Boston ferns, some little stocks of silver dollar eucalyptus that are scattered a little bit more, maybe one stock of true blue, one of lamb's ear, and then some myrtle and filler leaves to finish off. Let's get started. In this video, I'm going to paint the bigger leaves, which are the leather firm and the lemon leaf, and then we'll see where we get from there if we need to move on to the next video. To paint the leather fern, I'm going to use my number 6 brush just because I don't want tons of water, and I know that the number 10 quasi mop brush that we use, that Synthetic Sable Neptune Series puts on a lot of water, so that's my reasoning for that. When you're painting wreaths, it's also important to note which general direction you want the leaves to go. With crescent wreaths, you can have them all go in the same general direction or you can have them have a middle point and have some of them going one direction and the other ones going another direction where you can see where they've all come together. I'm going to have them all going in the same downward direction or some of the leaves might jump upward, but for the most part, the bigger leaves, I'm going to be having pointing this direction. Starting with a leather fern, then if I want my leather fern to be jotting out this way, I'm going to start my stem and angle it like that. I don't want to paint this upside down though, so I'm going to flip my paper and start painting. If you need to pull out your reference leaves, that is totally fine. Here is my fern reference leaf and so I know that I'm going to start the leather fern, is the one that's made up of lots of smaller ferns, starting with one at the top. I'm just going to paint that for the top and then start from the sides maintaining this curve of my stem that I've created and not really caring so much if I get everything exactly perfect parallel to each other because this is nature and it is okay if it doesn't look exactly right. Normally I would have this would be joining up even further but because we are coming near to the end of the paper I'm taking some artistic liberty and making that leaf a little smaller. Now, I'm going to paint in these little fern leaves just like that. You see why we start with the bigger leaves because if we had put smaller leaves on the paper already and I had tried to paint this around them, it would be pretty hard. As we are talking about this, another thing to remember is that when we're painting leaves, in fact, we want some of the leaves to dry before we paint other leaves so that we can add layers and depth to this wreath because, with so many leaves, it'll probably take a little bit. It's not a quick 10-minute project, at least the way that I'm doing it, you probably could make it a quick 10-minute project if you wanted to, but waiting for some of the layers of leaves to dry before adding layers on top of it, adds some really cool depth that we will see as you continue with these final project videos. I'm getting bigger and bigger and adjusting as I go along in case I'm not quite big enough, that is totally okay too. Almost done. Just making sure to add this curvature to the leaves. I think I might do one more of these leather ferns and then I'm going to paint in some lemon leaves. There we go. There's one thing of my leather fern and now I think I'm going to do another one that's jotting this way like that or maybe have it be like that. I'm just eyeballing it. A lot of people sketch first and compose where they want the leaves to go first and if that's what you want to do you should. Honestly, I probably should do that more but I like the, I guess, surprise or challenge of trying to compose something on the fly, that's just something that I enjoy. That's why I do it this way. I'm going to have this one be a little bit more curved that way. I'm going to start with the leaf on top that has the point and then draw in my guidelines, paying attention to the curvature of the stem. Before I get started, and I'm going to turn my paper again. Do the same thing that I did before. You notice that I'm going quickly; you don't have to go as quickly as me. But in order to not pay too much attention to the form, and maybe that's not the best of me, I'm adding a little thing here just because I don't think I added enough of these leaves. I'm just a person who believes that these loose florals should really be loose and don't have to look exactly perfect in order to be beautiful. I'm also a recovering perfectionist, and so in order to really embrace that, sometimes I have to make myself go faster than I normally would just so I don't give in to the temptation to spend, it's not a temptation, it's okay to spend more time. But since I'm embracing this kind of loose style, that's really the style that I want. That's what I'm going for. I can do that best by telling myself to not pay too much attention, not to care so much because it's going to look cool either way. If I wanted to paint realistic florals, I could but that's not what I'm going for for this particular style. Don't mind this, don't mind me self-talking to myself. I'm going to turn the paper just a little bit so I can get a little bit better angle. I like to do this self-talk during my classes because sometimes I feel like we all suffer from the same, I mean not suffer unnecessarily, but have some of the same issues and a lot of the same insecurities, and so I like to talk through what I go through so that you know if you go through the same thing, you are not alone. Watercolor painting, honestly, has been one of the best things for my tendency toward perfectionism because I've really learned how much beauty there is in letting go, and in recognizing that, "Okay, my version might not look exactly right, or it might not look exactly like this version I was going for, but that doesn't mean it's not beautiful and that doesn't mean I can't be proud of it." Then I found that it turns out other people thought my stuff was beautiful too, and so why not keep painting this way? That's my little spiel on perfectionism as we painted our fern leaves, and now I'm going to paint a few sprigs of our lemon leaves before we move on to our next layer. Let's pull out our lemon leaf reference. In case you don't remember, here is the lemon leaf. It's basically the basic shape of a leaf in pretty big form. Let's do maybe one of those right here. I'm trying to think if I want to do 1, 2, or 3, I think I might just do a small one and then a big one down over here. I've put that where I can see it. I'm using this hooker's green. I'm going to start my lemon leaf stalk pretty close to where, it's going to overlap my fern leaf a little bit. I'm going to have it mostly be a little bit straight like that. Then I'm just going to paint the basic shape of the leaf that I know. Remember that the lemon leaves were a little bit more full than this basic shape of a leaf so you might have to go in and fill in some space, or you don't have to. We don't want them to all be in exactly the same angle, some of them can be slightly different. I'm going to have one coming out like this. I have this one be bigger. We want them to be different sizes, slightly different angles, mostly the same basic shape, but just so that we have diversity, we want to make sure to diversify our leaves because that's what makes them look so beautiful, I think. Another important thing is that we don't go over really in-depth here, but when you're painting with watercolor, water control is always something that is important, and with the leaves, it's tricky because you don't want to have too much paint but you also need enough water so that the paint goes where you want it to go, and that is, I feel like a battle I'm constantly fighting between having too much water or too little water or too much paint and too little paint. I would keep that in mind. Just pay attention to what your preferences are. Maybe here is where I'm going to do another little overlap, I'm going to have a big leaf. If I'm going to overlap this fern, I want to make sure to have some dark pigment which means I'm using more pigment to water ratio than normal, just like that. Not bad. This is bigger than I initially anticipated, so I think the ones over here, I'm going to make smaller, but that looks pretty good. That's one lemon leaf sprig. Instead of one stock, I think I'm going to do one that branches off. I'm going to turn my leaf. I know that I still want my leaves to go this way. I'm going to start this right here, and do two that branch off over here. I'm just going to keep painting leaves the way that I know how. I love painting. I think I've mentioned this before, but if I didn't, let me say it now. I have not always loved leaves. In fact, leaves have been traditionally notoriously hard for me. I think the only way that I knew how to get better at painting leaves was to just paint so many of them and to paint them over and over and over again and to practice looking at the different kind of leaves and to analyze constantly why my leaves looked different from other people's leaves I liked better and how I can make my leaves look better. Even if I could look at leaves and figure out why mine didn't look exactly the way that I wanted, it wasn't always easy to make my brush move in a way that I was comfortable and happy with. Having a leaf warm-up as part of your routine, just like painting leaves whenever you do watercolor florals, I think is a good way if you also struggle with leaves, that's the best way that I know how to get better, is to force yourself to practice. As we're getting close to the edge of my paper I don't want my leaves to jot out to the edge of my paper, so I am painting some of these leaves a little smaller, but I'm also making sure to put them at different angles so that it's not quite so symmetrical and some of them can be overlapping each other like that. I can see a little bit of pencil on this leaf, so I'm just going to darken it with more pigment. I'm going to do one last little lemon leaf sprig here as an end to our crescent wreath when we get there. Mostly because, I think I've mentioned before, I love odd numbers. Since I already did two of these fern leaves, I wanted to have an odd number of these sprigs of lemon leaves that we're doing which might make me weird, but whatevs. There you go. Those are our fern leaves and our lemon leaves, and now, in the next video, we're going to move on to our, what's next on our list? Boston fern and eucalyptus. That'll be super fun to navigate how to put those leaves in our wreath. See you soon. 15. Final Project: Layer Two: We're back with Layer 2. I'm going to add on our list of leaves here that we've practiced. Boston fern and the two eucalyptus leaves. I think because we already have two ferns, I like to work in odd numbers, I'm just going to do one sprig of Boston fern. I'm going to do that right here. I'm going to have it be like starting a little bit below this lemon leaf and jutting to be next to the last on the leaf. If we pull out our fern again, we know that our Boston fern is a little bit more simple than our leather fern. It just has these lines that go across starting small and getting bigger. That is what I'm going to paint. I'm just going to do one of these for now. At the end I may re-evaluate, but for now I'm just going to do one. Now we do want our leaves to taper a little at the end. You can start in the middle in the stem, or you can start on the edge, or you can do a combination of both honestly, whichever feels good for you. The Boston fern is a little less consistent than the leather fern is. That's important to note in terms of the size of the leaf. Generally, it follows the shape like a triangle and then it gets a little bit thinner toward the bottom. Not as thin as it is in the top, but you can have a little bit more fun with the size of this one. We know that it's underneath this leaf, so I'm just estimating where I think the leaf would go. I am going to call that good. I might add another leather fern later on, just because I think they add some cool shape and texture to our wreath, but for now, I'm going to move on to our eucalyptus. Pulling out our eucalyptus reference sheet. We have silver dollar and true blue. This is a fun part of our wreath where I'm going to switch up the colors now, where I'm going to use that terre verte color that we used to practice eucalyptus, which is a more of a sage color. First I'm going to do the silver dollar eucalyptus. I think I'm going to do one silver dollar and two true blue. For silver dollar remember, they're a little more flat and the stem has a little more curve to it, although the leaves don't really. Using this terre verte color, I'm going to put my silver dollar eucalyptus, I think interweaving with a fern right here, then have some of them jutting out this way and some of them jutting out this way. I'm going to have my stem go like that, and then like that. Then I'm just going to add a whole bunch of these round shapes. Some of them bigger than others, some of them silver dollar also remember I had that heart shape going on. I'm making sure to do that with some of them. But I'm not paying that much attention because these are supposed to be loose flowers, I'm going to have one jutting out this way. Maybe one of these stems is over here, because that was the other thing about silver dollars, a lot of them where I'm bunches as opposed to a straight line that the true blue eucalyptus leaves were. Some of them can overlap this fern. Here's another heart-shaped using these two crescent strokes. I'm going to have few little flat ones over here. Again I'm just eyeballing exactly where I think these shapes should go. Knowing that as long as I get the general shape right, people are going to know what flower it is. That is something I often do when I'm painting like this. Then at the end is when I also add more of a specific kind of flower that I don't think we really touched on enough. For now, I think I'm going to have this wrap back into the reef like that. I'll just add a few more leaves on here. But I think that looks pretty good for our silver dollar. Now I'm going to do our true blue, which is basically, it's a more straighter stalk. I'm going to have one be going through this fern right here. Some of our silver dollar ones also have a little point. But also, for the most part, our true blue go in order of two like this. I'm going to have one jutting out like that, some little ones like that. I'm going to call that stalk, that one at the top right there. I'm going to call that good. I'm going to do another one. I'm going to turn my wreath again. I'm going to do another one just to fill in some space right here. We're just looking at part of it. It's okay if some of these leaves overlap. I'm just painting flowers on top of each other, basically. I'm going to call that good for our eucalyptus leaves. That is going to be our second layer. Let's move on to the third layer. In the next layer we're going to do lamb's ear, myrtle, and filler leaves. Basically we're going to finish this wreath in the next video. See you soon. 16. Final Project: Layer Three: Before we start, I lied, we're not going to do filler leaves in this video, we're going to do those very last in the next video. But in this one, we're going to do lamb's ear and myrtle leaves. Lamb's ear is the last of our normal size looking leaves, and then myrtle leaves are our smallest ones that look a lot like these lemon leaves, but they are a lot smaller. Before I start though, I'm just going to take my eraser, and anywhere I see pencil lines, I'm going to see if I can erase them. If I've already painted on top, it might be tricky to get them off, which is okay, because they're not super noticeable. One way to avoid that is using the kneaded eraser just to make the pencil lines a lot fainter. But I didn't do that this time around. I'm going to go through with my eraser. Most of these leaves are already dry. Because we have the basic shape of this crescent wreath, I'm erasing the remainder of these lines. Let's get going with our lamb's ear leaves. Now our lamb's ear leaves, we liked to use this Davies gray, remember? I'm pulling out the reference sheet here. Here's our reference sheet for the lamb's ear leaves, and we liked having this Davies gray to use for those. The lamb's ear leaves are the basic shape of leaves except they're a little bit rounded at the end. Let's go ahead and make some of those stalks over here. I think that I'm going to have one that starts a little bit more over here and overlaps the fern a little bit. I'm going to have that be right there. That's one stalk of lamb's ear leaves that I'm going to do. Then maybe have that also branch off. Not all of them have to be straight stalks, remember. Then I'm going to have another one. See again why we do this in layers of largest to small. A lot of these leaves, it's hard to find spots to put them if you haven't already, placed it at a designated spot. I'm going to put another one right right. That branches off like that, and then our third one, I'm just going to do a little sprig right here. Just a little one. Maybe this one will branch off also like that over here. I have laid some general outlines for my lamb's ear leaves, and now I'm going to paint them. I know it's in this direction, and so I'm just moving my paper so it's a little bit easier for me to form these leaves. I'm just going to start at the top and work my way down using this crescent stroke that is rounded at the end. Remembering that for lamb's ear leaves, they can be in different of those bendy and twisty shapes, and mostly, we want them to not be exactly the same like all leaves pretty much. I might go back here up to the top and just a little bit. But I'm going to have some of these overlapping on these lemon leaves. Some of them are little. I can have one that's a little curvy right here. In general, if you're going to do overlapping, it's good to do light layers first. But in our case, because we focused more on size, it's okay if you can still see leaves underneath your second layer, it's still going to look pretty cool. The most important thing with lamb's ear is that they have that little rounded end. I'm just painting right on this fern leaf. Almost done with this sprig. I like to paint lots of different shapes with this one as we talked about before. I'm going to have one jutting out this way I think, like that. There's one sprig of lamb leaf. Now let's turn again to do this one lamb's leaf. This one, I'm going to have be that basic shape. I'm not deciding beforehand what shape I want it to be in, I'm just going with the flow. I like to have these blocks of watercolor paper specifically so I can turn my paper. Although if you you have a block, that's okay, and you're just like taping down your paper. You can still create beautiful things. I like to have the versatility of the block. That's why I recommend having paper like this. There is another little sprig of lamb's ear. Then last one right here, leaving a little bit wider of a vein in that one. Making this one a little bit more tourney, bendy. This one we are going to overlap over here because I love those overlapping leaves. I think that they provide a lot of cool texture to the bouquet. That's my last one. Next, basically we have myrtle leaves and filler leaves. myrtle leaves can be filler leaves. That's good too. I'm going to put in, I think maybe two sprigs of myrtle leaves, and then I'm just going to put in some blades of grass on this one because this wreath is already pretty full. Two or three sprigs of myrtle leaves. I forgot that myrtle leaves, we also like to have that brown stem, so that can add some nice color diversity as well with that brown stem. I'm going to maybe have the brown stem go underneath these eucalyptus leaves, but over the top of this lemon leaf just for those myrtle leaves, that's one. Then maybe right down the center of there, that's two, [NOISE] and then I think up here, I'm going to put some myrtle leaves that start underneath this fern but go on top of this lemon leaf again. [NOISE] That's three. I've added the brown stems in various places. Now I'm just going to do the bunches of leaves. Myrtle leaves, remember where the basic shape of leaves just smaller. Adding them, especially if they're on top of dark leaves already, we want them to be pretty dark. It's okay if the brown bleeds in, not a big deal. But they weren't necessarily all the way down the branch, remember they were in little clumps. That's important to remember. Because they're so small, we're not going to pay too close attention exactly to them being exactly the right shape, we really just want them to add some texture, some diversity to our painting here. There's one, and then I'm going to add another right here. Going on top of these eucalyptus leaves, add some cool contrast in colors. I think not too much water because too much water makes it harder to paint the actual leaves. I'm just doing some clumps and this time I'm going to do a little clump that branches off up here, so that it's this cascading layer look that we did in our reference photo. Then maybe just two up there. Then for our final sprig of myrtle leaves, I think three up here at the top, and then another cascading one that goes over these leaves at the bottom. There you go. There are our myrtle leaves. We are so close to finishing this wreath. It is ridiculous. Let's move on to the next video and finish up with some filler leaves. See you then. 17. Final Project: Layer Four: It looks like we already mostly have a pretty full wreath. I'm just going to add some blades of grass here and there in order to fill in some space. It looks like I might need some grass right here to fill in some space and to fill in any areas that might look a little not as full as we want them to. You don't have to always add filler leaves it is not a necessity but I like it sometimes to add texture, especially when I'm doing a bouquet that has lots of different florals like this one and I can just go right on top, just like this. That's just what I'm doing. You don't want to add too many because sometimes it might ruin the effect of the different leaves that we have here but I think that about sums it up for me, that's filler leaves. If you have a wreath that is a little bit less full, then you would probably spend a little bit more time adding the filler leaves, but for our part, because I used all of the different leaves that we had here, which is about seven I think, we have a pretty full wreath and it looks pretty awesome like this big crescent jungle. This would be a perfect place to put a quote if you do calligraphy or to do a little line drawing. These crescent wreaths are a nice way to frame any kind of something to show it off, or you can just show it off like this. Thank you for taking my class and I hope you enjoy this final project and learning about these leaves. I had a really fun time learning about them too and then teaching them to you. Most important, I hope that you feel good about these techniques and using these loose watercolor styles to create very beautiful things even if you're not getting as detailed as maybe portrait artists are. I think that it's amazing what you can accomplish using just a few easy tricks to mimic a lot of what these leaves look like in real life. If you loved what you painted, I would please encourage you to post it in the project gallery. I'm going to talk about this in the recap as well, but I would encourage you to post it in the project gallery. If you post it to Instagram, please feel free to tag me, my handle is this writing desk. But once again, thank you for joining me. I hope you had a great time. 18. Recap: Thank you so much for joining me today for this deep dive into loose watercolor leaves. I know we went over a lot of material, and so if you made it through the whole class, give yourself a pat on the back, and I hope that you came up with an end result that you're really proud of. This is the watercolor wreath I came up with at the end of this kind of crescent wreath. It can also be this direction. I really loved the diversity and all of the different textures happening with this wreath. I particularly am so excited that we got to go over all these different styles of leaves for you today so that you can incorporate them in your paintings of bouquets, and also so that you can take the techniques that we practiced and learn how to paint leaves on your own and learn and tweak them so that they can match your style. Because ultimately, that's really what I'm hoping for is that you can watch these classes and become the artist that you really want to be. Thanks again for joining me. If you loved the class, one of the best things that you can do to support me as a teacher is to leave a review. I would love to hear any feedback and what you thought went well with the class. The more reviews that this class gets, the more chances students on Skillshare will see it. I would really appreciate it if you have a second, but if you don't, all good, no worries. Another thing that you can do is post your final project to the project gallery, particularly if you have any questions or requests for feedback on this specific project. I try to answer all of those as fast as possible, and I would love to see your final project in the gallery. Last but not least, you can post your project to Instagram. My handle is This Writing Desk, so please tag me so that I can give you some love. I also do features of all of my Skillshare classes a couple of times a month. If you tag me, when you post your final project, there's a very good chance that you'll be featured in my Instagram stories. Once again, thank you so much for joining me. If you enjoyed this class, I have a loose florals class that goes over some florals that you might enjoy. I also have a lot of other classes on wilderness subjects and some various other things. I would love to see you in any of those, but if not, thanks again for joining me and have a great day.