Transcripts
1. Intro to Floral Watercolor class for beginners: Hello there, watercolor fans. So if you love to
paint with watercolor, then this is going
to be a really, really fun moment because
we're not only going to paint with some
granulating watercolors, but we're also going to do these two beautiful pages
in a watercolor journal. If you don't know what kind of watercolor
journal you'd like, then just give something a try. I like to make my own
watercolor journals, and I have many, many times made them as part
of my YouTube channels. So if you want to
learn how to do it, there's either a course on this platform that
can teach you or you can always proceed to my
YouTube channel to get instructions on how to
build these journals. Watercolor paper is amazing, and it's really important that
you decide whether you're going to get a smooth
finish or a hot finish. So for materials for this class, you're going to choose between a 100% cotton paper or a paper
that's like a sketchbook, a paper maybe of wood pulp. I highly recommend that you use a 100% cotton
paper when you can, and there are great ways
to get them on sale. Also, arches makes
an amazing pad of 12 sheets that I
actually turned into these 48 page journals just
by folding the pages in half and either sewing
or gluing them together. And it makes such
an amazing journal. And then that way
I'm always, always, always painting on a 100%
cotton watercolor paper. You can choose from
the fine-grain or the rough,
whichever you like. But those are my favorite papers lately I've been trying this one which is an umbrella and
they're made in Germany. It's a little more expensive
and I find that it's very, very good, but arches
is still my favorite. So depending on where you are, you have different things
accessible to you for sure. So take a look and
see what is there. And if you can try for a
100% cotton paper, also, there are some really
good hot press options that will still work
for this class. And again, if you just have
regular watercolor paper, that'll be fine to. Other items that you will love to use in this class
is the Shi'a set. The Shire is by
shimming get hornets, and it is a set of
granulating watercolors. I've customized the
box that it comes in with my own additional colors. Just that I think coordinate
really well with this set. But for this course, you're gonna be
using shy or yellow. Shi'a green, share all of
Shire blue and Shi'a gray. In order to establish
the backgrounds for the actual
flowers themselves, you can really choose
whatever colors you like, whether you want to
use a bright yellow, you can use some cobalt. You can also use turquoise, whatever it is that
makes you happy. Even some bright
reds would be nice, or oranges, just
choose what you like. And if you want to see what I'm personally using
these flowers, then just check below
the tutorials so that you can get a list of
all the colors that I use. Another thing that
you really benefit from is a permanent pen. This is a water-based
ink pen, a black liner. And I love these because literally right
after I draw them, they are ready to go and maybe 510 minutes is all you have to wait and you can
paint right over. These brushes are really important to me
because I just love watercolor brushes and I
pretty much have them all. But this is a really
great set for this specific kind of tutorial. The reason why
this green esco to set is great is because it has certain brushes in it that
make this so much easier. So whatever watercolor
brushes you choose to use, make sure you're using something that is really easy for you to use and that fits
the kind of paper, the size of the paper, and also the kind of watercolors
that you want to use. The reason why this is such a great set is because it comes with one brush that has a very fine point. It has a lot of snap, but it also does washes, so it dumps an equal amount
of water onto your paper, which is key to getting
granulation to really work out. Another good one that is in this set is the
Skoda 12th, bright. And this is kind
of a really easy, easy one to get some
details in and to also make certain petal shapes
workout even in small form like on
this sheet of paper. And finally, the last one that I love is the number for Ultima. This is a rigorous style brush, even though it is round, but it's a little
longer than usual, which brings it into the
rigor or the script area. I love this brush. It's one of my gotos
and you can see, I can get fine points. I can use it for details. I can also use it for the
stems and the little leaves. It is just a great
all around brush. So this is all you really need. If you just have one
brush and that's it, then I recommend having
something that will allow you to apply the color, have enough of a belly to
hold the water and the paint, and enough of a tip so that you can actually get into some
of those fine details. So that's really all
you need an a brush. You don't need three brushes. You only really need one. But hey, I really like brushes. This is what I'm gonna be using. Alright guys, so
we're ready to get in here and do this course. And I'm so excited if
you want these drawings and you don't know how to draw these types of
things yourselves. You can use my template, which I've included below, that has all of the
basic drawings, try and trace them, or you can also project them, or you can also just
look at them and try to practice drawing them on your paper with some pencil. First, erase all the lines and ink them in once
you're finished. Otherwise, why don't you just create your own
if you'd like to. It's pretty simple. I mean, most things
have to do with little style lines and just
a little bit of a vision. So you can either
look at Pinterest for some ideas for your flowers or like I said, access my file. I've got lots of them in
there for you to choose from, and so that you will really get the most
out of this course. Also, I want to
remind you to join my Facebook group page because that's where we share a lot of the tutorials and give tips
and also come up with really, really fun and crazy ideas
for future tutorials.
2. Flower 1 Painting backgrounds with granulating watercolor: Before we get started,
I just wanted to remind you that granulating
watercolor has a very specific thing that must be done in
order for it to work out. One of the things that
granulation needs is water. So it's really, really
important that your brush have a large enough capacity to hold water and that you
give it enough water. One of the other things I
find that works better for granulation is to get an
adequate amount on your brush. But then also use a
ceramic palette to continue to add
the water and add the pigment and mix
it in really well. I find that if the pigment
is too thick right away, then it kills the granulation and you can't see it as much. So you really want to work
in transparent layers. And the best thing is to
wait for it to completely dry before adding
another layer on top. If you get your paint too thick, then all you wanna do is add a little clean brush over
it and wipe it away. It will help to start to
loosen up the pigment and spread it
across the paper so you can actually
see things going. I think that's why having a rougher paper
really works out. So I'm taking the
first color here, which is the olive,
shy or olive. And I'm just kinda
diluting it out and giving it room to breathe. That's what I always say. We're gonna go ahead and paint Shire Olive into the
background of this. Now, depending on the flowers
that you're going to using, to be using, you can
either go completely over the flowers and wait
for the layer to dry. Or you can just use a nifty brush like this
and go around the flowers. Just adding some paint, mixing it in the water. And painting with one stroke. I also find that if I go
over granulation too much, then I end up
killing off some of the granulation and it
doesn't give me the best of luck really
what I want to see. So I try to use the biggest brush I can
with the most amount of water and just
go over it once. Don't scrub and don't make
it too thicker, heavy. This is a decent amount of color I'm getting
I've seen a lot of diluted washes that
are really nice too. So that's up to you. But remember, super granulation has more than one granulating
watercolors in it. So often it's made with
more than one pigment. And that means that
you really want to see more than one
pigment happening. Since there's more than
one color mixed in there to get the granulation
to be super granulating. And both of the colors are granulating and that's why they're called
super granulating, then it's not really
necessary to do much more than just add one clean, nice looking wash of granulating watercolors
to the background. Because it's going
to show a lot of different colors and variations. And you don't really
need to do much more. It kind of creates this
nice little blurred effect is you're seeing now where the different colors
come out and start to intermingle with whatever
it is that you're painting. I think that's really convenient and really fun because a lot of times when we're trying to get these backgrounds
to look really good, we can't figure out what colors will go
together and not make mud. And one of the best things about granulating watercolor is
it's already mixed for you. It's already there. It's
part of the actual paint. Now if you want to create
shadows with the same color, you can either take a
little bit of the gray, which I'm going to show
you in just a second. Once you have completely
painted the back or you can go maybe a little heavier with the color that you
have on your brush. Just remember that
the more layers, the less you're going to
see if the granulation. So you don't want to scrub
and you really want to let that nice water just mixed in and carry
those particles because there's sediment
in granulating watercolor. Both of the colors that are used to make this
color have granulation. And in that it's going to be looking to
separate as it dries, but it needs water
in order to do it. Because if it's just paint, it's like anything else. You kinda locked down the
beauty of the watercolor. It's really important that you keep that environment for it. Look at how pretty that is. Can you already see the colors? So as you can see,
the granulation is already taking effect. And we're already getting some of those different
colors that come in. The Shire Olive. It's a beautiful, beautiful
background color. Now if I wanted it
to be a little more, a little darker than I would wet my brush with some water, mix it in the palette, grab a little bit more,
little bit more paint. And then I would just add that to the areas where I want it to get it a little more dark. But as you can tell, if you look really closely, There's a fine line
that walks between the cloudiness and
the granulation. So you don't always want to add too much,
too many layers, but at the same time, you can kind of tell depending on what
you're working with, whether or not it's okay and
it's working out for you. If you find that it's not working out and you've
taken too much paint, just what your brush
and then go over it once and wipe away
some of that color. It should come right off because granulating watercolor
is really amazing. And it usually is
not very staining. So it moves really well. There. I've actually done
some darker areas down at the bottom for you. And I'm going to bring some of the darkness in between
the flowers just a bit, just to create some
little shadows while everything is still wet. There you go. Now if we
wanted to take it one step further and add a little
bit more of a dark line, then this is where we
can either use the shy or green or blue, or the psi or gray. So let me pick up
a little bit of the Shire gray and
I'll tell you what, I'll show you how to use it. I'm actually got it on my brush here and I'm going
to dab it out, dilute it so that it's
a very light layer. Take a little bit of the
previous color and add it in. Now I get a four times
granulating color. Now in areas that
I wanted to maybe add a little bit of that gray while the color is still wet. We're just going to dab
it in just like that. I'm not overworking it. I'm not even trying
to get it perfect. I'm just letting the
water that's already existing on the page
before it dries. I'm letting that take it. And all this is
going to do is add a little more depth and dimension to your
watercolor painting. Give it a little
bit of shadowing. Just under where the leaves are. Or if you had a light shining on your leaves or
sun and it was kind of reflecting onto the back
wall or the back of the whatever it is
that's behind it right. Then you would have a little
bit of darkness there. So there we go. We added just a little
bit of the Shire gray. And as it dries, it's gonna give us
more and more effects. So let's let this
dry and we'll come back and do the rest
of this painting.
3. Flower 1 Painting the flower: Okay, firstly, we're going
to work on the flower. Now I've chosen this
beautiful cobalt violet to do the inside of the flowers. There are two choices.
You can either use your rigger brush
depending on the size, or this brush, which
is the bright brush, Let's give it a try so that
you can get familiar with it. I'm just going to
put a little bit on my of water on my brush. And what the paint. Again, we're going to dive
just a little bit into the palette and
make sure that we have the right mixture
of water versus paint. It's too thick. You'll lose some of the
great granulating properties of these colors. If it's too thin, then you're gonna have
to do multiple layers to get the effects
that you want. So I'm just mixing it until I find just
the perfect thing. I'm going to take one
of the smaller flowers and just test it out. Yeah, that's a great
mix of colors. So to start with, I'm just
doing a nice light layer. And I'm going to try
and on dry paper, deliver it within the lines, but in a way that doesn't
make it look too even. So. In order to do that, I'm going to use
what's on my brush to do these nice even strokes. But then I'm gonna go back and load my brush with
a little bit more and just add a dot more
of the color on the base. When the page is dry, of course, it's going to the water that's on there is going to
pull this up and forward. And that's gonna be really, really nice way to get
differences in shades. If you also notice I'm
leaving a lot of whitespace. I'm bringing the
color from the base up, leaving some whitespace. And then I'm going back
in with a little more of the color and putting
it down at the bottom. You don't have to get
too heavy with that. But I'm trying just to
do a light pass on it so that we've got more
of an effect look. We just don't want it to
be all just one color. Very simple. If you do this in the beginning, what you end up
doing is creating a really beautiful
multi tonal wash without having to go back
and do a lot of layers. A brush like this
is really good for it because it's
got a lot of snap. It doesn't hold too much water, so it's not going to
make a big soggy mess. And it allows us to go and do different layers on the washes without it just over
saturating the paper. The paper is going
to dry a lot faster than if I used a wash brush. That's what I want here, especially in the small format. So because this is the
one in the background, once this dries,
I'm actually going to go back in and we're
gonna do some shading. But right now you can
see I've already got shading going on just by adding a very light layer of
color and then going back in and just adding a dot of extra color where I feel that it needed
a little more depth. So again, just doing a wash of color here,
leaving some whitespace. Go back and grab some more. At the base. Just put a dot in. A little wash, leaving some whitespace and
a dot of color. When you get a
little more brave, you can actually set the belly of your brush
down and it's going to deliver a lot more
color in an uneven way. And that is actually really fun. So give it a try. Let's do one together. Okay, so we're going
to wet our brush. We're going to grab our paint. Some grabbing more paint, right? Putting it on my brush,
so I'm loaded with paint. Now we're gonna
go here and we're just going to sit the belly
down and pick it back up. Now we're ever you
start this stroke. That's where most of the color is going to be
left in a brush like this. But you do have to
just try it out and see by adding a
little more depth of color into the bass
just by dabbing it in, I'm already getting those
very variety of shades, which is so nice in this area because this is
the outside of my flower. I just kinda wiped away some of it because I'm
keeping it mindful. I'm being really
mindful of where. The outside of the petals are versus the inside
of the petals. So that I can already
get some shading in. And if we do it right, we actually don't have
to go back later. Beautiful. Huh? Let's go to the next one. I'm going to wet my
brush and start again. Load it with a nice
diluted amount of paint. I'm going to lay the brush down, get the belly down and
push. Let's come back up. You can see the see how
diluted it is at the end and how the paint rushes to the bottom of where
the brushes lying. If your brush doesn't do that, change your brush and
try something else. Loading my brush with the color again, remember
granulating color. You have to kinda stir and make sure you get it
all on your brush. Setting my brush
down and up again. Perfect. One more time. Let's go ahead and turn
this around so you can see. Lay my brush down and bring
it up, load the brush, lay it down and bring it up and see how it's
already leaving the bus, the bottom, the base color in. And anytime that, I just want it to look
a little bit more dramatic than I can just
dab in a little more of the color laid down
and bring it up. Now this is the outside of it, so I just kinda wiped
it away with my finger. Now I'm going back in with
just a little bit more paint. And I'm going to dab in some areas just to deposit
just a bit more color. Try not to do this
really evenly. Try to do it unevenly, because you really
want to be mindful of shadows and you can just smear it with your finger a
little bit just with a touch. Going underneath. And on some of the sides
of the petals where I think if the light source
is coming this direction, that we would see
a deeper shade. If my light source
is coming this way, then this underside and this underside would
be a little darker. The center would be
a little darker, and the leaf that goes down
would be a little darker. May go ahead and
just color some of this color, some of that. We left our little
one over here. Color that in a
little line there. So you can see I'm just going through and imagining where
the light source is coming from and just kind of eyeballing what I want for my
colors to look. If ever like right there, I feel like it looks like there's a circle
inside of a circle, so I'm just bringing
this out just like that. Okay. So as you're drawing, if you find that any of
the areas have gotten too dark or you feel like
you'd like them to lighten up then just
use a clean brush. So you're going to just
wipe your brush down with water and then get it so
that it's not sopping wet. And just go over the area
where you want to remove the color and then
wipe it on your towel. Add water, blot it, remove your color and just
wipe it on your towel. This is the advantage to
using granulated watercolor. Because if you ever feel
like you messed it up, then if you're working
on good paper, you can pretty much go in and remove color anytime you went to say my light source just didn't work
out on this petal. I can back it off and just
let it completely dry before I add an additional
color or I do anymore work. This is also a good way to add a little bit of
negative painting. Look to your okay, there we go. So our flowers are done. Let's move on to the stem.
4. Flower 1 Painting stems: Okay, we're ready
to paint the stems. So I'm gonna be using the lungs, thin brush the size
for ultimately, it's a rigger brush. A script tool work, or just a pointed
brush will also work. As far as colors. For this one, I'm gonna go with the shy or blue because it's a very bluey green and I need a contrast to the
background that I chose. So if I use the olive
on the background, then this screen will work, but it might be a little
too light to show up. So I'm going to go
with the darker one, which is the blue Shire. And that's gonna give me a
little more depth of color. You can also use
a brighter color at this point or
even a darker color. But I've already got the
black lines in there, so I'm looking for a little
bit heavier amount of color, but still same rules apply. We're going to load
our brush with water, which is why a wider
belly brush works. So this has got a wider belly. Load it with paint. Mix the paint in your ceramic palette so that you activate some
of the granulation. Get it just right where you
feel like you're able to create these lines and
it's what you need. Now the lines are so
thin that you're not necessarily going
to see granulation, but we're still using
granulating watercolors. So first, I'm going to
add a little swipe to our details on
these little buds. And because it's so small, sometimes there's too
much color on my brush, so I'm just going to blot a little bit of it
with a clean towel. Clean dry towel.
You can also use a Q-tip or you can just
smudge it with your finger. That just shows me that I have a little bit too much water on my brush for the size of this. It's now let's go ahead and
we're gonna do one stroke. Following the line of the ink. Very thin. Even fast strokes. Don't use a lot of pressure. If you're using a brush
that's this size. For this size paper, if your paper is a lot
larger than it's easier. But if the paper is really small like this in a sketchbook, you have to go really carefully and use the thinnest
brush that you have. Rinse our brush out.
Now for the centers, I thought it'd be fun to
do little shot of colors. So let's go ahead and utilize the yellow
that I have in here. I need to get a nice wet wash with lots and lots of
color for it to stand out. It's almost gotta
be, I would say, very opaque at this size
because it's so small, it really does need to
have a lot of punch in it. Perfect. Go ahead and just add
it to the center, making sure that
everything is dry. Otherwise, it will
turn around here, stabbing it with my
finger a little bit just to smear it around so that it doesn't
puddle. And that's it. We have our first
flower painted. Now once it dries, if you
want to add layers, you can, you can go back in and
you can very carefully at another layer of depth and
dimension to this area. You can also add more
layers of color to your flowers if you want to get a little more darker look, but I love it the way it is. So it just depends. Now this point, as far as
more work or more detail, you can just grab a small detail brush loaded with paint and just start going
around and doing it. But I warn you to be very, very careful and tread
lightly because if you put too much paint or
granulation, granulation, you're going to ruin some
of the granulating effects and you don't want to
dilute them too much, but you also don't want to have so many layers that
you can't really see the granulation
unless you're working on super rough paper. In any case, if you do
add too much, remember, all you have to do is
just what the surface and then pick it back up and
it will actually do that. See if I just wet the surface, I dab on my towel and
I pick this back up. You can see it's removing
some of the layers of paint that I used to that I was using for a little bit of
depth in the background. So I can just go back
and just add it back in. Now this background is dry, so I really have to tread
lightly if I want it to blend. And the way to do that is
to wash the entire area. If you don't add water to the entire area and go
back over this incomplete. What will happen
is you'll end up with these lines like this. And that's fine if you
want that to happen, but if you don't
want that to happen, you're going to have to paint the entire area again like that. And the only way to back it off and make it
blend is to take a little bit of your rag and
slightly remove the color. And that and you kinda
go at it like that. And that's why I love
to do these things with the first pass unless
you don't mind really modeled look
for the background. I find that once I get
started adding again, then I end up with
these little areas that are lighter
than the others. So then I have to go
back and paint those. And then it goes on from that. It's a much different look, but it's still really, really nice and you can't really do anything
wrong, I think. But depending on the
effect you're looking for, if you don't want a lot
of lines through it, that makes sure you
wet the entire area and then add your layer. Okay. So just kinda went
through a little bit, muddled that up so that I could get those
different effects. The areas where my
stems were not dry yet, I'll have to do is just take a clean brush and
literally go through. And I can just clean
it all up and just add a little bit more
depth and dimension to it. I loved the way the
granulation looks. It's so, so pretty okay. We're all set then. Let's move on to the next
one. How you guys doing?
5. Flower 2 Painting the Background: For our next flower, we're gonna be using
shy or yellow, a little bit of lemon yellow, shy or blue, and
one of the greens. So get ready, this
is going to be fun. So before we painted
the background first and I think maybe we should just stick with that flow because it seems to be working out
really, really well. So let's go ahead and take our big wash brush again with the point because that
really, really helps. We're going to take
some clean water, much like we did
on the other one. Let's dip or paint
into the Shire blue. Just wedding some
of the colors here. Go ahead and mix it
up in our palette. Get a nice amount of
color on the brush. And just on dry paper because
this isn't our sketchbook. We're just going to start
putting in that color. Now if you find that you don't
want it to be this dark, you can work in
lighter layers just by diluting the water. Using water to dilute out some of the
color on your brush. Remember you're
working on dry paper, so not so hard, you can always pretty wet
the paper if you want and just the areas where
you'll be painting. But granulation
doesn't necessarily require a lot of wet
paper in order to work. You can paint just
fine with this size. With wet paint on dry paper. Some of the areas where
I went a little darker, It's very easy just to move the paint up
with a wet brush. And then some of the areas where we're going really light. You can easily add more color
just by dabbing it, right? And, and then pushing
it around the page. When you're painting
backgrounds with granulation, they don't really
go evenly because the granulation has several
different colors in them. So you don't really
need to look to try and accomplish
the most even washes. I'm just working
in sections now, wetting the paper with
my brush in a little bit of the color and
then building it back in just to see those beautiful colors
separate as they go through. I'm trying to stay outside
of the lines that again, this isn't that hard. These specific colors
aren't not staining. So if you do go inside the lines and you
want to erase it, I have to do is just get
some clean brush with water, go over the area
and wipe it clean, let it dry completely
and then start again. But because we're doing
a continual wash, I recommend that you
just move forward, do the whole wash, and then take the area out
that you want to delete. That way you don't really
mess up the background. If background does dry and you're working on a
really large sheets, then you can spray
it with some water. Or you can just take
your brush and wipe over the area with some water
just to reactivate it. Just being very,
very careful to not leave any area dry next the
area that you're painting. Because if it's dry, it's going to leave a watermark. So when you want to
deposit more color, the area has to be wet. Otherwise, where you don't deposit color is going
to leave a watermark. Look at all these beautiful
colors in the blue. It's really, really a
pretty background color. I think it'll look really
nice next to the white arrow, next to the yellow as well. There's a little bit of
yellow in this color. One of the things I find works the greatest
with granulation is identifying what color is in the granulation like
what's actually made of, and then trying to stay
in that color family. And that way you're either
working with compliments or you're working with levels
of the same colors. So in other words, if this color has
a yellow in it, it has maybe a green
and a civilian blue. Then obviously working with Cyrillic in blue with the yellow itself or with another green that compliments that are
going to work out really, really well for
your painting and make it look really cohesive. It's now I'm just
dabbing and look at how beautiful this
color graduates. It's got so much going on. As you can see, I've really utilized everything
in my palette here. I'm just going to
get what's left. Fill in the little gaps. That background just
couldn't look any prettier. It is absolutely delicious. I mean, you can't get
any nicer than that. Trying to mix your
own backgrounds. It's literally just
beautiful as it separates. It's going to have all different
kinds of colors in it. And that is going
to look amazing. I'm dabbing a
little bit of water through the areas to just keep it flowing
because I'd love to see more of the colors separate. And I find that
with granulation. When you move, move it
around a little bit. And even when you remove
some of the upper layers, it will reveal more colors
that are underneath. You see what I mean? Because I'm removing
some of this upper blue, it not only will dry faster, but I'm just wiping
it on my towel and removing some of the extra
water that I just put in. And that's revealing
some different tone, some different colors like the yellows coming more forward. Some of the blues and their civilian in here is
coming more forward. And it's also allowing it to settle into the page
now because it's going through that stage
where right before it dries where it just
kinda settles in. Isn't that great? Look at that effect
is beautiful. So you can really
play with wiping away some of the granulation
and letting it just dry. It just do that. Let it crack and dry and just do its thing because
it just really, you can't improve on it. Let's go to the next stage.
6. Flower 2 Painting petals with shading: For this next stage in
painting our flower, I'm going to work
from light to dark. So I'm going to take the brightest of the colors
we're going to be using. And I'm going to put
it in the palette with a little bit of water. This is lemon yellow. So I'm getting a nice
watered-down consistency. Then I'm just going to swipe over some of the upper
areas of the flower. Just an easy stroke. Nothing too crazy. Just to get the
color established, rinsing out my brush. Now, I'm going to start
working on the shy or yellow. The yellow is a interesting mix of colors. Let me show
you what's in it. Like to do these pages
in my journal when I first get colors so that I can really rip apart what's
in these colors. This is the Shire yellow. So you can see it's got PV 62, it has pv1 59. Pv1 59 is a special yellow
that is granulating, and PV 62 is a beautiful violet. It's manganese violet actually, you wouldn't ever guessed that, but it does have that in it. Of course, you know
that when you mix yellow and purple
together you get brown. So we're going to be really careful because
I've added a little bit brighter yellow and I'm letting it seep into
the background. But that's okay because
we're gonna do this in layers and we're
not going to mess it, mess with it that much. So let's go ahead and now
that we know it's in here. So now we're gonna take our shire yellow
and we're going to mix it in over the lemon. Take this away. Now I'm going to take my brush and I'm bringing it forward just to see how much I
have on my brush. It's a little dark. So in order to counteract that, I just rinse it off in my water, dab a little bit
of the water off. And now I'm working with
a much lighter layer. And I'm building in
my lighter layer. I'm just kinda
using because this is such a small sketchbook. I'm using my tip of my finger just to control
some of the extra. Water. Can also use a smaller
brush if you want. But I find that using the larger brush
actually works better because it delivers enough water to encourage the granulation. This is a little bit more of an intermediate
technique actually. So as you can see, the
gold on our flowers is really starting to
come and take note. And the lemon being so bright
is working in contrast. So we're just going to
continue to move up the flower just like that
with little strokes, leaving those little raw edges. Just gently going over
in some areas and not all so that we can
spread the color and, but get it to be really
uneven like this. It's more like a shadow of
the painting of the flower. If you notice in some
areas and leaving it a little darker
than other areas. Especially on the under
base of the flower, where there would be less light. Just spotting this end because
it is very, very small. You get you a different angle. You can see where I had
left some of the light. We actually got a lot of bleeding and our
yellow which looks, I think it looks really good. If you don't want that, you can actually just
back that back out, let it dry, and go back and add more color
that you do want in there. I actually really love it. But it's just a personal choice. Very easy to back it
up just like that. This is also a good
way to teach you how to delete some
of the background. Should you not like
it if it looks too heavy or you feel like
you've messed it up, just make sure whatever you do, you do it evenly. Otherwise it will leave lines. And in some cases
you have to trail off into all the areas. And finally, to finish
off our flower, all we have to do is add
a little more yellow at the tip just to brighten things up and combine the two. Now remember, if your paint in the shadows
hasn't dried enough, then it's going to mix together and you're going
to have to go back with an additional layer in order
to re-establish the shadows. So the best bet is to let it dry slightly so that your
shadows still exist. And then go back in and go over the entire thing with a
glaze of light yellow. And that way you still
got the brightness, but we've used the shy
or yellow in order to establish those amazing shadows and a little bit
more granulation. It's really unique
doing it this way, but I think it's really fun
and it's a great way to get a little more depth and
dimension into a beginner class. And you've just learned
something about shading.
7. Flower 3 Painting the subject first: For our next flower, we're going to be
painting with the Shire green for our background. And then for our
butterfly and our flower. We're gonna be using
a bright yellow, a cobalt turquoise,
and a cerulean blue. These are going to be working together and
intermingling often. So get ready to have some fun. I'll try and make it as
beginner as I can for sure. So first off, I have a
wash brush with a tip. This is a size 16, Morocco and a rigor with a
tip and a nice large belly. Ultimate size for just gonna get our brushes wet and
start mixing our paints. For the background. Let's go there first. Going to establish a
border on your butterfly. Actually, let's go to
the butterfly first. Let's add the yellow. I'm just going to put our
thinner brush and the yellow and mix it
in our palette and a little bit of
water. Strikeout. Just that simple. For the flower. We're going to add some of this yellow right in the center. And again, strike
out just a bit. Let's pull back some of
the excess because we just don't need it
to be that way. We want to encourage it to dry. And it's plenty bright. This is a lemon
yellow and it really, really has a lot of
fluorescent qualities to it. Now we're going to take
our cerulean blue, put a little bit in our palette, mix in some water until
we get the consistency and the color we're looking for. We're going to lay the brush
right where the yellow ends. Lay the belly down and
strike out. Again. Some of it is going to
bleed in and that's fine. Now we're going to take
the cobalt turquoise, get enough on our brush again, put it in our palette and
just mix it up a little bit. Sometimes I do let
them mingle in my palette as long as I have the majority of the color
that I want on my brush, then underneath the yellow, we're going to just strike
out just like that. You're creating the
wings of the butterfly. Now I'm going to rinse my brush out and go underneath the layer. And just encourage a little bit of a lighter wash
towards the ends. Wedding the brush,
dabbing it on my towel. Letting the brush
dabbing it on my town. I want granulation
to happen with the yellow as it mixes
with the other colors. And the lemon yellow is so
nice and bright that when it touches the cerulean blue
or the cobalt turquoise, it generates a really,
really bright green. So you can get as much of that or as little of that
in here as you'd like. And you can get as
wispy as you want with that background
choice as well. Some of these I'm just
blending out into the background into very, very light washes of color. Almost like a transparent
veil on our butterfly. Looks really pretty. You can add in a
very light. Wash. Don't use a ton of water because you don't want to encourage
the granulation, but you don't want
to cover things and have really heavy, heavy layers. You want to try and
get a little bit of a really pretty transparency and it's going to keep
mixing as this dries, so leave it alone at that point. Now for our flower,
we're gonna go ahead and take the cerulean blue. Try and get a nice
light wash of it. And we're going backwards
in on the flower. I'm going to try and not hit
any wet areas of the yellow. Because if I do, it's going to make that
area really bright green, which isn't bad, but
I'm trying to just let the yellow dry and heavy
blue and yellow flower. This is going to be
a one strike motion because if you do
hit any yellow, you definitely don't want them mixing unless you do
want to encourage green. So try not to hit any
yellow that is not dry. And definitely try
not go over it twice. Finishing off my flowers here. This is civilian blue. The real civilian
blue will granulate. So it's gonna be a nice
mix of granulation. Now once the yellow is dry, you can actually go back
and do one strike motions just to add a little bit of shadowing into the
center of the flower. I also recommend adding a
little blue to the base. Just try not to strike it
too much with the brush so that it doesn't turn green. You don't want a
really bright green. Okay, that's looking good.
Let's let it dry and we'll go ahead and put it
in our background next.
8. Flower 3 Adding a background: Now it's time to
paint the background. And if you haven't let this dry, it's gonna be a little
more difficult. If it dries, it's a lot easier. So you might want to leave
it as long as possible. Mine is semi dry because
I'm giving the class, but I'm going to use
the Shire green next. So as always, I'm just getting
some on my brush here. Using this yellow. We'll just turn this around. So I'm putting some, as I always do, into a ceramic palette that I
can add plenty of water. And encouraged the separation
of those colors because I really want my background to show off some of the
beautiful mixes that are in this gorgeous premixed
colors, super granulating. So starting with, of course, the drier areas, a very light wash is
what I'm looking for. I'm going to try
and get as close to the subject as I
can without completely painting over it so that we don't get
too much of a bleed. Now if it were completely dry, you can be a little
messier but because I'm not entirely dry, but I still want to
add my background and now I'm just doing light layers and I'm
being very careful. That's why having a nice
tip is really handy. Also by establishing
the foreground first, what I've been able
to do is decide on how bright I want my subject. And then I can now have
the subject present. Do the background. Before we had to
foresee what we wanted to do with the flower by
painting the background first, because that left us
with the decision of the background is what it is. So we have to make the
flower right enough to hold, to hold the attention, right? So this is the
opposite of what we just did by painting
the foreground first. Now we get to paint
the background very, very light or very dark. But you're constantly
looking at the foreground, the butterfly and the flower. And it's giving you
this nice sense of balance and your decision-making and
there's no guesswork. You're painting a
background that exactly goes or it doesn't, and you can alter it without
having to go back in. That's what I love about
painting foregrounds first, but some people get a little bit worried that they're
not able to do it that way because they're worried about their painting bleeding. But if you notice, I'm
using a very fine tip. I'm striking away from the
subject and I've let it dry. There's even a tiny little
bit of white right there, little tiny bit of white line in-between my paint
and my subject. And that helps me to keep them separate because
it's a little bit wet. I can always go back in and
touch it up once it's dry. But that's good. I'm
really happy with that. So that allowed me to establish this beautiful, beautiful green. Now in some of the areas, I might want it to be a
little darker so I can add a little more color so that we have some areas
with a little more depth. Just by dropping in the color, allowing it to swirl
around in the paint. You can always remove it later. Remember, I'm just kinda
randomly trailing and out, letting it dance around
itself while it's wet. Another thing you can
do is you can take the Shire gray or even the Shire blue and very diluted patterns and you can just dotted
in and let it spread. This is a great way to get additional movements in
coloring into your background. Now that will spread
as the wash goes. But if you want to encourage it, you can just kinda brush back-and-forth
with a damp brush. When you see a
puddle arising and your paper is still wet,
it shouldn't be a problem. But if you don't want backwash
is with granulating color, It's really easy I have to
do is just dry your brush off and start wiping away
some of those puddles. Which you should see is the reveal of some
beautiful color underneath. And if it's not dark enough, you can always go back in
and add another layer. That gave me some really
pretty movement too. And some of the areas
by adding the blue. Okay, there we go. We have our next flower
drawing completed. Don't forget you've
got black ink there. So if you want to add
some more details, you're welcome to ink those in after this is completely dry. And even if your
background layer doesn't turn out like
you liked it too, you could go back in and watch the entire thing and
add another layer. Just be careful not to
go over your flower. If you do go darker
than this, ultimately, you might have to go back
with a little more of the blue and enhance some
of the style lines. Which actually
looks pretty good. Just like that. I'm using my brush like a like
it's the black pen. And putting in some styling. And that will just add
a little more depth and dimension to our flower
and not leave it so light. And you can also go in and give some more values
to your butterfly. Always fun to do. There
we go. It's beautiful. Love it. So, so pretty.
9. Flower 4 a light washed granulating background: For our next flower, we're going to be using this beautiful cobalt
turquoise for the flower. This really in blue, and the Shire green for the background just sit very similar to the green
that we had here. We're going to go
ahead and put in the background first using a smaller brush
with a large belly. By large belly, I mean
that it holds a lot of water despite the fact
that it's a smaller brush. This usually is the case with very long brushes that aren't
scripts when it's a rigor or just look for something that has a very wide belly
on it but at the tip. And this is an ultimate
SCADA size four, so it's a small brush, but it has a wide enough belly
for us to be able to paint a background where small wash
on a smaller format page. So I'm just gonna give
it a nice light wash so that it brings out the yellows and the blues that are mixed into this beautiful
background wash. This color is so, so pretty and so easy
to use because it's such a clean, bright,
cheerful color. One of my favorites in this set. You can just start with a very, very light wash, something that will dry really quick and that you
can paint over. Remember, in dealing with
granulating watercolor, pick up enough of the watercolor for it
to actually granulate. Sometimes if the washes too diluted and you
don't have enough of the paint in your palate
when you mix it with water, you won't really get
a lot of granulation, even with a super
granulating color. You have to get enough
of the pigment onto the paper mixed with water
for it to actually work. Then the href for the paper, the more likely it is to
show a lot of granulation. Now that these areas are wet, I'm just dropping in a
little more color to enhance the effect and encouraged that lovely
granulation to happen. They painting in the
background first on this one, it's going to allow us to let
the background dry and then have achieve a depth of color that lays over
the background nicely, especially because we're
doing blue flowers and green stems on this screen. It's really not going to
compete with it as long as it's dry enough so that it
doesn't bleed into it. On a very small piece like this, you want it to dry? Definitely because
if it's not dry, then it's not going to give you the sharp edges and you're going to have to leave a lot of white around where you've painted
so that it doesn't touch. What I'm doing is
I'm removing some of the upper layer of water
with a clean brush. And what that is going
to reveal is some of the brighter colors
like the yellow that is at the bottom of the
pigment chain here. It's like lying
underneath the blue. So when I remove it, this is when that
little secret is revealed or getting all this beautiful yellow
is coming to life. Because I'm lifting some of
that blue off. Beautiful. I love to see the magic behind the different colors that are in these pigments. So crazy. So let's let this dry
and then we will move on to painting our
flower and our stems.
10. Flower 4 Painting the flower and stem: Okay, so now we are nine tenths of the way dry to
make it much easier on you, make sure it's a 100% dry. I'm going to take the darker
of the two colors and add it to the granulating background
that is currently here. And the reason why I can do
that is because they're all made of pretty much
the same colors. So this is like a yellow and blue background that's forging this
beautiful green. And I'm going to take
the two colors that I intend on using in
this palette and mixing them together to get
my lightest value of my wash. So now I have it on my brush. I'm gonna get a nice light value and I'm just going to start washing the area from the tip back to the base. Just like that. Then I'm going to add
a little of the dark, pick up a little
more of the color. And I'm going to strike in
some of the darker areas. Remember it's wet so the values are going
to start to combine. Rinse out my brush and
add the lighter value, which is the cobalt turquoise. Get rid of any excess here, and start dropping that
in towards the outside. This is what I like to
call a drop in color. It's just kind of
letting the watercolor combined by dropping in
pieces of the color, just a little strikes of it. You can end up with some really, really pretty things happening. So just wait, Here you go. Now the base is still dry here. So I'm going to take full
strength of our darker color, which is this brilliant. And I'm going to swipe out, rinse out your brush,
dry your brush, and then go over the color
again just to smear it around. Reason why I used a little
bit of a dry brushes. I want to control the water. This allows me to push the paint around and mix it a little easier because I'm not
creating puddles on my paper. I'm actually just
encouraging it to go exactly where
I want it to go. If the brush gets way too dry, I can always wet it
and then dry it again. And then you've got something
a little more pliable. It's almost like I'm taking colored pencil and I'm
combining the two. Then I'm using what's left on my brush to pull back some
of the color from the, from the outside of
the flower at the top, back into the base. I'm going to take
full strength on that civilian and I'm going
to paint the base of my flower and just kinda dot
some of those areas out, giving it that really,
really deep bass. Now where we have
the lighter wash, We're going to start at the tip. We're going to watch it back
just a little bit more. So we're encouraging
everything to go here. And this allows me
to just get a feel for how I want the
flower shaded. Now I'm going to take
the brighter of the two. Give it a nice wash
with some water. And we're just going to touch the top of the flowers and go in towards the base. You can decide how much or
how little this you want. Remember as it dries, it is going to spread
so you don't wanna go too far into the flower. Keep it out on that
tip. Their way of a beautifully shaded
flower in pretty much one go. You want to peel back
any of these areas? Just take a clean brush that
has a little bit of water. So I'm basically, I'm dipping
my brush in the water here. I'll show you. I'm dipping my
brush in the water. I'm tapping it dry a little
bit on the towel and I'm painting those areas. Then. Taking the color off. As I pull off some of the water, you wanna go gently and if you don't have really good paper, this can actually
overwork your paper. So this is where a 100% cotton paper
really comes in handy. Because great watercolor paper
can be worked and reworked and you can peel it back to add light whenever
you want to. You don't have to
use things like masking fluid that can tear
your paper and you don't have to think that far in advance if you knew your
colors really well, just check and see if they're staining or non staining and you should be able to control it. Okay, now we have time
to do our leaves. So our leaves are going to
be in one of the greens. Being as this is a
really beautiful green, I'm going to try and add a darker value of
the Shire greens, so the same background. But because we're not going to remove all of the greens and blues in there that
make up the Shire. It should have a nice deep value to contrast against
the background. If you notice I
wet my brush ones, but I'm using this in mass
tone and full strength. I'm leaving some white areas. Now once I have it on there, if I feel like it
looks too heavy, I can again just wet my brush, dry it off, and pull
some of it back. And that will reveal some of the beautiful granulation and some of the lighter
tones in the color. This is a great way
to work shade on shade and still be able to define what it is
that you're painting. I've got my really light
wash in the back and I'm using the exact same
paint in the front. But the fact that
I am using it at full strength is going to make it look that
much different. And it'll give me
the values I need to contrast between the
light and the dark. Then on the bottom here, just to establish
more of a foreground, I'm gonna go ahead
and paint a base. How pretty that is. Easy peasy. Now here you just learned
how to use values. Even if you're painting
with the same color, how to use granulating color and take advantage of the
granulating color. And how to mix colors on paper working from
light to dark. Also how to coordinate
your colors because we managed to use the same base. Then we mixed in some blue, we added some mixed in
some blue to the base. We added some cerulean. And we ended up just kinda
layering it in here. And then we went
back with just this, the cobalt blue and put it
in and then brought it back with a little bit of water so that we didn't have
it be too bright. And now we have our
beautiful flower with all kinds of
different shades. How I doing so far, I hope you guys are
enjoying these lessons. They're really fun to
do, very, very fun. Also remember that if you add a little bit of
blue to your green, because this is made up
of one of these colors. When you start adding
it to the green, it will just get a
deeper shade of blue. So if you did want to add a little bit of
style lines to this, I'll you'd have to do
is wet your brush. Do it with a drier
and drier brush. And paint in those
lines that you like. Just little more
depth the color. If you do it too much, clean your brush off and dry it, and walk them back. Just manipulate them as you like and put them where
you want them to be. One of the great
things about this set, the Shire granulating, super
granulating colors set. And I'll give you the
links and everything in the Materials page
for where to get all of these is that the color
doesn't stain a whole lot, so it's really easy
to walk it back. It's easy to manipulate it. And that's why I chose
it for this class. Because one is you're working with colors
that were pretty, they weren't too bright, but
they were just beautiful. And they gave you a little
bit of a depth of color to make it not look like
a beginning painting, to make it look a little
more intermediate. And hopefully, depending
on what you do with it, even maybe a little
more advanced.
11. Flower 5 Painting light to dark shades: In this next exercise, we're going to be painting
here using light, dark, and a mid tone. So the idea is to try
and teach you how to use three different values
within a painting. Let's start by doing the
lightest shade first. The lightest shade is gonna
be this green, shy or green. But we're going to use
the lightest version of it to encourage that yellow to come out and play a
little bit on our page. So in each of the
upper left corners of these beautiful
little berries, you're going to paint the Shire green less than halfway into the
curve of the berry. This is gonna be
our lightest value. Now we're going to
wet our brush and wash it off and then dry it. Now I want you to
go back and wash away some of that color. Because this is a
granulating color, it's going to leave
a level of yellow. And that's what we want. We want to leave a
little hint of the green and a little
bit of the yellow. See how pretty that is. Okay, now that we
have that done, we're gonna go back and we're
gonna go a little deeper, adding the Shire blue. Mix it in your palette a little bit so you can control how much. You're going to paint that. In the second half of your vary. Depending on how much
water is on your brush, it is going to start mixing. So as you can see, I'm just manipulating the
color down to the bottom. And if I feel that I have
too much water on my brush, then I just dry it off. Go back and pick up
some more color. Adding it in. Again, because this
is such a small area in my sketchbook. You can't really leave the
puddle there and it's really difficult not to have a puddle depending on how
big your brush is, but at the same time, you're playing with water to
encourage the granulations. So you want the
granulation to be there. So there is a level of
water that has to come. But you're going to have to use your best judgment and
peel back some of it. Play with it just a little bit so that you keep
the shading going, but you don't entirely
lose the granulation and you don't end up with a
really big sloppy circle. You also want to try
and maintain some of those light areas too. Now I'm going to teach
you how we're going to wash your brush off and
we're going to dry it. And then we're gonna
go on the line between the two and we're
just going to wipe it away. This should give
you a little bit of a blend the two colors, despite the fact that there
is a line there right now. This is a great way to
work with granulation, knowing that it usually
is not staining. And so therefore, you
can peel back some of the layers to reveal some of the lighter shades underneath. This allows us to paint with
some really nice lights and darks without removing so much of the color and giving us some of that
really nice granulation. So right now I'm working with a clean brush and kind of partially
drying it on my towel. And I'm just peeling back
some of the colors to reveal and blend
at the same time. Some blending that line
in-between the two. And I'm removing
enough the colors so that I maintain my light. And it's also trying
to make sure I don't get a harsh line
in-between the two. It's now let's go back
to our light yellow. And we're going to try and
use as little as possible. So we want to try and get
the yellow from this. We're just going to tap that
back on the lighter areas. And that's just to encourage
a little brightness. Doesn't work with every color. This color has a
lot of yellow in it and it's weakest stage. So, and it's a weaker state. That's what we want. We
want to add that back in. Then let it dry and we should end up with some
really nice layering berries. So now we're going
to do the stem in more of a full tone
of the screen. So get it on your brush and just paint a very thin,
wiggly stem line. If you've inked it in like I
have that of course has made this whole process
so much easier because you don't have to
foresee where everything is. If you didn't ink this in, then you might want to
draw your stem first with your paint and
then do your berries. It depends on how
good you are at foreseeing your, your page. Or if you've done
like maybe pencil. Now for the background. Now this is going to be
where the dark comes in. So we're using the gray. This is the Shire gray. And I'm going to start
going around here. Now, if it's dry, it should paint
in pretty easily. Just a very small area. Going to dilute
some of the color out and pull it
around the paper. This is our darkest value. Shy or gray actually is made up with some really
interesting colors, but for some reason you don't really see them when it's wet. It has to be played
with a little bit. But if you notice,
even when it hits, the stem, is still looks
really, really good. I don't find that it ruins
the other colors at all. I think it's such a neutral. And it goes such a long way. This brush has such
a nice belly to it, despite the fact
that it's so little. And with that, what
happens is it allows me to do so much painting and moving around the color because
it just stays damp. So on these smaller areas, I'm not constantly having
to reload my brush. Now. I'm going to rinse it
out and reload it though, because I want to make sure I have enough of the granulation. We don't want to like not have any granulating
color on the brush. You know, when you get the wash so light with granulation, sometimes the granulation can be washed away and not
end up granulating. And the whole idea to
this little painting is to see all that nice
texture when it's dry. I think it'll come
out really fun. I'm dropping in some color here because they have
to move it around. But I wanna make sure
that I'm dropping in enough pigment
with granulations. See what the
granulation looks like. You can use a tighter
brush if you're working in a small area like I am and your hands are in steady. If you find that really
difficult to pull off, then you can you don't have
to use as looser brushes. I'm using I'm using it because my hands tend
to be very steady and I can maneuver this
one and I liked the fact that it stays wet
and holds color for so long. I also liked the fact
that it allows me to really encourage the
granulation with the water that it
holds in there. But if you're able to manage
a different brush better, then you can just watch and see how much water that
brush actually delivers. And if the paint is drying and granulating just like you want it to be, then you're good. My tip is just that
I find that when I do have the granulation
kinda dancing on water, it brings it out so much more
than just the dry paint. And I get nicer
looking washes with different tones in them
because there's water. Then my brush stays
really damp and I'm able to do this where I can just kinda go over it and pull off some of the upper
layers of color, which will reveal some of the
other colors that pretty, pretty so that neutral
background really did play well. Now on the bottom half, we're going to go
back and pick up some of the water
out of the blue, which should be more of the, the, the granulating blues. And we're just going to go over the lower half and
paint that little. That little shadow
that would happen underneath the Barry just
to get a little life. Then we're going
to dry our brush out and let me show
you what you're doing. So now I have a dry
clean brush and I'm just going to go
along the edge and smooth it so that it looks like I've smudged
my pencil line. Clean the brush, dry
it off a little bit. Again, you have to judge your own brush if you're
not using one like this and it doesn't
hold any water at all, you might not be able to
reactivate this line. So you have to have a level of dampness on the brush
in order for you to be able to blend like
this does not look good. It just gives me that
little added bit of color. So I have this little
bit of like a blue, turquoise shade coming
out just in the puddle. And I think it's just lovely. These tiny little details really do take you
from a beginner to a more advanced
watercolor artist. I consider it a colorist. Because only people who are
really good with color can do these variations and tones
and make them work out. There are so many choices. I mean, if you think about it, you could be choosing
any color right now and it could be absolutely going into a mangled mess and
it's not so well done. Now, I like my stems, but I think I really like a little bit of the
bluer tone on the stems. So I'm just gonna go
ahead over them just a bit with a little bit of the blue wash. And I'm being careful not to mix it into the
background if I can. I liked it. So the base of the
stems are just a little darker green leading into a little lighter
green on the outside. That's just a personal choice. Something I like to see is
just not all one color on the stems was looking
at a tree today and as it was changing
its colors for Fall, who's literally shedding
some of its bark. And as they look really
close at the colors, they were just all
these different shades. And it made me think about
how often we tend to just take one color
and paint the bark. And it looks great, but that's not really the
way things are. There we go. Okay, and we're all finished. There we go. Now you
learned a lot of things in this one,
light to dark, how to encourage nice blends, bring out granulation, work a dark background
on a light subject. And how to mix these
colors together and utilize all the different tones that are within the colors. So you can see even in
my palette right now, if you look really closely, you've got the green, but that is actually
made of a yellow and a blue and that's what's
bringing out this green color. And you can see the
little puddle of blue down in the bottom. Same here. You can see
the lavender color, the purple shade
in the water here, that actually makes
this color not yellow. And that's super granulation. You often see it in the palette. If you look at my palette, you can see now how all
the colors separate, like right here, this is
separating into multiple tones. Same with this one. Back here. This green is separating into
a lot of different colors and the olive is separated
out into different colors. And so has this one here. It's separated into this bright blue with different shades. Not just shows you what's actually in these
granulating colors there. It's all of these
shades all wrapped into these nice
little tubes for you. So there are a lot
of fun to play with. Alright guys. I hope you're enjoying this so far and I can't wait
to see your paintings. Be sure to join that group
page on Facebook so you don't miss seeing
all the students and what they've painted.
12. Flower 6 Washing a flower: Welcome back everyone. So today on this tutorial, we're gonna be doing
this design here. And once again, just a little
reminder that if you want the original drawings
to be able to trace or to use for your own
purposes of this course. They are available in
the description box. So just go to the
Google Doc where I have them located and
you'll be able to use them. This is a color we're
going to add today, and this one is a magenta. It's really beautiful. It is supplied on
our materials list. But if you have a magenta
or a permanent carmine, a kind of a rose color, I think you'll really,
really enjoy it. It actually looks
like this shade here. So you can darken
it and layer it. You can add it to
other colors, is just, just beautiful, so great
color to have in your pack. And I didn't actually
add it to this palette. I added more cobalts
and purples, but this is definitely
something that if I had room, I would certainly add if I were going to
change this pellet, I think maybe I would replace
this with the Quin gold because I don't seem to use the queen gold in
this kit that much. I use it in other ones, but I feel like I tend to stay more warm as I'm using this. And the Shire custom
kit that I did here has all of
these colors in it. I find that the only
thing I'm really missing is a more pinky, but like definitely
a cool color. And you can see that
it really fits in well where the Quin gold
doesn't necessarily be, it's not necessarily something
I need to reach for. I tend to reach for the
more lemony yellow is because these ones are
very much in that speed. You know what I mean? So I think that at
the end of the day, I would probably be able to
switch out the Quin gold for this one and just be completely happy with it
and not really need it. Because I just can't
see myself mixing quin gold with many of
these colors because it would just make more
of a muddy mess and having it there is deceiving
because if you use it, you really can't let it touch
a lot of the other colors unless it's a warm color and then you're just
going to get more brown. And we can, of course use
more purple to get brown. So it's not really unnecessary
color in this palette. So we're going to switch it, which I probably
will do right now. Then I would easily just
put the magenta in. This one we're gonna do. Since we're using magenta, I find that some of the best things that go with
magenta and lay really, really nicely close to it are
things in the blue family. So when you look at like
cobalts and civilians, and then you look
at how beautiful the purple goes and magenta. I'm thinking this is
what we're going to lead with on this piece. Now before we've done things in the previous ones where we
did the background first, we did the foreground first. And either way it
worked out just fine. So I think for this one, since I'm using a bright pink, I'm going to start
with a bright pink and let it lead the way and just kind of go with it and see how bright we actually get. And then we're going
to mix down from that. And I thought that would
be a really good way for you to learn
about coordinating your paint colors with
your art piece so that you don't
look like you have a contrasting crazy mess. So right now, I'm just putting
a lot of this color with water into my palette to get that nice kind of like
medium tone, right? Not really washed
out tone just to start with something
and we're going to lay the brush down
with the belly down and swipe up
and see what we get. So you can see I've
gotten a nice bright, beautiful tone and I really
like what that looks like. If you wanted it
a little darker, you could just add a
touch at the bottom. If you wanted it a little later, you can just add some
water to your mix. But I kinda like
where this is going. So now I'm going to rinse
my brush off now that I've got a lot of that
color and I'm going to go backwards and wash
back the watercolor. This is something
really that you can only do with watercolor to get these different shades
right on that first go. Now that I have it down here, I'm going to take
a little color on the tip of my brush and I'm
just going to add a pinch there because I want it to bleed forward and
see what that does. I'm going to bring it up
a couple of these petals, and especially underneath
another flower so that we give it that
depth of color. But I want to leave some areas
a little bit more washy. I'm going to rinse out my
brush again and wipe it on Excel and then swipe back. So I'm kinda doing this
back-and-forth here until I get the right mix. And I'm just double-checking
to see what it looks like. And then coming back. I'm going to blend these
edges where it goes onto the white to preserve
some of my white. But also, I just don't feel at this time I want
like a defined edge. I just want a nice soft
white to the gradient shade. And that's how I'm achieving it, does I'm just kinda
blending it back. Remember, you can always
build the color back up. It's a little more
difficult if the color is staining to remove it, even though it will
let you do some. But it's always better to
do it while everything is wet or damp so
that as it dries, it can decide what it wants, how it wants to spread, and
you can keep an eye on it. So it kinda really liked
the way this looks here. I'm going down the accents and thinking about the
light coming down, washing through this flower. And that's what's really making me determine these decisions. Like if the light was
coming down from here, then it would be brighter up top and more dark down below. So that's where I'm adding
the volume of the color. Going to let it sit
on the paper for just a little bit so that it
stains some of these areas. And then we're going to
add some clean water. Here's the underneath
of the flower is another great place to paint a deeper tone of this magenta. I'm using the size for ultimate brush from the
green set by a Skoda. If you want to know where the best prices are for
all of these things, I always adjust
the materials list depending on where the price
is turn up to be the best. And I'm constantly in
there making changes. So don't forget to check the materials list if you
want to get these brushes. So now I'm on that
second flower, and in the second flower, I'm starting in the
center and brushing out. Leaving some areas
in the Center for me to add a different color. I'm going to create this
nice little effect first. Now you could also just paint
your entire flower first and then go back once it's dry and add these
little effects. But I like to be able to see my flower almost in its finished version so that I can make
these adjustments. And that's as far as I'm
going to go with that for now, we're
going to leave it. This is a little area here where a pedal is
over another petal. So I'm going to darken the
underneath petals so that I can reflect the visual
changes in the eye. This part is going
to be really dark. And then the part above it is going to carry
more of the light. That'll be a nice
contrast later. And also this darker
petal underneath is going to look kinda cool
next to our background. I'm going to the brush. Then you're going to
just dry it on a towel. And we're going to
work backwards, picking up a little
bit of the color. And if the brushes is not wet enough depending
on your paper, then you can just wet
it a little more. Just try not to distribute
a puddle onto your page. Otherwise, you're
probably going to wash out what you just did. I want to just kind of lightly smooth onto the edges
so that I maintain this, this melting of color right on the paper without losing
a lot of my whitespace. See how I lost a lot of my
whitespace already as it bled. So I'm just going to clean
off my brush with water again and make sure that
it's nice and clean. And we're going to scrub back a little more of this color, wipe it off on a towel. Now, this would be a highly staining version of this color. You would be in
trouble because you literally might not
be able to remove it. If your paper is too unworkable, it could start to pill, or it might grab the color in a way that you just
can't back it back out. So since my paper
is a 100% cotton, it's going to
change as it dries. I'm going to back
it out a lot more. I did before. Just to see how that
bleeds forward. This one's looking pretty
good though because it didn't use a lot of water,
so it maintained. And I even got some
nice little white bits in here to stay on the paper. Can you see that? Little white areas
like here and here, I'm going to leave some of
those little white strikes because they think
they look really good. Now let's continue onto
these other sections. Just blending out a
little bit on that edge. We're working kind of small
because it is a sketchbook. So there's not a whole lot that needs to be done
on sketchbook size. But if you were doing
this on a larger piece, then of course you could use a larger brush to do
the one stroke method. Like I'm doing. Great. Okay, we're just going
to let that dry because I love that color variation. Now in the center, if you look over here at my mix, I actually have the pink going
on here with the purple. So in the next section, we're going to start
mixing some custom mixes. So let's move on. Shall we?
13. Flower 6 Adding shadows: Welcome back everyone. In this section, we're gonna be adding some
shading to our flower and also starting to mix
down from the magenta. Right now in my palette,
I have magenta. And if you noticed, I have a little bit of the violet in the
back of the palate. I haven't quite used it yet, but I eventually intend to
mix towards the violet. That is a coordinating color
to this series of colors. So as I start to add a
little bit more magenta, I'm actually picking up a little bit of
the purple violet. The reason why is
it's gonna give me a nice shadow available in this palette for
this beautiful flower. So I'm able to pick up
a little bit more of the violet, cobalt violet. And I'm adding it
to the center so I get that nice
little bit of depth. Then I can choose some
areas where I strike out words with just a
little bit, not a puddle. And you can always wipe
some on your towel. If you feel like there's
just your brushes just to wet and giving you
too much color. What we don't want to do is we, we don't want to add
so much that we end up having to back too much out. We'd like to maintain
the white areas, but give our flower
just that ability to have a little more dimension. See what I mean. So beautiful it is, and it's by painting this area,
I'm contrasting, I'm leaving this area
a little bit more lighter because that's the
peel back of the flower. But this is like the
curve of the flower. So you actually want to create these little style
lines to draw the eye, to make you feel like you're looking at a flower
that is curving. You know what I mean?
That has that curve. By doing these
little style lines, you actually are building up that visual of there's
a shadow there, so therefore there's a curve. You know what I mean? This is giving us the, it's taking away the flatness
of what you're looking at. Also wherever a flower as overlapping another flower I'm gonna go in with that color. Isn't that beautiful contrast? We can also use the
color to enhance the lower end of these
flowers here and now that they're starting to work and all the colors starting to blend on a larger
piece of paper. Of course, this is going
to be a lot more dramatic, but it's fine on the sketchbook. This is like a quarter
of a sketchbook page, but it's easy for us to
do in this tutorial. So that way you get the idea and you get
some nice practice. Now as I move more
towards the end, I'm actually right in my
palette here grabbing more of the cobalt violet and just adding that just by
touching the bottom. And it's going to,
the paper is going to definitely carry that
out, carry it forward. So I'm just kind of
building up the color. This is what I call
washing a flower because I literally have done
multiple washes, some little glazes,
you know what I mean? And just different
techniques in shading and shadowing to add a
little more depth of color to the flower. Now let's just leave it because I love the
way that looks. I actually liked some
of the sharpness, but I'm going to get a clean brush and dab it out in a couple of
these areas so they don't look too even I
am actually just going to rub it into like if this was a an area where the flower was a little bit receding
beyond what the front was. Then I would add the shadow here and see this is
actually receding back to, so we're going to add a little
bit of the shadow there. And that's how I'm
making these choices. This one as well is
kinda curling up. So we're gonna go ahead
and let this come out and add a little
shadow there. And now I've just taken this
even to the next level. So washing my brush out, drawing it on the towel. And I'm going to smear out this one here
just a little bit, but leaving it very light. This one, I really do
like the way it looks. So I'm gonna leave the top edge and then just smear the bottom. These I think I'm going to leave alone because
they're really loved the way that they're
spiky and shadow, I think they look
really, really good. Here's a nice shadow to, that. Can even go a little further. And right here we
don't have a shadow, so maybe we'll just
add one here so that there's a lightened
dark contrast. So there's a side of me that is only painting where I
think the shadows would be. And then another side
of me that's looking at stuff that's like
white and making sure that the thing next to it recedes back a little bit
by adding some color. And that's how I'm
making these decisions. The center, I'm leaving a little bit of
whitespace because if your flower was here and the light source is
coming this way, then what would happen
is there would be some areas where it would hit
and there would be light. So I'm always thinking about the light as they
move through this, this one's looking
really good here. Some of the areas that it
would have more light, you could actually watch them back if you want it a
little more contrast. That's kinda fun. But just make sure
that you don't lose the shadow at the base because if the
light's coming over, it's not going to reach
down and all of a sudden reveal some
light and you want to keep that consistent
so that the eye is always following
the trend, right? Alright, so that's how I
shade and shadow the flower. That's a really good lesson and shading and shadowing and using, once again, just a reminder, rinse your brush out
and you can always go back and pull back some more light with a color that is not highly staining and
some good paper. And that's just by dabbing a little bit of
the water and then removing the color
with a couple of swipes and then wiping
it off on your towel. This does pretty good
with this brush. It actually removes color. Well, I find that
snap brushes work the best because they are so snappy. So like this brush in the kit, size 12 and the grain kit, this is a great brush
for removing color. But be careful with
it because it will remove it right
back to It's white. Just depends on how heavy your hand was the
first time around. You might just need a
little bit of practice. Let's move on.
14. Flower 6 Mixing a granulating super background: So in this next section we're going to be doing
the background, and it's gonna be a slightly coordinating
black background. I'm using either
our Baraka is 16, which is a great wash brush with a little snap and a nice point. Or if we find it's way too big, I'm going to go back to the Skoda ultimate size four depending on
your papers size, that's what's really
going to determine this. But let's start
with the wash brush and get some color down. Now first I'm going to mix so that pan that we had
with our magenta in it. You can add a little bit more if you haven't got it in there. We're going to use the blue shy or blue for this background. And we're going to add that into a pan with some cerulean. You can see I'm actually, I had some cerulean blue
into this pan here. And if I need to add more, I've got it right
here on my palette. This is just a pure,
so really in blue. I really want to
enhance the fact that this shy or blue has this
color and it already, and by adding a little more
of the single pigment, you're just going to
bring it out ever so much more and create a
really beautiful, fresh, new super,
super granulating color because this is really
in blue is granulating. And these Shi'a blue is
already a super granulating. So we've got super,
super granulating. Okay, So that should
be a really nice mix. Let's give it a
try on dry paper. I'm just going to
swipe it down here. Yes, That is beautiful. It's exactly what
I was looking for. Thing I like about
this brush is even, this is a really little
piece of artwork. The point is so snappy. Meaning it's got, it's not a very loose point
in the Morocco. And that allows me to get really in tight and still
carry a ton of water and paint without having to just go back and forth
and keep loading my brush. I can get almost
entirely in there. And if you notice, I'm
going back over with the same brush of paint
and just delivering even more of those
beautiful shadows leave the stems
because we're going to add some green to
those stems later. I mean, at the end of the day, if you do mess up and you
don't leave the stems, you can use a brush like the
bright brush that I have in this kit to remove any of the extra blue
and then add green. You remember the base
of this color is green because it's yellow
and blue mixed together. And because we know what the
base of this color it has, it's not gonna be too
hard to add green to it and turned it into
a green stem later, even if I have
messed up entirely. So this is a really
forgiving background for florals because you have this beautiful
blue contrast. It's easy to, if you mess it up to
just to add like a more yellowy green for your stems and they'll work out just fine. And it's a gorgeous contrast to whatever color flower that
you have in the blue shades. It's granulating. I love granulating
backgrounds there. They're just like the
easiest backgrounds to paint because the paint really
does everything for you. You don't even have to
paint super consistent. You can just splotch
it on pretty much because it's
already going to granulate and do
different things. So you don't really
need to worry about having perfect strokes. Just go on dry paper if you don't even have
to have it pretty wet. And just start adding the color. And it allows you to build in. See, I'm adding a lot of
color here just to show you how to work with
the granulation. So I'm just kinda
pushing this around because I want to spread
out the granulation and I can already see some of the beautiful yellows
that are in this tone. So I'm just going to let them
sink into the paper here and do their beautiful thing. Remember one rule of granulation
is if you've added too much and you feel like it's not revealing enough of
the other colors. You can always go back with a wet brush even after it's dry. But I say when it's just damp and remove
some of the color, the top layer of color. And that's going to give
you a reveal on some of the other beautiful pigments
that are in that color. So if you're granulating, if you're super
granulating color or just isn't revealing too much, all you have to do is just. Add a little water and
a clean brush and pull back some of the top layer. And you'll see if you
pull back too much, you can always rewet
the entire area and add the granulating color
back and then try it again. Or just add more
water to your palette so that you have
a more washy mix. So that you're just picking up a lighter version of this
shade like I'm doing here. It's a little more wet, is going to granulate
a little bit more for you because you're
going to see it. I'm going to show you
how to remove the color. I'm taking this smaller
brush because this is a very small area wetting my brush just so that it's damp. And I'm going to
go over this area again and kind of push aside some of the color and then just keep wiping it on my towel. If I feel that my brush
is too dry for my paper. If my paper starts
to dry too quickly, then you'll see you won't be
able to really remove much. So you'll have to damp
your brush again. Then keep doing this process. Rinse my brush out. And I'm going to pull back
some of this color in these areas just where I want to doesn't have
to be everywhere. Just in some areas to reveal more of these beautiful colors and to get that really
nice washy look. Again, if you go over
some of your stems, it's not a big deal
because this is blue and we can easily change it to green just
by adding yellow. Really, really nice. Now as this dries, it's going to do a
whole nother shift. So you might want to
watch it while it dries so that you can
watch the magic happen. This is a really fun thing also to do with your
children because they will be so excited
to learn the patients. It's a great way to
exercise some of their paintings skills and
get them to understand watercolor a little bit
better and how to tread lightly in order to
get the best results. Teaches a lot of
really cool patients. And the patients gives you so
many great magical things. Okay? So there I have backed out a
lot of those upper layers. And you can see that if
we sat here for awhile, we literally would see some of those yellows
coming through. Let's take a quick
look at what is actually in this color so that you can get more
acquainted with this paint. And I'll show you how we do it. This is the Shi'a set. It comes with these core fives, but these other colors
that make up these fives. So when you're looking
at shy or blue, which is what we just
painted with its p G26, which is this beautiful
cobalt green deep, which gives us the greens. The PB 29, which is
the ultramarine blue, which gives it the blues. And PGY1 59, which
is a beautiful, beautiful yellow that is
a really unique yellow. So you're gonna get all three
of those in this color. And so what we did is
we added the P B35, which is a civilian blue. You could have also added p
B29, which is ultramarine. But either one will
work and they're both granulating in most sets. The P B35 actually is the best in White Nights
and Winsor Newton, but there are some
Inca PV 35's as well. Just make sure it's a
single pigment color and I have it in my
materials list for you. Hey, B29, not to be
mistaken with PB 74, which look very similar. But PB 29 is the
ultramarine color that is already granulating
and a single pigment in most sets as long as they're
professional watercolor. So that's why I
added a little bit of blue to this set just to cast it a little more on the blue side rather
than the yellow side, so that it would work really
well against our magenta. And now we're going to
grab a really bright, bright green to add
to those stems. We might even grab like a PG-13, which be great,
which is viridian, which is also used in this set. Or the PG 26 is will also work if we wanted
darker green leaves, you could even mix
the PG 26 with a bright yellow and you would
get a really brightness. Or if you've colored over these altogether and you just want to start with a
little bit of yellow. You could use a little
bit of a cool yellow and see if it starts to change
those stems into green. I think what would really
look cool is maybe just a mix of PGA teen added
to the Shire green, or a little p G26 added
to the Shire green. And we'll get a really, really neat looking green. So that's how you make
those decisions and you stay within the color family. It's really good to know
what's in your paint. And if you're not using
single pigment paints and they have more
than one color, It's amazing to do these
charts when you first get your paints and
really just pull them apart and find out what is, what is in them. Like. For instance, here,
when you get a tube, you can look on the
side of the tube and it says this is made from PGY1 59, which is the yellow, and PG 18, which is this viridian green. So it's made with two pigments, but both of the pigments
are granulating, making it a super granulating
color called Shire green. And that's how it works. Okay, Let's move on and
we'll do some stems.
15. Flower 6 Final touches that make it unique: So now we're going to
paint the stems and I have a little color swatch here
just to show you what I mean by taking a little
bit of the viridian green, which is the PGA, a team
that's this green here. So if I were going
to use this green, it would be a little
bit bright for this. But if I take this
green and I add it in to the previous blue color that we mixed for
the background. If we do half and half, we'll see what we get. And now that changes it
to a much different tone. It starts to make it
a super granulating color because viridian
is granulating, but It's slightly granulate, I would say it's more semitone. Semitone granulating. You can kinda see it, but it's really the blue that is giving us the
most of the granulation. And now we have a
coordinating green that really is going
to play well with our background and not
stand out too much. I do this so often in my color work because
as a colorist, you get to realize that unless you want your paintings to look like a coloring book
or a comic e-book. You do have to keep in mind the colors that
you sit close together. Because if one is just a single pigment and
it's super, super bright, It's never going to
really sit next to a beautiful granulating
color that's been mixed. You know what I mean? So I added a little bit too much of the green
here in my mix. And what I'm gonna do is I'm
just going to drop back with a clean brush because I feel like it's just
a little bright. And I actually want to add
a little more blue to it. The viridian green
takes over a color. You'll notice that right away. So I'm going to add a little
bit of my shy or blue, but I'm also going
to grab some more of the Cyrillic in blue and
temperate out just a bit. Because my goal here
was more of a teal, not a bright, bright green. Much better by having a little bit of the
blue shade in there. It really does look so much better and it doesn't
make it stand out to the point where it
just looks so odd. I'm also gonna do these
little a little extra, I don't know what they are. I just made little stems with like stamens on them
are little tiny leaves. Just to kind of
fill in the space. Some of my page is
still wet so I'm letting it bleed
into the background. I think it looks really good. You can always go back
and add more definition if you want that this
is a really tiny piece. So it's not really
that necessary. I'm gonna go ahead
and fill in some of these little light
spaces as well with the color. Lovely. Now in any areas where I feel like it's standing out too much, I can just take a damp brush and peel it back or blended
into the background. This is the beauty
of being working with a color that is made
up of the background color. Because you really
can't go wrong. And if it bleeds. And I know you've seen
that in many paintings and wondered how they managed
to do that so well, like this area here,
when it bleeds, it actually is that
much prettier. You almost want it to bleed. I'm actually encouraging it. In some of these
areas that I feel like are just a bit too light. I'm just going to wipe some
of it right over them. Because I feel like
some of this just doesn't need to look bright. And it looks better when it's got a little more color
washed through it. I can get really carried away with this stuff, but I love it. I feel like it's okay
to have it a little bit lighter up there, but I really wanted
it not to have too much light
behind these leaves. I'm just kinda filling
in the whitespaces, giving it a little
more. Perfect. I love that. That's what I'm looking for. So this is just absolutely
the benefit of working with granulating colors and building on the background color
that's already there, just adding a little
more green to it. But again, test it out
on a sheet of paper depending on what colors
you chose for this. If you decide to do this
same technique with other colors, you totally can. You just need to test it out on a sheet of paper and
that's what your sketch books for anyway. So maybe try a layout
like this and use my, my flower guides to just
trace in a bunch of different really cool
flowers until you get used to drawing
flowers yourself. Chasing sometimes
is the best way to learn to draw the flowers. So that you can
learn to draw them just the way you like them. Alright, so we have
a little time here. I'm going to add just a
little more depth of color to the base because now that it has drained out a little bit, I feel like we can actually
go back in with our magenta. So it's wet it down and we're
going to choose some of the purple and bring
that in to our base. Just to reinforce some of those nice shadows that we have. This is the one thing you
do have to do when you have used a lot of water
to back things out, is sometimes you have
to go back and add a little bit of glazing
just to brighten up the color and to make sure that things are exactly the
way you want them to be. This is a great
opportunity to establish a few more style lines and
just finalize your painting, making sure that there's little areas that
you really wanted to stand out do and
that the colors right. You can always add pitches of the color
like in other words, if you want something
a little more blue, you can mix in a little
more blue tier color if you decide you want
something a little more pink. This is the time to glaze
and have something. Look at the painting and just look at the
painting and say, Oh, you know what, this would
look good if it had more purple and magenta. So I'm gonna go ahead and just add a little bit of glaze to it. And just enhance, enhance until you stand back and you look and you're
like, oh, that's it. We got it. We captured it. That's exactly the
look I was going for. So I'm pretty much there. I'm gonna go back
in with my magenta and just brighten up some of those little areas that I feel like could be
a little brighter, like right here on the ends. And I'm letting it bleed into the background just because I
happen to really like that. Look, if you don't like that, look, that's perfectly fine. You don't have to
do it. Going over my magenta highlights
to make sure that I have enough of that beautiful bright color
reflected on the painting. This is my personal drama that I tend to add
two paintings. As I go through the
working process, you can go a lot lighter. You don't have to go as
dark and bright as me. I just it's just one of my things where I
see it that way. So every artist is going to see something a little different in what they want
for their painting. And this is the
point in which I'm encouraging you to
see what you want for your painting
and do it exactly as you would like to see it. This is the individuality stage. Now what you're going to
see me do is just fine tune some little details and make certain things pop out
just a little bit more. Overall, what I feel
like you learned really well from this
is mixing color, making super granulating colors. Not being afraid of glue
color because you know now how to remove it and
how to paint with it. How to enhance the
colors that you have and whatever
is in your kit. Enhance it and be able
to use watercolor for the beautiful effects that it gives you that you just don't
get with anything else. If you mix acrylic
with water, you can, but it doesn't give you these
kinds of effects and it doesn't like keep melting into your paper as you go along. And I feel like that is something that we only
gained from watercolor, like this beautiful
little melting transition as it's melting away
from the flower. I just absolutely love that. So I'm gonna go back
and let this one do it. Because I think
it's just lovely. And I think that this is
the beauty of watercolor is letting some of the
pigments melt into the paper. I'm just dropping them in and letting some of my flowers
melt a little bit. Look how beautiful and vibrant this background is turning
into as we play with it. Now I feel like the top
just has too much light, doesn't really need as much. And I'm really loving what I've been doing with the blues, adding a little bit of
a blue cerulean wash. So I'm just gonna go ahead
and add a lighter wash of it. A little bit darker
in some areas. I haven't decided yet if I
want the color to wash up, I really liked the
effects and the below, but nope, I definitely do. So I'm just going to
add a little bit of the color that's in my flower
to some of these areas. And I'm going to let them carry out and such a
lovely way because I just think it's so pretty
just adding the magenta. And when it hits the blue, it's turning into this
beautiful lavender color. Alright, net finalizes
our painting. I love the way this
looks at something so different as opposed
to the other ones which all have beauty and so much variety that
you're learning here. We've got one more
to do in this class. I hope you guys
are having a good time and learning a lot, getting some ideas for
your own paintings. And I'll see you in just a sec.
16. Flower 7 Granulating background with Helio Turquoise: In this last and final
example in this class, I'm going to add a little
bit of more color. This one is called
Helio civilian, and it's a really,
really bright color, but it's so cool to use because you can infuse this
even though it's not granulating into
pretty much any mixture that you like to really
brighten things that I thought, since we have a beautiful
flower and butterfly, we would use a base of this
beautiful Helio civilian mixing with our granulation and just see what it does
so we can play with it. Alright, let's get
started, shall we? I'm ready. So this is what we have as far as our color mix. Or helios, really
unbiased mincut, I'm going to start
painting the background first and work forward
onto the light. But first, before I do that, I think what I'll do is just add a little bit of
helium is related to balance things out
and keep me on track to the actual flower. And this is just so that my eye is constantly got direction. I don't lose my way. So I'm going to dilute my Helios cerulean
with my brush here. And I'm just going to strike some style lines
into our flowers. Beautiful bright blue flowers. Again, this is so, I don't forget how
beautiful this color is, how bright it is, and how it can really
take over our painting. If we didn't do that, you would risk really developing and background
that might not work with this or a background
that you'd have to go back in later and
keep working on. So I find that when I have
a really bright color, that's gonna be
part of my subject. If I add a little bit of
it to the subject first, let it dry, then I have a base. I kinda like, Oh yeah, that's exactly what I want. So now in this little
mixing area here, let me bring this forward
so you can see it. I have the helium. Helium, which is over
half mixed with water. What else is in this is the cerulean blue
that is granulating. And again, if you
wanna know the colors and by who and get
these exact colors, they are in my
materials list for you. I have those two colors. Now what that is going to
make is this color here, which is a granulating, a little deeper
version of the Helio. But you can see that
Helio definitely takes over any mixture, right? So like this is that bright alone and this is
what the granulating, so brilliant in it. So you can see it's
going to granulate. Definitely a little, a
little more depth of color and not such
a light light wash. So in order for us to add a
nicer really in background, but that stands out. We're going to actually
use a little bit from our Shires set in order
to establish that. This time I'm going to take
the Shire green color. Now, if we look at our
chart like we did before, the Shire green is
made up of what? Green is made up of PY 159, which is the yellow and PGA 18, which is the viridian. Both of those colors
will work really well. The blues and the civilians, without there being a contrast, what might change it
is if we add purple. So we want to be
careful with adding purples or any of
the purply blues. P B29 would be a good addition. P B35 or PGA a teen
or more yellow. So those are your
options there without really changing the mix
and dirty in the color. As I go through here, I'm going to add this
beautiful Shire green. Because the Shire green already has complementing colors that really won't affect it too much. Let's go ahead and
what our brush and just add a little in the corner and see
what we've got. Oh, that's really neat. So I'm going to add a very, very light mix of this
to the background, encouraging a lot
of the Shire green and the yellow to show itself. Very careful because with
the really light mixes, It's really easy for it
to become a soggy mess. So depending on your brush, you need a lot of control. I'm using the ultimate four because it's got
a nice big belly. Still has a point that I
can work around the paper. Literally, it's going to hold
so much paint at this size. I don't even think I'll
need to refill it. Carefully. Moving around my flower. Again, I actually like bleeds. So these happy accidents, it's not a catastrophe. The way that I've been showing you how to paint this course, because I'm using all really
complementing tones and things that work so well
together that if you do touch them and they
start to bleed, it's more like a happy
accident and it's really not going to kill your painting. You can work around it. At a beginner level.
I think it's really important to study your colors. So I encourage you to build a sketch book like I have
shown you in this class, using the colors that you have. So, right, as you
buy new colors, you should really have a
sketchbook that is just designated to swatching
and doing sampling. Sample little circles,
sample paintings, just like I have shown you and you know what at
the end of this lesson, I think I will do a little
sketch book tour so that you can see exactly what I've done in sketchbooks in
the past here to get used to the colors that I
am now teaching with you. And that's how I
know so much about what they'll do is
I worked it all out previously in
my sketchbook and I have that to go back
to as a reference, I'll show you how
I did it so that I always know what
colors work together. And it saves me so much time, especially if I'm having
one of those days where I just don't remember anything and I just start
grabbing colors and literally mess everything up
and have to fix, fix, fix. It saves you so much time. It makes the whole
experience so much better. Plus, learning what's in these is really interesting
because some of these colors date back
to the 19th century. Like post-impressionist
Impressionist painters like Monet and Vincent Van Gogh. And people that I know you've heard of if you're
studying art right now, those people were using viridian green and
in their paintings. I put it on my blog at Jacqueline Jack's dot
com so you can see the stories and see the colors and where they came from and how they were used. And I think that that
is something that I note in my sketch
books all the time. I love to find out
the backstories of where the pigments were from
and how they were made, and which ones are single pigments and
which ones are not? Which ones are synthetically
made? Which ones are not? I think it's really important that you
know what you're using and it allows you to really
fell in love with watercolor. This is one of those mediums
that you can get really romantic about and get
really connected to. Have your favorite colors and just kinda like
serve them up. Often. Experienced them
paint with them. Some days you'll find
that you'll just really feel like painting
with certain colors. Like I just really love to
paint with cobalt turquoise, or I love to paint with a single pigment,
ultramarine blues. They're just beautiful. I love to come up
with my own mixes and see granulation happening. Isn't that gorgeous? There? We've made a beautiful, beautiful version of
the Shire green by adding cerulean blue and
a little Helio turquoise. And you can see how the Helio is just like brightened
it right up. It's taken this green and
just made it into something even so much more prettier with like little shots of
green running through it. It's just gorgeous. So let's
move on and we're going to come back and paint our
flowers and our leaves next. And then I'll give you
a sketch book tour in our final thoughts videos
so that you can see how I go about mapping
out my colors and yeah, get rid, get used to everything and just play and have fun.
17. Flower 7 Painting the focus points: Okay, We're back to
finish off our flower. So I'm going to take the green, the Shire green that
we used before. Got to clean out my
palette soon here, running on a little
areas to mix-in, mixing it with a little
bit of water on my brush. And we're just gonna do a one track lay
down and swipe up. Adding our, our beautiful
green to these leaves. Lay the belly down
and it actually gives you plenty of color. Love it. So, so simple. You can let it pull
in certain areas. It will be fine. You can
just leave it at that. Next, I'm going to go
ahead and do the petals. And with the petals, we're going to dive
into our helio. So really in here, mix it back into our
background palette. And just kinda work
on the little area where it's mostly are
Helios, cerulean. And now I'm going to
just do the same thing. I'm going to lay my brush
down and bring it back up. Lay my brush down
and bring it up. Not really worried if I go into the background a little because I used the Helio civilian
to paint the background, remember, so it's
not a catastrophe if they touch, if they're wet. I actually love to encourage
the bleeding as you know, but it doesn't have
to be that way. But if they do touch, I think it would be
even so much more lovely and not letting this dry and letting them
just bleed into each other. But that's just me. And might be a little more of an advanced lesson
for the future perhaps on how to deal
with it and make it work. So pretty. I'm leaving a little bit of
the white as they go through. And I'm thinking in terms of what do I want to
do with the center? I think it'd be nice to go back to that magenta
for the center or a yellow. And I can't decide. The magenta would be
more of a contrast. Just so small paint. I cleaned my brush off and
tried it a little bit so that I would be able to control the colors
a little bit more. So my paintbrush
is not very wet. Pretty little blue butterfly. I think I'm going to
grab a little bit of this yellow actually. And just see what happens if I touch the butterfly and let
it bleed into the civilian. Think that might
be really pretty. Yeah, I like that. That's beautiful. It just created something
a little extra. And actually, I think I'm
gonna go ahead and use this yellowy green mix to paint the center
of our flowers. Keeps it in the family,
nice and coordinated. It's lovely. Now I'm just dabbing it with my fingers so that I don't cover all the
little black spots. Otherwise, another thing
you can do is you can go back and use them later. I had someone asked me, let's use a little bit
of the yellow as well on the upper portions of
the the leaves just to bring the eye around the
painting that somebody asked me what I'm using
as my black marker. If I was using a Sharpie and I'm actually not using a Sharpie. I'm using a liner
that is listed in our materials box
materials list and it is my favorite one of everything literally
does not believe. I find that a lot of these do bleed and they
make I don't know, they're really hard
to control sometimes, like I'll use one. And then I noticed that
even after I've let it dry, I start to paint. And I start seeing some
of the black come off. So if you want to get the
name of that black marker, it's it's in the materials
list and it's well-worth. It's like so inexpensive
they sell it at Jackson's. I edited a little Helio to the
base of our flower stamen. And now I'm going to add some more concentrated Helio directly from my pan
with a semi dry brush. So I want my brush to be wet, but I don't want
it to be bleeding color too much
because I would like to get some style
lines in our flower. So parts of our flowers, much like I do with this
shadows and shading, are going to have a
much deeper color. And also I'm going to dab
some of it in the center area just to enforce where the center is to make the flower kinda
pop a little bit more. I'm doing this on
the lower petals with the petals that are
underneath the other petals. And some of the lower
areas of the petals, but not the top areas of the petals where
the light would be. Good. I think that's plenty, leaving a lot of light areas and
anywhere that you feel that maybe it got
a little bit too dark. You can either let it dry and back it back out just to see or you can just like
I've done in the past, just wipe it clean
with a clean brush and wipe the excess off
on your on your towel. Now I feel like I went
a little too light, which is a really
good lesson here. So I'm just grabbing
some more of the color. I'm going to dry it
off by pressing down. See, I removed it. And now I'm adding it back in. Then I'm going to dry
off my brush again. And I'm just going to smear
the line ever so slightly. To bring it back in. Then I can wet my brush, clean brush, and remove a
little bit of the top layer. Now let me show you
this thicker brush with a little more snap on a very small area like this is actually going to work
even so much better. So I just wet the brush, wipe it off on my towel. And look at that. It does perfect removals
because it's a snappy brush, but it's also very thirsty. I literally can add some whitespace onto my
flower and certain areas and I can blend the color
so easily with this. It also allows me to get
pretty exact where I want it. Just make sure it's clean. If you want to remove color. Perfect. Wicked, our butterfly,
butterfly turned out great. I'm going to use this
brush as well just to add a little bit of
darkening to this. So I'm gonna go back to
the blue-green shades, pick up some of the
Helio civilian mix it in with the blue
greens so that I have a little bit of an accent for our leaves because
leaving them just, even though this is
a granulating color, leaving them just
like they were, they looked a little bit Stark. So now to mix it, I'm just going to
add a little bit of water in-between the two so that it can
blend into each other. And now you have something
that looks just a little bit more unusual than
just leaving it. Because that's really
how leaves are there, not one color if you've ever looked at leaves or tree trunks, painting them one color
really just doesn't make any sense because
it's not how they look. So unless you're
painting a cartoon, you need to exist
somewhere in-between, a realistic version and
a stylized version. I didn't really love to paint
photo versions of things because I did that in college and my first jobs
were painting really, really large photorealistic
versions of paintings. And that's just not something I'm interested
in spending my, the rest of my art careers. They did it for so long. So I really liked to exist
somewhere in between. But I find that dirty nap things with a little more color is more interesting to look
at and watercolor, because it makes it
just so much fun. Right now I'm using that same
brush just to delete out some areas on my border
where I messed it up. Rather have it
just kinda smeared out as a light
version of the blue. And then very carefully, I'm just going to dry it should lift her right out. There we go. All right, We've finished, we have completed
all of our flowers. Look at how beautiful
our butterfly looks. It's so, so pretty. I love the way this
all turned out. Bring it up to you. And in
the next final thoughts, I'm gonna give you a little tour of my sketchbook so you can see how I get to use my colors and get
to know everything.
18. Final thoughts and sketchbook tour: So just wanted to
start by saying, thank you so much for
taking this course. I'm glad and I hope
that you really enjoyed it and that you've
learned a lot from me. I'm gonna be doing, of course, more courses as we move through, especially like urban sketching, which you're going to see
in my sketch book tour. This is the page where I painted all of the examples just recently, they
turned out great. I had a great time, so much fun. But to get to that
point, I actually, when I first got my shrink, super granulating color sets in, this was how I got used to them. I actually painted some
swatches and made sure I use lots and lots of water
to see the granulation. On the side of the tubes. There were pigment information, so I added that and
the name so that I could start mapping out what was actually
in these pigments. In the cross page here, you can see that pg F150 is represented as
cobalt right there. Pv 16 is the manganese violet, PB, 29 is the ultramarine. So that's how I went through. So I actually painted the, the Shire color, or this is the deep sea
deep-sea drumming cassette. I painted the actual
tube color here. And then he painted the
supporting pigments that make up the colors around them and did some lighter shades and
some darker shades. And that just allowed me
to get acquainted with what makes these colors
what the base colors were. If I wanted to alternate them, I could mix some of my
own little mixtures in the other ones and see
how they blend together. And this just really
got me acquainted as a first step in getting
used to new colors. I do it for every single
color I received. When I first got mineral Violet, I actually painted
with it and added some different colors to it
and then made some notes. This is the tender pink. My first painting with
tundra pink was really cool because I got
to know how it mixed with like the deep
sea colors from this set. So that was really fun because I used the deep sea green
which had PGA 18, which is the viridian and PB 29, which is the ultramarine. I added that to the
tundra pink and I got this like little different shade of the kind of like
mommy blue color. Really pretty, but this is just getting used to adding
different colors to these sets. Here's the Shi'a set that
we just painted with. And this is where I originally mapped out the colors
that were in it and kinda looked at
the variations in varieties you got as
you mix them together. I also tried to encourage the maximum amount of
granulation by giving it a very large area of a swatch and adding a lot
of water and in some cases, even going back with my brush to remove the top layers
of the colors. I also did that here to experiment further
with granulation on these circles and mix some additional versions like lighter versions and
much darker versions. Just to see what
adding some more of their base colors would
actually due to the color. And this really just helps. It also helps to see
like when you see a really outstanding
color like the violet, the cobalt violet hue or
the iron oxide black. Those are colors or even the viridian from
the 19th century, right? Paintings. They will take over a palette. So you have to kind of
like on your sketchbook, mix them back into
these colors to see exactly what you're
going to pull and get. Because you want to know if
something's going to turn brown or what the
end result will be. This is really the
best place to do it. Have a nice sketchbook. Don't save the paper. Actually paint on a
100% cotton paper. You will keep this
forever and love it. It's just something
that I absolutely adore and I do it every
single time I get new paint. Let me show you this one. This was the artist's
sketchbook that I made. I actually made this
myself because I can't find any
arches sketchbooks. So I just buy a pad of the papers and then at
12 sheets ends up being this lovely 48 page sketchbook that I can just go crazy
and on beautiful paper. This is what I did to test out further on my
granulated deep set. Again, encouraged
even more granulation because now I was
starting to get used to the water to paint
ratio in order to encourage the maximum
amount of granulation. I also started using
a ceramic palette to mix in so that I
can really enhance the granulation and get
different variations and shades of the pigment and
see how they layered. This is really,
really fun to do. Took the Shi'a set
a little further, adding some texture and adding some layers and
getting some ideas of the different washes that
I could do with the set. Always keeping mindful of the colors that
make up this set. So I'm really respectful of
what goes into the colors. Taking it also to the
next level with layers and just getting used
to painting with it. This is actually from
an upcoming course that I have about to release
that I think you'd really, really enjoy painting these
little city scenes are so much fun to do
and they're quite easy actually with the
granulating colors. So I wrote a lot of notes. And this is just the process. Getting the colors
to separate on the page is going to
help you a great deal. So putting it down, but then also adding water to
it is definitely the way to go to just encourage
that back-and-forth. Then here's that permanent
pigment water-based pen that I like so much. These come in different sizes
and with different tips. So you can get this from
my materials lists. I think it's like $2 per pound. So, so inexpensive and well-worth
and they last forever. Alright, so that is a little sketch book tour for you with my granulating colors. As I develop these classes, you will certainly see more and we're having so much
fun with granulation. I love to paint with that. You'd be surprised, but in
every set that you have, you don't necessarily
need to just buy super granulating colors. You can find out by checking the pigment information
which colors in your already existing set, especially if it's
professional watercolor, professional grade watercolor, or even in White Nights
in Winsor Newton sets, there are tons and tons of single pigment
granulating colors. So you start mixing those colors together
and you literally can design all of these without
having to buy the tubes. I suggest by buying the tubes now that I've shown
you how to use them and creating these amazing
little mini palettes are so much fun to have and you can really
take them anywhere. And hey, you got a nice little Schmidt NCAA
palette, all your own. Have a great day. You guys. Happy painting and
be sure to share all of your painting
on my Facebook group, which is linked up in
our information section. I'll talk to you later. Bye.
Jacqueline Jax, "Creativity brings peace into your life"
