Watercolor Flower Postcards: Beginner Painting Techniques for Creating Fun Floral Illustrations

1. Watercolor Flower Postcards: Beginner Painting Techniques for Creating Fun Floral Illustrations: Would you love to start a creative and relaxing watercolor painting practice? But our limited on time and space, then this is the perfect class for you. Hi, my name is Jennifer Rose. I'm a watercolor artist, illustrator and surface designer. I first fell in love with watercolor painting in college. I had taken a class and I was instantly hooked. What I loved most about watercolor painting was just the flow of the paint on the paper, the transparency working in light layers. The other fun thing about watercolors is there's something serendipitous about just letting the paint do its thing and seeing what happens, and that's when it's magical. I've been painting for over 15 years now. Recently, my art practice has been mostly digital, and I missed pulling out my paint palette and my paints and just sitting down and painting. This class is born out of my challenge of trying to find time and space to make my painting practice work. This class is perfect for a beginner watercolor painter. In this class, I'm going to teach you my tips and tricks for creating quick, beautiful floral paintings so you too can fit creativity into your busy schedule. After this class, you will have a pints board or folder full of inspirational source material, confidently. Be able to sketch your ideas. Be able to mix up a watercolor palette like a boss. And create beautiful floral paintings that you can share with friends or family. And I do recommend sharing your work. It's so easy to put your art in a box. I want you to send your art out into the world and be proud of what you've learned and created For the final project, in this class, we're going to be creating a floral watercolor postcard that you can send, trade or keep for yourself if you can be parted from your masterpiece. I'm so glad you are here. I'm excited to share with you the beautiful versatile world of watercolor painting. In the next lesson, we're gonna be talking about this last project. Talk to you soon like a fame song, right? The ith, the watercolor. 2. Class Project : Hello, welcome back. I'm so glad you decided to continue on this watercolor journey with me. In this lesson, we're going to be talking about the final project. We are going to be working on the final project as we go through each lesson. The final project for this class is going to be a watercolor, floral on postcard says paper. There are a couple reasons why I chose such a small size paper to work on for our final project. One, it will allow us to complete the final watercolor painting in a short amount of time and a limited amount of space. And two, it'll make it easy to take that watercolor postcard and pop it in an envelope and send it to a friend or family member. Why are you suggesting that we send these paintings out to friends or family? The reason is, is it holds you accountable to being consistent in your creative practice. When you share with your community what you're working on, they take an interest in what you're doing and they're going to follow up with you on what you're making next. When starting a creative practice, you could use all the support that you can get. It's very easy to make art in isolation and hide it away. I want you to take your creations and send them out into the world and share with other people what you are doing. Make sure to post photos of your process as well as your final project in the project. T, I love seeing students work evolve and I'm sure other students would find it inspiring too. Here's an overview of the lessons in this class that take you on your watercolor journey. In the next lessons, we're going to be going over materials needed for our watercolor kit. Gathering visual inspiration of beautiful florals by taking pictures or creating a Pinterest board and gathering images online. Sketching our ideas to plan out our painting. Color mixing. For painting, mixing up our watercolor paints, brush techniques, we will practice on scrap paper before moving on to our final watercolor paper. How to embellish our completed paintings with oil pastel color pencil or fine line pens. Finally, I will share with you how to send your work out so it gets to the recipient in one creased piece. To get started, go to the Project Resources tab and download the materials list. In the next lesson, we're going to be going over materials. Talk to you soon. 3. Materials: Hi, welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to dive into materials. If you haven't downloaded the materials list, go to the project resources tab and download that. Now, first thing before we discuss materials that you're going to need, you do not need to spend a lot of money in materials. I'm going to be making recommendations for materials I like using in my watercolor kit. But if you already have materials that you are using, stick with those, you can always add to and upgrade your kit. As you become a more experienced painter, I'm going to list the materials that you're going to need for this class and then I'll go into detail as to which ones I like using and why. So let's dive into materials. The materials you're going to need are pencil, H or H. B, Watercolor, pencil, pencil, sharpener, sketchbook scrap paper, watercolor paints, tubes or pants. Four brushes, paint, palette jar for water, paper towels or rags. Watercolor paper, nine by 12, artist's tape or painter's tape. Postcard paper, hair dryer envelopes, acid free, clear sleeves, cardboard, fine line pens, oil pastel colored pencils, eyedropper. And make sure to have a pair of scissors handy if you're going to be cutting down your watercolor paper. Real talk in terms of where you can spend versus save on art materials, save on the brushes. I'm very rough on my brushes and I have to replace them frequently. And I haven't really found a huge difference in a cheap brush or really expensive brush. They all fall apart. You need four brushes to start with. You're going to want a large flat wash brush, this is simply, Simmons is the brand. And it's a flat wash brush, you're going to want a medium round brush. This is a number seven by Windsor Newton Cotman. You're going to want a small round brush. This is great for laying down fine details. One's Princeton, it's their heritage line. Again, a little firmer brush head, It gives me more control and it's a number one round. And then I'd like to have a flat or shader brush. This one is number four. It's Princeton Art Brush Co, and I'll show you different techniques to use these brushes. In the brush techniques lesson, I would say buy the best quality watercolor paint that you can afford. As a college student, I didn't have a lot of money. And for my first watercolor class, I ended up buying those eight color praying watercolor pans. And it worked great. It served me well through that class. And when I could afford to upgrade, I did some watercolor paint Brands that I like and have been using over the years is these are relatively affordable and they usually come in large sets. I also like these Windsor Newton artist watercolors and these are the ones that I've been using recently that I really love. This is scene and they are super pigmented. I need just a piece size amount and it goes a long way. I love these, but they're definitely a splurge in terms of colors, orange, violet, yellow, red, blue, and green. And that would set you up good. You can add a black to your painting kit. I choose not to use black, and a lot of my paintings find that it mutes the colors too much. It kind of muddies them. And we don't need white because for white and watercolor painting, we just add more water because that adds more transparency to the paint and allows more of the white of the paper to show through save on water containers. This is a repurposed jam jar. You can use a plastic cup. You can use a ceramic cup. Use what you have. I'm going to be using a dedicated paint palette, but you can use a plastic white plate. You can use an old ceramic plate that you're not using anymore. These things are not worth spending a lot of money on because they don't make a huge difference in the quality or outcome of your work. Where I think you should spend is on your watercolor paper. A good quality watercolor paper won't peel or rip or pill, and it will be a heavier weight. So you can erase and lift paint, as well as add multiple layers without it warping. I love this Canson watercolor pad. It's a nine x 12. It's 140 pound weight, which is what I would look for as the minimum when you're buying watercolor paper. It's got 30 sheets and we're going to be cutting this down. So it'll go even further. If you want to go and buy a postcard size paper, you can absolutely do that. Just again, make sure that it's a good quality and good weight. This one is 140 pounds as well, and it's got a similar cold pressed surface with slight tooth to the paper, but overall pretty smooth. So you can have both of these, or if you just want to buy the one watercolor pad and I'll show you how to cut this down. Pencil, pencil, sharpener, any kind of pencil will do. This is just an H pencil because I just need something that's light and has a fine point. I like using a watercolor pencil or any water soluble pencil when sketching on my final watercolor paper. And I do this so that my sketch disappears or becomes less visible. I don't like to see my sketch showing through the watercolor paint using a water soluble pencil. Whether it's a watercolor pencil or the sketching pencil by Derwent will prevent that from happening. In terms of fine line pens, I've been using a couple of different brands. This one is Windsor Newton. It's a fine liner and it's water resistant. It's not waterproof. So we would add this at the end once we're done painting and it's dry. And then the other one I've been using and liking is this tambo mono drawing pen. Again, this is a water base, so we would add this at the end once we're done painting. If we add it before, we'd end up making it lead all over the place, which could be a cool effect, but not where we're going for five size is great, go smaller and do more detail. You could do a 01, that would give you a really nice fine line and then you can go up to a 0.8, which would give you a thicker, heavier line. See optional to have a hair dryer. Speeds up drying time between layers, artist tape. Just make sure that it's made for delicate surface. I would hate for you to be painting and rip up half of your paper when you're taking the paint up. You can also buy painter's tape. Again, just make sure it says it's for a delicate surface. Envelopes and cardboard for mailing. I want a size larger. This is a five by seven envelope. You want to have a little extra wiggle room to protect your artwork when sending these crystal clear sleeves are nice because you can preserve your artwork, so if you're sending it out, this is kind of a nice added insurance policy to keep it safe. These are four by six and we'll accommodate the artwork perfectly. Scissors going to be helpful for cutting down our paper rags. And paper towels will be helpful for painting. I use them for touching up my work, picking up paint if I made a mistake or too much paint went down. As well as cleanup for drying off our brushes. Also an optional material to have is an eyedropper. This is really helpful when you're paint mixing and pulling water into your paint palette. It's not required. You can use your paint brush, but this is an inexpensive tool and you'll see me using it in the paint mixing lesson. So I just wanted to put that in there. And optional oil pastels, color pencil, watercolor pencils for embellishing your work. At the end, this is an optional material to have. This is a great student grade brand. I think it was like six or $7 for this set. They're fun to play with in your watercolor painting. So I do recommend having them if you would like to add them to your kid. If you have any questions on the materials discussed in this lesson, please leave your questions in the discussion tab and I'll be happy to answer. In the next lesson, we're going to be talking about gathering images as source material for our paintings. Talk to you soon. 4. Gathering Images: Hello, let's continue on our watercolor journey. In this lesson, we're going to be talking about gathering images of flowers and leaves as source material for our paintings. I love having images to work from when I'm sketching and painting. I never draw them exactly how they see them in the photograph. I always take some creative license with it. But it's so helpful to have an image in front of you when you're working. We're looking for clear, crisp, detailed photographs. We might not make our paintings or sketches that detailed, but having a clear and crisp photo will definitely inform us the most. When we're gathering inspiration, there are a couple ways that you can gather images. The first and my favorite, is to go out into nature and take a nature hike and see what flowers and leaves you can find outdoors. If I'm taking pictures of my phone, I like to save them as an album in my camera role. And then I can pull up that album whenever I'm doing any painting, and I have all of my images saved there. If you can't get outside or the weather or season is not appropriate for going on a nature walk, you can definitely rely on the vast resources of the Internet. One of my favorite sites for gathering source material for paintings is Pinterest. Pinterest has a vast resources of images on their website, and you can also save images from your web searches into Pinterest. Pinterest is going to be like having a bulletin board of inspiration at your disposal if you don't want to start a Pinterest account. I understand you can absolutely use image searches like any browser has an image. Or you can use sites like unsplash, which are royalty free images that photographers have uploaded when using any of these platforms. The more specific you can be, the better access Pinterest. You can go directly to the website listed here or you can download the apps available for your phone or tablet. I love using Pinterest as an artist for gathering inspiration. I think this is a great resource if you are wanting to build a collection of images that you can draw from at any time when you have time to paint, I would recommend getting a Pinterest. First thing you're going to do is to create your Pinterest account. Once you've created your Pinterest account, the first thing you're going to want to do is to create a board. And you're going to go to the plus sign right here. It says start creating now. And you can choose whether you do a pin or a board. And we're going to choose a board, we're going to call this flower painting inspiration. You can add people you want to share this board with, or you can make it private so no one else can see your board. And I will link my board with you. In the project resources, I'm going to hit Create. There's my board from your board, you want to go back to search for images. I'm going to choose a tulip because I like the shape of tulips, tulip photos. And hit Search. Going to pick images that I like and save them to my flower painting inspiration. Let's choose another flower to search for. I'm going to Wisteria because I like the wisteria way it drops and falls. Let's see, yeah, this is nice. I'm really looking for like close up images to let me know what's going on. Maybe not every one of these flowers is going to be what I want to paint. But right now I'm just gathering as much imagery as possible to work from. The other thing you can do is you can do foliage like leaves and different shapes of leaves that you like. Let's see, I like ferns. I think they have a really interesting leaf shape. I'm going to search for photos because maybe incorporate this into some of my floral painting or maybe I just want to do a painting with some ferns in different shapes and colors. This is really cool the way they carl Again, just trying to get close up detail shots so I can get the most information when I'm painting and sketching. Let's say that you didn't know what kind of flower you wanted to look for, but you knew you wanted detailed close up flower shots. You could search that detailed flower close up photos. Let's see what we come up with. This helps in narrowing it down. That's a great shape. I like that actually. It looks like already saved it. Once you have enough images gathered for your inspiration, I would aim for like ten to 12 images to work from. Just to start, you can always add to your inspiration board. I think I have enough. I have about 13. Those are a couple of sources for images that I would use. Pinterest Splash, Google Image Search, or you can go out in nature and take your own photos. I always encourage people if you can, if you have the time and it's the right time of year, get out in nature, walk around, take pictures. It's really inspirational to be outside and taking pictures of the things you want to be painting. I love gathering inspiration, even when I'm not like planning on being in a studio because then I have it to call on when I do have time to paint. And I would encourage you to do the same, always be gathering image inspiration, because when you have time to paint, you have it right there at your disposal when you're ready. In the next lesson, we're going to be working on our sketches. Talk to you soon. 5. Sketching: Hello, let's continue. In this lesson, we're going to be sketching our ideas for our final watercolor composition. The sketches that we're going to be making in this lesson are going to inform the style, the shape, and composition, of our final watercolor paintings. The sketches do not have to be super detailed or highly refined. Trying to overthink your sketch, I'm not going to be sketching with an eraser, and I would encourage you to do the same. It removes the temptation to go back and rework and refine your sketch. Materials that you're going to need for this section of the class are going to be paper. I'm going to be using printer paper. But if you have a sketch book that you would like to use, you can use that. We're going to need our H or HB plan. Sketching pencil, pencil sharpener. You're going to want to have your watercolor pencil or your water soluble pencil and then your final watercolor paper. If you're using postcard paper, you won't need to do anything further with this before sketching. If you're going to be using the larger nine by 12 watercolor paper, we're going to cut this down so we have the right size before we put our final sketch onto this paper. If you're cutting down your paper, you're going to want to have scissors. You're also going to need your images of flowers and leaves that you selected during the gathering images lesson. I'm going to be using my ipad to sketch from, but if you prefer printouts, please make sure that you have those handy now that you have all your materials gathered together. Let's get to sketching. I would encourage you not to overthink the sketch. Just remember that this is preliminary to the final paintings that we're going to be making. This is just to give us an idea of how we want to lay out our composition. The photograph we're going to be using is really detailed, but we're going to stylize it, we're going to simplify it. I like to start my flower by drawing out the center. It's usually a circle or like an oval shape that I use for that. Once the center is drawn, I'd like to create a guideline that I want my petals to reach. I'm going to draw that, the center that I've just sketched. Starting from the center, I'm going to have my petals radiate out to the guide that I've created. Touch the guide and then come back down and taper back in. I'm going to continue around the center. Don't worry about making the flower symmetrical. Nothing in nature is perfectly symmetrical. Or even one more pedal. And then what I'm going to do is I think I'm going to add some details to the center just to create some interest in depth, But I'm not going to go as detailed as the photograph. I think I'm also going to include some ridges in the petals, again, to add some details in depth. Okay, so this looks good to me. I'm going to sketch another one just so I feel confident when comfortable drawing this. Before I move on to my final paper, let's speed this up a little bit and relax with some music. I finished with that view of the flower and I'm going to pull up the next image that I want to use, which is a bud of this cosmos. I want to create a center point from which the petals are going to radiate. Create that center point. You can even make a little dot if it helps give you a visual. And then the petals are going to radiate out from that one point. Just keeping them tightly clustered together. Because it's supposed to be a very tightly closed flower. Again, I'm not making it super detailed. I'm including a few of the leaves that are around the outside edge and the stem. That looks pretty good to me. There's one more view I want of the same flower, just a different perspective. And I'll show you how we handle a sideways perspective on flowers. We're still going to start with the center. The center is actually, doesn't look like a perfect circle. It looks more oval shaped. Again, I'm going to draw an oval. Then from that oval, I'm going to look at my picture and see where the flower petals end in relationship to that center point. It looks like they are further away in the back to the center in the front. That's the shape I'm going to make my guide further away in the back and to the front. And then I'm going to have my petals radiate out again to that guide. There's some foreshortening happening in this visual because the perspective of the flower, those are my finished flowers. I'm looking to add some foliage, some leaves to the background of my painting. I had picked out some leaves that I liked. It was this maiden hair fern. I just really like the shape of the leaves. I think it's interesting without being too complex. I'm going to practice sketching this maiden hair fern. Just whatever space I have on the paper left, I create a center point, the stem, that's where I start with, and then I have my leaves radiate out from there. Let's speed this up a little bit and listen to some music while we sketch. And here's my final sketch. It definitely has enough information for me to work from when adding it to my final watercolor paper. I'm not going to be too detailed or precious about it. And I'm going to put my tablet away at this point because I no longer need to look at those photographs. I'm going to put my sketch to the side. We need to prep our final watercolor paper so that we can have the composition laid out how we need it to on that paper. Now, if you're using postcard paper, there's nothing for you to prep. It's already cut down. You can just start sketching on the paper. If you're using the larger 912 paper, we're going to need to do some prep work to cut it down and get it ready. But before we add our final sketch to it, I'm going to grab one sheet of the nine by 12 paper and take it out of the pad. The nine by 12 paper is going to be slightly larger than four by six when we cut it into fourth. What we need to do is we need to remove about an inch from the long side of the paper before we start cutting the rest of the paper down. You can measure this with a ruler if you want to be precise. I'm eyeballing it and just taking off the inch that I need to remove. There you have it. We're going to fold it in half to make our marks on where we want to cut it. If you have a ruler and you're going to measure it, you're going to need to mark it at the six inch mark and then cut along the six inch mark for the long side. I'm going to just fold it and mark it by folding it in half. Then I'm going to flip it and fold it in half again. I have a really clearly defined line to cut on. Then just using my scissors to cut along the line that I created, that now I have four, even four by six sheets of paper from 19 by 12 sheet of paper. Once you have your paper cut down, you can continue with your sketching the sketch on the final watercolor paper. You're going to want to grab your watercolor pencil or your water cellular pencil, whichever one you picked up. For this part of the lesson, we're going to just work on transferring our sketch over to the final paper. Here's where you get to make the decisions about the composition. Where you want to lay everything out. It doesn't have to look exactly like it did on your sketch. You can refine it a little bit more on this paper. Just remember, have fun with it. We're going to be painting over it. During that stage, you can cover up any mistakes that you feel like you made with a sketch. Let's relax and sketch along together while we listen to some music. As you're sketching, be mindful not to fill the entire paper with flowers or leaves. You want to leave some negative space, some empty space, the painting to breathe and give the viewer's eyes a rest. Here's my finished sketch on my final watercolor paper. I'm pretty pleased with the composition. I can always make adjustments when I'm painting. But for right now, I feel like this is a good outline and I'm going to stop here. In the next lesson, we're going to be talking about color mixing. Talk to you soon. 6. Color Mixing Part 1: Hi, in this lesson we are going to be color mixing. The first color palette that we are going to mix up is a monochromatic color palette. What is a monochromatic color palette? A monochromatic color palette is made up of a color, one color or hue, and tints lighter colors and shades, darker colors of the same hue. A monochromatic color palette creates a harmonious color scheme. And it's created using relatively few paint colors. In this lesson, I'm going to demonstrate how you can take two colors and make a monochromatic color scheme. Before we dive in to mixing up some paints, please be sure to go to the class resources section. In there, you will find a digital illustration of the color wheel that I created for this class. For this lesson, the materials that you're going to need are a paint palette paint brushes, your watercolor paints, a water cup, artist's tape, towels and rags. Color wheel download 912 watercolor paper, a hair dryer optional, and an eye dropper which is optional. Once we've decided on our color that we're going to use for our monochromatic color palette, for example, I'm going to be using red. How do we create our tints and shades? You can use whatever colors you want or you can follow along with me while I'm mixing up these two. How do we create the tints and shades in our watercolor palette? The tints in a watercolor palette is just going to be adding more water that will lighten the color and when we make it more transparent so the more of the white of the paper show through for the shades, you can use black paint to mix into red to create a shade. With a word of caution that a little black paint goes a long way, or how I like to do it is to use the complimentary color of whatever color I'm using. If we're using red as the example, the complimentary color of red is going to be the color that is directly across on the color wheel. Here's red and then directly across is green. I know it sounds unlikely that green and red will mix well together, but a little green used in mixing up the red will create a nice maroon shade, which will be exactly what we're looking forward to creating our monochromatic palette. Once you've gathered all your materials together, let's dive into mixing up a monochromatic color palette. We're going to put our pure color in the middle. You can always mix up more paint if you need it. I'm going to be using my eyedropper to pull over water into this. You can also use your paint brush to drag water from your cup to your paint. Let me show you how you would do it with the paint brush. Just take a paintbrush full of water and just mix. You're looking for the color to be more liquid than a solid. At this point, you can always add more water or add more paint if you went too strong in either direction. Okay, I'm going to add a little bit more water while my water is fairly clean, I'm going to take my eye dropper and I'm going to add water to both of these wells so I can mix up my tints from the red. For the shade that I'm going to be mixing, I'm going to mix in green. I'm going to add green just a little bit. I don't need a whole lot. I'm going to add some water to that green to get it a little more liquid, like a half eye dropper full. Not a full eye dropper this time it seems pretty good. Rinse my paint brush so it's clean with my rag. What I want to do is I want to mix this red with that green. That's where this well is going to come in. I'm going to take my red, I'm going to use the eye dropper, drop a third of the paint there, clean it out so I don't mix my colors into the green because I use that again and then drop some Marine less than the red. Let's try mixing it again. You can also do this with your paint brush. You don't need to use the dropper that created a really nice maroon burgundy color, which I like. I think it looks really good. I could add more red if I didn't want it as deep. Let me add a little red. This is where you have to experiment. It's the one downside of the eye dropper. Sometimes it does flatter, but that's what the rag is for. I really like that. So I'm going to leave it there. I'm going to mix up a little more of the pure red, and then I'm going to mix it in with that green that's left there. Then I'm going to take a paintbrush full of this pure red and I'm going to mix it right into this green and see how we do. It's slightly darker than this one, but looking at this, I like this color is my deepest shade. But I think I want to lighten this one up a little bit. So I'm going to add some more of a pure red to that color mixing is an experiment. You just have to be open to the discoveries that you make. Some of them are serendipitous, I like that. Now I'm going to mix my tints, I'm going to take my pure red again, take my paint brush, load it up, and mix it in. I'm going set off again, take some of the one that I mix that's lighter and mix it into this one so it goes even lighter. Now, this is going to be hard to see on camera. We're going to test it out on paper. Let's take our paint palette and test this out. I'm going to take a sheet of my nine by 12 paper, and I'm going to use this as my Swatch samples for my paint. And I'm going to start with my pure red, and we're going to start in the middle. I, in looking at this, might want to add a little more water to this red because it's still very thick. Just a little bit. A couple drops from the eye dropper. Try it again and see how it works. That looks a little better to me. Okay, let's try our shade, shade one and a shade two, which is almost like a really deep brown. But I like it, I think it's cool. I think it'll mix well with the ones that we currently have here. So this is our monochromatic color scheme. I'm going to write that here if you love the monochromatic color palette that you have mixed up. And you want to skip the next lesson where we're going to be mixing up an analogous color palette. Feel free to do so. If you have any questions, please leave them in the Discussions tab, and I will be happy to answer them. I hope you enjoyed mixing up some paints with me. In the next lesson, we're going to continue our color mixing adventure and mix up an analogous color palette. Talk to you soon. 7. Color Mixing Part 2: Hello, let's continue mixing some watercolor paints. In this lesson, we're going to be mixing up an analogous color palette. What is an analogous color palette? This color scheme is made up of three hues, or colors that are next to each other on the color wheel. Analogous colors will create a harmonious color scheme. You are going to need more paints for this one. I'd recommend three colors to start with. The materials that you're going to need for this lesson are going to be your paint palette. Paint brushes, watercolor paints, water cup, artist's tape, towels and rags. Your color wheel download nine x 12. Watercolor paper, hair dryer optional, and an eyedropper which is optional. To make our analogous color palette. We're going to select three colors on our color wheel. By limiting our color palette, we're not actually limiting ourselves because you can make a multitude of colors just from three colors. For my demonstration, I'm going to mix a color palette that's consisting of violet, red violet, blue violet. Now to get to that red violet and blue violet, I am going to have to do some paint mixing. I'm going to need my blue and red as well as my violet to mix up this color palette. I may also use this rose red color since it's a little bit of a bluer pink ear shade, which I think will give us a nice red violet. You can choose any three colors that you want as long as they're next to each other on the color wheel. If you have any questions on how to mix those colors, please let me know in the discussions tab and I'd be happy to answer. Gather up your materials and let's continue paint mixing, placing my violet in the center. Go to add water. Right now, since the water is clean, I usually use like an eye dropper full for each of them. I'm just going to add an eyedropper fall to each of these walls because they're all going to be mixed in there. I'm going to use blue on one end because that is going to be my blue violet. I'm going to mix my blue violet from blue and violet. I'm going to use my red on the other end. And I'm going to mix up a red violet by mixing violet and red. Okay, blue on it. Again, trend is the same size amount so that it's a balanced color paint hands. It's the mark of a painter. You paint fingers all the time. I'm going to put my color wheel aside right now. I'm also going to put my paper aside because I want to just put this right in front of me so I can mix. I'm going to mix up my violet. Pull some of this over here. I'm going to mix up my blue. I should have rinse my brush first works. And then I'm going to get my blue violet. I'm going to rinse my brush. Okay, now I'm going to mix up my red and pull some red over here. And then I'm going to take a little violet. You can either use your brush or your eye dropper and bring it over off some of the water. I want a little water on my brush, but I don't want it soaking wet when I'm taking my paint. And I'm going to pull the pure color in the middle, my violet color. Okay, then I'm gonna work on either side. This is my analogous color palette. That's it for our color mixing section of our class. If you want to explore other color schemes, I'm going to provide you with a list of websites that go into color theory and paint mixing more in depth. You can find that in the class resources tab. Paint mixing is a relaxing activity to practice even if you don't have time to complete a painting. Just marking the paper and testing out colors is a great way to expand your skills. Don't watch out that color palette yet. In the next lesson, we're going to be using it when we work on painting techniques. Talk to you soon. 8. Painting Techniques Part 1: Hello again. In this lesson, we're going to be using the paint palette that we mixed up in the last lesson. And we're going to be practicing our painting techniques. The materials that you'll need for this lesson are your paint palette with the colors you mix up. In the last lesson, your paint brushes, watercolor paints, water cup, artist's tape, towels or rags. 912 watercolor paper, hair dryer optional, and an eye dropper, which is also optional if you mixed up your paints in the last lesson and had to step away and came back and your paint palette was all dried out. Not to worry. You can easily revive it by using our eye dropper to squirt some water into each of the wells and mixing it up again, or even using a tiny little Mr. with water to revive your paints, water color is very forgiving in that way, in that you can add water and it usually brings them back to life. In this lesson, we're going to be going over wash techniques for laying down a color ground before we start our painting. And we're also going to be going over wet on wet techniques and wet on dry techniques. And I'll explain more in my demonstration. Let's gather up our materials and continue with our painting techniques. I'm just taping down one side of my watercolor paper so it doesn't shift while I work. We're going to be creating a wash. Now, a wash is going to be a very light color ground that we're going to lay down on our paper. Before we start adding in our details and layers to make the wash, I'm going to water down one of the colors that I have here. I think I'm just going to use this blue on the end and I'm going to mix it in with a lot of water. I'm just using a little bit of blue, just like a few drops. Then using our wet wash brush, mixing it up. This is the brush I'm going to use. I've created my wash color. There's two ways to lay down a wash. You can lay the wash down on a dry, dry watercolor paper, or you can lay it down on a wet ground. I'm going to lay mine down on a wet ground first so you can see the difference. And then I'm going to lay it down on a dry ground using my paint brush. I'm going to just paint a rectangle or square on the paper, not saturating it but getting it wet. Then I'm going to my wash that I've created, I'm going to lay it down on the square that I painted with the water color with the water. Now, I'm going to do the same thing on the other side with our wash brush, but I'm going to put it on dry paper. I'm just going to dab off some of the water. I do want it wet, but I don't want it that wet. I'm the wash that I created from this side and I'm going to lay it down on the dry paper. I don't know if you'll be able to see the difference on this video, but the one that's on the wet paper has softer edges and has a softer gradation of blue. Whereas the one that's on the dry paper is more saturated. It's less of a gradation. It pools the color around the outer edges. Neither one of these is right or wrong. It's just showing you your options that you can create with the paints and brushes. I'm just going to write down what these are. I know the wash, I'm going to say wash, wet on dry. Put this aside. I'm going to take another piece of paper. I'm going to save the tape. I'll just peel it up here. Grab another piece of paper. You can also do this all on one sheet of paper if you'd prefer, but for the visual, I'm separating them. For the next demo, I'm going to be showing you how to create your painting on a wet ground. We're going to do a wet on wet technique with our painted flowers for our square. I'm just going to lay down a small background of our wash on dry paper. I'm actually going to do two squares because this one will dry by the time I'm ready for it. Using the medium round brush that I have. I'm going to take another color and I'm going to paint a flower shape on the wet paper just using one square. I'm going to use this violet color, wipe off any excess you want to wipe off a good amount of paint. Because we're painting on a wet ground, it really is going to spread out. I'm going to be using an outline technique to just pull some paint color to make a flower shape. And you'll see what happened was it really spread out. Which is what's going to happen when you do a wet on wet technique. It's not wrong. It's just a different way to approach painting in a more softer, organic manner. Even what I could do is if I felt like that flower, I wanted to have a little more variation. And I wanted the center to be lighter. I can pick up my paint using my paper towel or my rag and just blotting it. It looks like a mess now. But I promise you it has potential. So we'll come back to that. What I'm going to do for our next squares, I'm going to dry it with the hair dryer, so I know it is a dry ground that I will be painting on. So using my hair dryer. And I want to keep the hair dryer about 6 " away from the paper. And I want to try and shoot it straight down, not at an angle, because what will happen is it will direct the paint off of your paper using the hair dryer and just keeping it 6 " off. I'm making sure it's set to cool and it's going to be on low, so both squares are pretty dry right now. And now what I want to do is I will come back to this wet on wet application and show you how to layer in the next lesson. But right now I want to show you how to layer wet paint onto dry paper. Here again, I'm going to be using an outlining technique where I'm just outlining the shape that I want from my flower and filling it in. So as you can see, you'll get a much more defined edge. You'll get less color variation. It's much more uniform. You have softer, more organic edges over here. I can still do the pick up if I wanted to pull up that color in the center with my paper towel and just using my fingertip and pressing it in, this is our wet on dry. And we will come back to these in the next lesson, where I show you how to layer your paints. In the next lesson, we're going to continue learning some painting techniques. Talk to you soon. 9. Painting Techniques Part 2: In this lesson, I'm going to show you some more painting techniques. Now is a good point to change out your water if you haven't done so already, And if you need to mix up more paints, go ahead and do that. Now in this lesson, we're going to continue learning painting techniques. We're going to build on our knowledge from the last lesson. And we're going to learn how to correct and erase mistakes on our watercolor paper. I'm also going to teach you how to layer watercolor paints to create depth and dimension in your paintings. The materials that you'll need for this lesson are your paint palette with the colors you mix up. In the last lesson, your paint brushes, watercolor paints, water cup, artist's tape, towels or rags. 912 watercolor paper, hair dryer optional, and an eye dropper, which is also optional. Let's gather up our materials and continue with our painting techniques. If we're going to create a flower and we wanted to create a bunch of flower petals, one way you could do it is to use a poll brush technique, where you basically lay down your paint brush as hard as you can, flat on the paper. And then as you pull the brush, you lift up so you get a nice taper at the edge. Do it again using the real flat part and then bringing it up to the tip to get that nice taper. If I don't like how the paint laid down, I can go back in and move it around. But what it does is it creates a nice gradation. I'm going to show you if I dropped paint and I didn't want it to be there, how can I fix that? Just blot it up with my paper towel now if I still wanted to erase it some more. My flat brush, make sure it's wet. And scrub the area that I want clean pretty good. I'm going to make sure it's dry before I continue. And just make sure I wipe off my brush a little better next time I can go over any of these and applying that same technique with adding pressure and then letting up at the end, I created a nice flower shape. Using that brush technique, I can even pick up some of the paint in the center with my paper towel. If I wanted to create a lighter center, you wrap it around your finger and you get that round shape. If I wanted to create some stem and leaves, what I would do is I'd use my flathead shader brush. And I'm going to go in with this blue wipe off any excess. And I'm going to pull, using that fine edge of this brush, pull it down to create a stem. Now for the leaves still using this flat shader brush, I'm going to do the same thing that I did with the round brush. I'm going to push down with all the pressure on the tip. But instead of pulling it straight out and up, I'm going to pull it and twist it. At the same time I end up on the fine edge of that brush. And do it again. I'm going to pull, push it down, pull and twist. I end up on that fine edge of the brush. If I felt like some of these edges were a little bit rough, I can go back in and just smooth them out, but it is a great quick way to lay down color. We can go back in and smooth them out or build on our shapes a little bit more when we start layering. That's a nice stem and leaf shape, I like that. The other way to create a flower shape is to just outline it. Let's start with this reddish color. I'm going to outline my flower shape instead. Say I wanted to do a tulip, which might not necessarily work with that pole technique. I want to outline the shape of my tulip. I'm just going to create the shape and then fill it in. I'm creating the shape and then I'm going to fill it in. Can even leave ****** between your petals, like this white area to create your lines outline. And then fill in that looks pretty good to me. I can also use this medium ram brush for laying down stem and leaves. I just want to use the slightest amount of pressure because I want it to be that fine tip. Then with the tulip leaf, maybe I want something bigger and bolder. I'm going to outline a larger leaf shape. And then I'm just going to fill it in. This works best when you're moving the paint around while it's wet. Otherwise you will get a really hard outline and do another one over here. And then I'm going to fill it in. I'm going to concentrate some of the color down at the base here. This one was created pulling or dragging our brush across the paper. This one was created using our outline. Both are great and beautiful starting points for creating our watercolor painting experiment. See which one you like best. Let's come back to this wet on wet and wet on dry. This will be a good example to show you how you can pick up and erase and make corrections, as well as how you can build color. Say I wanted to create correct some of the lines on my wet and wet technique because it was a little bit messy or smudged. I can go back in with a wet paint brush and just move the paint back around, continuing to build that color. Now, I don't want to entirely cover up those edges because I like the softness of them. But say I wanted more white on the petal. What I could do is using my wet paint brush. Since this is now dry, I can pull up my color, pick up some of the paint. Using this scrubbing technique, you don't want to scrub too hard because you don't want to rip the paper. If the painting was still wet, it would be better for me to go back in with a dry paint brush to pick up the paint. But because it's dry, I'm going to use the wet paint brush to rewet it and work that water in so I can lift the color. If there was a larger area and see some of those fine points that I wanted to pick up color on, I could wet the area and just give it a little scrub and then take my paper towel and press down. See, I pulled up a larger area of color to erase and correct any color that was laid down that maybe didn't want to be there. I'm going to go back in and start building some depth on this wet on dry flower. I want to create a little bit more definition on the petals. I'm layering on my violet color. I did end up mixing up some more violet because I had run out. Then I'm just using my angle paint brush, the flathead one, to get some of these sharper edges and lines. Not entirely painting the whole thing, because I do, again, want some of the lighter color to show through to create highlights. That's pretty good. Now for the center, say I wanted to use this red violet. Actually, I'm going to switch brushes to my medium round. I'm going to use this medium round brush to lay down some of this red violet. Now, because I do have wet paint, it's going to bleed a little bit, But I like that effect of the paint spreading out. I think it will look really cool. I'm going to do the same thing over here. Now, this flower is actually dry. I'll have a little bit more control when laying down that center. I'm going to go back in with the violet. Now on this wet on wet flower, again, I want to keep some of those edges. I don't want to lose them. I'm just going to do a little bit of outlining and emphasizing maybe where the ridges of the petals would be. Because I do have wet paint, it is going to bleed a little bit. But I'm okay with that. If you wanted to have more control, go in with your hair dryer and dry it first so that there's no paint spread. I'm just blending out some of the hard edges here, creating a little more softness at different points during your painting session. You might have a lot of emotions. You might feel good about it. You also might feel, I have ruined it. I assure you you have not ruined it. You just need to keep going. Using my paper towel to contain any paint spread that I did not like. I can always go back in and paint over that section. Use my hair dryer, dry these guys out, and then we can continue layering. I'm going to show you how you can pick up color with your dry paint brush. This has been dried and the paint on the paper is wet. I'm just taking a dry paint brush and pulling up. I prefer the short flat brushes for this because I feel like they're a little bit more controlled. Just softening out some of these edges again. If there was a larger area I wanted to pick up the color on, I could just go over and blot it. I paper towel, you can see my results are similar. There's a softness to the wet on wet flour that you don't have with this more structure flower, both are good. It's just a preference as to which technique you want to try and use. I will say if you do wet paint on dry paper is a little easier to control. So if you're a beginner and you want to try out, if you also want to try out this, that's great too. Next we're going to be diving into working on our final painting soon. 10. Final Painting: We can skip the intro here because we know what we need to do. We're going to take everything that we learned in the last two lessons on painting techniques and jump right into our final painting. Take our final paper, which has our sketch already on it, and we are going to tape this down using our artist tape. I like to tap it, making sure it's like catching at least an eighth of an inch of the paper. Whatever I do, making sure it's even all the way around, this will ensure that our paper doesn't slide all over the place while we're working on it. And it will keep the paper from warping, especially working on such a small surface. You'll find that the paper can warp pretty easily. Put my tape away for now. If you need to mix up more paints, this is a great point to do it. I think I might add, I had added some of this rose color to the violet to kind of warm it up. And I think I'm going to do the same thing to this red and the red violet. I think I am going to get a fresh cup of water. I'd recommend changing your water frequently because the more paint that gets into your water, the less pure the colors will be that you've mixed up. Let's go get some fresh water before we start painting. First thing we're going to want to start with is our wash brush. We've created a wash here, but I think I even might want to water this down a little bit more. So I'm going to bring some over here and add a little more water. We want to wash our background wash to be very soft. Remember I said you can do a wet on wet or you can do a wet on dry with the wash. I'm going to do wet on dry because I already have this nice sketch here. If I was painting without the sketch, I would probably do the wet on wet, so I'd have some gradation, but we're going to do it wet on dry with the sketch. I will warn you, you don't want to overwork this. Just very gently, drag the color. Go get more. We still have our sketch intact. It will bleed a little bit, but that's okay, we're going to be painting. All right. There's our background wash. Now, again, maybe there was areas I want to be lighter because I want the flowers to appear lighter than the background. So I'm going to pick up some color where those flowers are. Now we have our wash in the background and we have to wait for this to dry or we can take candy dandy hair dryer and we can speed up the process a little bit, making sure it's cool low and that we hold it at least 6 " away from the surface. You don't want to be too close. And we're going to very gently run this over. As it dries, you can get a little closer, you can see that it sent some paint flying, so I'm just blotting it up with the paper towel. Okay. So that's pretty good. I'm going to put my wash brush to the side because I am finished with it for now. Now I need to make some decision about what the colors are going to be on this final painting. I don't have to use all the colors I've mixed up. I can just pick and choose. I'm going to start with this sort of red violet as my cosmos and use the bluer tones for the leaves when you're working. You might want to start if you're right handed. You might want to start in your upper left hand corner and work this way. You will probably end up leaning in your paint at some point. You can see, I already have no worries if you do. But starting on the op side opposite your dominant hand will help. So you can work. If you're left handed, it's going to be the opposite side. You're going to start in your upper right hand corner and work towards the left. I'm going to start with my round brush, and if I find that this color is too strong or maybe I need to add more to it actually. That's pretty good. Want like a mid range. I've chosen to work on dry paper since we went through the exercise of drying our paper. And I'm leaving some areas of white because I do want some of that white of the paper to show through as my high light. And you will get some color transfer from your watercolor pencil. I pressed really hard so you guys could see it on the camera. On your paper. It's probably a little less bear in mind we're working in layers, so this is just the first layer. Maybe I want to soften those edges that I created when I left the paper showing through. So I'm just go over that really quick. Make sure you when you're doing that, wash your brush frequently because it's going to pick up the paint and it'll transfer it back for the leaves that fern. I'm going to do this blue again. I'm going to leave some white to allow the paper to show through as my highlights. Because remember with water color, we don't use white paint. We just let yet we can add more water or we can let the paper show through as our white. You may reach a point of despair when you're painting. I always do where I'm like, this is terrible. How am I ever going to make anything out of this, being honest with you? Because I want you to know, even when you've been painting for a while, that there's still that moment of like, did I ruin it? And most likely the answer is no, you didn't ruin it. You didn't ruin it. You just need to keep working. You need to add more layers. Okay, so there's my first layer again. You might be feeling like at this point, I've ruined it. It's not ruined. Just not finished. Don't give up. I'm going to go back in and soften some of those edges again, making sure to dry my brush and clean it frequently. I don't spread around too much of that paint because I want to keep it pretty light. Let's give it a blast with the hair dryer. Take a look and deliberate and where I want to continue to add depth and dimension by adding color and where I think it's good. I am going to go in with some different colors though I think I'm going to add a little more warmth to that center of the flower. I'm going to add some areas of shadow on my petals just by picking up the same color going around the center. If it helps you to have your photograph so you can see where the light and dark areas of each flower are going to be, then you can definitely have it next to you. I choose not to because at this point, I'm using my knowledge of what the flower looked like. I don't want to get distracted by the image again, because again, I'm not using the same colors. I'm making some creative choices here. Anytime you want to add another layer of color and you don't want like a wet, wet technique, you need to go back in and either dry it manually using the hair dryer or wait for it to dry So it's looking pretty good. Again, I'm just going to go back in and to find different areas with my fine brush. So this is looking pretty good to me. What I might want to do is have a little fun with it. If you're feeling brave, I can add some splatters. Can even add in the background a little bit of patterning. If you felt like it needed a little umph. Maybe the lighter wash one. I just kind of using the square edge of my brush to kind of probably should have done that before I splattered paint. But and we work around it, I'm just adding some visual interest. That's what I'm looking for here. You know, the background to me felt a little plain compared to the flowers. And while we do want the background to blend, I want to make it a little more fun and funky. Give it a shot with the hair dryer. Again, make sure it's not too close, especially if you did the paint s bladder part. Now we can pull off the tape. You don't want to leave the tape on there too long because that will tend to rip your paper. And I'm pulling the tape away from the paper at an angle, not straight up. Again, pull your tape at an angle away from the paper, not straight up. And it will reduce the chance of it pulling up your paper and ripping it. In. The next lesson, we're going to be embellishing our watercolor paintings. Talk to you. So. 11. Embellishing your Painting: Lo, we are almost finished with our watercolor paintings. You did an amazing job in the last lesson, creating a beautiful watercolor floral on postcard size paper. In this lesson, we're going to be embellishing our beautiful flower watercolor paintings with watercolor pencil, fine line, pen marker, oil pastel, Whatever you have handy and you want to use if you love your watercolor painting as it is and don't want to add anything else to it, that is totally okay. Just skip ahead to the next lesson. Just a quick reminder, please be sure to post pictures of your process of your painting as well as your finished watercolor in the projects tab. I would love to see your process as well as your finished piece, and I know other students would love to see them as well. For this lesson, you're going to need your watercolor painting artist's tape. Whatever material you decided to use, be it fine line pen, watercolor pencil, oil pastel markers. If you're going to rewet your painting, you're going to need a jar for water as well as brushes, rags, and paper towels. Once you've gathered all your materials, let's get started on embellishing our watercolor paintings. Think about this as an experiment. You're experimenting with different materials. Try not to worry about ruining anything. I promise you, most things are salvageable and you will do amazing. I do, however, want us to be strategic in the order that we layer these extra materials onto our painting. The reason being is some materials we do not want to get wet if we're going to be using watercolor pencil or water soluble markers and then re wetting the paper. We want to use those first, then let them dry, then add the oil pastel. Then add our fine line pen. And the reason being is the oil pastel won't work very well on a wet paper. A fine line pen, unless it says it's waterproof, will bleed black ink all over the place. That's why we want to go in a certain order. First step, I have my final painting here. I'm going to use two small pieces of artist tape to secure it to the desktop so it doesn't shift around while I'm working on it. I don't want to do the same thing where I taped all around when I was painting, because I'm going to run the risk of this tape getting stuck again just using two a small, tiny pieces. And I'm not trying not to catch any of the area that is painted just in case it does rip. As I mentioned, we do want to be strategic about the order that we go in for painting and adding the materials to it. I'm going to start with my watercolor pencils and then if I want to add any marker, I will do that. Add water if I need to. Then I'll let it dry, add my oil pastel, and then finally my pine line pen, if I'm going to be using that. I pulled out a range of watercolor pencils that are in the color scheme currently have. I tried to choose colors that would complement what I was working with, not too much contrast. These are derwent, they're watercolor pencils. You can use whatever water color pencil brand you have, but these are the ones that I have in my Kip. I'm going to try and create some depth in different areas. You might also, you may also want to have your pencil sharpener case. Your watercolor pencils needs to sharpen in mind. I'm using this like Prussian blue, which is a really deep blue. I'm going to go in and just out. Now, I could also offset my line, it's slightly outside. Sometimes that creates a nice interesting effect. If I offset my line so it's slightly outside my painted area and it broke. That happens. I just want to outline the ones that I want to give a little bit more depth to. I might not do all of them. I'm going to take this dark violet and work into my flower petals and just deepen some of those colors that I used before I go to use one of my lighter blues to work into the background, just kind of create. A little edge. Emphasize that frame that I've created. I just want to use a marker to play up the red in the center of the flower. This is a tambo brush marker has two ends. It has a brush tip and a fine line tip, and it's water soluble, so it can be used almost like water colors, so it can get wet and be moved around like a watercolor paint. But I want to bring out some of that red that maybe got a little muddy with the purple because these markers are water soluble, they're water based marker, they will mix with and pick up some water color. You don't want to work it too much into the paper, just use it sparingly. I'm going to be using my round, small round brush number four and a small shader brush number four as well. I'm just using a little bit of water and I have my paper towels and my rag handy just in case. And I'm just softening the edges of some of these areas that I've created. I do like the sharpness on some areas, but others I'm just going to leave a little softer. You can either let this dry or you can give it a blast of air if you have your hair dryer handy. It's a very small area, so it won't take long to dry. Now that this is dry, I'm going to go in with my oil pastels. And this is where I get to decide, do I want to keep it in the same color scheme? Do I want to add a different color in? What I do want to do is I want to pull the white out. I'm going to add some more white around that center of the flower because I want that to stand out a little bit more like that. I like that. Maybe I want to add a little more red to that center area. Just doing small amounts, I can always go back and add more. I do want to keep that white center area intact where I pulled the paper through. That looks good. I'm going to put my all pastels to the side because I'm finished with them. I'm going to bring my fine line pens over. I want a medium size right now. I'm going to use this 1.5 I want to connect those little sprays I created so I'm finished with my fine line pens, I'm going to put them off to the side. I'm going to take one last look at my painting and make sure I'm happy with it, and I really like how this looks. So I'm going to very carefully pl my tape off again. Remember, don't pull it straight up, You're going to pull it off at an angle that's parallel to the paper. We don't want to take our surface accidentally. I really love how this turned out. I think embellishing it gave it some extra special details and popped up and emphasized the color and brightness in some areas. Just added extra special pop, some texture color. That's all I needed. I didn't spend a lot of time with this one. I just added those little details and now I am ready to send this off. But before I send this off, I am going to sign my artwork. I just pick a corner of the artwork usually where, where there's like a nice opening and I sign my name and I put the year and now it's ready to go. Thank you so much for watching this lesson. I hope you had a great time embellishing your painting and playing with other materials. In the next lesson, I'm going to be showing you tips on how to mail your finished postcard so they get to the recipient in one creased piece. Talk to you soon. 12. Sending: In this lesson, I'm going to be sharing my tips on mailing your postcards so it makes it to your recipient in one increased piece. If you're not going to be mailing your postcards, you can skip ahead to the conclusion for this class. I do hope that you share your final postcards with friends or family. Even if you aren't mailing it out, you should be so proud of the work you've accomplished. And I'm sure everyone else would love to see what you've been working on. The materials you're going to need for this lesson are your finished watercolor painting, crystal sealed bags or extra watercolor paper, artist tape, envelopes, cardboard and a pen. Once you have all your materials that you need to send these paintings out, let's get started on packaging them up. Before we start packaging up our final paintings, please be sure to add your message to the back of your postcard. I've embellished my painting, I've written my message on the back, and now I am ready to package it up. The first thing I'm going to need is these crystal clear sleeves. These are acid free. It'll help preserve your artwork and also protect it from any water or moisture that it may encounter in the mail. Hopefully none, but you never know. All you do is you take your artwork and you will simply slip it inside the seal there you have it. And I would just peel this tab and I can close it up. Now if you do not have these cust clear bags, what you can do is you can take a piece of pre cut watercolor paper that's slightly larger than your artwork. Going to lay your artwork like this face down with the message up. I'm to take my artist tape and create a little hinge along the edge where those papers meet. And then I can fold it and I've created a nice little seal to protect my artwork from any envelope rubbing. And that's how you would protect your work if you didn't have the crystal clear bags? I do have them, so I want to use them. So I'm just going to peel this off that for something else. I'm going slip my painting into the sleeve here at the end because that's like a self adhesive envelope. Just fold this down over my painting. I've created a nice little sealed bag for my painting and I have a message and it's all protected. Now, I'm going to need my cardboard. I'm going to take one piece of cardboard. You can do two if you want to be like extra and merely make sure it gets there. I'm just going to use one piece, but you can do two and sandwich it together. You'll see it's larger than my painting. It will help protect those edges from getting bent. You can do it face down if you want your message to be showing first. Or you could do it face up if you want your artwork to be the first thing that they see. I'm using my artist's tape. I'm just taping it on there to keep it in place. You don't have to worry about the artist tape sticking to your artwork at this point. It's covered and protected by that crystal sleeve. So there we go. Here's my artwork, nice and secure. Might even want to go a little extra. Make sure that this side doesn't accidentally open up. You can do that. It's not the prettiest, but it will get there. Again, like I said, you could do an extra layer of protection with another piece of cardboard and make a sandwich. And then what you would do is tape that sandwich like that. I know my artworks tape to that first layer. It's not going to slide out now. The cardboard is connected to the other piece, can make a little note that is really secure, it's not going anywhere. I'm going to take my envelope and I can slip my little sandwich inside. Just bear in mind that if you do multiple pieces of cardboard, you're going to increase the weight and therefore the postage for your peace. But I always like to make sure things are protected when I'm mailing them. That's the best way to do it. I'm just going to peel my envelope and close it up now I can address it and send it on its way. Please let me know if you have any questions or comments on this class in the discussions tab. Congratulations, you did it. Up next is the conclusion. Talk to you soon. 13. Conclussion : Hooray, I knew you could do it. Congratulations on finishing this watercolor flower postcards class. Take a moment to appreciate all the hard work you did from start to finish to completing this final watercolor painting. Thank you so much for choosing my class. I am so honored that you have chosen to spend your time learning watercolors with me. Watercolors is a fun and relaxing medium and I love it so much. I hope this class has given you the confidence to continue your own watercolor journey. Lead this class to review and let me know what's one thing that you learned in this class that you will continue to use in your painting practice? If you'd like to learn more about me and my artwork, you can please visit me at my website, Jog Art.com You can also follow me on Instagram at Jog Underscore Art and Design. Please let me know what other watercolor topics you'd be interested in learning about. You can leave me a note in the discussions tab. One final reminder. If you haven't done so already, please be sure to post a picture of your final watercolor painting in the project tab. I would love to see all of your beautiful watercolor paintings and it'll be so exciting to see them all together. Till next time, keep on painting and I'll talk to you soon.