Watercolor Doodles: Summer Snacks

1. Intro: Hi, my name is Colby and I am so excited that you're joining me for my class today, all on loose summer watercolor doodles. For this summer doodles class, we're mostly focusing on fruit, like strawberries and blueberries and raspberries and blackberries and kiwi and watermelon. We're also going to learn how to paint some popsicles and at the end of the class, when you've gone through all of the different modules to learn the different subjects, we're going to put them altogether to paint a fun watercolor wreath that looks just like this one. I think one of my most favorite ways to practice doodling is to put them all together in a wreath because honestly, you can put lots of different subjects together and slap some leaves on it and it just looks super cool. If this sounds like a fun project to you, I would love for you to join me. Go ahead and watch the next video to gather all of your materials and then I can't wait to see what you come up with at the end of the class. Thanks so much. 2. Materials: Before we get started, let's take some time to gather our materials. First, I'm going to talk about paintbrushes. In this class, I'm mostly going to be using a size 6 paintbrush and a size 0 paintbrush. Both of them are round in shape and both of these are professional-grade paintbrushes. This is Princeton brand and it's the velvet touch series. It's synthetic sable hair. It's a little bit stiffer than some other synthetic sable hair, this velvet touch series is, but I really enjoyed this paintbrush. I'm also going to be using some times this size 0 paintbrush. It's Utrecht brand, series 228, also synthetic sable hair. I prefer synthetic over real hair on my paintbrushes. Just because I think it allows for better water control. It's also because it's synthetic. No animals were harmed in the making of these paintbrushes. That's always a bonus and important. For all of the paintings, the loose summer doodles that we're going to be painting today, I'm probably not going to be using a brush that's higher than a 6. But if you do, I wouldn't go much higher than a 10. A 10 I think is probably for some of the bigger things we're going to be painting like the watermelon or the popsicles. You could use a 10, but I'm mostly going to be using a 0 and a 6. There's paintbrushes. I always like to have a pencil and eraser, especially for our final project. I always like to have some Q-tips on hand, especially when we're working mostly with the wet-on-wet technique, which is what we're going to be practicing a lot today. For paper, I like to always have both professional-grade and student-grade. I practice on student-grade paper. Most of the tutorials in this class I will be using this Fabriano Studio Watercolor paper. It's cold press, it's 140 pound in weight. That means a whole rim which is 500 sheets when they're altogether weighs 140 pounds. Regardless, if I'm using professional or student grade, I always like to use watercolor paper that's at least 140 pounds. Then for our professional-grade paper, for our final project. I'm going to be using this legion paper and it's also cold press and 140 pounds. The biggest difference is this is made of 100 percent cotton, while the student-grade paper is made of only 25 percent cotton, and a bunch of other like wood pulp is what it's called. Just a bunch of other materials that are cheaper to make than using cotton. That is paper. Then for paint, you can use whatever paint you have on hand. My only recommendation is that you have assorted colors. I'm going to be using a lot of reds, and pinks, and yellows, and greens, and blues today for our bright, loose summer doodles. All of this paint is professional grade paint, mostly Winsor & Newton and Daniel Smith, in case you're wondering. But you don't have to necessarily have to use professional-grade paint in order to come up with beautiful wet-on-wet blends, you can use whatever you have on hand. I just find professional-grade is more vibrant, and it does tend to blend slightly better than student-grade paint, but you can always create beautiful things with what you have on hand. That about sums it up. I always have two cups of water that I use to rinse off my brush. one I always keep clean as much as possible. Then, of course, a paper towel to rinse off in-between things. I never feel the need to put those in the video because it seems implied. Either way, those are the materials I'm going to be using with the paint. I also like to have some mixing palette. I am just going to be using my plastic palette here today. But if you have, because some of the colors that we want, I don't necessarily have just in the pure pigment. I'm gonna be doing some mixing and I'll tell you, what colors are we mixing while we learn how to form the doodles that we're going to be painting today. Now, that sums it up. Gather all your materials and let's go ahead to the next video. 3. Warm Up: But let's do a little bit of warming up by discussing the major technique that we will be practicing in this class, and that is the wet-on-wet technique. If you have any experience with watercolor, you may have already heard of the wet-on-wet technique, but for those of you who haven't, I'm just going to do a quick overview in this video. Before we start on the wet-on-wet technique, I'm going to talk about the wet-on-dry technique and I'll demonstrate that to you right now. The wet-on-dry technique is when you paint with watercolor and the paper is dry. It's not wet and that's the dry part of the wet-on-dry. Wet is always the watercolor because watercolor is activated with water. But if the paper or whatever surface you're painting on is dry, then it's called the wet-on-dry technique. What most characterizes the wet-on-dry technique is the fact that the paint only goes where your brush tells it to go and that's because watercolor is activated with water, as I just said. Because your paintbrush is the only thing that's putting water on the paper, then the paint is going to follow where the water is and that means following wherever your brush puts that water down. [NOISE] The wet-on-dry technique we use to create really crisp defined lines, a lot of details, and precision work is what we use the wet-on-dry technique for if you want to create a really structured shape. However, this class is mostly going to be focusing on the wet-on-wet technique, which, as you might have been able to surmise, [NOISE] is when you paint on a surface that is already wet. We're going to be talking a lot about the wet-on-wet technique today. But just as this brief overview, I'll show you the wet-on-wet technique is characterized by the paint. Because the paper is already wet, the paint does not stay only where your paintbrush tells it to. It wants to go wherever there's water, and so you get this really cool blooming effect. Now the wet-on-wet technique can either be if the paper is wet with just water or if the paper is already wet with paint. That is the method we use [NOISE] to get some really cool blends. Blending colors together really seamlessly so that they seem to just melt into each other or form these cloudy blends. If you want to practice along with me, I'd recommend that. Getting your paper wet and practicing, just putting different colors next to each other and seeing what happens. [NOISE] Again, we're going to be doing a lot of this throughout the course of this class as we learn how to paint different kinds of loose summer doodles. As we paint our subjects, we're going to learn more about how to control the wet-on-wet technique and how much water to use. For now, just know that this is the wet-on-wet technique when the paper is wet with either paint or just with water. You paint on top of the wet paper in order to create some blend or some loose image, like a software layer of color. That's typically why we use the wet-on-wet technique. Practice the wet-on-wet technique. Some things I would practice are, what happens when you put down only a little bit of water? [NOISE] If you spread it out so it seems like it's a thin layer and it's going to dry pretty soon. What happens? You'll notice here, really what happens is that the paint doesn't spread very far. It looks like I'm just painting fuzzy lines. Versus what happens when you put too much water on. I'm going to put too much water on here. If you put so much water on, that it's forming a puddle, you can actually see the physical bump. That means you have too much water. Let me show you what happens when you put the paint on there. It just floats on the top, you see. It doesn't stick to the paper or blend onto the paper. It floats on top of the water. But that's why we have Q-tips so that we can just mop up the excess water because occasionally, especially when we're doing big washes, you will accidentally put too much water on there, but mopping up puddles is so salvageable. I like to have Q-tips on hand. You can also use a paper towel or anything like that, but you'll notice when I mopped up the water most of the pigment that I put on here went away as well, and that's because, again, when you have too much water on, the paint does not go down to the paper. It just floats on top of the water and does not create the smooth blends that we're looking for. Now that I've done this brief overview, practice the wet-on-wet technique, practice different kinds of water control, and then let's steam on ahead because this is not the last that you will see of the wet-on-wet technique. 4. Practice: Popsicles, part 1: To continue our warm-up of the wet-on-wet technique, we're going to talk about how to paint one of the most fun and iconic summer doodles I think there is out there. That is the popsicle. Here are just a couple of examples of quick popsicles that I painted before this class. We're going to learn how to using the wet-on-wet technique to paint those really cool blends, these loose popsicle shapes. While we're doing it, we're going to practice the techniques that we need for using the wet-on-wet technique for the other summer doodles that we're going to paint in this class. First things first, grab your paintbrush and put some clean water on it, and like you're painting with water outline in water the general shape of a popsicle. Just like a rounded top hat's squares off at the bottom. We're going to fill that shape with clean water. We want to try to keep this shape wet while we're painting. You may have to come back and put different washes on if you're using student-grade papers. Student-grade paper dries more quickly than professional-grade. That's something to pay attention to. One way to know if your paper is still wet is if you bend over and see that the light is reflecting off of the paper, that means it's still wet. If it's not, that means part of it has dried. You might need to re-wet it. But first things first, we outlined the shape of the popsicle in water. We have our wet surface and now I want you to pick a color. I'm going to create a strawberry lemonade popsicle. I'm going to do pink. This is quin rose right right, Daniel Smith. I'm going to do pink and yellow and I'm going to do pink first. Grab your color. For this first layer of wet-on-wet, you want it not to be super pigmented. Not like mostly pigment, you want it to be a little bit wet but not too wet. Submit that you're going to make puddles but if you do make a puddle, that's okay. That's why we have Q-tips. I have my paintbrush with this pink on it. Now, along the very edge of the wet popsicle, I'm just going to guide my paintbrush along the edge so that my paint blends in with the water. Notice that I'm not really doing anything right now except putting paint on the water. The paint is doing the blending all on its own. All I'm doing is instead of putting paint just randomly in the middle of the water and letting it do its thing there is because my goal here is to create a loose gradient where I want the outside to be darker than the inside. The edges of this popsicle, I want it to be darker than the inside and I want the middle to have some white spots to be contrasting. I'm just painting along the edges because I know along the edges outside is dry. Outside the confines of this popsicle is dry. The paint is not going to go to this side. It's only going to go inside the popsicle. As long as the paper is wet, it's going to blend. By painting it this way, by letting it blend inward, it creates its own smooth gradient. After I have mostly done that, I'm going to go in and manually blend some of this paint together with the middle. But instead of doing big washes like this, like painting big strokes like that, I'm just going to wash off my pigment and use what I like to call the tapping method. Using just water. I'm going to tap around where the pigment has landed. Sometimes I might pick up more paint than I want when I tap around. I'm going to periodically wash off my paintbrush so that it just has clean water on it. I'm going to tap around using this water. That will achieve two things. First, it helps enhance the cool watercolor texture going on here, where if I show you more up close, you can see that it looks like there's some water splat, just some water texture going on here. I'm helping that along by using this tapping method. That also helps to blend the color in with white while maintaining the white. I can still have this contrast of colors in-between. We've put down the pink. Now, I'm just going to make sure the bottom of my popsicle is still wet. I might extend it a little bit. If it's not still wet, I'm going to re-wet it with clean water. That's again why I like to have at least one cup of clean water with me all the time. I'm going to do the same with yellow along the bottom so that yellow and pink can meet where I'm just putting this yellow along the bottom here. The yellow and pink are going to meet to indicate that this popsicle is strawberry lemonade. When you're creating loose summer doodles like this, especially like popsicles and just practicing your blending, you can either paint a popsicle you know exists or you can paint one that you wish existed or just put a lot of different colors together and call it good. As long as you put it in the shape of a popsicle, it's going to look real cool. I'm using the tapping method again to blend some of this yellow up here and make sure it's blending smoothly. Then one last thing is once you've put down that first layer, you can go back again with even darker pigment as long as it's still wet. This is something we're going to practice more later on, as long as it's still wet and put down another layer. Doing the same thing of just even darker pigment, only going along the edges. If you use a higher concentration of pigment to water ratio, more pigment then the paint is not going to go as far, especially if it's not as wet as it was before. It's just going to create even more contrast, even more of a gradient which is going from one color to the next pretty smoothly. Creating these monochrome gradients in a wet-on-wet shape, it's pretty fun and pretty simple once you know what to do. You know that the paint is going to move where the water is and so if you move along the outside edges, are probably going to stay pretty dark, and then the remainder of that paint is going to move by itself inward. There you go. There is our popsicle. Now in the next video, I'm going to add onto this popsicle after it's dry, it looks like I got a hair in here somewhere, that's okay. I'll pull that out in a second. After this is dry, I'm going to show you how to paint those little ridges that are often inside popsicles to make them look like they're indents and shadows. That's using both the wet-on-wet and wet-on-dry techniques but we need this to dry first. Either do that manually or wait for it to dry but either way, I will see you in the next video. 5. Practice: Popsicles, part 2: While our other popsicle was drying, I went ahead and painted a couple more, just a few different shapes that are pretty common. I painted this square one that was probably more like a fruit sorbet, not a square, rectangle. I feel like, in America anyway, this rocket-shaped red, white and blue popsicle was pretty popular. Hopefully, especially with this one, knowing what we did here, you'll be able to tell how I painted these blends together. Following the instructions that we did last time, basically, I did an outline of the rocket ship and water, and then I started with the red down here just going along the edges, and the blue up here going along the edges. But instead of going all the way, I left a little bit of white in the middle so that the blue could meet just the water, and the red could meet just the water and leave some of this middle space, that white just icy space. That's how I painted that popsicle, and if you painted along with me in the last video, you have all the tools that you need. But in this video, we're going to really quickly go over how to paint those little ridges. Basically, once the popsicle is dry, you take another layer of paint that's a bit darker, or rather, not paint. We're using very similar techniques. First, you put down water on top of the dry paint. We don't want a very thick layer of water, just pretty thin because if you have too much water, the paint is not going to blend the way that we want it to. Well, you put down a pretty thin layer of water, and then you pick up some of this paint and do the same thing going along the edge just on this one side. We're going to make this ridge a little darker on the one side so that it shows, or it tricks your mind into thinking that this is deeper than the other side. Again, the trick here to making this really look like an indent is to get one side that's darker than the other. We're going to do that using that gradient trick we learned in the last class, by using the wet-on-wet technique to create this seamless gradient so that we have a nice shadow there. I'm going to do the same thing. I have two of these, and I'm not really worried. These are loose summer doodles so I'm not really worried about them looking super realistic. They don't have to be perfectly straight, these are just supposed to be fun. I'm going to do the same thing that I did before, where taking this darker pigment, I'm going to go along the outside. This looked a little bit better because I have a little less water. The more water I have, the more the paint is going to go everywhere, and the less water I have, the more the paint is only going to go a little bit. But it's tricky because if I don't have enough water, then the paint isn't going to go very far at all and I'm not going to have the results I want that way either. That's why the wet-on-wet technique is tricky. It's important to practice, especially if you want to be a master at watercolor. Not that I'm saying I am, but painting these popsicles is a really fun way to test out water control and to figure out how you can make the wet-on-wet technique work for you. I'm going to go back just with darker pigment on this side and see if I can get that contrast I'm looking for, but otherwise, I'm mostly going to call that good. Once that dries, that's how we're going to create those ridges inside the popsicle. Just by creating shadows within these little rectangles that I painted inside the popsicle, we're creating contrast so that part of the rectangle is darker than the other part, and it tricks the brain into thinking that that's a shadow and you can see inside of it. There is that. Your task now is to practice the wet-on-wet technique, blending colors, and practicing the wet-on-wet technique within specific shapes. I encourage you to paint as many popsicles to your heart's content before we move on to the next summer doodle. I will see you soon. 6. Practice: Watermelon: Next up, we are going to learn how to paint a loose watercolor watermelon, and the techniques we use are very similar to the techniques we used to create our popsicles. Let's get started. Now, before we get started painting, I want to talk about color a little bit. I have some opera pink here from Daniel Smith and opera pink is a fun color if you want to use for watermelon. But for me. It's a little too bright, neon kind of pink, and so to get the color that I really want, I'm going to mix opera pink with just a little bit of yellow ocher. Yellow ocher is this darker yellow color over here that I have. I'm going to mix just a little bit of yellow ocher in with my opera pink. I don't want it to be too colory. I've mixed probably a little bit too much. Yeah, it's a little too colory. I'm going to mix a little more opera pink. I want it to be like a nice Melanie color there. Just like that. Perfect. With some of these fruits, sometimes in order to get the exact color that I want, I have to do my own mixing, which is why I like to have these palettes, and why I like to test my colors on scratch paper before hand. Now I'm just basically creating a nice little bank of this color, so I don't have to go back and mix it together every time. With watermelon, like I said, we are going to be using very similar technique as the popsicle. First, I'm going to paint a watermelon facing down. It's a slice of watermelon that's facing down, so I should specify this particular tutorial is just for a slice of watermelon that's facing down. I'm going to paint this triangle because I feel like watermelon often come and triangles. I'm just using water. I'm not having a very sharp point to this triangle. It's pretty smooth. Just in general, this watermelon is not an exact triangle. We're painting. We're going for a loose styles here. Loose doodles that are just fun ways to warm up and enjoy summer with your watercolor. I'm making sure to get down a good layer of water here. Then I'm going to take this melon color that I created. This one I'm not trying to be as careful about going around the edges because it doesn't need to be super shaded. I'm just painting along. I still want to leave some white space just for that nice watercolor effect. But the key here is I'm not going to go up to the very top of this triangle just yet, and that's because we're going to paint in the outside, the green part of the watermelon in just a second. But the tricky part with painting watermelon is pink and green, as colors, do not blend well together. Let me show you what I mean. After I finish shading this. With my brush, I'm just using the tapping method again to add in some of this darker watermelon in some places and using the tapping method to make sure that I don't have just a straight wash because that's not what I'm looking for when I paint these loose doodles with watercolor, I want them to look like watercolor, like they have this cool texture. That looks pretty good. I'm going to show you what happens when you mix pink and green together. First, I'm going to create a little bit more of this melon color that I created before with opera pink and yellow ocher. Here's my melon. Then I'm going to take some of this ocher green. When you mix pink with green, you get this gross brown color, which is not advertising and that's because red and green are complimentary colors, which means they're opposite each other on the color wheel, which means they do not go well together. Because we know that about pink and green, but I still want to have a nice blend because these are still loose watercolor doodles, I still want to have a nice blend of colors in my doodle, I'm just going to leave a little bit, a layer of clear clean water at the top that's still wet. Now that I've painted most of the body of my watermelon, I'm going to take some pretty watery Hooker's green, not so watery that it's transparent but just pretty wet hookers green. Along the top, I'm only going to have the tip of my paintbrush be skimming along the top and still be painting on the dry paper on top of that layer of wet. It's like I want to leave that layer of white where you can see the paper. I want to leave that there. When I initially drew the triangle for the watermelon, the water wasn't supposed to capture what the outside of the watermelon, the green part of the watermelon, is supposed to be. I'm painting that on top so that the bottom of the green part is the top of the initial outline of the watermelon that we painted with water, so that I still have this layer of white. Part of that is if you look at watermelon, there is a layer of colorless melon, basically that connects the green part of the watermelon with the actual fruit. In that way we're mimicking what exists in real life, but in terms of what it means for us as artists we're doing that also, so that we try to avoid mixing green and pink as much as possible because we know that they do not mix well together. After I've put down my layer of green, I'm just going to go back and do the tapping method again to mix some of these together and create those cool watercolor blends that I really like. The next step here is to add some seeds. We're going to wait for it to dry, and then we're going to add some black seeds. Now that our watermelon is dry, I'm going to take my size zero brush and I'm just going to get some black paint. If you don't have black paint, an alternative is if you have a nice black pen, you could also draw on the seeds that way. But I'm just going to draw in a few of these seed-like things in the watermelon. Not very many. I like to go in odd numbers, so I'm probably going to go for five and we're just putting them randomly in different sizes scattered on the watermelon. Then maybe one down here. I'm going to do seven, I lied. Sometimes I eyeball it and just decide if something might need a little bit more. Again, this is a loose watermelon. We're mostly going for quirky illustrationy kind of style here. That's it. That's our watermelon. It was pretty simple with using the wet-on-wet technique to blend in these colors over here to get this cool watercolor texture, and then using the wet-on-dry technique to paint our seeds on top of it. Practice your watermelon and let's move on to our next doodle. 7. Practice: Strawberries: Next up we're going to learn how to paint loose watercolor strawberries. We're using a lot of the same techniques we've already learned, the wet-on-wet technique and practicing water control with that. First, I'm going to do the classic view of a strawberry. It's not cut, it's just in the general strawberry shape. You can start out with the strawberry shape with water if you want, which is like a loose heart shape or we can start out with some diluted red. I'm going to start with some diluted red which means I'm putting a lot of water in it, I don't want it to be super pigmented just yet. In general, it's a lot easier to make something darker and add contrasting colors after than it is to take away colors if you've added too much. I'm using some of this diluted red. I'm going to make the first half of my strawberry, which is again really loose heart shape. It doesn't have the angles that a heart does, but it still has this point at the end and deep in the middle. Now, I'm just using water to finish off the shape. That's my strawberry. Strawberries as you know probably can come in lots of different shapes, they can be a little more round or smaller or longer or bigger. But in general, this is the shape that I'm going for, this crooked heart shape. Once I have my red down, my really light value red that's diluted with water, I'm going to take more. Going along the edges again, I'm just going to add some of this darker pigmented red to add some contrast into my strawberry and to make it a little more watercolorly and loose. I'm not going to do it all the way, I want to leave some whitespace because I'll show you why at the end of this tutorial. I'm doing the tapping technique to blend this in a little bit better, make a little bit more of that watercolorly texture that we love. Finally, we need to add the leaves coming on top. We know we learned in the watermelon tutorial that red and green are complementary colors, so we don't want them to mix too much. But that said, I'm still going to add some leaves on the top like this. I only want them to mix a little bit, so I'm just going to add some pointy leaves on the top. Again, this is a loose strawberry, so I'm not caring so much about if my leaves look perfect, I want them to look a little messy. Then I'm going to tap just to blend that in just a little bit, but not too much. Because if you tap too much, then we're going to get a lot of that brown watery mess we don't like. That's my loose strawberry. As you can see, it's a very loose representation of a strawberry, it's basically me just painting in the basic shape. But I use the wet-on-wet technique to create some contrast here to give the strawberry a little bit of shape and texture. I might even add just a touch more in places and use the tapping technique to blend that in even a little more. Finally, one of my favorite things to do with these loose watercolor strawberries, because you can usually see seeds on the outside of strawberries but they're often like a beige seed color. It's hard to capture that beige seed color with, I'm just mopping up some excess water here, some excess pigment. It's hard to capture that seed color in this loose watercolor style because it's hard to add lighter colors on top of darker colors. One thing you can do is after you've already painted your strawberry to pick up with your paintbrush some highly pigmented red, so it's going be dark. Then just gently tap once or twice to splatter some paint on your strawberry. That adds some fun splatters to the side but it also adds that dotted texture that typically we see in strawberries. If you want to add a little bit more, if you want to manually add some of that dotted texture, then I would take a round zero brush , the small detailer. While it's still wet, just to dot some of this heavily pigmented, so not tons of water, lots of heavy pigmented paint, and just add some manually in after you splattered some. That gives a more loose effect of the seeds on the strawberry. As a fun bonus, you get these fun splatters on the side of the strawberry, which is one of my favorite watercolor techniques when I'm doing a more abstract version. Another option 2 is to get a little bit more watery. Just to add some more texture onto the side and splatter again, so you get just some bigger splatters on the side. That can be a fun way to frame loose watercolor illustrations, to do some splatters on the side. That is the front-facing view of the strawberry. Now, we're going to do as if we had cut the strawberry in half, which is a little trickier but also very doable. For this, instead of starting with paint, we are going to start just with water. I have my Number 6 brush again. I'm going to still do that same loose off-kilter heart shape and fill this with water. But the trick for the cut strawberry is that we don't want too much water for sure on this one because if you have looked at a strawberry on the inside, it has a heart shape or an oval shape. The fruit has contrast in colors on the inside. We're going to use the wet-on-wet technique to form that inside of the fruit. But in order for it to work, we need to use a little bit less water because we're trying to make the inside of the strawberry hold its shape. Keep that in mind and if you use too much water, that's okay. You can always start again. We have this little bit of water laid down here. Now, because this is more detailed, I'm picking up my zero brush. I'm picking up something with a more diluted red first because again, so much easier to make something darker than to make something lighter. Just in the middle of the strawberry that I made, I'm going to make another loose strawberry heart shape using some of this diluted paint. It's okay that it's going places but because I don't have too much water, I don't want it to go all over. I still want the middle to mostly be white, a little bit of white, and I want outside around the edges to still be a little bit of white. Once I've put down that paint, I'm going to do the tapping technique to just blend in some of those tendrils a little bit better. Now I'm taking my Number 6 brush and I'm picking up some darker pigment that's not quite as watery. Similar to how when we painted the green around the watermelon, I'm going to paint this red around the strawberry. Part of this red around the strawberry is on the dry paper. Then the tip of it is blending into the wetness. I don't want it to blend in too much because I don't want it to completely get rid of that ring of white that we have. I want the middle to be white and then this ring of red and then I still want this layer, at least a little bit of this layer to be white. But while this is still wet, I'm going to go in with my detailer brush and just with water and blend in the paint that I laid down on the outside with the wet inside. I'm just doing that so it looks a little bit more naturally blended. Then once I'm done, I can go back and add in more pigment as needed. I want to maintain mostly these rings. Now I'm looking, it's a little bit off-balance, I'm just going to add a little bit more paint on this side with my detailer brush, so it's not too much this time. Then I'm going to pick up a little bit more of this diluted paint, not my really pigmented paint, but some of the diluted paint that I had on the palette. I'm just going to go back in and go over again while it's still wet, this ring in the middle, to make it just a little bit darker. The rest of this strawberry, until we get to the leaves is basically going to be a dance between those two moves. Until I get to a place where I feel like yeah, that looks pretty good, which is I'm very close for me. I'm going to go back and forth between adding a little bit of darker paint on the outside and blending it in, versus carefully blending it in so that I still maintain the white space around it versus adding a little bit of the diluted paint around the middle. Then I'm almost done. That looks pretty good. Finally, I'm going to add the leaves, which is going to be basically the same process. As for the other strawberry, I'm going to start with a little bit of pressure and then come down and meet it. Basically, just doing some of these spiky leaves coming out of a strawberry. I want the ends to be a little spiky though. If some of your leaves don't turn out that way, that's okay. Well, that's put that the way I'm [inaudible] Cool. We can also do the splatter thing. I can just add some texture and add a little bit darker ring around the edge here. That looks pretty good. That is a loose-cut open strawberry and that concludes the strawberry tutorial. We learned how to use the wet-on-wet technique to create a loose uncut strawberry and a loose half-cut strawberry. Practice this. Practice using the wet-on-wet technique going back and forth between using your detailer brush and using your bigger brush so that you can get a little bit more control over where the paint goes while still maintaining this blend chaos. Then once you've printed strawberries to your heart's content, let's move on. 8. Practice: Kiwis: Welcome back. Next up on our list we have kiwis. Kiwis are super fun and again, use a lot of the same blending wet-on-wet techniques that we've used for most of the summer doodles in this class. First, let's do a kiwi that is just like a slice on its own without any of the skin and then we're going to do a kiwi that's cut open, but it still has the skin on it, so it's cut in half. They're all very similar, just different angles. But let's get started. I'm going to use some sap green for my kiwi. This is Winsor & Newton sap green, which is just basically a little bit more of a yellow green. It's darker, so it's like an olivey kind of green but I want to use a light color value of it, so I'm adding a lot of water to dilute it a little bit more. Similar to how we started off that first layer of the whole strawberry, we're going to do a really similar thing with this kiwi. I have this very light green and it's very watery, so it's not going to dry immediately as soon as I paint it on here. I'm just going to do the outside of the circle here and I'm washing all of my pigment off and only using water, I'm going to bring some of the pigment toward the center. But the trick with kiwis is, I'm going to leave part of the center dry. I don't want to leave it dry in a really symmetrical shape. I want to leave the center really uneven and it's kind of off-kilter shape, but I'm leaving some of it dry. The middle is not wet with water, it is dry and you can see the paper coming through. Next, once we've done that, then I'm going to take a little bit heavier pigmented green. You might be able to guess, I'm going to go around the kiwi, just around the edges with this more heavily pigmented sap green to add some contrast just around the edges of the kiwi. Trying to show you, move my hand so you can see. It's okay if it's a little rough, if your circles not perfect because guess what? Kiwis are in nature, which means they are not perfect. Once I have that down, you can either leave it as it is. Or if you think it needs some manual blending, use the tapping technique just with water to tap some of the paint into each other so that it blends just a little bit nicer. We're making this rough gradient, like when we practiced with the popsicles around the edges. Then with your detailer brush, with your size zero brush, pick up some more pigmented heavy side of the green. Then we're going to do the same thing that we did around the edges. But instead of around the edges of the big circle, we're going to do it just a little bit around the edges of the middle of the kiwi. Just a little. Then I'm washing off all of the pigment. I just have water now on my detailer brush and using the tapping method to blend in that pigment that I just laid down. We want some of the middle to be a little bit dark and the edge to be a little bit dark. Then with my detailer brush and clean water, I'm just going to make that white dry middle just a little bit smaller. Now we have most of the kiwi done, we just need the black seeds, and the black seeds go in two layers all the way around this middle part. We can either wait for this to dry and draw in the black seeds once it's dry or if it's not too watery, which it doesn't look like it is, then we can just draw some black seeds right on there and embrace the whole loose effect by knowing if I draw some black on here, it's going to blend in. Because this is still a little bit wet, so it's not going to be completely dry. The dots are going to be a little bit fuzzy but I like that effect with these loose kiwis. I think we're going to go with that. But then I'll also show you what it looks like when you would do it after it's dry. I'm just going to do a slightly different angle so that you can see the dots a little bit better. Here we have our still slightly wet kiwi and I'm taking my detailer brush and picking up some black paint. Just around the circle, I'm going to do little rows of dots just around the middle. I don't want them to be too symmetrical because this is real life in nature and also we're doing some kind of loose fruits and so doesn't have to be exactly perfect. I can get some of them in the middle, most of them staying around the edge and leaving the middle white. There you go. You notice because the fruit is still a little bit wet, that the dots are just a little bit blurry and that can be a cool effect. Because it's still looks like almost you can see the seeds underneath the fruit. Or if we're just going for loose watercolor look, that is really in line with that look. But if you decide you want to do more detailed seeds that aren't fuzzy like this then I just quickly painted another kiwi over here and it's dry. Then you can still paint the seeds dotting along the outside like this once it's dry and that can look really cool too. It's up to you how you want to do it either way we're painting these seeds and a few layers around the center of the kiwi and that wraps up our seeds and now we're going to learn how to paint the kiwi as a whole as if it were cut in half and you can still see the husk, the skin on the outside. To wrap up this tutorial, I'm just going to quickly show you how to paint the kiwi as if we were looking at it, like it was cut in half and so you can still see the husk parts. Similarly as before, but with a little bit less water, we don't want it to be super watery because we're not going to paint the same surface area. We're going to paint a more skinny oval that's going to represent the part of the fruit kiwi that we can see with that diluted water and then just using more water to paint the middle. Then we're going to take our heavily pigmented sap green to go around the edges again, like that. This is very similar to what or it's exactly the same, actually, the same technique as when we painted the kiwi as before, except instead of an a circle, we're doing this oval shape to show the perspective of looking at it from its side. Then I'm just using the tapping method with clean water and a clean brush to blend in some of this paint here. Then I'm going to wait to put the dots in for just a little bit. But to paint the outside husk, the husk of a kiwi definitely has some brown to it, sometimes it looks almost dark greenish brown and so I'm going to take some burnt umber and just put it in my green palette over here and add just a touch of sap green to this burnt umber to give it that slightly green tint. It's okay if we want to have a more diluted, watery version. We're going to take this sap green tinted burnt umber over here and using my size six brush, I'm going to form just this half circleish shape and using water that's one of my favorite techniques to control paint and to control the wet-on-wet technique is to instead of using paint the whole time to, once you've laid down part of the pigment to use water to spread it. We're going to use water to spread it and we just want it to barely touch the outside of this kiwi so that the husk still blends in. Once we have that wet foundation, like we've learned, we can add more of the color that we want a little bit darker so that we can control it a little bit better. I like to do it just on the side or on the top. Then some of this is escaping into the kiwi, so I'm just going to mop it up with my Q-tip a little bit and go back in and blend some of that green in and then also use the tapping technique to blend in some of this burnt umber over here. Some of my paint it looks like has washed out. If that happens, if you add too much like diluted paint and it looks like some of it's really washed out, you can always go back in. I'm going to go back in with a little bit more sap green just around the edges just to make that color shine a little bit more. Shine as in be a little more vibrant. Then I'm going to add just a little bit more straight burnt umber. This isn't the diluted with sap green anymore. I'm just a little bit of that regular burnt umber at the top and blending it in using the tapping method. Now, I'm going to use my detailer brush to add in a few seeds just like that. There you go. That is a kiwi from its side, that still has its husk on it. We practiced a lot of fine detail work with the wet-on-wet technique with a detailer brush. I would definitely recommend you practice kiwis a lot and see if you can get to a place where you can really get these contrasting monochrome blends here and getting the water control nice enough so that you can still get some blends, but also maintain some semblance of shape with the blends that you're creating. That's what we did with kiwis and now we're going to move on to our final doodle before we practice and learn all the steps for our final project. Practice these kiwis and I will see you soon. 9. Practice: Blueberries: Last but not least, we're going to learn some quick moves to paint loose blueberries and also loose raspberries and blackberries. These have a lot less to do with the wet-on-wet technique, we're still using some very wet paint. For our final project, we're going to paint a wreath of all of the things that we've learned, so a wreath with the popsicles and the fruit, and the blueberries and raspberries and blackberries are going to act as filler spots basically because they are a lot smaller. For blueberry, I'm going to pick up some Winsor & Newton Indigo and I'm going to mix with it just a little bit of Prussian blue to make it a little less indigo. Winsor & Newton Indigo can be a little bit much, but mostly indigo just with a little bit of Prussian blue. Basically there are two ways to do a blueberry. Blueberries have that little ridge on the top if you look at them from the side and if you don't look at them from the side, you can't really see the ridge. Blueberries you can paint like you're just painting a circle if you want. You can fill them all the way in like that, and maybe even leave a little highlight space like that. That highlight space is something that's important for these loose blueberries. When I paint blueberries circles, I usually like to leave just a little bit of whitespace especially when I'm doing these loose blueberries to show that they have some shine or texture or whatever to them. They don't have to be perfect circles when you paint these blueberries. It's probably better if they're not perfect circles. It makes them look cooler, more natural and realistic. I'm also going to give you a side angle shot of these blueberries because I think it's easier with these smaller berries to see that side angle shot. Here it is. One more time. I'm going to paint these loose blueberries without the little ridge on them from the side, just so you can get a little better view than that bird's eye view that I usually have with my videos. I picked up some of my blue and I'm forming a circle. I like to form the whole circle and then fill it in, leaving just a little bit of whitespace. One more time. I'm going to form the whole circle with my paint, like that, and then fill it in leaving just a little bit of whitespace randomly around one of the berries, just to show that there's some texture, might be some shine on that blueberry. That's the angle as if we're not looking at the ridge. Now if we're going to paint that little ridge of a blueberry, it's basically going to be the same except instead of painting the whole circle, we're going to paint only like three-fourths of it. I'm going to start making just a little line like that with my paintbrush and a little line over here. We don't want them to be super parallel, we want them to be pointed out just a little bit. Then I'm going to make a circle that meets those little lines like that. Then I'm going to fill it in and leave a little bit of whitespace right there and paint a couple other lines to form the ridges that we're trying to create, like the folds on top of that blueberry. It's very loose, it's not a very realistic blueberry. Painting blueberries like that, with those ridges, might even be easier with the smaller detailer brush. Let's try it with that. I'm picking up my zero-brush and I'm painting my little ridges as guidelines knowing I'm going to put in more after I finish the circle, and then with more paint, I'm going to paint around. Then using my brush, I'm going to finish this little fold that we have up here, and add some details, and then just fill in the blueberry, leaving just that little bit of whitespace so that you can see this ridge on top. One way that I completed that ridge is once I had these two parallel lines, you might have noticed me go with the flat end of my brush. I've put some pressure down and just made little waves with my fine detailer brush and then added some more little ridges on the side, and then filled in a circle just like this, leaving a little bit of whitespace, making the ridges a little higher. These ridges on this blueberry is a bit much. If that happens, I think the blueberry might need to be a little bigger, and so I just widened that a little bit and that looks pretty good now that I've done that. Blueberry in two different ways, the circle or with the ridge. Blueberries make great filler berries for our wreath. Practice your blueberries. Then I decided to make the raspberries and blackberries to have their own video, just so you can watch these in bite-size pieces. So practice your blueberries and remember to embrace the chaos, embrace the loose nature of this watercolor technique that we're practicing. Let's move on to blackberries and raspberries. 10. Practice: Raspberries & Blackberries: Welcome to our video on raspberries and blackberries. I'm leaving it in this side angle shot because with these smaller barriers, I think it's a lot easier to see. Raspberries and blackberries are probably the easiest of the lot. Blueberries are second only to them because of that little ridge thing that we have to do for the blueberries. But raspberries and blackberries are also going to make a great filler berry for our fruity wreath. For raspberries, you can do red or a darker red. Sometimes I like to do red mixed with a little bit of purple, so it's more like a red violet or something like that. I'm mostly going to pick up some red for my raspberries. I'm using my fine detailer brush, not my number 6 brush. The thing to remember when you form raspberries and blackberries in basically the same way. Typically, raspberries are a little smaller than blackberries, so I'm going to paint those first. But I've picked up some red and we're just going to paint little circles. Sometimes the circles can touch each other, but we want to leave some whitespace in-between. These are loose raspberries, remember, we want to leave some whitespace in-between, so we're not just painting a big blob of paint. We're basically going to form shape of a triangle. But we don't want it to be super symmetrical or even anything like that because, once again, nature. I'm just painting a bunch of these loose circular motions, leaving a bunch of whitespace and forming the basic shape of a raspberry just like that. That is one of my raspberries. I'm going to call that good. If you want, you can also add some green on the top with your detailer brush similar to how we added with strawberries. Just going to do a little tuft of green like that and that is going to form our raspberry. Now, I'm going to do the raspberry one more time and then we'll do a bigger version, slightly bigger for the blackberry. Once again, here's the raspberry. I'm just forming off to the side here, I'll show you. I'm just forming a very imperfect circles, but I don't want them to be super watery. I don't want to see that it's like arraysed dot because that can just be a lot harder to maneuver on the paper. I don't want too much water, but I don't want too little water either. My raspberries don't have to be always be the same size, they can be little like that or I can make them be a little bit bigger. Regardless, I'm just putting a bunch of these circles together and making sure to leave whitespace in some areas so that you can still see the shape of some of the circles because that is what indicates to anybody looking at our art that these are raspberries and not just blobs of red. There's my raspberry. Now with my detailer brush, I'm adding just some tuft of green. I don't want it to blend in too much with the red because red and green are complimentary colors and won't look very good together. There are our raspberries, and now blackberries are about the same, except slightly different color. I'm going to add some purple. One of my favorite purples to do for blackberries is perylene violet. I like Winsor and Newton a lot for perylene violet, but blackberries are a really dark purple, so you can add perylene violet and then even just like a touch of indigo to that perylene violet as well to get this color for blackberries, a deep violet. Remember, blackberries are just a little bit bigger usually than raspberries. I'm taking that into account when I form my loose uneven circles. They don't all have to go in a row either. I sometimes to paint not in a pattern. I have to force my mind to do that until purposefully not go where my brain is telling it to go. That's something to keep in mind. I'm going to call that good for my blackberry. Honestly, painting raspberries and blackberries is a really good warm-up, I think because it's a lot of fine motor skills that you are using with your paintbrush and also forces you to leave whitespace and to embrace this loose style that we're going for. You're still getting the shape of whatever fruit we want but it's not perfect. If I were to an even bigger one putting more pressure on my brush, leaving whitespace so that you can still see. That's an even more blendy one. Now I'm going to do the same with the raspberries and add just a little crown of green right on top there. My friends, that is how you paint loose raspberries and blackberries. I know this video might have seemed a little easy, but it's not. I think that learning how to control your brush and learning to get this whitespace in the middle so that you have that abstract loose look where some of the dots are touching each other and some of them aren't, but you still have enough whitespace so that you can see the outline of a lot of the dots, it can be tricky. That's why it's a good warm-up because it helps focus your hands and focuses your mind on keeping track of where that whitespace is. Practice your raspberries and blackberries and let's move on ahead. 11. Practice: Leaves: Like I said, we're going to be painting a summer doodle wreath with all of these fun, fruity things that we learned, the popsicles and also the fruit. Really quick before that, I'm just going to do a quick tutorial on how to paint basic leaves. If you've never taken any of my floral classes, then this will hopefully be helpful for you. To form a basic leaf, it's important to know the strokes. One of my favorite strokes that I like to use for leaves is called the crescent stroke, where I start like below on a paper, putting not very much pressure. Then starting off with little pressure and going thick and then letting off and going thin and I call it the crescent stroke because you're basically making a crescent to like that. They don't all have to look exactly like a crescent like that one does, it's just the basic shape. In fact with leaves, mostly they should look a little off kilter but with leaves on wreaths especially, we want the leaves to help form the shape of the wreath. Keeping that in mind that some of your crescent strokes can definitely have a little bit of unique shape to them is going to make our wreath look even better. That's the crescent stroke and then the way that we form leaves, sometimes you can form leaves just by doing the crescent stroke like that to make them look bendy but the typical leaves that we're going to form start off with a stem. I'm going to paint a thin stem, putting very little pressure with my paintbrush and then on one side of the stem, I'm going to form one crescent strokes starting from the stem. It's always important whenever I paint leaves, I always start from the stem just because it's a lot easier to get that nice point at the top. It's also a lot easier to maintain this white space that I'm going to talk about, loose floral leaves. We're not going to paint in any of the details, any of the veins or whatever that leaves usually have. Instead we're going to leave just this little sliver of whitespace to indicate that that's where the vein goes and then I'm going to do another crescent stroke that is going up to meet the first one to finish forming the leaf. That is how we paint a leaf. I'm going to do another one where I'm going to paint the stem. I'm going to paint a crescent stroke and I'm leaving a little bit of whitespace, just a sliver, I'm going to finish off that crescent stroke. Sometimes the point can be just like one singular point or it can be a little bit looser. Honestly when I do these crescent strokes for leaves, I try not to pay too much attention to making all the leaves look perfect. I just tilt my hand and create movement even if it means leaving some of the leaves a little bit wonky at the top, as long as it comes to a point. That's what I'm looking for even if it has some rips and tears up here. That's okay because some leaves do, and we just want our leaves to look natural and that means giving them some shape like they're bending in the wind. I would practice if I were you, lots of leaves. I would also practice the leaves in bunches. If you've painted one leaf, try painting another one next to it. Remember that because these are loose leaves, it's okay if you're not exactly sure where [LAUGHTER] the next leaf came from, like if this leaf is just coming out of these two in bunches, like these leaves are in bunches and that's totally fine. When leaves cascade down in bunches like this, that's when they look the most realistic and when they look the most realistic in wreaths. Leaves, for my part, if you've taken any of my floral classes have always been really tricky for me, notoriously hard. I don't know why that is, but because of that, I like to practice them a lot. I like to warm up with leaves a lot. Those are the basic techniques. As a reminder, I almost always start my leaf from the stem, so I never start it from the top and go down. I usually do it in those two strokes with the two crescent strokes meeting at the top, and starting at the stem like that. Those are just some basic leaves,and practice those until you feel a little bit comfortable and then let's move on to our final project. 12. Final Project: Part 1: We have learned how to paint so many fun loose summer doodles and now we're going to put them altogether to be a fun, fruity, summer themed wreath. The most important thing when we paint wreaths is to think about placement and where everything is supposed to go. If you are somebody who likes to sketch things beforehand, please, I encourage you to do so. I typically just eyeball where things go and make things up as I go along because that helps me to be loose and not care so much about being perfect, which is something that I love so much about watercolors. But it's up to you. The most important thing that we're going to remember, because I do like to have some sort, is that when we place elements on wreaths, we go from large to small, big to small. Because it's a lot harder to put bigger things on top of smaller things when they're already there. Like our priorities, we do the most important or the biggest things first and then we use the smaller items to fill in the space around them. In our case, we're going to paint some popsicles first. I'm going to put the popsicles down here at the bottom to be the crux of our wreath, I guess and then everything else is going to go in a circle around the popsicles. Popsicles first, then watermelon, then kiwi, then strawberry, and then the berries, which are all about the same, and then leaves. That's the order in which we are going to paint all of our fun doodles. You can paint all of the doodles that we learned or you can only paint some of them, totally up to you. But I'm going to attempt to paint all of them to be one mega summer floral wreath. First things first is I always like to have some guide. I like to pull these round palettes out to act as a circular guide. Then I just like to lightly in pencil draw around, lightly in pencil draw a circle. It doesn't matter if I get the whole circle as long as I get the gist of it. That's the most important thing because I'm not really keeping track exactly of the circle. I just want the circle to act as a loose guide to my placement to where I put all of my fruit. One other thing I like to do when I draw in pencil with these wreaths is if your pencil marking is a little heavy, I like to take a kneaded eraser and just pick up some of the lead so that the pencil is as light as it can be. Because when we paint on top of pencil, if the paint is still transparent so that we can see the pencil, it's really hard to erase. I just did a kneaded eraser to get rid of some of the heaviness. Now first things first, I'm going to paint three popsicles. In fact, I'm going to paint the three popsicles that we painted earlier. This is a great time to pull out all of your practice sheets, all of your reference sheets. These are the three popsicles that I painted and I'm going to paint them again on this wreath. A little bit smaller, but see how nicely that the inside of this one turned out to be all shaded. That's perfect. I'm going to put this shaded one in the middle. Then I'm going to put these two blended ones on the outside. I'm also going to put them at a little bit of an angle. Knowing that I'm going to put them at the bottom, I'm also going to draw little popsicle handles on their popsicle sticks in some light brown. I don't want this to go off of the paper, so I want to leave a little bit of room at the edge of the paper here. I'm going to mostly paint these in the middle of the wreath. I'm going to start with my middle one and I know it's rectangular. I'm just going forward here. These are super loose. All of these doodles are supposed to be honestly that you could use them for warm-ups or if you're just looking for a fun afternoon of no pressure painting, that's my goal for this class for these particular subjects that we're learning to paint. Because what better time than summertime to just let loose and paint some fun doodles. There's one popsicle. Now I'm using the tapping method with water to just add a little bit more of that cool watercolor texture in there. Now, I'm going to paint on this side my raspberry lemonade. I'm going to have it overlap just a little bit that popsicle because I really like having my watercolor elements overlap sometimes so that some of this paint is just blending in a little bit. It can pretty fun and a cool effect. We don't want it to blend in a ton. I might take a Q-tip and mop up some of this up here. I'm putting down my water first like we talked about. Then I'm going to take some of my Quin Rose and blend in this popsicle, blend in some colors here to make my strawberry lemonade flavored themed popsicle. [NOISE] I'm going to take some yellow and do the same at the bottom here being careful because I know that purple and yellow are complementary colors and so if they blend too much, it's not going to look super awesome. But it looks like the yellow is overpowering the purple, so it's not looking too terrible either. Then adding a little bit more just around the edges here to add some higher contrast. Now, I'm going to add just a little more yellow down here before I go in with the tapping method to manually blend, manually create just a few more blends. I am going to call that good for that one. Now for the other one, similar thing, similar deal. I'm going to put this one out a little bit of an angle too. I'm going to start with the top of the rocket. I'm painting this in water and have it meet just casually bump into that other popsicle because we like that loose wet-on-wet watercolor look. At the bottom I'm going to do red and so that red is going to blend in with this popsicle. Then using the tapping method, just quickly blend some of that in right there. We don't want the red to go too far up because remember, we want to have a little bit of white space in the middle right here. I'm going to take my Q-tip and mop it up just a little. Then take my water and push it down a bit as well so that it stays right there. Then I'm going to make that edge not quite so much of a corner. Now, I'm going to take some Prussian blue and just only put it around the top. After I've put the pigment down, I'm going to use the tapping method to bring it even further and just watch as it blends in and does its thing. But I don't want to go too far because I also want to maintain that white space in the middle. I'm going to take some water and use the tapping method to blend this down so that it's dark on top and around the edges and then gets lighter. But also just has this cloudy watercolor texture to it. There you go. Those are our popsicles. Finally, last but not least, I'm going to take some burnt umber and mix it with yellow ocher to create, to paint just little popsicle sticks underneath here. Those are optional. You don't want to paint popsicle sticks, that's okay. But I thought that they would just be a fun little add. We've done our popsicles. Like I mentioned, I'm going to keep my popsicles contained down here. I might have some leaves and tendrils coming out at the end. But I'm going to keep my popsicles down here to act as the bottom crest, I guess, of the wreath. We're showcasing these popsicles as for our fruity wreath. Next we're going to paint our larger fruit. In the next video we're going to paint the watermelon and the kiwis and maybe if we have time the strawberries before the next video onto this wreath. Stay tuned. 13. Final Project: Part 2: We've painted our popsicles and now we're going to paint the larger fruit. If we refer back to our list here, popsicles first, then watermelon, kiwi, and strawberries. I'm going to paint watermelon and kiwi in this video, and if we have time, a few strawberries, but with watermelon, especially, watermelon are pretty big. With the kiwi and strawberry and berries, I think I'm going to do them sporadically around, but with the watermelon, I'm thinking I might just have one or two around the popsicles because they are second largest summer doodle that we're doing. Make sure you have some of our melon color prepared. Again, if you forgot, or it's been a while since you've watched the watermelon video, I liked to do that opera pink with just a little bit of yellow ocher to create a melon color. I'm going to do that melon over here. I think I'm going to have it peeking behind this popsicle. I'm going to form my triangle. It's going to go behind this popsicle right here and paint that in. The popsicle is in the front, important to note. I'm painting in water, my shape of my melon. Now I'm picking up my melon color that I just made more of. Making a little more because it turned out a little more colory than I intended, and painting this melon color next to my strawberry lemonade popsicle. Diluting it with water sometimes and leaving that little bit of whites space for when we paint the green. Remember, we want to leave a little bit of white space at the top for when we paint the green on the top. I'm just going to add a little bit more of the melon color around using the dotting technique to create some watercolor texture here. Maybe adding a little bit darker pigment around the edges just for contrast, what have you. These are loose watermelon, so we don't necessarily need them to look exactly perfect. Now I'm going to take my green and paint above, and just barely touching the wet part of that layer so that it's still blends in but it doesn't blend in so much so that we get a gross color, and also maintains that little space in the watermelon that indicates where the green part turns into fruit. All watermelon have that clear melony spot. That's what that line of water is for. I'm going to manually blend in some things here. I think I'm going to do one more melon. No, that's good. I'm going to call that good. I'm going to paint in the seeds a little bit later, but right now it looks like this popsicle is dried enough so that I can paint in the ridges on the inside. First, we're going to use our paintbrush just to have water. Then use the wet-on-wet technique to add depth so that this popsicle looks like it has these ridges on the inside like a lot of popsicles do. There's one. Now we're going to do the same thing over here. Doesn't really matter if they're even. This is a loose popsicle style. Most important part is to make sure that the shadow stays on one side so that at least one side is somewhat darker than the other because that shadow is what tricks our eyes into thinking there's depth in here, that contrast between the light part of this rectangle and the dark part. There we go. Now I'm going to paint our kiwis. For the watermelon and the popsicles, the big stuff, I put them all in the same spot right here, but for the rest of the fruit, I'm going to put them mostly sporadically around. Knowing that I want to fill in this spot with something that offsets the watermelon, I'm going to put two kiwis right here, but then I'm going to put another kiwi somewhere up here. First, with the Kiwis, I'm getting some diluted sap green. I'm going to have one of the kiwis hidden behind here leaving a little bit of white space in the middle. I don't want to paint over the top of the popsicles, so I'm going to be pretty careful not to. Then paint around the edge just like that. I'm going to blend in some of this green so it doesn't look quite so much like a line. Get some green again and just put a little bit on the edges this way so there's some contrast in colors going on in here. I'm going to let that dry a little bit. I'm still going to paint my seeds there while it's wet, but I'm going to let it dry a little bit longer while I paint my other kiwis. Because I want this to dry a little bit first, I'm going to paint my other one that's up here. While this is drying a little bit, I'm going to paint this kiwi up here, and then I'm going to paint this one down here. Because you know exactly how that looks, I'm going to fast forward to when those are finished so as to shorten your watch time. I've finished these two kiwis and now I'm just going to do one more. I'm not going to put any kiwis with the husk this time on this particular wreath just because I don't really think the brown goes with a color scheme but neither here nor there. I am going to have these kiwis overlapping a little bit. Maybe I'll make this slice a little bit bigger. Still going behind. It's okay if I overlap on the other kiwi a little bit because the green is fine. But for the popsicle, I'm going to be careful not to touch most of the water to the other popsicle. Leaving some white space and then adding the green around it, blending it in, and adding some green around this edge a little bit. Then finally I'm going to add some of the black for the seeds. [NOISE] Those are our loose kiwis for this wreath. This is very wet, so the dots didn't really stay dots, but that's okay. It looks cool I think. Definitely looks like a loose watercolor kiwi, which is what we're going for. Here's two embracing chaos and imperfection and moving full steam ahead. As you can see, the ridges here dried really nicely. That's perfect. Next, we're going to paint our strawberries. 14. Final Project: Part 3: Back to our fruity summer wreath. We've painted popsicles and our watermelon and a few kiwis. Now we're going to paint our strawberries. I'm going to do a combination of the whole strawberries and then a couple of our cut in half strawberries. Like I said, I like to go in odd numbers, I'm thinking for strawberries because they're our last bigger fruit I'm going to do probably five. I'll probably do three whole ones and two cut in half ones. I'm just going to put them around sporadically and have them be different sizes because strawberries can be small, but they can also be really big if they have grown in a weird way. I'm painting this loose, heart-shaped we talked about. I put the pigment down first and then just spread it around using water. Now I'm going to add in some darker pigmented red to add some shading here [BACKGROUND]. I'm using my tapping technique to blend in those colors. A lot of the techniques we learned in this class, we use on all of these fruits, which is important to know. I am going to do just a little splatter. Just like that. That's okay if it gets all over the wreath because this is a loose watercolor wreath and that's what I'm going for. I'm going to paint the leaves after I've already painted all the strawberries. I'm going to do another strawberry down here. I'm going to make this one a little more round in shape [BACKGROUND]. Added a lot of dense pigment there. Now I'm just using water to move it around. I'm going to have this strawberry be behind the watermelon. Like that. Because I used heavy pigments already, there's already a lot of good contrasts and blending here for this strawberry, so that works out nicely. Then I'm going to do one more whole strawberry. I think, next to this kiwi and have it overlaps the kiwi a little bit like that. This one will be a little fatter. Blend in with the water. Then to try to cover up this green, it's okay if it's not completely covered up, actually, it looks cool when it's not, so maybe I won't completely cover it up over there. That's called watercolor glazing, by the way, when you use professional watercolor to paint dried layers on top of each other, and you can see the layer underneath it. That's called glazing [BACKGROUND]. That's a really cool technique. I'm just going to shape the strawberry a little bit more. Then maybe do a little splatter on both of these [BACKGROUND] and call that good for the whole strawberries. Now I'm going to go back and do two open strawberries. I'm going to do one open strawberry here. Might be a little smaller. Remember, I'm going to go in with some diluted red to do the center to dot some of this in the red center. Then go along the outside, along the edge. It's barely touching the edge. Then I'm going to use water to blend those in. That is going to form my loosely shaped cut-open strawberry. Just like that. I'm going to paint another one here. Then I'm going to paint the leaves and finish off this layer of strawberries. I have painted the rest of my strawberries and I actually, at the last minute, decided to add just a couple more kiwis to fill in the wreath before we add in our berries and our leaves. Now I'm going to finish off the strawberries just by adding the leaves on top. This time I'm using my detailer brush. I want the tops to just be crazy pointed on these leaves. I'm not really caring much where they're coming from, I'm just making sure that the tops are pointed. This one is upside down. A lot of these have already dried when I'm painting these, and that's totally cool too. That's a good way. It's not a bad way to paint these leaves on top, just because we know what happens with red and green. Some of these strawberries, actually it looks like even though we did that splatter technique, some of the splatters have melted in, you can't see them very well. I'm actually going to take my detailer brush and just do another tap, tap, tap, tap to get even more splatters on here. I don't care if they go on to the other fruit because this is a loose watercolor wreath and I think it looks cool [BACKGROUND]. While we're at it, let's just add the seeds to this watermelon that has dried. I'm going to add some seeds, all going the same way. Maybe one is coming up from underneath this popsicle. [BACKGROUND] There are my seeds, that finishes off our strawberries layer. Next, let's paint in our other berries. 15. Final Project: Part 4: You may have noticed that before I ended that last video, I didn't put the leaves on these strawberries, but I have now remedied that. Now let's draw some filler berries. First, I'm going to do blueberries. I'm going to get my blues over here, and I'm going to put some blueberries over, honestly, I'm just going to put them everywhere. Some of them in a clump like a cluster together like that. I'm leaving some white space, as you'll notice. Some of them going to have overlap this kiwi right here, and even some other fruit. If you do clumps, again, my rule is I like to do odd numbers just because I think they're a little bit more pleasing to the eye , for whatever reason. I'm sure there's science behind it, but I'm not going to expound on that right now. [LAUGHTER] Then I'm going to put blueberry here, blueberry here, and blueberry here, and blueberry here. Maybe I'll just do a little clump of three right here. I'm not really focusing on the blueberries with the fold at the top that we practiced just because I'm not feeling it this time. But notice I am twisting my brush to be in a circle that's leaving some brushstrokes that leave these cool, like streaks on the outside of the blueberry. I think that looks super cool with the watercolor, so I'm leaving it like that. Next, let's take our detailer brush and paint some blackberries. [NOISE] I'm just going to paint a few. I think probably, let's see, probably maybe five blackberries and three raspberries we can get in here. Let's try. One, and I am not really caring as long as I have enough white-space in-between these berries to see. I'm going to call that one of my smaller blackberries. Maybe we'll do a bigger one next to it, right here. Just like that. I'm eyeballing it, which can be a fun thing, can be a stressful thing, [NOISE] it's up to you. I'm going to put one right here, I think, [NOISE] and one over here. We're going to have this one be going like upside down. Like that. What do I have? 1, 2, 3, 4. You will have a clump of raspberries here. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 [NOISE] two more. Six, and maybe just one nestled down there would look cool. Add a little bit more pigment to that one since it's overlapping these guys, there. There are [NOISE] blackberries and now let's add our raspberries. I did seven blackberries, now I'm going do five raspberries, but we'll see how it goes. I said I wanted to do a clump over here, 1, 2 facing this way. I'm just putting these dots in random places, just in the general shape of a raspberry. I fill this one out a little bit more. Then we'll have number 3 go right here. 1, 2, 3, then put one right here and maybe just one over here. There are our blackberries and raspberries we added just around the middle. Now I'm going to add some leaves just at the top. I painted just some little leaves on top of some of the raspberries and blackberries, not all just some. Now, we're going to finish off our summer wreath by adding some leaves and that'll make it look a little bit more full and make it look more like just a fun mixed wreath. Last painting video coming up. 16. Final Project: Part 5: The very last step to any wreath that you paint, whether it's florals or just leaves or whatever, is to paint the leaves. That's what we're going to do using the basic leaf techniques that we learned earlier. Basically, I'm just going to paint leaves wherever I see a spot that could use some extra filling and I'm going to do it both on the outside and on the inside of this wreath. Just in general, for a rule of thumb when you're painting leaves, if they go in some general direction and follow the laws of gravity, then that makes them look a little more realistic, so I'm having all of my leaves mostly go this way if that helps. This is one of the reason why I think painting warm-up leaves is good just to get you used to painting leaves on wreaths because I think the hardest part about leaves for me is knowing where to place the leaves and I honestly whenever I paint these, I try to just not worry too much about where the leaves are. As long as they're all falling and cascading and one in the same general direction even if some of them are pointing in opposite ways, that's okay. That is the look that we're going for. I'm doing these and remembering that I don't want my leaves to look really straight, I want them to look like they have some curve to them, some natural curve. I'm going to skip the popsicles for now and maybe not put leaves in between them, but we're using this two stroke method that we talked about in the leaf section, and some of these I want to be pointing down because of gravity. Some of them can be pointing up, but when you paint in clumps is generally when they should be going in the same general direction. For the most part, we want our leaves to be going in this direction up here because we're going to say that's the direction that the wreath was initially formed. I'm painting some leaves in clumps up here. Some of them I'm having fall cascade down and not all of the greenery coming out of them have to be leaves like I can have just some little blades of grass becoming out of here too, that can look cool. Usually, I do that after I paint all the leaves, but I just wanted to mention that having just a little blades of grass coming out of here and like loose shapes like that. I'm letting my hand just gently form these leaves and sometimes they look like they're perfect and sometimes they don't and that's okay. We're just letting the responsibility go and painting the general shape of leaves for our wreath because if you focus too much on having things look exactly perfect for loose watercolor style, it's no good for anybody. It just you feel inadequate. You feel like everything you're painting is terrible and it shows in your painting that you spent way too much time focusing on the details when the magic of loose watercolor is that it looks abstract at least that's the way that I think about it. We're nearing the top. At this point, I'm going to flip, so it's easier for me to paint knowing that generally, we're trying to go in this direction, but some of the leaves are going different directions just to add some diversity. Always starting from the stem, that's just generally the way that I can get my leaves, the way that I like them, so I always start from a stem. Just about done here. You can go a second round to put two layer some leaves on top of each other, that can be fun. These leaves are dry right here, so if I put just like another little layer of leaves on some of the clumps that have dried, that can add some nice fun textures well, good to have some of those layers. That's what I'm doing now. I'm just going around and adding a second layer, not as many leaves in this second layer, but to the leaves I have already dried. If I put just a few on top, then adding more layers only adds more depth. Then after I add the second layer is usually when I go back and add blades of grass that are peeking out. Now I'm going to go and just add a few wisps here and there just like that and I'm moving my hand just a little bit so they can so the grass isn't always straight it has a little bit of shape and movement to it because that's what makes it look more realistic and more like it belongs in a wreath I think. For the most part, I think that's it. I'm going to leave the popsicles leaf-free. I think it looks cooler like that. There is our summer wreath. Just in general, this recipe for wreaths is how you build wreaths always. With that, how I built loose floral wreaths always is having the subjects I want and I put them on biggest to smallest and then I add leaves and filler things last. I think that this looks really cool and I'm so excited to see all of your final projects, so if you loved what you've made, then I would love to see it. Please feel free to post on Instagram and tag me. My handle is this writing desk and also please post it on the project gallery, especially if you want feedback. If you have a question, then I can give you the answer to that question or what I think about your piece in the project gallery. That's probably the best place to come if you have a question about any of the elements of this class or any of the elements of your final project. Also, posting to the project gallery helps other people to see it. The more projects that are posted on the project gallery, the more people can find this class. I encourage you to do that if you loved this class. Also, if you loved this class, please leave a review even if it's just really quick, it really helps for the class to gain attraction so that other people can enjoy this fun summer class as well. I always love to hear your feedback and thoughts so that I can make all my classes even better. I'm going to talk a little bit more about this in the recap, but for now, you did an awesome job. I can't wait to see all of your projects and thank you so much for taking this class. 17. Recap: Thank you so much again for joining me for my class on loose watercolors, summer doodles. Hopefully, you learned something about painting different subjects, the berries and the fruit, and the leaves and the popsicles. But more than that, I hope that you came up with a result that you really loved and are proud of. Here's my wreath again, just for you to look at. Honestly, it came out even better than I expected it would. I think it looks really cool and I can't wait to see all of yours. I would love for you to post your projects in the project gallery. That way I can give you some feedback if you have any questions and also me and the other students can show you some love and give you all the compliments for what I'm sure are awesome projects. If you also want to post your projects on Instagram, please tag me. My name is thiswritingdesk or my handle on Instagram is thiswritingdesk. I do features once every week or a couple of weeks for all of my Skillshare classes, so if you tag me there's a very good chance that you'll be featured in my Instagram stories. The last thing is if you really loved this class and you want other people to be able to take this class and other classes, the best thing that you can do for me is to leave a review. Leaving a review on Skillshare, the more reviews I have, the more people are able to see it based on the way that classes are organized. I would really love to hear your honest thoughts, your honest feedback. I appreciate all of the time that you've given me for this class and I really hope that you came away with something that you loved. Thank you again for joining me and see you next time.