Watercolor Explorations: Spring Florals in Mixed Media

1. Introduction: Hello and welcome. My name is Natalie Martin, and I'm a watercolor artist and educator based on the Surf Coast in Victoria, Australia. I am so excited to welcome you to watercolor Explorations Spring Florals in Mixed Media. In this course, we're going to learn how to loosen up, get a little experimental, and also discover how mixed media can bring a whole new life and energy to your work. Watercolor was one of my first loves. I love its fluidity, its unpredictability, its gentle softness. When I mix it with other mediums such as pencil, pen or pastel, it takes it to another whole dimension. It's something that I've always explored with. If you take a little tour back through my own work, you'll see that right from the very beginning, I've actually always incorporated a little bit of mixed media here and there. Mixed media is brilliant for adding layers, creating some form or definition in your work, and you also get to play with some spontaneous expressive marks in what you don't generally you can't really generate that with watercolor in the same kind of way. It's a beautiful balance of control and freedom. So it's your chance to have a little let go to perfection and dive straight into the joy of the process. Going to guide you through a series of techniques today, exploring our wonderful world of mixed media. I mean, ultimately, it can be almost overwhelming because mixed media is there is unlimited potential with mixed media. But when I'm talking about it, I'm thinking about my own process, and watercolor is always the base, but I would love you to introduce today, we're going to explore some pencil, pen, and pastel as some combinations that really, really work well with watercolor. We'll explore some beautiful spring florals. You'll see them around me here today. I've got some fresh ones for us to work with. I'll also supply some photos, too. You don't need to be an expert. All I want you to bring is a little bit of curiosity, some willingness to play, and, of course, you'll paints and brushes and all of those kinds of things. By the end of this course, you will have created your very own collection of spring florals with your own voice, and I hope you walk away feeling confident and ready to paint more. Alright, grab your brushes, grab your pastil, that little pinch of courage, and let's get painting together. 2. Let's Talk Materials: When we talk mixed media, materials can be a totally overwhelming thing. We walk into the art store. There's so many goodies. It's like a lolly shop. We want to buy everything, and I honestly have bought way too many things. So today, I want to make sure that everything is less about what you actually have and more about using what you have. So it's not so much worrying about having the exact same brand as me, but if you have some oil pastels, some water soluble pencils, I've got these beautiful Karen dach pastel. And array of other things. That is going to be enough. I'd much rather you play with what you have on hand. And then if you see something throughout the course that you're dying to try, then go to the art store and buy stuff. Don't let the materials be the thing that prevents you from getting started. Please. I promise you it's not the end of the world. Okay, so I've got my paint set here. This is array of professional watercolor tube paints that I've squeezed into a palette, and I use this central area as my mixing palette. If you have these set here that I bought that I recommended from Welcome to Watercolor, they are also just perfectly fine. Just roll with those. It's all good. I've got an eraser. I'm pointing into the wrong. An eraser and a pencil sharpener, piece of paper towel for your blotting, a nice clean jar of water. To, if you're that kind of wide person that likes to have the two and is really good at keeping one clean and one for rinsing, doesn't work for my brain. When it comes to brushes, I'm going to work pretty This is my big array of brushes, but I'm pretty much going to work exclusively with these three Paulina round synthetic round brushes today. It's a side, zero, one and two. I really like these. They've got a beautiful, long tip, a really, really long bristle, and you have a beautiful held line with these particular brushes. You can see I have a whole host of other brushes, but I pretty much lean on these to do most of the work, as you would have heard if you've done any of my other courses. So I'll close up those and probably put them off to the side so I don't confuse anyone. Now, the thing that I wanted to focus this little conversation on is the mixed media itself. I'm going to start off really simply, and we're just going to do watercolor with one other media. So that could be a pencil. It could be a water soluble pencil. So I've got this progresso here that's a water soluble graphite, which is pretty cool to play with. It could be a fine liner pen. It could be a water pen that you have Indian ink in. That's also totally fine. Could be a fountain pen. Oh, I've got these two brush pens, so they're UIPin brush pens, so you kind of get a brushy mark as you paint with them. This UIpin brand you'll see that I kind of hold dearly because they are pigment ink in there, which makes a huge difference because when we introduce water to the work, they don't bleed. They're totally fixed. So you can get them super readily at any news agents, and they hands down my favorite pen to work with in a mixed media sense. And this little sneaky guy, you would be surprised. It's just charcoal, but I can promise you with every testing group that I did this course with, the charcoal was the hands down winner for everyone's favorite. I think it's because it's a little bit dirty, a little bit fun. And it's not something you pick up every single day, like a pens, whatever. But the charcoolal really starts to make you feel get a bit arty. If you have some so the first part of the course is going to be working with a singular black or colored media. And then we go and move into kind of brain explosion, but we go from a singular color to as many as you like. And that can be a really difficult transition. So I recommend you could either go with colored pencil. That's just a I've got prisma color there. Any colored pencil will be fine. These are the D and ink tens pencil, so they are a water soluble watercolor style pencil. Super pigmented, but expensive. So if you don't have these, it's fine. Just use your colored pencils. Use your kids colored pencil. Doesn't matter. These ones here. These are what I'm going to work with in terms of colored media. So this is my Carin dash set of No Color two. So neo Color two is the water soluble kind. You might see in the art store some neocolor ones, and I think I actually have one neocolor one that's snuck in here because I love the color of it so much. But anyway, the neocolorO isn't water soluble. It's just a beautiful, really, richly pigmented wax pastil. These are the water soluble ones, so I can use them in really interesting and intriguing ways what we're actually going to explore next. They are like top dollar premium products, though. So And also, this is the mega tin. Honestly, don't feel like you have to go and purchase this. I think this is the 84 set or 86 set. I can't remember the exact number. You don't need this one. They come in smaller sets. I'm actually going to provide you a list of my favorite colors you can even just buy them individually, and that can get your collection started as opposing to unless you've got a really nice birthday coming up or Christmas, these are a bit of a big purchase. However, I just got these, and I was really intrigued because they are water soluble oil pastel and they are much more friendlier on your wallet. And I had a play with these recently, and they were sensational. They are really, really liquidy, silky color, and heaps of really lovely colors to play with. It's not super limited in your I find the pre made smaller sets are often very restricted in a more traditional palette but there's some really yummy colors in there. So I definitely don't want you to feel like you have to go and bust your budget over really fancy Caron dache neo colors if you can run off and get some of these at a much more affordable price. I really don't want the focus to be on what you're working. I said this before, but what you're working with. I'd rather you get on with the content and enjoy it, and then maybe buy a few things as you really discover mixed media because there is a whole realm of things to play with here, and I really can't wait to show you where we're going next. The last thing I want to cover is our paper. So I've got some torn down sheets of Saunders cold press white paper here, 300 JSM. You could work in a sketchbook for this class. I think it really naturally would work well in a watercolor sketchbook if you had one of those. I love the loose sheets because I'm a bit free flowing and put one over here and do this and do that. And I feel a sketchbook sometimes is a bit limiting for me, but that's just me and my brain. I've also just got, like, a really lightweight lightweight paper sketchbook where I can just do some thumbnails or that kind of thing or notes or anything like that might come in handy. Other than that, we have some beautiful flowers, and I cannot wait, like, have a look at these beautiful things. Oh, my goodness. I have spent far too much time sourcing some beautiful flowers for us to paint at the moment. It was honestly, the most challenging part of putting this course together was deciding which flowers to paint 'cause we're in spring here in Australia, and there's just this huge array to select from. But why not celebrate color and joy and new life and all the things that flowers represent? Okay, enough of me waffling about materials. Let's get into it. 3. Testing & Swatching: To help us rule out some of the whos, what's, hows, whens, and whys, we're going to do some testing and swatching now. I know that is not a very sexy way of explaining this, but it honestly helps so much with our pathway forwards. So we're going to work out what media works well, direct with water, not water on top of water in wash, dah dah dah. There's a whole lot of things, and we're going to explore all our different media. If you only have one or two of those things, that's totally fine, as well. For the moment, I'm just going to do our singular media, so I'm going to test out our pencil, watercolor graphite pencil, charcoal, our pens, and fountain pen. And I'm just going to demonstrate different ways of exploring how these things interact together. So I've done myself a service here where I've pre made a template for you. There are seven columns, and we're going to create several rows as we go down here. In the first column, we list down our media, and then it's six different ways of applying them. And I'll do a first one as a demonstration so that you can see how it all comes together. So I'm going to grab our pencil, and on here, I'm just going to write pencil to B, so I know what I'm working with. It's very scientific. It's like going back to high school. And then direct literally means grab your media, direct onto the paper. I really want you to consider working on the paper that you will work on down the track, as well, because if you're working on cheap paper here because you're doing some testing and swatching and blood whatever, you'll find that it will perform quite differently on different papers. So it's actually a fun thing to explore. I'm on it's actually a block, but it is the same paper that I would be using down the line. I love saundas. It's a very lovely soft paper. With a beautiful texture. Now, the next one is called water on top. So, literally, I'm going to do pencil again, and I'm going to grab my brush, and I'm going to see what happens to pencil when I put water on top. Not a whole lot. Just disrupted a little bit of pigment here and there. Then I'm going to grab my wet brush again and I'm going to do it the other way round. I'm going to do water first, and then I'm going to do pencil into water and see what happens. It's a little bit lighter, not a big deal. And then I'm going to grab some wash. So I'm just going to grab some mucky color that's on my palette, to be honest. This is, like, a cool sort of light wash. I think it's largely like a palo blue, along with a Paine's gray, a little bit of green in there, it looks like, too. But just whatever you kind of got lying around on your palette and into a wet colour wash. O. And then I've done these so that I could keep working alongside. This fifth column is layering, and this is on a dark wash. And then the second column is layering on a light wash. So it's when you work your media on top of dried watercolor. So in this instance, I'm just going to go like this again so we can see how it all works. It works really well on top of dried medium, less so into a wet wash. It's a really good exercise to start feeling out how different mediums work in different ways in different times places and how much water comes into play with it as well. In our next one, I've got the progresso the watercolor progresso. So this one is a progresso acral and I'm going to do direct water on top. I like doing a scribble because you'll get a little bit of different surface area and you just get a bit of a range of different things to play with there. So with this, I'm going to take the water on top and see what activates. I'm going to keep rubing there a little bit to see how it goes. So I've actually almost erased the entire mark, apart from where I gouged it with a little too much pressure. But you've activated all that pigment on top, which is really interesting. So now I'm going to get clean water. Like this. And then I'm going to do the progresso directly into clean water. Mm, I didn't disperse like I was anticipating it too, which is really interesting. I feel like that might actually dry like that. And then we're gonna grab our wash again. And this will probably do something similar. But the way that pigments, so this is just clean water. The reason why we do into a wet wash, as well, is because that wash has pigment in it, and this is pigment. And sometimes the way that two pigments interact is really interesting. Like, sometimes you'll get a crazy dispersion and you cannot create it in any other combination of paint, and other times you might get a really interesting color mix happening. So it's a very, very fun thing to play with. Next like we've got charcoal. I'm just going to write charcoal here because otherwise, that's going to get really messy. I don't want you to fret about making mess with charcoal. It is so much fun. And this is just one of those boxes of willow charcoal that you get from the art store. What I tend to do is just snap it straightaway, 'cause honestly I'm gonna snap it in about 15 seconds anyway, 'cause it is quite fragile. And so direct water on top. Do another one, getting ahead of myself there. So water on top. So I've activated some of the pigment there, but it really hasn't lifted the line, though. And then, oh, into water. Do that again. Oh, I had a nice softness as I was painting, which was interesting. Grab that little bit of wash. There we go. Oh, I've forgotten to do our layered on both of those. Well. Okay, here we go. Do layer it here and lay it there. Not a huge difference to the two B pencil, if I'm really thinking about it. And here's our charcoal. Charcoal obviously is gonna layer really nicely. Lovely. Alright. There's out is our charcoal. Next up, we've got our pigment pen. So this is the unipin pigment pen pigment pen. I've bought two of these. One's a brush one, and one's just the 0.5 mil nib. So when I've used the pigment pen in the past, I've always used 0.2, which is here, it's a much finer line. But if you tend to be heavy handed with your when you're writing, you'll just push the near bit and straightaway. They're not the most resilient little things. So I recommend the 0.5 until you get familiar with how it starts to feel. So we've got direct and Like this, a fine liner on a textured paper as well, is not going to be as smooth and luscious as what you'll find on, like, a typical office paper or something like that. Just something to bear in mind. You won't get you'll get a bit more texture in there, I guess, is what I'm trying to say. And then water on top. So, interestingly, I put water on almost immediately after drawing it, and that is going to activate that pigment a little bit. But if I had waited for it to dry for a longer time, it would be totally fixed, and I would be able to do it. I might even do a second one, a little one where I dry a little bit longer. So that's immediately, and then I might just make a note for myself. And so pen into water. That already screams to me, like, slightly problematic. Let's see what happens. Didn't really work. But this is why we do this, right? This just doesn't look right. So we know that the wash is probably not gonna look quite right, either, but we'll do it anyway because the sake of experimentation, literally nothing at all. And now I'm probably going to have to blot that water off the end of my pen. And here we go into this one, and on top of a layered dark and a layered light wash, it actually looks quite nice. So just something to think about. Next up, we have the brush pen, which is a recent discovery for me, but it is such a lovely way to create really interesting lines. It's a bit more versatile than the just straight up pigment pen, brush pen. And it's also still brush. It's still pigment ink in there, so it's still super resilient when it comes to being on the paper. So direct so I have a lot more texture and a lot more play there, water on top. So this time around, I've learnt my lesson. I'm just going to wait a little bit longer. I'll come back to those two, and I'll put water on them shortly. Next one into water. Now, we know that the last lot of pen ones didn't really go so well with the pen into water. So let's just see how we do here. Well, okay, yeah, I wasn't even expecting that. We'll see how we go, hey, and then we're going to do into our wash. Like so. And again, so it's really just taking that pigment ink and just dispersing it absolutely everywhere. And then on top of our layered dark, we're just going to go like this. And like this. So actually quite nice again. It's got a lot more control once the paint is dry underneath. Lots of control here when we're going into water. Alright. Finally, for our little testing and swatching, I will do the fountain pen. Oh, I just said fountain pen. That's weird. Fountain pen. So this has a really bog standard. Find it at the news agent. I think it was like 20 bucks ink cartridge and fountain pen. If you might I mean, you already might be down this road already, but if you are really into fountain pens and you like this mixed media vibe, it's worth investing in some carbon ink cartridges. They are much similar to the pigment ink pens where the ink doesn't bleed once you put water on top. Whereas if I put water on top of just your average Joe ink that you get at the store, then it's definitely gonna bleed everywhere. Just something for you to note. Alright, fountain pen. Fountain pen is one of my favorite ways to do mixed media. It was back in the day when I first started releasing prints and selling artwork, it was all about the combination of watercolor and fountain pen. Alright. So that's my ink bleeding everywhere. Rinse that off. Ooh, I just sproted ink everywhere. And we go. So the fount pen really doesn't work into wet water. And I'll just grab a little bit of my wash here. Into that. Again, we know the kind of results gonna happen there, but then on our ledge, dark and light, it's looking nice again. So you can see that we've got that much more control there when it comes to mixed media. But then if you say you've got some watercolor pencils or things like that, then that wet stuff is actually when it starts to get really interesting. So I'm going to leave a gap here because I'm going to come back to this section when we get to our colored media. I think this is a really nice place to start. Make sure you leave lots of space because you can always keep adding to this. You might go to the store and go, Oh, my God, I just found this thing, and I want to try it out. This is the best way to try it out. You're going to see every avenue that it's really successful, and it's going to really obviously take you to the places where you really shouldn't bother using it in the first place. So I've got some extension work for you. You know I love a little extension project, and this is the best way to enhance your whole experience today. But I've got two options for you. First one is a chart where you focus on your mixed media colors, and we're going to go and do every single color in there or every color that you reach for. And that's a really nice way to explore the whole palette, and you get to have a reference chart that you then put on your studio wall or workspace wall or whatever. And you'll see that I start to build up all these interesting things where you can kind of go, Oh, when I put those two things together, it eradicates that whole, confusion about what to do when helps you work out how and when to apply the mixed medias together, especially when we've got so much water in the play. Now, this is the one for the people that don't have watercolor pencils or water soluble pastiles. This is a colored pencil only one. So I've stripped out all the watercolor stuff because it's not going to mix with water at all. It's a wax based pencil. So if you've only got a set of plain colored pencils and you're absolutely welcome to use them today, there's not going to be any hindrance there. But this demonstrates my favorite selection of colors across a cool dark wash and a light cool wash and a warm dark wash and a warm light wash. So you can see how the colors represent across. So in this instance, where, say, blue and orange are opposite to one another, they don't really sing out very well. They kind of don't support each other very well in this instance. It's not a great combination. But say this hot pink on top of the dark wash, I'm like, Whoa, that is good. I want to use that right now. Like, get me into the studio. Let's go. So it's a really good thing for inspiration as well. You might just find combinations that you're like, I really need to work at how I want to make this into a work. I want to use it now. So they're your extension projects. Is Eon as excited to start painting as I am 'cause I sure am. I cannot wait. Next up, we are going to go into our peony. I know that feels like we're jumping off the edge of a cliff, but I'm gonna break it down for you, make it as seamless as possible, and you'll be painting peonies in the next 30 minutes or so. 4. Simple Mixed Media: Peony: When I discovered that peonies were going to be in season when I was going to film this course, it was just too good to resist. You might be looking at me like, Oh, my God, no, I can't do this. I can't paint this. I will get you there. I promise I'm going to break it right down for you, although they look like a complex flower painting with watercolor, and in this instance, I'm going to use a pencil, just simple to materials, we're going to get this beautiful rendition of a peony on the page. But we're going to strip it right back, start, start, and I'm going to demonstrate how to draw it. We're in this instance, we're going to draw the pencil lines first. I think sometimes, especially when I did, like, welcome to watercolor and some of my other courses, and I discourage all the pencil work. I love that freestyle free flowing kind of aspect of watercolor. In this instance, because we're going to have the pencil linework down first, it gives you that little bit more structure and confidence to go in with the watercolor. So it can be a really nice way of exploring that loose quality of watercolor with a little bit of help from the mixed media. So, penny, I know. You're looking at me, like, Nah, I'm not doing that, but, I promise. I just going to leave it there for you so you can just, like, keep it in mind. Like, we will get there. Alright. I've got a pencil. This, like, humble little dude is like a super duper incredible tool. And what you may not realize or you haven't played with probably since high school is its versatility. So what I want you to do in any media that you have, you may not even have a pencil on hand. You might have, say, water soluble progresso or the fountain pen or whatever. I just want you to have a little play with the marks you can make first. So initially, I'm going to try and just do light marks. I'm going to do dark marks. I'm going to try and do a variegated mark, so lightly press and then darkly press. So you get a bit more variety in your line. That can be a lot could be called a lost and found line or a variegated line. You can lay the pencil right down flat and you can do shady. And you can do little tiny marks, as well. And it's really sort of endless the way that you can sort of explore this. I really love, especially in florals, this variegated line. This guy here is a bit of a workhorse because it can really help inform the three D shape, as well as give it a really delicate petally feel. And as you can see here, we've got lots of beautiful delicate petals to work with. The first thing I like to do is break down the shapes of each of the flowers. So this works for any flower in front of you. If you had, say, a rose or this Ixia or any of it, the carnation, this applies the same. It's all about breaking it down into simplified shapes, looking at things individually, and then putting it all back together again so it makes sense as a flower. So I've got a leaf. I've got a petal. They're probably the two main things that I'll look at, as well as the structure of the flower as a whole. So initially, I'm just going to start with the leaf just to get warmed up, you know? These leaves down the bottom here are a little bit broader. So I'll go with that one, and then they get a little bit narrower as we get to the top. That one's a split one. So that's a lovely little one just up there, and they go right up to the base as a flower. I will supply photos of these beauties, as well. Although I encourage you to work with things in front of you, I know sometimes it's just easy to follow along for now, and then you can do this for yourself when you say, the exciting things in your garden have come out or you've bought yourself a beautiful bunch of blossoms. You can paint them to keep them forever. So leaks I'm going to try and do this with this variegated line so that I can get really feel confident with how that might look. So I like to try and place the darkest part of the leaf where the shadow would fall. So in this instance, I'm just drawing a singular leaf, so it's a bit of a practice. But something to bear in mind is that that little bit of heaviness in the line is actually going to help inform that shape, and it's going to give it dimension as well. And then it's got some lovely veins. It's got a central vein and then some little side ones as well. Whether I get too hung up on those or not, I'm not really sure. But sometimes it's nice to sort of explore it out. I'll keep them quite faint, quite like that. So. And then I know this is a bit strange, but I'm just gonna pull a petal out because understanding the petal shape is actually a really important thing because it's not dissimilar to a rose, to be honest, but it's got a few of these little wiggles at the top, and not all peonies are like this, but that's one of those really clustered, beautiful. I love the color. It's just outrageous. But this shape is part of what makes it look like a peony. So I'm just going to do the petal, the similar kind of way. And I'm going to look at all those crucial little aspects of it being a peony petal. So it comes right down I've done the wrong way around, like so, and it comes right down to a point. And it's got a lovely vein there, and it also spreads out like this. So, yeah, I think that's kind of what I'm working with there. Got some petals. The buds are super lovely, too, but I'm going to focus on the peony for now. The next up is sort of exploring the shape, the form of the flower itself. I think that's the thing that can often go wrong, and it often makes your paintings look totally flat. So my idea here is to help you really generate form and liveliness. This thing is blooming off the page. So how I break this down, especially with any new flower. And I still do this for myself, as well. Anytime I'm approached with something new or a little bit difficult, this is the best way to go about it. Just draw it out. Which is why we're starting with the pencil as our first mixed media. It might seem almost too simple, but I feel like sometimes simple is best, and it's the ultimate combination. So I'm just going to have a look at this flower again. So we've actually got almost a flat top and a cup shape underneath, but it's quite a boxy kind of shape, and it's got three sort of areas of petals that are quite clustered around the base. I don't know if you can see that there. It's not perfectly round, is what I'm trying to say. So I'm going to try and generate that shape on the page, which is basically like a disc on top. I'm going to have it pointing this way. Disc on top. And then we got this general kind of cup shape, but it's quite a flat wide cup. This is why it's so helpful having the flowers right here because I can pick them up, look at them different ways, that kind of thing. And also, you get to have nice fresh flowers around. But if you don't, I understand you can work from the photos, too. Okay, flat. And then we've got we've got these sort of going to break it down the next stage again, which is the we need to round it out a bit more. And then this one sort of goes like this, and then we've got some shapes up here. So I'm going to sort of break it down into the next round of shapes. And there's a really night still petals. This is still coming out. So there's still some petals in the center there that are protecting those samen. So it will be in there. And then now that I've got this basic little form here, that's where I'm going to start. So the point of axis, which is where the stem attaches through the stamen the flower is pointing, which is this thing here, it actually drives right through the center of the flower. So the stem is always going to exit at the bottom directly from where the flower is looking. Sometimes it can be tempting to put it off to the side or that kind of thing. So we're going to start putting some of these details in. Okay, so I've got my basic forms in, and now I'm going to start giving them life with these petals. So I don't know if you can see that, but there's layers and layers and layers of petals. And that's what's really going to, like, make the pony come to life. So that's what I'm going to really focus on. Gonna start in the center in this instance. Alright, and then around. And then I might do some of these back pedals. Working out where to start is often the most difficult part. I need to hold it with me so I can make sure I get my petals right. Like, for a flower that's built from a central point, I often find the center the easiest. If you start from the outermost thing, it tends to look a little disproportionate once you get to the center if you don't get it totally right. And it's also okay to not totally get it right the first time. Like, we're just, you know, sketching things out at this point, and if it's totally not working for you, get rid of it and start fresh. It can really affect your mental state. So just, like, if you're getting irritated by it or if you're not feeling it, just get rid of it out of your visual line, and you'll feel so much happier. Alright, keep building up these petals. There's lots of these wiggles at the top, so I really want to focus on those. It's that working on there? You with me still? You're not freaking out totally. You haven't gone off and made yourself a cup of tea because you're like, too much. It's too much. The petals that fold in on themselves can be quite challenging, but it's a really, really lovely way of getting a real expression of the flower on the page. So I'm only really focusing on the tops of the petals in this instance at the moment because otherwise, I'm not going to be able to see much more. I can't get to the base of the flower petals. So I'm looking at I'm working exclusively from observation, knowing that each petal has these sort of ridges at the top here. Okay. Getting there. There's some longer ones out there might lighten them off. I've gotten quite heavy for the central part. And then as I get out lower, I want to try and lighten them up a little bit. Let them free flow a little bit. And that's gonna get that liveliness and energy in there the minute that you stop caring and just let go. You know what? That's when it's gonna really start working. So let's make that the goal. Go to keep working down. It could have been so tempting to start down here, and I almost did, but I think working from the center, you get a bit more control, and that's where your eye wants to go, right? Eye will always it naturally seeks out things that look like eyes or centers. It's a pattern that we recognize with our brains. And what tends to happen is that you don't start at the base of the flower and take it into the top. You look from the top down. And when you start drawing, your energy and excitement for the subject goes into that, as well, and it totally reads on the page. You can try both versions if you want and see if you can get the gist of what I mean there. Correct. Now I'll do some more little petals. Now I'm going to do this big one here. And there's a little cup one there going around. And then there's a leaf here, so I'm going to draw that leaf. So I've gone darker on the underside and lighter on the top side, and that's going to help get that form and essential feelings on the page. Is there another leaf down there? You know what? I kind of want to add one, so I'm just gonna add it just for fun. And then more of these split petals here. And another nice big scoop one here. And then I just go to fill in this gap. I've kind of left this rim around the middle here that needs a bit more detail. I think I'm nearly there, though. How are you guys going? I'm dying to see how you go with this flower. I know it's super challenging, but I think, why not? Give it go. You can always retreat back and try something simpler if you want. Just gonna do a little vein in there for funzies. And then we know how the stems coming off because I've drawn sort of it in. So I'm just going to draw myself a little stem in there and add another couple of leaves. So I've got a nice sort of thing to work with here. In this instance, the leaf goes under and behind, but maybe I'll do something else, or maybe I'll put it under. Let's go. Maybe I'll do one bigger one up here. I think when you leave little gaps and breakages in your line, that can make really interesting rather than if you have a really heavy outline over everything, it ends up looking quite dense, very illustrated, very overworked. And my whole goal when I'm working with mixed media, is thinking about things in a really light and airy way. When I look, even if you just Google mixed media, you're going to see some very overworked, heavily laden artworks. And it just irks me. I think you can use it in a really subtle way that can be really beautiful. So I think we're nearly there. It's time to throw some coloring, which might just feel bizarre. The only thing I'm going to do is I'm going to grab my eraser. A little rub on my pants. It's always nice to just get all that little bit of grub off there. My bench is way not clean enough to try and normally I just go like this on the bench and that cleans it up, but it's not the case. I'm just going to quickly erase the really faint lines that I use for structural purposes because when we put watercolor over our pencil lines, they show through, and you can't erase them anymore unless it's a really, really light wash. So I'm just going to really gently erase all this. I'm gonna get rid of my axis line there. You guys know what I mean. And there we go. It's almost there. I think some lines are quite lovely to leave in. Others, I don't want there. I wanted to make sure it's still got that light, airy, not overworked feeling. I tend to be very heavy handed with the pencil, as well. So if you're someone like me, I would just recommend going so much lighter than you would imagine because it will mean that you don't gouge the paper and erasing it will mean you don't have trenches for your water to fall in. Can be very problematic. A right. Nearly there. There we go. So, I could sit here and do a full colour by numbers, fill this in perfectly, but that's gonna lose that light, fresh, airy feeling that I was just talking about. I really want to keep it really fresh and vibrant. I know I've just said fresh like ten times, but that's something that is really important to me, especially when we're talking about such beautiful flowers. Where's another brush over there. I'm gonna set myself up for painting now. I've got this reference, obviously right in front of me. What I recommend when we're painting in flowers is that we go quite dark with the center that helps it look like it's gonna pop out and open, and then the outermost petals can be a bit lighter. Here we go. I'm going to grab a big brush. This is, like, a close to a size ten. Paulina bright brushes are mop sizes in everything. So it's a bit harder to articulate. This is the size two. So I'm going to grab some really, really lovely rich pink, some purple. Make a little mix for myself. The other thing I really love doing is making sure that I'm not using the same assortment of colors and mixes and blends for every part of the flower. I'm even going to add some Pains gray, I think, into this to make it really deep in the center. So I've got really, really dark purple here. And for the center, most petals, like, I've got this pink ball in the middle. And then it's this dark outside area that I'm really interested in lifting with the dark paint. And I'm going to do these little upward motion strokes like this, enhancing that center. And then I'm gonna wash it all off a little bit, get the next lot. Just a little blot there to take off some excess. And you know what? I'm just going to ignore all that line work that I just did, but that's gonna give it that looseness and carefree nature that I'm really going for. If I get too stickler about making it perfect, then I'm going to lose all the fun out of it. And every little error or mistake is gonna be heartbreaking, whereas I'm just gonna slosh some paint on and have fun. Alright and some pink for that center. Keep going kind of looking at this and trying to find the directions of all the petals. And that's one of the things that I really like working with the most is making sure that like, the directions of the petals are going the right way. So for me now, most of them are going almost straight up just slightly out when I look at it, and that's going to help me articulate this better than if I was to sit there and, like, count petals and get all particular about the way it's all sitting. I'm gonna put some more dark in there cause the dark is going to sit in there. And I'm going to use not just not going to just use the pencil for helping to create form. I'm also going to use the color. So those two in combination is when you start to get really interesting dynamic shapes. Not filling it in all perfectly. Very, very key. And on this lighter side here, I probably just go quite light with my paint like it's getting caught in the sun, basically, and then go a little bit darker for the base. And a few little horizontal lines here, mimicking those little petals that we painted in. And gonna go really, really hard with this really vibrant pink. It's basically straight cinacridon rose to get this really, really vibrant color. Kind of want to do a little bit more dark in the center. The littler marks in the center always help it feel like a center, as well. And this last one can be quite dark 'cause he's going to be the little one that's gonna send everything else forwards. Lovely pretty happy with that. Just go to do a couple of other details. Going outside, I can't iterate enough how powerful going outside the lines can feel. Like, it's quite empowering and strange. Like, you've been told all your life that going outside the lines is bad. And then when you do it in your own work and in your own playtime, it's so rewarding 'cause it's so much fun and feels like you're breaking the rules, but you get the most beautiful results for it. Now, this here is Perl and green. I'm going to mix it with a bit of, I just grabbed three different blues at once. That was a bit mad. The peril and green I really enjoying at the moment. It's a really nice deep bottle green. It does dry a bit flatter. If you don't have that particular green because, I mean, it's such a beautiful, natural I just look at that and go, that deep green is a really lovely thing. You don't have to run off and buy a tube of it. You can mix it yourself. I would use a combination of, say, a turquoise, Paine's gray, and a little bit of umber, and you're going to get that lovely color. Maybe even with a little bit of the coracudon gold, and you're going to get basically a Perl and green. So you don't have to mix up. You don't have to buy every tube of paint. I love to experiment with different tubes of paint, but I also don't like I don't want to make everyone buy exactly the same palette as me. It's such a unique and special journey to go on yourself. And if it's something that you're really invested in and interested in, jump on my magic of color mixing workshop workshop, online course because we go totally deep dive into color and learn how to make all these colors yourself. You can do the whole course with just three colors. Alright. Now, I'm going to paint this backmost leaf here. Again, trying not to worry too much about the lines. I know that's just so weird for our brains. I go to get a slightly different green here. I'm actually not the biggest fan of green, but in this instance, where we've got a really rich pinky purple flower, it actually makes a lot of sense. That was another one there, and I'm just going to really lightly touch in the stem. I don't really want to get too heavy or focused on the stem at all, because the flower is where all the actions at. It's where I want people to look. And this is just a support act to help iterate the flower on the page. A little bit there, I might just throw in a little bit of blue or even a little bit of purple might be nice in the base of that. It'll help tie the top of the flower to the bottom of the flower, drop in a little bit of colour and maybe in there where it touches the stem, and that will help adhere those leaves into the stem, as well. Alright. You still with me because we did it. We made it, we painted and Drew a peony in, like, not even that long. I cannot simply wait to see you. They're such a popular flower right now. I feel like they're quite readily available, although the season is so short, but what a way to celebrate them when you can paint them yourself. As an extension project, I'd be really interested. So today, we focused on the pencil and watercolor. I'd be really interested for you to go back to our testing and swatching and pick one of the other mediums that you really enjoyed working with and create some further peonies using the other mediums. I've got some examples for you. So I did the brush pen for one over here. And that was a really lovely painterly mark. So I had a little play here with the different marks I could make, and then I penciled in a structure just like we did here, and then I painted the rest in. And then this one was a really interesting one because I wanted to see what a single colour addition would be. So I used the dark purple pencil and I used that as my base, and it was just a straight colored pencil. So it was a wax base. I could paint over the top of it. No problem. And then you get a totally different feeling compared to a black line. The black line or the gray lead line can feel very illustrative, but I feel like you start to explore really interesting things when you get into more color play. So there we have it. Next up, we're going to go and reverse everything, and we're going to paint first and then do our line work. I know that is mind boggling, and I feel like it can be a bit intimidating, but I simply can't wait to share where we go. 5. Loosening Up: Yarrow: No. It felt pretty nice to have some structure there, didn't it? We're going to flip the script now, though, and we're going to do the paint first and then put the pen lines or our structure in after the fact. And this is going to be really confronting for some people because we really lean on those lines to make it feel like the thing, and I think we feel like it's going to make it better. But I can promise you you're going to end up with a much looser, more lively result. This is something that I employed in my practice for a really long time. I often would get asked, at what point do I do the pen? Obviously, you do it first. Sounds like, actually, no, I get a painting that I'm really happy with first, and then I add the pen line in, and it can be really subtle. This only has one, two, three, four, five, likes. Less than ten little pen marks, and that is still a mixed media piece, but has a really light and fresh feeling. Same with this one here, the little hakeer bud. I've really just used it to create a little bit of movement, some definition here and there, and that sort of illustrative fun kind of feeling overall. So that's what we're going to explore now. Our flower of choice is going to be yarrow because I want to make sure that we cover a few different bases here. The pony was that big lush full flower. And a bitty flower, actually, well, a bitty flower can be it's not the nicest phrase for it, but, you know, it kind of is what it is. It can be a really interesting thing to explore how you simplify that, how do you make it a more interesting and curious presentation on the page. If you'll obviously take some photos of this f to share. But you say Yarrow is not your thing, so this is yarrow or achille depending on I don't even know why, but that seems to be 50 50, what people call this one. So I call it Yarrow, and you could also replace that with baby's breath or what else do I have the Queen anne's lace here. Even a hydraner would really work for this one, because you want those little tiny petals all clustered together to make an interesting. That's the challenge in this one is to have a little fun there. So I'm going to grab my paper. And let's get started. My weapon of choice today is going to be the fountain pen because that's what I used in the past to create those really fresh free flowing lines. So once again, I'm just going to explore a little bit this pen before I dive into the painting part. Okay, I've got my pen here. I'm just going to do a similar kind of thing. I'm going to try and do really light. I do a little wiggle because the pen at different directions or the pencil or whatever can really react quite differently to the direction you have on the page and then do a bit of a hard line. And then maybe a hard and soft And then maybe I'll do some dots. See? I'm trying to make that pen splurt a little bit, too. This is honestly a really cheap fountain pen. It's nothing fancy. I do have a really good one somewhere. I've totally lost it. But I think this one is actually it's really lovely in my hand and I enjoy. You don't need fancy things. You can just work with what you've got. What else can I do here? I want to do some just even little dots and then some fast line. I often draw quite fast. So I want to make sure this works in terms of drawing fast. I'm kind of liking how that's feeling. Then what I could do is explore a few little lines on, like if I'm looking at these flowers here, they are almost like a little quintessential flower like a little kid would draw, but there's hundreds of them on every branch. How do I distill that so that I've got that light and fresh feeling and it's not going to feel overworked? So my go to method would be, where's my pencil. I'm gonna do a little bit of pencil work as a structural component as well. These are like little umbrellas. So each little stem is gonna pull one out here. Like a little umbrella, a little tree. And that's why I find them so enchanting. I really love these flowers. So I'm going to try and draw a little umbrella, and I'm going to structure that use that as the basis. So I've got these oval again and then comes down into a funnel like this, and then I might do another one over here like this. And then it joins in the stems. And then it's just a matter of populating that with a little bit of information. I don't want to go overboard, though. I'm not going to sit here and go, Alright, one, two, three, four, flashes and boring, and you're going to get so bogged down in detail and lose all the fun in it. So just gonna slide that one back in so it doesn't wilt on me. I'm going to try and just do a little bit of penwk to generate that feeling without getting too concerned with details. I might even do a few that feel quite like a flower, but then I might skip over a few details and just get a little bit sketchy with it. There we go, a few more petals. It's like implying shapes without getting overly worked about it. Out on the outer edges, I kind of want to have a bit more form. I'm only going to really have a few real flowery flowery flowers, flower leaf flowers. That's hard to say. It's good. I'm big on tongue twisters today. Alright. And on the lower side, I'm going to have more information, and on the upper side where the light would be hitting, I'm gonna do that same kind of theory where it's a little bit lighter, I put less detail. You can do this with any media. If you don't have a fountain pen, use your charcoal, use your pigment pen. Go back to the pencil if you want to. You're going to get the same result, but you're just going to have a different medium. I've chosen a different one so I can demonstrate the benefits of working with various different mediums. Now, they're in little grouping, so I want to make sure I get that feeling as well. And then we're going to start drawing in some of these little branchlets which they cluster together first, and then they go into another one, and then they go down even further. So it's just a matter of getting that feeling. They almost flop out a little bit. And then down. And I'm trying not to be pressing too hard with my pen so that it's not looking like a fully outlined coloring book situation. I want to try and get lots of little details in there, but it's still feeling arty and sketchy and fun, as opposed to too bogged down in the details. And next side might just do those in for prosperity's sake whilst I'm there. I'm just going to do two little branchlets of these ones. You get the idea. I mean, you could go to town and do a whole page of this. Is this something you really enjoy? I think there's a lot of therapeutic benefit to just rhythm and pattern in your mark-making. So you might actually just really sink into doing these little marks and really enjoy this process. Getting more detail down there. I love a few little, token flyaway marks, 'cause it kind of feels like it's bursting with energy then. It looks less static. You might have noticed that in, like, much of my work has a few things that are like, that doesn't really make sense, but when you look at it as a whole, you're like, it gives it an energy and a vibe. So I'm having a little practice here, doing my flowers. Do, do, do. Alright, and then gonna do the little stems I'm kind of enjoying that scratchy nature when you do the fountain pen quite fast. And again, yeah, just use the pigment pen or what have you got on hand? It doesn't matter. Starting to look a little bit like a broccoli if I'm not too careful. Alright, so there. I've really tried to strip all the information out. Now my challenge is to generate I now I have my little practice. I'm going to put the color down first. So without pencil or without anything, using this as my guide, my framework. I'm going to start over here, and I'm going to show you how loose you can get with the watercolor before you can add the pen. Okay, just gonna mix some colors first because we've obviously got a bit of a different color going on here. I did love the rich purple with the pony, but I think I'm going to focus on this softer pink because I think it's gonna complement it better when we bring them all together. Sh, I didn't tell you that, but that's what we're doing later. Um, brush. I'm going to go down to a one this time, so that is the equivalent of about a size eight round brush. It's a bit complicated with the old different sizes. To get that lovely peach color, many people get stumped by this, but it's often just a red diluted heaps or a burnt sienna makes a really soft peach. Or sometimes I'll just add the tiniest touch of pink if you need it to be a bit more softy, pinky. I'm going to put a little more orange in there, and then just heaps of water, more water than you could possibly think. And then you're going to get this really beautiful soft pink. So this is the kind of color I'm going for. That's the darkest version I'm going to use, and then I'm going to use my brush and the water load to dilute it, as well. So it's going to point this one away to me again. That's kind of went the other way in the end, but oh, I never did the little leaves in there. I should have done those. Alright, so I'm going to follow this sketch here and I'm going to start by just simply really lightly washing in these flowers. And I'm not getting too detailed again, because by the time you bring the two together, you actually get a really cool result. Again, I'm not going to try and just do the whole thing in one color load because that's going to look quite strange and flat. I'm going to keep shifting those colors a little bit so that it doesn't look too manufactured. I might even steal a little bit of that purple from the peony. That's why I love having my palette as an absolute. Well, a lot of people would be like, Can I clean it, please? Can I clean it, please? I love having that because I can reference past paintings. I can link paintings together because that peony mix there is from when I painted the peony. But if I wanted these to sit together, I can put a little bit of that pink into this one. Doesn't have to be much, and that will automatically link it. It's like creating a DNA inside your paintings if you have a really messy palette. Really blobby and fun here. That's starting to look pretty good. I just kind of want to go a bit darker in the corner there. So that's a burnt sienna with a little bit of pink. To get that really dirty colour colour, I'm going to use wet on wet in there to create a little bit of those forms so you can see that there's the little clusters of flowers inside each one. I'm going to leave that, like, so I'm going to focus on the second little cluster of flowers before I move on to the branches. That'll give that a chance to dry a little bit, because if I painted the little stems in next, the green will run everywhere, and it'll be a bit of a mess. So let's go with this one now. This one's a little bit more in shadow because it's sitting underneath the other one. So I'm going to go a little bit darker. I try not to put my fingers on the page because you get little white, you know, the oils from your fingers go on the page, and then oil resists water, which we're wearing painting with watercolor. And it causes a lot of problems. The amount of times I've gotten into a painting and then you're trying to work around, you know, these resistant little spots because you've put your fingers all over them. So I really try and train myself to put my fingers right on the very edges if I have to if it's bouncing around. People often ask me, why don't you tape your paper down? I find a lot of people demonstrate with just masking tape, but that doesn't successfully stretch the paper. All it does is stop the paper from moving around as you're painting, and often tears the edges. And I so love the decled edge of a piece of paper, so I don't do that. So I prefer to just sort of gently hold it, I guess. It's just something that I've worked with rather than against. I'm going to switch down to my lilla brush, my little size zero, and grab some greens here. I'm going to go quite a dirty, sort of sappy olive green. Get a little bit of that color in there. So again, another benefit of having a really dirty palette is you can just steal bits here and there. So that was a little bit of our musty pink with some other yellow and greeny colors to make a quite olivi green cause I think that'll give that nice vintagy kind of floral look. And then go to put in some of these little stems. I can go overboard with stems, and I definitely I can't say this often enough. I think I say in every online course, don't go too heavy with your stems like half, if that half the wits of what you think you want to paint them in at. Otherwise, you'll just be so devastated when they just look funny and wrong 'cause they're so heavy. So delicate and pretty this stuff. I love it. Alright, gonna go a little bit darker for download and then maybe bring them together. I think that's looking nice. Now, what I didn't do here was I forgot the little leaves. So on here, I've got these beautiful little fern like leaves, which are very quintessential of the yarrow. So I'm just going to paint those in as well. With just another bit more of that green, I think it'll help with holding it together a little bit more. Really just want that more sort of feathery feeling. A little bit more color in there. Give more yellow. A little bit more in there. I just amazing what you can do with just a littlest touch of pain. It can bring a whole thing to life. Alright. Yeah. I'm going to just quickly blow dry this so that I can keep moving for you. That's not an essential ingredient at all. I would suggest, if anything, go make yourself a cup of tea rather than blow dry because what tends to happen is you artificially dry the paper. The paper becomes more brittle and it doesn't perform as nice. I don't think there's much benefit to blow drying, apart from keeping you moving faster. If anything, go back and practice something else, go make cup of tea or walk around block. Come back. It'll be dry, ready to go again. For this instance, so I'm just going to dry it so that we can keep painting together. And we're back. So, you may have missed the importance of drying off our work, but if you refer back to testing and swatching, fountain pen does not do very well in wet paint. So we really need to make sure that we're doing a secondary layer and painting on top of not painting, drawing on top of totally dry paint for that successful, really crisp look. So this is totally dry now for us. I can get in with the fountain pen. I'll just make sure that it's definitely flowing nicely because, you know, sometimes these things can dry up on us, especially in a warm environment, like in here. But it's all good. So I'm basically going to replicate what I've done here on here and try and get the two like two dimensions, the two levels working really nicely together, so I don't have to add too much information. It's more about getting the gist and the essence of this beautiful flower on the page. So I'm going to start off where I kind of did before, go over here. So really cute little pedily things. I love them. They're so sweet. Try and do the stems last again. Be really tempting when we have those clustered dense, bitty kind of flowers, especially like a hydrangerT do stamped out the same flour all over. Getting irregular shapes and some variety in there is so important. Having more play. If you find that your paint is very heavy and you've gone for, say, the darker yarrow or something like that, it can really sort of play with the balance of things. I think it's important to sort of identify that you'll be drawing over the top of it, so you don't need to make the paint as heavy as what you might think you need to. So one of my pet peeves with mixed media is just how overworked it can look because it can be really exciting, testing and trialing all these things. But then by the time you have, then you've, bungled up an area, so you try and fix it, and then you do this and you do that, you'll end up with something that looks super dense and laden with paint. And it's just not my favorite look. I really love that vibrant, fresh feeling. A little bit lighter on the top there, and I'll just build up a bit more down here. Oh, this is looking cute. Can totally see this is like a wallpaper or something like that. Little daisy shapes. Make sure we get some regs in there, little friends, imperfects, lots and lots of imperfect, little shapes. If you ever find that your medium of choice, especially if you've got a pen in your hand starts to, like, glitch out a little bit, or it's just not quite working properly, don't keep testing it on your artwork. Go back to your little sketchpad somewhere and just go, Hang on, are you working properly? Hello. Uh, no mine stop drying out just a little bit. So just something to bear in mind, get it working again before you take it back here. Otherwise, you're going to persist and end up, making a little meal of it. So just take your time. We're not rushed. This is a really enjoyable, pleasurable process. And you've got time. Time is on your side. My hand is all over the page again. Right. A little bit more. So I'm doing little circles, petal shapes. My pens starting to go again. Might just give the tube a little squeeze. This is so naughty. It sort of pumps the ink down into the nib. There we go. And then definitely don't take that to your work because it'll be a bit of ink explosion. There we go. A rash. Now. The last time I did that, I put the pen down because I was just doing some trial work with it, and the nib just went all over the page. So you definitely don't want to do that. So it takes a little bit of time to build up these little marks, but you get that really luscious, full feeling with lots and lots of things without having to cover every single detail on the work. Might just do a few more And then I'm going to very lightly draw in these stems. So I might even just do one side. Might be enough to generate that line work there without having it fully outlined, because that's what I want to avoid I want to avoid that heavy outlined kind of look. Might even do all of them, might even do some without, you know, some free flowing without the watercolor there, and then down into there. And then I might just do, say, the underside of the leaf or something like that or just some light pen work through there. Just do one little final review. Final fun few marks. Sometimes when we get towards the end, we can either go one of two ways. We can go, Oh, just, like, quickly get this done. That never goes well. So don't do that to yourself. But if you're like, in the floor and just having a lovely time, then definitely just go for those last kind of marks because I think sometimes that's the glue that brings everything together. Alright. There we go. I think we're pretty much there now. I might even just give a little yarrow kind of makes me want to do seed packets or something like that. It's a really lovely little illustration. So that is our exploration of watercolor first, then our media on top. And we're still talking singular mediums. So here I just did the fountain pen. Initially, I did the pencil. You can choose whichever you like. As I've articulated, my challenge to you as an extension project would be to then go back to your other mediums and have a play again with what other mediums you could generate here. I did these as well. And I went wild. I did the sepia colored brush pen because that has a really soft country, very girly, feminine kind of feel. And then I went the complete opposte and I did the charcoal. So the charcoal is very, very, like, bold and energized and fun. I really loved it for the small marks because you obviously don't have such a fine nib to work with. So you have to be more thoughtful about the marks you make and how they all come together. So I can't wait to see what you come up with here. I would love you at least try two different mediums so that you can kind of get a feel for how all the different ones can work and interact. And you just never know which one you might fall in love with. Honestly, it could the amount of people that fall in love with charcoal just blows my mind. You might have noticed that I've smudged a bunch here as well. If you fall in love with charcoal, you don't have to go off and buy the fancy fixative. Just use hair spray. And that means it won't rub off everywhere, and it can also you can store it all pretty safely. Next up, we're going to explore a little thing I call the Goldilocks Effect, because working out where the sweet spot is the just right spot when it comes to when and where to utilize all these different things is something that I find most people struggle with. So we're going to give you a couple of little things to have a little trial with so you can find where works for you. It may not be the same sweet spot for me, but you will find your little sweet spot, and I can't wait to see where you take it. 6. The Goldilocks Effect: Okay, I mentioned we're going to investigate this Goldilocks Effect in this video. But first, I want to introduce you to our subject, which is this white oriental lily. And if you've ever attempted painting a white flower, you'll understand my absolute fear right now. Painting white flowers in watercolor is seriously challenging because we rely on the white of the page to articulate our um whites? Well, I do, anyway. It's my preference. So you have to really work your shadows very well and very hard to really get a white flower to lift off the page. And I thought, What a perfect way to marry now mixed media, which really can help enhance that shape as opposed to reduce it of just playing with the leaves here. I'm going to shuffle this off to the side, though, because I'm going to run us through a few of these little things, few tips and tricks to get us to the point where we can feel confident about approaching this. I don't know about you, but it can be quite intimidating. And I feel like, yes, the pony was maybe tricky, but this guy's a whole another level. Like, I kind of put the white lily in a bit of an advanced category. So I'm really excited to share this with you because I couldn't think of a better flower to really delve into colored mixed media with our watercolor. So I'm gonna slide this on Opit's side. Hopefully I don't knock it everywhere. Excuse me. What a ginormous, cumbersome vase to deal with. There we go. I'm gonna leave you there so I can see this beautiful thing. Alright. So before we jump too deep into anything further, I'm going to pull out my trusty testing and swatches chart. I'm going to just quickly throw in some of my colors. So for this final few videos, I'm going to work with my carnas No Color two, which is this set here. Might even go like this so you can see all the colors. I obviously don't use all however 80 something colors in one thing. I do have some colors that I really lean on a lot, and I will provide you a list of my absolute favorites. I especially love the lighter colors on dark laid washes. So let's have a little play with that one first. I'm going to grab the this one's called light cobalt blue, and I need a pencil. What have I done with my pencil? Hidden it from myself. Alright, so this is No color, too. When we do mixed so when we talk about color media, I like to write the media and the color name 'cause it actually can be quite mystifying when you come back and go, Oh, I can't remember exactly that color. I'll pick up that one. Didn't really work. So, this one's light, cobalt. Blue. Oops, still can't spell. And I'm gonna do direct and direct with water on top. So let's crab that water. Just light that over there. Alright. So water on top. As you can see, this liquefies in a really nice way. You still have a little mark left behind, but really the pigment activates and it smooths out just beautifully. This will also occur with other water soluble media. So if you've got watercolor pencils or if you've got those beautiful water soluble oil pastels, do this same exercise. I'm just going to do a few colors here. But as you saw earlier, I did have all of the colors. I mean, you can do as many as you like. But this is one that I did where you can really experiment. This is your colored media of choice, then you go through and you do your whole palette. So this is only, say 12, but then you'd have to do a few more sheets for the other one. But I think it's well worth the exercise because although you're in the same sort of bracket, you're in this water soluble crayon bracket. Each pigment actually can perform quite differently to one another. So say ultramarine blue, has a tendency to granulate in our watercolor media, but it also can do unusual things when you mix it into wet. So it's just something really fun and interesting to play with as you go. Pop that down away. Alright, got distracted into water. I need to get some water on here. Into water. So you get this really nice syrupy kind of feeling as you're drawing into the water. Now, I've mucked up my wash here, but I'll try and find something similar. There we go. And into the wet, which I sometimes, especially with this blue, I love it when you do it on dark you get that opaque nature, which you cannot replicate in any other way with watercolor. But I also really like similar tone. So that's a cool blue background wash with a warm blue on top. And it can just create, like, a different kind of sort of magic, and I really enjoy that. Let's just do another couple of colors, do a couple of my favorites. Now, this one is the What is it called? I've got it up here. It's called Sky blue, but I honestly think of it more of a cornflower blue or a periwinkle blue. So sky blue. And we'll do this. This is, like, my favorite all rounder when in doubt, use this color. I don't know why it's this one, but it just seems to work in so many instances and tie things together. If you take a look through some of my work, you'll see this color everywhere, like in everything. Alright, see how that one activates up. Nice. It's not often that I paint into these after the fact, but I do really enjoy the fact that you can, if that makes sense. I do like drawing into wet, though, that gets you get some really interesting effects when you can do that. And that's a really fun thing to play with. Like so. I like sew. So, again, it turns out really nice on the dark wash, which is always something I'm sort of intrigued to explore. Now, this is another favorite here. This is Sahara yellow. I think I lean towards because they're so beautiful and opaque, I lean towards the the lighter colors because you can get that freshness back in without necessarily throwing white in, you know, like it can bring in a little pop of color cause it's this really saturated, rich color. And it plays off the watercolor so beautifully. Mix that up. And then we're gonna rinse this off. And each brand, it doesn't matter what you use. If you have the ink tense pencils, that is so hard to say. The Derwent ink tense pencils or any other brand of watercolor pencils, still do this exercise because you're going to see just how different a lot of these pigments can perform as you're working. Alright, we'll just do this one. I'm going to do one last color after here, where I'll do see, that one I sort of takes a minute to peek through, and then it's like, Tara. I'm here. Alright. Where's my other little favorite dark chocolatey brown? This one. I've forgotten the color of this one. And once you get into them, they can be really tricky to remember because you peel the papers off, and then you got it. So this is why I did this chart here, to be honest, because I end up with all these little tiny nubs, and I have no idea of the names, but you can reorder the singular units, which is super helpful. It's just burnt sienna. Probably should have known that. Alright. And just as a dark color, as a reference. Ooh, do the same thing again here. Rinse that one off. Alright. And then into water, you can see that the blues have dispersed a lot more, but the yellow hasn't. So it's really interesting and important part of the process, I think, is understanding how they perform in different conditions. Mm hm, do this, last one. There we go. You might just really enjoy this process, as well, and you can do it with any combination of media and just enjoy it. Like, you could do a color pencil trial and you can do a watercolor pencil trial, and then you can do oil pastel would totally work as well. It's just a really good thing and it's really good for cataloguing how things will work in practice. So there we go. We've got a little bit of a feel of our media happening on the page now. I can sort of see where I really like. So, I mean, I just always love this sky blue, cornflower blue. I really, really like this really light blue on top of the dark wash, and I can kind of see how that might come into play here. And then the yellow is a lovely warm yellow, and it might bring a little bit of extra warmth into this, as well. And then the brown could be the perfect fit for these stamen here. So I've started to play and think about some of the colors that I might be using. Right. Next part of the process is having a little go at drawing this beautiful lily before we get into the Goldilocks Effect, because the Goldilocks one, we're going to have to do the same drawing a few times so that we can kind of get a feel for where we fall in terms of our tastes for mixing our medias. So from here, just gonna do a bit of drawing. Grab my piece of paper. I might even need two. Alright. I'm going to do pencil knowing that eventually I'm going to be doing colored media on top. So I'm not going to do any mark make or anything. I'm just going to get to the bones of how to structurally get this on the page. So basically, we've got a circular shape here, and the petals meet to the edge of the circular shape. So I'm just going to draw a really light big circle. I want to go quite big because these are big, glorious queen bee flowers that we really want to make the enormous centerpiece of our sort of work here. I'm going to do it direct on straightaway, and then we'll do a little bit more of an angle so we can see how we shift that angle. So direct on. I'm going to draw just some very basic shapes for petals. And they come off in threes like this on top. And then on the bottom layer is another three petals. So we've got the very, very basics of a flower shape happening there. The next thing I want you to do is very lightly sketch in the vein down the center of each one of those petals. Like that. And then we've got the stamen, which we can kind of just throw in for now because they all go to the center. And then there's the little senago. There we go. So now go to try and sketch in these petals with a little bit more vitality and excitement. So I'm just going to do that light lightw light and dark line, starting with the topmost petals. I've got a little bit of a crinkle and a curl happening on the edges of the petal, so I'm just going to roll with that a little bit. And then we're gonna do this lower level, which we'll do sort of darker because it's sitting down low. And then we can just do a little bit more of a firm line for this center vein. And there we have a very simplistic Wi. I bet you didn't know you could draw that, but I promise you, it is like when you break things down into much simpler shapes, it can get you a long, long way ahead. The next trial I want you to do is we're going to put it on a bit of an angle. So it's the same principle, but we're just conforming, changing the shape a little bit. So I'm going to actually change the shape so that the lily points outwards. So it's going to point this way. And I've got more of an oval shape because the opening is gonna shut a little bit, and we're not going to probably seeing any stem or leaf still because it's hiding. But then the bottom of the base where the petals start is going to sit back lower, as well. And the same kind of thing, I'm going to put my three top petals in I'm going to move that paper towel because I keep carrying it around with me, like this. And then like this for the back row. And look, we've got one pointing in a whole new direction. I'm going to try and draw this one with a little bit more uh specifics as well. So I'm going to really try to get into those more crinkly shapes and stuff because it will help me articulate it with color because I really start to look at where the shadows fall when I'm sketching, especially when I'm drawing. It's one of the key things to help you translate this flower onto the paper. If you go straight in and just go with the colors straight away, you might end up with, like, quite a disproportionate looking thing. If you want to get it a little bit accurate to what you're seeing in real life, a drawing in between steps one and two will actually help you so much. So I'm just going to have a look here, get these we got these beautiful crinkles right on the edge and it's got a bluntish kind of petal and more wrinkles here. And we'll do this other one up here again. It's quite broad petal, this one. But then it curls over at the end. So we don't see the whole thing. And then this one is quite the challenge because we want to make sure that we're getting it accurate to what I'm seeing. So it's going to have to have a bit of a curl that way. Like so. And then this one it is a bit shorter because that's going to help create the sense of form there. This one, again, is going to curl outwards a little bit. And this one gonna curl Alva. It might even curl completely over. And then we're going to do those central veins again, just lightly sketch them in. Like so. And then I'm going to do it a little bit more formally because they actually have quite strong central veins. It's almost like a double. And The central vein to the flower is one of the key defining things for helping you understand the way that the petal is flowing in space. If you just do dead straight, it's going to look totally flat. You really need to think about the way that it's moving along the edge of the petal, so it might be a bit more of a curve, and that's going to give it that undulating shape. And now for the stamen again. So this time around, this will quite central. I'm going to point them in the direction because they generally shoot with the access point, so I'm going to put them up here. I love these for being that little bit random eccentric part of a lily. And go right down to the central point. So as you can see, our first sketch, it feels like a lily, but it's probably a bit straight on and a bit flat. And then the minute you give it a little bit of angle and a little bit more thought, you have something that has a lot more energy and vitality. So I think I'm going to roll with this one as we go along, and I'm going to take this into our Goldilocks Effect. Might need to throw a little few leaves in there. Actually, now I'm thinking about it. So knowing that that's the access point, that's the base, I'm going to do a stem out here, and I might just throw a couple of leaves in so that I've got something else to add into the mix here. I might even do a bud so that we've got, like, more than just a flower sitting on a page. I think it's always nice to think about it in context. And then you got more opportunities to work out what to do with your mixed media. So there we go. Small amendment, but we're going to do some leaves in there as well, cause I think it just gives it a bit more life. Have a bit more creativity. The leaves themselves are really long and strappy, so they can be a really designed, interesting compositional element too there. But for the moment, I've just sort of thrown them in as I see them. We'll talk about composition in the next video. From here, we do the Goldilocks Effect. So we are going to do three thumbnails across the top here. One, two. Oh, they're definitely not the same size. You're welcome to rule these. I'm not one for a ruler. But if you're someone that much prefers a little bit of neatness to your page, you're welcome to rule them. In our first thumbnail here, we're going to do watercolor only. In our third box, we're going to have pastel only or color pencil or whatever medium you are. I'm not judgmental here. Just work with what you've got pastel only. And then in the middle, we're going to find the blend of just right. So I'm going to very loosely pencil in a very rough sketch because this is thumbnail, right? We're not putting a lot of energy here. It's more about exploring and experimenting and finding that sweet balance of how much watercolor to add and how much pastel to add. Because I think it can be overwhelming when you've got this many pastels to work with and all the colors in the rainbow and your palette here and what to bring in where, at what point and when it is really, really tricky to work your head around. It also can be the fun part, as well, which is what this exercise is for is learning and feeling it out before you get to a final work and just dive in and go, Oh, I've just completely overcooked for this. How can I fix it? We do the prework first here. Let's take out all the overwhelm and just make this inspirational. Alright. So we'll just very lightly sketch in my lily here. What have I done here? I've missed a petal there. And then we'll do the leaf, another leaf and the budge, and the stamens. Do myself a favor and maybe do the little sketch this time. Do circle right center of circle. Like so and then we'll do the branch, do leaf and Alright, so that's just a little framework, so I don't fuss around too much and get all anxious about trying to get the proportions right or whatever. This is very much about feeling it out in color. We do a lot of prepwork in this instance. I think the temptation to just dive in and go for it can be really extreme. But putting in this prepwork really, really helps with that overwhelming feeling of, like, what and when and how. So for watercolor, I'm going to try and throw in some colors, get a feeling for how I might like these shadows and this representation of the lily to show up. I might even paint a background in just for fun. I'm just going to really lightly wash in some colors. I love a blue for a shadow rather than just gray. I think gray can look really flat, but a blue can really lift and give something a very natural feeling in the work. I've moved my paper towel now. I've done myself a disservice. There we go. Alright. Might even work with the smallest brush, 'cause I've got this teeny, tiny thumb now, right? Like I don't need this flopping brush, and then just do a little bit of colour. I'm not trying to be too analytical with the color, but it's just a very little thumbnail to explore what we're working with here. Might even do a little bit of brown All right. And then do this branch. Kind of want it a bit darker. There we go. And we'll pop in this here. So one of the huge advantages of white flowers is that you can get really playful with how you integrate them in negative space. So using the leaf or anything behind them to also help articulate it on the page. And then I'm going to go a bit lighter for a branch up there. I think I'll definitely do a bud. Yet. And I think I'll definitely do a little background here as well, because of that white flower, when you throw in a background, you can help define it in a whole other way, as well. So I might even do, like, a dark really dark navy blue indigo kind of color for a background might be nice. It'll give it this lush rich feeling. So really trying to throw it together and not being too pedantic. It's about exploring. And if you don't get your background color right the first time, don't worry about it. Just try it again. You got plenty of room. Do some more thumbnails. I know snails can I don't know. I feel like people poo poo somenils, but honestly, they are the best little tool for working out new things. Things that you might go, Oh, it's gonna take me ages. If you're thinking that, then it's time to do a little thumbnail, just to make sure it's definitely go to work before you ruin your beautiful work? Because you might have done all the effort of painting in the lily, and then you muck up the background by picking the wrong color. I mean, I've been a culprit of that so many times. Cause I, Oh, no, color. This will be fine. Didn't go to plan. Alright. So very closely. Just put that in there. So you can see how that lily form is really starting to sing with that dark ground. I think that's really going to work. I like that a lot. It's still got a nice softness to it, though, without being overly saturated. Alright, so there we go. You might just do the get a little burnt sienna umber for the stamen, just so that they're in there. Cool. Alright, that's my little all watercolor thumb now. Now I've got to go to the other end and do all pastel. So as tempting as it is to do white pastel, I think I'm going to try and reserve No. I'm trying to reserve the whites, and I won't use any pastel in the white areas at all, but I'll use a number of other colors to articulate this one. For me, the beauty of mixed media, I think, so it doesn't matter how many crayons you have. You might have a set of 24, right? But you only have those ones to work with. It's not like watercolor, where you can mix any color or any, I can mix any color I want here, but I'm limited to what I've got here. So it adds a whole new dimension of problem solving in the mix. I find it a really interesting challenge. So I don't have the colors I would mix here to put here, but I have to find alternatives and troubleshoot my way out of it. So I'm going to reach for some of my favorites. As I mentioned, really light blue. I've got a silvery gray, my sky blue, cornflower blue or whatever. There's a sort of warm brown, and I love this cobalt blue that I've got here. So I've got a little bluey palette. I might pick a nice teal as well for the leaf. And the bud might be the green. Yep. Alright See how we go. And if that's not bright or colorful enough, I might have another go. Alright. Actually, we'll do the stamen on that, too. And then the do them, 'cause I would struggle to put them in on top. And then I'm going to use the power of these little hand drawn marks to help make the shape happen as opposed to the fluidity of the watercolor. And I'm going to need to use bolder colors to inform that form as opposed to darker shadows. Like, I could do I could add in, like, really deep colors. But then I think that sort of sucks the life out of it. You can have so much more fun and learn so much more about color when you get more playful in what you think is just a plain colored thing. Like, it's a white lily, yeah, but I've got like how I got eight colors in my hand to help try and make it come to life. I love a hand drawn mark. I think that's what always keeps bringing me back. And it's probably why I haven't done too much in, like, mixing watercolor and gouache or watercolor and acrylic ink or anything like that, because I just love the combination of a hand drawn mark with watercolor. I think they just marry so beautifully. Whoops jumping out of my hand like grasshoppers. Alright. Maybe just do a little bit like that. Look, I could sit here all day and keep fussing around with it, but let's keep moving. I'll just do that stem, do that one up there. I'll color in these guys with that dark green, add in some of that blue to help that one, and then we'll do that green for the and the bud. It's a nice way of practicing your drawing marks, as well, I think, in just small format. You never know what might happen. Like, you might do something like, I'm not really sure about this. Let's just see what happens. And I think that's the right frame of mind to be in because this is not final work. This is why we're doing the thumbnails. I think it's a really, really important thing to just sort of dabble around and give yourself time to explore. I'm just going to rip the little bit of paper off this little guy. I end up with all these teeny tiny nubs because I love these crayons so much. I call them crayons, because they feel like crayons in my hand, like I'm a little kid again. But they are technically pastols. I think crayons probably are technically pastels, too. All right. I was gonna throw in a bit of a background. So we got a bit of an idea, like a comparison point for the watercolor versus pastel. And while I'm doing this, I'm thinking, you know what? I think I really like the watercolor background more than anything. I think this drawn background is going to look too messy, and it's gonna be really hard to use in an effective way. It's a bit harder to control. I don't feel like it's gonna look quite flat and dimensionless, but maybe there's a way I can use it at some point. Alright. I'm gonna have really blue fingers after this. Alright. And back down around again. I mean, there's 1 million ways that you can bring this to life on the page as well. Like, if you wanted to show it in a bit more realistic context, you could get right into doing a lot of leaves and stuff around. For the sake of time today, I'm just going to focus on a single flower. But of course, if that's something you're really enjoying and you're so loving the lily, then start building out more, have a little experiment. Look at my hands with how else it might come together. Okay, so from here, I'm going to pick my favorite bits out of this and my favorite bits out of this, what felt good, what looks good, what gets me excited. And I'm gonna put them together in the middle. This is going to be slightly different for everyone. So you might be leaning. You might just be loving how that pastel looks and how textural and interesting it feels. Otherwise, you might be like, Oh, I'm more pro watercolor, but I love how that expressive mark really helps bring it to life in another way. So, we got to do our little pencil sketch just for a little favor to ourselves. Do it again. Otherwise, we cause problems. Gets a little more wild and loose every time I do this. Right. I mean, it's a very simple composition, ultimately, but I'm really happy with how it's looking so far. Alright, I'm going to start with that light blue again because I love that light blue. What the trickiest part here is, do you dive in with watercolor first, or do you start with pastel, or do you work with them alternating, or do you do all the pastel first and then do the watercolor or all the watercolor first, then do the pastel? That's completely up to you. You'll watch me do it and you'll go, that just makes no sense because everyone's brain works differently. So I have a I really enjoy sort of intermingling them, and I am so familiar with how this media works that you'll see me like put a mark down and then quickly work in with a bit of watercolor and then work into that again, as well. So it's very much more of a practice hand thing. I think the more that you experiment with this kind of thing, I mean, ultimately, you can go and do the pony and the yarrow with this same technique, and you'll discover all kinds of different ways to utilize these media together. So I'm going to try and do this in a little fumnail version first, so we can sort of find what I find as a sweet spot. Whereas some of you might be going, I love that colored background. I'm leaning more this way. So I'm going to try and do a fair bit of pastel in the flower because that'll lift it forward and I'll have a mostly solid watercolor background. Okay. And it's so funny 'cause it's like, what's that? Like, eight by 10 centimeters oring. It's tiny little artwork and there's so much to think about. And if you don't get it right the first time, just give yourself some grace and a little do another one. See how you go. Go to use those same colors again 'cause I really liked how that blue came into the mix. And there and up there for the semens. Doing my concentration tongue. You'll see me do that a couple of times in the rest of this course, I'd say, sticks out whilst I'm trying to think. Now, I've got a few marks down. That's a good place to start. I'm then gonna get 'cause this is so much softer and it has so much more control over what color is on my brush, I'm going to now brush in a little bit of color to help that mixing happen. And these upper petals, I'm going to do really light and washy. And the back ones will be a little bit less. So I need to get back in there with my crayon. Make sure it's all harmonious. You really got to have your play cap on just let your inner child run wild here and see what happens. But that's already feeling a little more balanced and a little more fresh to my eye than what I see elsewhere. I'm then gonna do a little bit of a Sten down. I feel like I can be a little bit lighter handed when I have it all mixed together as well, which might feel a bit strange to some, but I really do like that sort of lighter touch when it comes to mixed media. Keeps it all fresh and happy. Now, I might do that one there, and then maybe I'll go to a green here and do a bit of an outline for that one. And then maybe I'll do fully outlined here. It might look cool even to not have anything filling that and just working with the outlines might be nice. And that's the budge. Might need a little bit of something. Like so, and then I'm going to get that lovely, deep indigo kind of color, which would have been a pains gray and palo mix. I just picked it off my palette so I don't even know. I'll do. And we'll throw that in again. What do it do? I'm trying not to be too pedantic here. I want to save my energy. Like, there's I don't want to see, like, three immaculate, perfectly sketched out thumbnails. You've missed the point if you've done that. I think it's more about really feeling things out, and you'll get an immediate gut reaction about what's working and what's not working. There'll be things that you just automatically gravitate towards and go, Oh, I just love how that feels. But look how much that white flower pops when we put a background in. I love that effect so much. Really utilizing I think one of the best things about watercolor, and I keep gravitating towards it is that it works so beautifully with negative space, and it's like a visual puzzle. Alright, rinse that off. And there is our first array. And you might be wondering what this real estate down here is for because we're going to do another three because we've got one more Goldilocks Effect to explore out, which, let me just sketch out my boxes here. This one's a really interesting one. This one I get confronted with in classes all the time. I find that some students that are really light touch, really hesitant to use much pigment, really hesitant to get in there and really get some grunt on the page. And then there's the heavy handed crew. I tend to err on the heavy handed side, and it's always me trying to pull back on the reins as opposed to add more. So, of course, we got to find the sweet spot, the just right. When I talk about light touch, I'm talking like extreme lack of form and contrast. I think that's what tends to happen is that everything is too gentle. It can be really easy because you're working with these washy, soft, lovely colors, but it ends up flat. Especially when in mixed media, we kind of want that pizzazz and energy. It's nice to sort of really delve into that. So I'm just going to do our little sketches again. I might do myself a favor and just do all three at once. You'll be pro at sketching lies by the end of this, and you won't even think it's a tricky flower. It's gonna roll with that same composition again because we'll just explore a different idea across the same layout. And I'm not even confident I would roll with this in the final painting, but it is it's just a simple, very simple way of looking at the lily. Tongue twister. I'm going to put that one up there just so I've got that for reference by myself, too. Let's start with the light touch. I think this is what I come across the most. It's actually it's actually probably pretty close. Light touch, very gentle. They might just go with all very soft colors. What tends to happen? Let's find some nice light colors is we'll end up with a very colored in flat look. So I'll end up with, like, we'll just go like this, and we'll just paint the whole thing in 'cause that's gonna be safer. And there's no risk to be taken. So I'm just gonna go like the hah. The other thing that can cause a really light touch or, like, a weaker representation of paint on the page is really poor quality paints. If you're working with your kids paints that are, you know, sitting in a flat plastic set and they are really bright in the palette, that usually indicates to me there's a lot of chalk and filler in there, and you're not getting much representation on the page. It's worth having a look at those Mika door set because they are the most cost effective set for vibrancy and color. The cheaper sets just have less pigment. When you pay more, you're literally just paying for pigment. That's the most expensive part of paint. Oh, I've got to do a little bit of mixed media here, but I might go really, like, conservative with it, and I'll go like, around the outside edges. And then I might do, like, a really light colored vein here. I'm exaggerating this in a big way, just so you know, but it's just some things that I really noticed in a lot of my classes. And I'm just gonna color that in pretty flat 'cause I don't know what else to do with that. And then I'll go here and then just do this one up here. And then I'll probably, like, what am I gonna do? Grab this Gregan. Oh, no, I need to put the veins in. This one. It'll be very, very soft, very gentle. And let's go with that one. I mean, it's not the worst thing in the world, right? It's not the end of the world if you're painting really lightly and you've got to go gently with it. I just want to push you to try and add a little more punch and flavor to it and see what happens because you might just trip yourself into, like, the next level of experimentation and play and really allow yourself to delve a little deeper. In this one over here, I've got heavy handed. This is where I tend to fall. If I'm having a bad day, I will gild the lily. Not even kidding. That is the perfect pun for me when it comes to working heavy handed. So what tends to happen is I'll go in with the shadows first, and I'll just go way too hard. And it'll be way too dark. Maybe even this dark blue, and I'll go, Alright, well, I'm just drawing it in now. I'll just keep going causes know, it's game over pretty much, and it's looking like a navy flower, not a white flower. And I'm going to fill that whole one in. And then I'm going to go purple because I'm crazy. He chi chi. But I still want to try and generate that Lily look, so maybe I'll add in some of that blue. Oh, I actually really like that. Maybe I'll do the whole thing blue here. I think it's when you're doing decisions on the fly that you end up really heavy handed 'cause you're like, loving what's happening in the moment, but then you're not pulling yourself out to go, Oh, actually, that's not really working. And then I've forgotten to put these semen in, so let's do that again. And we'll go like bright orange or something 'cause we love color. And then let's keep going. Let's see how hard I can push heavy handed and make it look diabolical. I think the other thing that can happen is you're like, I've just opened up a whole new world literally with my mixed media, and I'm so excited about how this is all looking that I want to do everything all at once. That's not the best time for this. Let's save that and keep doing more thumbnails to keep exploring and playing as you go. Alright, I'm gonna do half here. I'm going to do something else over here. We tend to get really excited with color as well, we're like, look at all these amazing colors at my fingertips. I'm going to use them. Oh. Go over here, and then I'm going to color in this guy or actually, let's go with this mega green. This green is, like, insane. It's like a love hate that I have for it. Like in the right time and place, that is the best green on Earth. But in a soft white lily, it's probably going to be a little bit dominant. Alright, let's do a bit of a green line over there, and then we got to throw in a background, and I'm just gonna go to town with purple. Actually, we're probably gonna do slightly different colours everywhere, 'cause that's more like what I see. Just a bit, everything. I mean, there's a time and a place for this, and if you can nail this combination, I think it can look really cool, but it's more a matter of, like, learning your restraint and knowing when to pull back and going, You know what? I think I've done my dasher. Like, I don't need to put anymore on. 7. Coloured Mixed Media: Lily: I may have given the premise of this video away in the past one. We are going to take our little sketches here and formalize them into a finished artwork. I couldn't be more excited. It's going to be a little more to it than when we were doing our peony and yarrow because we're going to think a little bit about our backgrounds, as well. I think it's just a nice way to introduce it, especially when we've got all these beautiful colors to play with and we want to explore. So just doing myself a favor. I'm not going to fill this whole piece of paper. I think that's actually going to look nice as, like, a smaller sort of insert with a rough edge. That's kind of what I'm feeling right now. So I'm going to very lightly pencil in this lily that we've been sketching so fondly. I'm gonna basically aim for something like this. And then, but without the pencil 'cause I'm gonna use the met the crayons to do the rest, I'm just gonna very carefully put in these petals. Yeah, that's gonna look good. And a dam in, and then we'll do the jute. I might just Do I want a pencil in the leaf? Noa, I want pencil in the leaf. Okay, that's me with pencil down. So, same kind of thing. It's gonna be sort of feeling it out as we go. We have had some time to experiment here, so I kind of know that I want to pick up that light blue crayon and start there because that's where I've started previously. The only consideration I've got that's soil is shaking me up a little bit is I really want to get those stamen in nice and early so that I don't accidentally paint put crayon where I can't then draw them in after the fact. So I'm just going to do them really quickly. I love those drawing marks for the stamen it's just so fun. And then I'm going to do I might even do that very last, the brown bits because they may bleed into the water if I do it now. I'm going to have a little glance at my beautiful flower here to play with and start drawing. So it's very much a sort of intuitive. It's hard. It's an intuitive process for me. I've practiced this a lot. You may not want to start there, if that makes sense. You start what feels what feels the right place for you. And if you're really stuck, I would follow my guidance there. And that way, you'll have somewhere to go from. But honestly, so long as you're getting that beautiful lily form down, I think you can't really go too wrong. So it's basing it all on that work we've just done. And sort of leaning into those curiosities and those chances to play, like, Oh, maybe if I just add in a little bit of crayon there, I can get that feel like that match that petal to that petal, I guess is what I'm trying to do there, and then a little bit more. I love the roughness of it, and that's something that I'm always trying to generate with it. And I need to get a little bit darker at the end there. Where's that Biji kind of color? Get that vein in. And then I kind of want to do that again elsewhere, so it's not a solo traveler. Alright. Get a little bit more paint. So you can see I'm really intermingling the two. It doesn't necessarily make sense to do that if you have just straight colored pencils. If you've got a water soluble medium, they do generally like to talk to one another, so it can be a really fun thing to sort of experiment with the way that you bring them together. If I was just using colored pencil, I would be doing all the watercolor first, waiting for it to dry, and then adding the colored pencil after the fact. Let's soil. Let's see. Gonna go. Trying to get some of those veins in there so it feels nice and fresh and free. Okay. And get that blue back. Oops. I like to sort of twist them and maneuver them in interesting ways as well, then you'll get sort of more organic marks. I really need that cobalt. There it is. Go bright. Do a little bit more there. A little bit more there. Having a darker center always helps the form of the flour. It can be really easy to not worry about getting it too dark in the center, but then you end up with something that looks quite flat. I'm just sort of having a play, filling in little bits here and there, might even get my favorite favorite blue into the mix now, trying not to be heavy handed because I know that about myself. I know that I tend to want to add in and add in and add in and add in. So just bear that in mind. Okay. I might put those in the orange blue of these stamens are the opposite color. They play off like a contrast to the blue, so that's why I like the blue, as well. But I'm just worried that they might bleed into one another. So I'm just being a bit cautious about how I go about that. And then might just do a couple more strokes of watercolor in there. Get that flowing. Alright. Now I'm going to do my leaf, which I have not placed in pen or pencil or whatever. I'm just going to try and dive in and do it. It was my really trying to come around to green. I've always, you know, not been the biggest fan of green, but I'm really trying hard to come around to green. Go to utilize that dark ground to really emphasize that white shape. I think that's why I was so desperate to share a white flower with everyone, 'cause you have so much more opportunity to play and leverage with the media. And then this gonna go up here. I don't want it to be one big flat green leaf doing nothing, so I want to make sure I've got some of those strappy feelings going on there and maybe a bit of blue to really enhance that bottom bit there and bring it down into a stem where the stem would kind of go. Bring that make it a little bit lighter. Yeah, the stem's quite a bit lighter than the other The leaves are quite luscious and dark and the stem's quite lush. Alright. Now, what did I do? I did watercolor for this next leaf. Gonna try and leave it a bit rough and ready on the edges because I think that can have a really nice framing effect. And then this stem over here is going to go up to the bud. I might just try and extend it a little bit further, so it's clear of the clear of the lily a bit more. That was the only thing that was bugging me with my other composition was that it was sort of competing a little bit too much with the flower. And let's go like this and do a bit of green. I think it's like this childlike quality to it, where you can just sort of get in there and get so absorbed and not worry about anything that can be a really fun playful to it. Like, I wasn't gonna pick up that mint green, but something about it just screamed out to me just then. I'm like, Sure, let's give it a go. I think it could work. Let's do it. Make sure it goes in a couple of other places. And then I think I need to have a little ochre or something to balance that out, so it doesn't look too nuts. Yeah. All right. Now, time to have a little play with that background. So I think what I want to do is just go straight in with the crayon because I'm kind of building this frame at the same time and just see what happens. And then, you know, if it doesn't work out, it doesn't work out, we can probably just delete this video, yeah. Alright. I'm gonna draw in my little side frame. And this is my little shape that I'm going to color in. I go quite hard with it, if you go lighter, you just end up with a really textured look. I like the look where you can kind of see that it is definitely hand drawn and it's definitely very different to watercolor, but most of the background is disguised with pigment. Alright. And then what did I do? I'm very much using my last little map as guideline here. Then we did the blue. Oh, I do that all the time. Always shocks me, no matter what I do. That's why I have jar, just of all the little nubs of my um, pastels now, don't forget these little holes in here. I think the not so secret secret is the less perfect, it actually is, the better. I don't want every little space to be perfectly filled with color. I think allowing a little bit of white come through, allowing a little bit of that handfel come through is really important. So don't sit here and go and try and make it so perfect that no one can tell that it's, you know, made by hand or whatever or no one can tell where things went wrong or anything. That's what makes you human. That's what makes the artwork interesting. It's one of my mentors once said, Don't shut all the doors. If you make a work too perfect, you've shut all the doors. You can't let anyone in to enjoy it. So don't shut all the doors. Make sure that there's a little few imperfections that make the work intriguing and really exciting. It's actually a really positive quality in the work. Alright, going to go like this. Alright. I'm probably pulling some really odd faces. I'm grinding these pastels into the paper. I did not think about that when I decided to do this one. Okay. I see so many of my students in, like, live workshops bending themselves into pretzels, trying to get around into the nooks and cranis. Just turn your paper around. Do yourself a massive favor. This one. Alright. Don't want to go. I want this sort of balanced space. The outcomes for this are sort of infinite. I really am so excited to see how everyone's turns out. I just have this picture in my mind, and I don't know if it's the same for you, but that's what I'm kind of leaning on here is that, like, lilies sit in these really lush, beautiful tropical gardens, and that's where I want this one to belong to. So that's what I'm kind of leaning on. Is that the same blue? That's not the same blue? Alright. Alright. There's my little corner there. Now I got to fill this central space so I know what's going on. Uh, might even do another leafy kind of shape. It's more just implied shapes, yeah. Like not everything's gonna look exactly like a leaf, but there'll be curvatures and things that sort of go, I look like I'm from the leaf family. Too. Get right up in there. Alright, now I might go back to watercolor just to fill in those little holes down there. Got a bit more bluey. There we go. Right into that tear family. Now that that paint is dry, it shouldn't all run into one another. The further you hold your brush back, the less control you have. So if you find just someone that is, like, really particular about control and wanting everything to be perfect, I really highly recommend trying holding your brush way further back. Like, you can hold it all the way back here. There's no rules. It's just art. It's not there's no particular. No one's gonna come strap you over the knuckles when you're holding your brush wrong. Okay, so I feel like I need one more tear one. Based on my sketch, I just need a little bit more contrast up here, one more leafy shape. I'm trying to verbalize my internal monologue. So some of it may or may not make sense to you. But it's just sort of things, considerations, thoughts, ideas that happen along the way for me as I'm painting. And you might come across similar, or you may not, or this might help or it may not. You can also turn off the sound if it's just annoying you and you can just watch. Alright, that's probably enough. That's going to stick up out of there. And then I'm going to go and go back into this one and paint in here. So now it's like a bit of a puzzle piece here. I'm trying to find all the colors and all the nice things that'll help lift this work and make it feel super lush and jungly. Like the vision in my mind. I think half the time I'm working with the reference in front of me and half the time I'm working with my impression of that flower and how it lives in my mind. I think it's just a nice way to put more personal imprint in the work. And now get this one. I need to do one more here somewhere. Maybe here. It might have been a wrong call. Let's go. Here. I don't really want it right in the center too I will look weird. And I'm gonna go sort of lighter for the rest, I think, so that it feels like it's working its way up to the sky. Stick that little bit out 'cause I think that actually, you know what? That's giving me an idea. There it is. This one's gonna stick out a bit more. I love it when things pop out of the frame. And then bring that back down. Small interlude, idea on the fly. Keep bringing that up. Really, really not striving for perfection here, really having a lot of fun with mixing up some colors and painting beautiful flowers. Alright. Bring that one down there. And we're just about there. I am painting at warp speed right now, as well. There is no pressure for you. That's one of those times that the paint really interestingly activates. I kind of like that. I'll make it work a bit more. Maybe in there too. Um, of course, you're more than welcome at any given moment if you're just like, hang on hang on hang on too fast. What's going on? Just pause. Hit, stop, catch up on yourself. Take your breath. And then you can regroup. And you don't even have to paint alongside me. Just hit pause. You do it at your own speed. Make sure you've got a really yummy cup of tea. Everyone has a really nice box of tea, stuffed in their cupboard for a nice special occasion. This is your special occasion. Have it now. Really enjoy the moment. There we have it. There's my little lily. I'm kind of licking that one's pretty fun. I can't wait to show you what we're doing next. In the meantime, I have got some examples my challenge to you as a bit of an extension project is to rewind the clock and go and do these same exercises with either the Yarrow or the pony, just as another way of exploring these same skills over again because every time we practice is a little bit better. We're going to get a little bit more confident and we're going to utilize and listen to things a little bit differently. So I've got these couple of examples. This is a ponia that I did that was in mixed media. I did a very roughly drawn, very, very I was feeling very, very fluid this day, but I was really enjoying just the rough marks against such a beautiful flower. I thought the juxtaposition of those two things was really interesting. And then this is actually a lily that I did in the first exercise. So this is a pencil version. So I've created the outlines of the lily, but then I've taken it a little bit further by putting a ground in. So it's the same kind of thing. It's actually a similar kind of layout, actually, it's funny. But I've taken I've used the pencil as my media as opposed to color. So that's just something you can utilize all these flowers in every which way and really just the whole if you do this whole thing, and use the flowers each of the flowers in each of the different techniques, you're going to end up with this incredible mental catalogue of all these different things to play with and every chance every time you play is a chance to learn something new. From here, we've got our final project, which I have been hanging for. I've sort of hinted at it along the way, but we are going to bring all three of the flowers together in one final painting, and I can't wait to share the process with you. 8. The Final Project: Thank you for being on this wild adventure with me so far. I know it's been a lot, and I cannot wait to take you to this final step. First of all, I thought I'd show you some of the works that I've created myself where I've got this combination of the No Color two and watercolor and the balance that I find as my sweet spot, as we've learned in the Goldilocks Effect. You may not even notice it necessarily, but when you look closely in here, there's all kinds of little crayon marks that I just love that super spontaneous expressive mark in and amongst the watercolor. I think it gives it a whole extra energy, plus the richness and pigmentation of that color is just so potent, like this blue just here, and then I've used a little bit of that teal that we only just recently used. I wanted to talk about this because we're sort of talking final piece here, like there's this huge pressure. I still want you to have your experimental hat on when you get to the end work. I don't want you to feel the pressure to create something super final, but I want you to sort of start to think about other elements that can come into play, like our background or just that balance of how much watercolor versus how much pastel. This is another one here where I've really gone to town with a lot of deep blue crayon. It's again, mostly watercolor, but then I've just got these rough marks throughout, and I just love how that feels. This one here, I utilize the watercolor or the pastel a lot to give to work my color balance a bit more. I think this one was a really interesting exercise where I wanted a little bit more warmth. It was feeling very cool. So I worked in some of the peachy past kind of things. If I'd put two layers of watercolor with a cool toned greeny yellow and then put a warm toned yellow on top, it just ends up looking muddy, but you get a chance here to have a little play on with your color blending, balancing, and that kind of thing. This one here, as I mentioned that green in the last episode where I was just like, This green does my head in, but it's also, like, the fun one to bring out when you just need a little bit to bring a little party to it all. So I've used that electric green throughout this one, and I've tried my best to really have a play with the colors here and balance them out carefully. So for me, a lot of mixed media is coming down to creating really interesting color dynamics, definition through expressive marks and helping generate form because you really can, like, give it a big boost with those drawn marks. This is a more recent work of mine. I think the color the pastel is a lot more subtle until you start looking, and then you realize it's everywhere because it's the background. And I've worked it all the way through, and I've done it really roughly. I love that really heavy texture that comes with it, and it was a gray because it was all feeling very punchy, too colorful, too silly. And then I put a gray background in, and it just helped calm it down because that's definitely something that I'm always trying to imbue in my work. It's a real sense of peace and calm, whilst also playing into energy. It's like a bit of a crazy balance. This one here is actually an original work. So this one, I've used that sky blue, that favorite cornflower blue all throughout this one. You may not see it straight away, but once you do see it, you can't unsee it. And it is the best little counterbalance to all these warm tones in the bankias. And I really love that. And then I've used it to help define edges of all these crazy Bankia leaves because they're so jagged that I found when I was painting it with watercolur was looking too soft and friendly. And then I worked in the more looser free flowing marks, and it just made sense all of a sudden. And finally, I think that's finally. Finally, we've got this one here, which I went for a super intense background because I had such a delicate flower. And then I've used that sky blue again, and it is helping define those petals. It's put in some of the shape. It's helped some edges here, and I've left a lot of white space around to help that bring together. I've also used that green again. So although I don't use a lot of green traditionally, and you can see here, like I've done everything in my power to not use much green. I have brought it in in little pops through the pastel that I've used there. So I really like a sort of more restrained feeling. The more I play, though, the more I go, You know what? Let's give it a little more. Let's try this. Let's paint into it. So that's just a constant experimentation for me. So with that in mind, there's lots of different things to play with here, and you will have seen a whole bunch of different compositions that I've just made. I'm going to very quickly articulate a few things around my thoughts on composition before we get into our final project. Okay, I've just cracked open my very fresh, very clean sketchbook here because I'm going to do a little bit of composition and nutting out how I want to do this. So essentially, our final project today is to bring the yarrow, the peony, and the lily all together into one bouquet ish kind of composition. I'm going to give you a few tips and tricks on how I go about it because I love working from live flowers. But when we do that in a bouquet sense in, like, a still life, I think it can be almost overwhelming and you don't know where to start, but we've just successfully built our little puzzle pieces. It's just a matter of bringing them together, and that's what I wanted to explore in this one. So I want to work on a vertical. I know that much. I always love working on a vertical. I don't even know why. Even a landscape, I love working on a vertical. And then we've got our lily, our peony and the yarrow. Let's just do a little quick, little thumbnail there. And we've got our lily. And you can kind of work with the shapes that you've already made here. Peony, Very fluffy and, like, so. And I want to bring those three things in a composition together. What tends to happen is we get a little bit jumbled on the page and the hierarchy gets lost. So in my mind, priority number one is our Lily. Priority number two is the peony, but we've got to be careful because it's a very strong dominant color. So playing the peony off the lily is going to be a little interesting compositional challenge. And then three is our yarrow, which I've essentially included to be a little bit of a filler flower. As you can see here in the bouquet. I've got some roses in here, but the florist has so beautifully put the yarrow in lower, and it helps really lift and pop out those roses. So we're going to use that in that similar kind of context. You may or may not have done compose paint create with me, but that is all about composition. In the most simplest terms, we're going to have a look at the rule of thirds. And I'm going to make sure that I put my key players on each of the thirds. So you can work on any of these lines. The intersections are the most powerful places to place anything. But that could also mean I mean, you can't just put a little tiny lily on there, right? You've got to think about what part of the lily is on there, and then I'm going to put the stamens on there because I feel like they're the most bold part of the lily. So if I go like that, the stamens come up there. I'll just nut this out for myself a little bit. And then there's the base. And so I've got petal, petal, petal, like so, and then the stamens go up to that surge. And then I kind of want to put the pony over here, so it's peeking out from behind. And I'm really interested to see what other compositions you might come up with as well. I might do a little bit of yarrow just up here and a little bit of yarrow in here, and that will be enough. I could keep going further. I could add some foliage in. I could do lots of different things like maybe even a little bit of leaf might be nice in there, actually, speaking of. But I really want to have a really beautiful cluster of flowers in the page scented, and that's going to have a really nice, engaging, free flowing, easy to look at work. It's not going to be ultra challenging. I'm going for just most beautiful and a really playful effect with the mixed media and the watercolor. So I think I'm pretty happy with that some now. If I was really concerned, I'd do another one, or I might even do another one or another one. But I think I'm kind of happy with how it's gonna look. When we've only got three elements and that grid, I feel like there's only really a couple of ways that you can bring those things together that work really well, and I'm really happy with how that's feeling. So I'm just going to go straight ahead and dive into the final painting. I hope that's okay with you, and I can't wait to see what you come up with next. And if you've got any queries about your composition, please just sing out. You can drop into the chat on Teachable or hit me up on email. Okay. Next up, need my piece of paper. Oh, I just shut my book. I need that, too. I can't flip that over. I've got a blue dot on there. I'm gonna keep that open 'cause that was a bit silly of me, so I've got that as my reference point. Aah. I'm going to I know this is not what we do in welcome to watercolor, but it's kind of what we've been leaning into here, so we've got that bit of framework to base our overwhelming amount of decisions to make. So I'm going to do a pencil framework here so that I've got a bit of a guideline on how things are going to go. I'm not going to, though, pencil in my rules of thirds because I find that they tend to stay, and you can see them in the work. So let's just try and do a visual kind of alignment there. So I'm gonna do my lily like so, really, really softly. Pony over here. And then I won't even draw in the yarrow. I don't think. I'll kind of just stick to those two for now. So in this one, I really want to push you. I mean, you can do anything you want, really. If you really just love the pencil and how that looked or the brush pen or the fountain pen, I am happy for you to do that and explore that further by bringing the three flowers together. But for me, I'm just going to go to town with color and have so much fun playing with everything and pulling it all together. There's a real challenge in my mind of making the white lily and the peony work together because they are such a strong, bold contrast between the two colors. So I think that's going to be my big challenge. I You know how I lent more blue in the first lily painting. If I just even move that to a more purple tone, that is naturally going to harmonize with that pony a little bit better. And these sort of things are always flowing through my mind as I'm starting to do my sketch workork. So I'll just keep plotting in here. We don't need beautiful immaculate sketches that you then fill with color. That's not the game. It's more about getting a bit of a framework in if you can let that feel comfortable in your mind. And then I think I want that lily to go over the top of the pony, which is these little considerations are really, really important as we go. Because if we then want to then put a leaf in or that pedal in or something, you need to know where and what order things are going in. Right. And I think I'm just gonna leave the yarrow for a bit and the leaves, and I'll get these two flowers in first, 'cause they're kind of the big heroes. And then the rest will hopefully just all come together. You have to unpack my crayons again here. Ooh, nice loud bang. Aright. With my theory earlier about where you start is where the energy goes, it's the same thing here. So I really want to probably start with my hero Lily, because that's going to be right in your face in the most prominent spot on the page, which is our top left intersection. So, where's my favorite light blue? There you are. Let's get into it. Now, I'm going to work in a little more purple, though this time, as well. Don't let me forget. I will make sure I add in some more purples as opposed to the cobalt blue that I was doing before because that's going to help really harmonize in that peony and it's just those little colour things that if you made it true blue, and then the peony is really pinky, it's going to look a bit like lolly and bright. Okay. You know what? I'm gonna put in the veins too. I did suggest doing that, and I didn't listen to my own advice. It does really help with your directions of everything. Put in these stamens. Such a cheap way to do stamens seriously because you um if you were doing this exclusively in watercolor, you'd probably have to start there and then so carefully work around them. Or I could just, like, draw them in first up and just go around them. It's totally fine. Um Okay. Precious on. It's always a little bit nerve wracking being filmed, painting this kind of thing, hoping for the best that it works out. I still make dodgy paintings, guys. You just don't see them. It's such a natural part of the process. I've got a whole pile that I just go. You know what? Someday, I'll revisit you and maybe you'll make sense, and maybe it'll come back to me why the reason I had to do that painting or all kinds of things. So just be kind to yourself. If you're expecting masterworks after a couple of hours of trying, then just reframe those expectations. So my goal here, you would have seen in my other finished artworks was that they were they all had grounds. They were all well thought out, like they had plans to them, and they were very much like a formal finished painting. For this instance here, I'm thinking I might sort of just keep it a bit more light and playful and keep a white background because I think that's going to lift all those colors in this instance because we're going for that bouquet kind of feeling, and I want that contemporary fun watercolor vibe. I think if I had put too much paint in this instance with three flowers and a background, it's going to look quite heavy and overworked. So I'm trying to avoid that as best I can. I need my little gray guy again. It's the handy dude. Loving how this purple is coming through. I've already made a splatter. I hope you have two, because that would make me feel better. I'm going quite soft, but then I can always add in a little bit more dark along the way. Like, if it's still damp, I love to flood in a little bit of dark to add that contrast. It really helps bring that into the center. Even just a little bit darker than you feel comfortable with is going to make it feel so much more contrasty and have so much more three D form in your final piece. Alright. Trying to follow those veins. When I'm picking my colors, I'm trying to make everything feel quite harmonious, but at the same time, I don't want to feel too Samsi. So I'm always having a little explore with where I can take things. What can I push? Where could this go? It's like things that I'm always asking myself as I'm painting. In there. Oh, that was good. I liked that one. Trying to get that nice and deep in there. Alright. Now I'll go back to my bluey purple, losing all my beautiful pani colour 'cause I'm mixing it into my blues. And I could have gone and erased most of that pencil, but in this case, I think it's all gonna come out in the wash, if that makes sense. Like, I'm not really gonna notice it, and anything that I do, I can erase after the fact, because I've got that edge that's going to cover it up. If you're worried about it, you can always erase it sooner rather than later. That's totally fine. Just working on those forms. You'll see me glancing this way every now and again, 'cause I'm just doing a little check on this, making sure I've got enough pop and emphasis going on with my lily shape. And a little bit more gray. And I'm kind of liking how that's feeling. I might put in the stamens now with pastel again. Make sure they're a bit funny and wonky. And then in the center part here, I'm just gonna It's gonna help with that depth in there. And then I kind of just need to put some more shadow in this petal up here. It keeps bugging me. Like, whenever something's leaping out at you and you're like, something's not quite right here, listen to that intuition. That's telling you something. That's your practice and your voice coming to life. A bit more shadow under there, too. Like it's popping out. Getting there, little bits of touching here and there. Alright, very, very close here. I don't want to overwork it. This is the thing. If I keep poking and prodding, there's every chance that I'll end up overworking it. Might just put a littlest bit up there. Oh, no, so there, that's what I've gone and done. Need to blot that off. Very professional. I want to take a little bit out of that. I still wanted to leave the tip on there, but I didn't want to leave that whole heavy load of paint. Let me just get these repositioned again. You just see my unconss? Like, that's not even a word, but I'm extraordinarily unco person. And I just do everything so awkwardly all the time. Okay. Wii, really happy with how that's looking. Next challenge, pony. Well, let me just rewind my brain for a minute. How do we go about that again? We didn't even do it with the colored crayon. So it's a whole new kind of challenge. You're welcome to do a trial run elsewhere where you just do the flower on its own before you pop it in here. I'm just gonna dive in and see what happens because I feel like I don't know. I've been practicing throughout today and it's sort of fresh with me. If you're doing this course in stages and you're sort of coming at a few you know, every now and again, I would totally recommend doing a second, like, a practice pony before you jump in. So start off with this ball shape in there. Really want to make sure that it's not too bold, but I've got a bit of purple there, so I'm feeling confident that it'll work and get a bit more hot hot pink going. Lighten it right off, 'cause no one is ever going to put these three series of flowers together and go, Well, that's not what she painted. Those weren't the instructions. You've got to listen to your own intuition and go, Too purple, too much. Maybe I should have made it a soft pink. I can totally do that. You can change it to your liking. You may not love dark ponies, that's cool. Change it. I'm not gonna gripe. It's fine. I would do it myself, as well. You might just be struggling to find the colors to make this one work. That's fine. Oh, you know what? I keep going to do that center, and then I forget this one. Yeah, be very mindful of that edge there, 'cause that is gonna be a little defining moment for that lily. And under there. And I want to kind of make it a bit more shadowy under there, 'cause that's where the petal would be overhanging. Just little considerations as you go. And let's just do a wild ling out there. And just keep going to fill out this little guy. I think there was all those beautiful thin shapes through here as well, make it feel really pedily and full. Pedally is such a funny word, but I really enjoy using it right now. I'm gonna sort of let it fade out a little bit over here, 'cause otherwise it's going to start feeling too heavy and start competing with that lily in a big way. So I really want to kind of just let that almost go and use a few light marks around it to make that work. Cool. Now, the most challenging part, I feel like, Well, I haven't done any crayon in there. I didn't really think about that. Let's get some crayon, too. This one I'm going to sort of draw in. You might have seen how I did it in the example that I showed earlier in the pastels. But I'm just going to kind of work in some of these pinks. Gonna use them to define some shapes. Sometimes it's really nice to just have a few loose guys hanging out sides, too, because it gives it that looser, freer feeling. And if you look at it, it really is this luscious, like, quite irregular, strange looking thing, but it's so beautiful. Like, I just love them so much. I don't feel like I need as much pastel in these ones, though. Just a few defining ones around those. There's that awesome eggplant color maybe for in this where I could add in some more pedily shapes in there. Cool. Gonna touch that any further. Now, probably going to refer back to my sketch, always a good idea because you can get carried away at this point and go, Oh, no, that was not what I was planning. I've gone free range and not really liked what I've done, and I have to start over. So I'm going to put a leaf in here. Again, a really nice opportunity to use that to define your petals. So I'm gonna be cautious as I put that one in. It's like loose tight at this point because I'm trying to be a bit careful. Strappy strap feeling. Like so. And put that one in there. Yeah. What color would I choose to complement that? I actually think I'm going to reach for my famous sky blue because I think that's gonna be a really nice balance to what's been going on in that leaf, and I'll just do a bit of drawings through there 'cause I love that look. Now, Yarrow in next fill this little corner. So I'm always constantly assessing, like, where's a hole? Where needs some attention? What's the next step? Because if you want things to bleed in together, it's really important to sort of identify those things in advance of time so that you can know that you're going to go from that leaf to the next module here so that you're not arriving there going, Oh, no, it's all dried and I won't get that bleeding effect that I wanted, or I won't be out of work into that color like I had planned. Just things to consider. I'll make it that dusky pink again, like the one in the little vase over here because I think that's going to be a really nice compliment to what's happening. It might even end up a little move because we've got such a strong purple trend in what's going in the work. I'm just going to try to go back to my original plan of inserting some of this yellow. But maybe it's not even really that much. Let me put a little bit up here. Looks almost dull compared to the peony. I might have to add a little bit more color to larvn it. And then I'm going to grab the salmoni color, I think, potentially. Yeah. W into it or whilst it's wet and it becomes quite paintly. And then I'll grab the other pink as well, so it's got lots of variety in there. There's that tip of that gin. The other thing that is going on with those yarrow is the centers. So I might just do a little bit of yellow in the centers. It's gonna kind of muddy in, but I'm okay with it. Yep. And I'm going to paint in those stems whilst I'm here and thinking about it. Might have to go quite vibrant compared to what I did in my trial painting because the vibrancy of the peony is gonna sort of compete. All these little details really help like the little considerations that you have along the way, help the thing come together as a whole. If you forget to put in the little stems, then it can kind of look a little bit lost in there. So it's sort of an important sort of it's an important thing to sort of bring to mind as you're painting, especially I love when you add them adding stems in whilst the paint's wet in the flower because you get that beautiful bleeding happening. Just go to add a little bit of a shadow in there as well. Yeah. The yarrow has gone quite abstract, but I kind of want it to be the Support Act, anyway. So, that's okay. I'm okay with it for now. And back to my sketch. Alright, so we've got the pin in. I kind of want to put in some leaves around that guy. To, to do, two. Get a slightly different green. Never, ever, ever use greens straight out of the tube. I just find them, I can't even tell you. It's not an uncommon thing with artists, but I find them so sickly. So I really mix almost all my greens. And if you're really struggling to find good greens, you can always just take a little bit of black and put it in your tube greens, and that's just going to take the edge off with this ultra vibrancy that can be a bit problematic. Yeah, how can I put this in here? So it's going to work nicely with our composition. I really want a nice flow to it all, and I've got this bigger leaf that I planned on putting in here of the peony, as well. Oh, rush. I think I'm going to have to put some more of this color in too. When you work into it, it kind of almost mixes in as well. If you had colored pencil, I'd probably be doing this after the fact, it can end up muddy. And it sort of when you press hard, it compresses in the paper, and we'll leave trenches for the watercolor to fall in. So I like to have the paint work dry before I do the the drawn media on top. But when we've got a water soluble media, it makes more sense to work with it whilst it's wet it's designed for that. And it's super fun. Hopefully, I've convinced you that water soluble media is the way to go. I do really find it a lot more playful. But if you wound back the clock back to, like, 2012, it was all about watercolor and color pencil for me because I just loved those two textures combining. I found it fascinating and endlessly joyful bringing works together. Alright, back to painting. Crack on. Put in a bit of a stem there. And then for the final little steps here, I'm going to put in a little bit more yarrow, but I think I'm going to actually lean towards the darker color for a little bit of it and maybe have a bit of a variety of colors coming through with the yarrow so that there's lots of diversity through there, and I might even include another leaf. We'll see how we go. I didn't, I did have one planted in there that comes from sort of behind. So let's start with the yarrow first. Um, try this darker color first so that it ties into the pony. But it might morph more to the softy pink. Need to make it lighter. So bobby really trying to make them quite abstract so that they're not the dominant force in the painting. I'll grab that yellow again and just work some dots in. I really kind of want them to be quite indistinct, I think, 'cause the hero pieces are doing the work, and if everything's in high definition, then it doesn't really work to the same extent. I'm also just gonna grab a little bit more bluey green for a final leaf falling out here. And, like, so, yeah, that kind of ties that leaf in. And maybe I'll do one more up in there or going outside the plan. No, I'm happy with that. Alright. Now, just to bring it all together, I need a couple more little things like I need to put these stems in for the yarrow, which I'm going to make it feel like it's coming into the bouquet, so it's coming to this centralized point. I think that always feels nice. It can be a bit tricky to work out where to finalize stems. Sometimes people put a flower over the top of where the stems would finish so you don't really see where they go. But in this instance, I think it's going to look really nice for them to sort of come together. And gets a stem to. And just for balance, I'm just going to do a couple of last little dots and blobs. It's a technical term, very, very important. I'm a big fan of a dot and a blob, and they really can do a little bit of extra magic for those final steps. Even sometimes. And this may not go to plan because I'm doing this live on camera, but a little splatter can be really nice way of just bringing a few little things together. So I'm just trying to really gently do that. And then I'm going to grab my blue my blue crayon, that's kind of become the linking factor in all of this. This would have looked great if I'd used the brown as a linking factor or anything, but I just prefer not to be black in this instance because we've explored all that, and we've got this whole realm of color in front of us. So why not go to town and have a play with those color relationships? Just need to do a little bit of brown in there, just to tie in those stamens. Where else can I put it a little bit in there? And I think we're very close to finish, guys, and I literally cannot wait to see how you go with all this. I know it's a lot to take on board, and I think, like, the potential inside mixed media is universal and so there's just so much realm to play with. And I really, really think there's a you know, you could take this course and expand it to so many different places. You could take Guash into the mix. You could do it through color pencil first, and then do it again with your water soluble mediums. There's just so many things, and I really would love to see what you do with your own flower choices, as well. Obviously, I'm really celebrating the spring florals today, and they're just so beautiful. But say, if you're absolute Australian natives nut and like me, like, I love Australian natives so much. It's just unfortunately the wrong time of year for me to pick a bunch and have them in the studio with me. But if you have beautiful garden where you can pick some things or take some photos of things, you're more than welcome to then take this same concept and take it through to the finished product. And I would love to see that so much. I have a couple of examples to show you here of I did another version of this just to show you how different days can have different feelings. So that is the other one that I did. So I've used a lot heavier blue. Like, I went with a real navy feel with this one, and I really wanted that blue in the lily to sing out. And then I kind of went, Oh, hang on. It's making me use a lot of pink elsewhere, but I did balance it with the bud, as well. And then as an extension project, you could always go back and try one of the singular mediums and create a work using that. So I've done just plain old pencil here, but you get a whole different feeling. Like every single one of these options has such a distinct, unique feeling and so much realm for experimentation and play. Like such a more feminine, gentle feeling here. You got a bit more fun, colorful modern here. This one's kind of got a bit more of the oldie weldi be with that stronger contrast, but different again, I've got a bit heavier on the pastel and this one. It just depends, and some days I'm heavier handed. Sometimes I'm more light touch, and that's okay, as well. Like having that having that versatility is actually a really fun thing and just lean into it when it happens. It's all good. So I just simply cannot wait to see where everything goes from here for you. I hope you've had so much fun discovering all things watercolor and mixed media in spring florals. 9. The Wrap Up: Thank you so much for joining me for watercolor explorations spring florals in mixed media. I hope you've had an absolute ball, getting experimental, making a little mess, discovering new things. I mean, I certainly have, and I simply can't wait to see what you've created. If you've enjoyed yourself today, the kindest compliment you can pay me in the world is word of mouth. So please let a friend know who might also enjoy it. You're welcome to join me on my Facebook group. It's called Dannie Martin Student Forum, where we do regular creative challenges. We have conversations about art, and it's a really lovely like minded community. I love a review. A review means the world. It honestly helps shape future courses, and it also lets other people know whether they're going to the course or not as well. If you've enjoyed the course with me today, I have several others for you to explore as well from beginners right through to the more complex subjects like composition. I've got color mixing, layering, you name it, and I love your suggestions. They honestly help me shape all future courses. Your feedback means the world. Happy experimenting. I think there's no limit here. Honestly, I mean, I did each medium quite separately, you're more than welcome to intermingle them, as well. I personally prefer not to. I like the cleaner look of just a singular medium alongside this. But I know plenty of people that just throw lots of different things in there, and it can be a really fun journey to be on. So happy painting and thanks for painting with me today.