Watercolor Lily of the Valley & Hawthorn

1. Introduction: Happy May to you, creative friend, in continuing with the Birth flower series. Today we are going to learn how to paint Lose Lily of the Valley and Hawthorn to celebrate the May birthday. As with all my classes, my hope is to offer you a comprehensive study of our subject matter, providing the instruction and education necessary to achieving success and leaving you with a sense of anticipation to keep exploring. I'll be providing numerous options on how to approach the lily of the valley and inviting you to find the style that best suits your autistic voice. We'll begin our time together with early practice, observing a few reference images online. Together, we'll discuss the shapes and structure of the flowers and point out any details that may feel significant and special. This time will be used to stir inspiration and help you collect information about the flowers. As always, I emphasize capturing the flowers through a loose lens. Main strokes and key details should bethoughtful and intentional without feeling the need to pin down every mark. After assembling our white mixture, we will take a few moments to sketch with our paint brush as an exercise to help us capture the general shape and structure of the flower. This time spent purely in exploration, and in preparation for the lesson will be extremely beneficial later on when we go for it and begin painting the lily of the valley. We'll be using a limited palette today consisting of brown, black, gold, and green with a pinch of pink for our hawthorn flowers. I'll show you how to decrease the color value of our mixtures to create different versions in the same color. Using this method to invite light, depth and dimension into your work. Because I do break down the material and actionable bite size steps, I consider this to be a beginning class with the note that basic concepts such as how to mix water and paint to achieve proper water ratios and using wet into wet techniques should be understood. Although we will spend a good deal of time exploring Lily of the valley, when we move into the Hawthorn study, I will be calling upon skill sets covered in previous classes, such as the pen wheel structure. With that in mind, let's begin. 2. Supplies: Let's take a few moments now to discuss the supplies that we will need to complete this class. We are going to be using a variety of brushes today. As always, I would love for you to have duplicates just because that makes for a smoother transition from paint to paper. But if you only have one, that's fine, we can rinse off and do the whole process without having to load our brushes. But if you've taken a class with me before, you know that my little secret to success is to pre load brushes. Duplicates if you have them. The first is going to be a Princeton. They're all going to be Princeton, Princeton velvet touch a size six Then we're going to have this really sweet little mini detailer. That's a Princeton mini detailer, and it's a size two. Then we also have the velvet touch in a size four. Then we have the heritage series. This is around three. Then for our larger brushes, We're going to have we may or may not use this one. I used it while I was exploring and I haven't quite decided yet if we're going to use it. But if you have it, bring it into the mix. This is a Aqua elite size eight. Then we will be using this is size ten Princeton Umbria, that's a round. That's it for our brushes. For our paints, we're going to be using a mixture of Mimery blue and Daniel Smith. Actually the only one for the Mimary blue is going to be the VsinoVlet then the rest are going to be Daniel Smith. We're going to use a rich green gold and indigo, burnt umber Under Sea green, and James Black. We'll be using Canson paper, 140 pound cold press. So I'd like for you to have either this specific paper or one that's comparable. You'll also need a paper towel, a cup of water, and then if you have an iPad that you want to bring up some reference images, that would be great. But I will as always pin the images that we are looking at to my Pinterest board, which is labeled skill shares. You can always find the images that I'm referring to on that board. All right. That brings us to the conclusion of our supplies. Let's go ahead and jump into the next video. 3. Observing The Flowers: Before we begin painting the lily of the valley, let's take a few moments to observe some photos I found online. These can serve as your reference images, or they can just be something that you look at with me. This is part of my process where before I paint, I like to, like I said, just spend a few moments looking at the flower. And figuring out what I find fascinating, what special, what intricate details I want to include in the painting. It helps to just serve me not only for success in the painting, but just ensures a more joyful process along the way. We're going to do that now. Then our next step will be to sketch. We do this or we've done this in previous classes, and I've heard that it continues to benefit those who take the classes and just allows you to become a little more comfortable and familiar with the flower before we head in with the paint. Most of you will be familiar with Lily of the Valley. It's a very popular flower. It's one that I've explored in great detail. I spent better part of a year um, just figuring out all the ways to bring it to life and interpret it. I think it is one of those flowers that is very highly interpretable, if that is a word. And I want you in this class to feel as though you've been given the tools to approach it confidently and the way and bring it about the way that you feel it best represents your style. So the first thing I notice when I look at the flower is the sweet little bell shape. Um, Finding common objects helps me to just solidifies what the subject matter is in my mind. So I see these sweet little bells with the little curves on the end. And that's something I definitely want to bring into the painting. I want to try and capture that shape to the best of my ability in gestural form so that will be something that we tackle together. I love the way that the ends of the petals just curl up, and they're very dainty and diminutive. Um, I also like in some of these photos, you can see the inside of the lily of the valley. We're going to really play with that structure and highlight it and be able to include some sweet little details on the inside of the flower. Um, I also notice in this image where the bells are hanging over. And so this stem has quite a bit of posture to it. It's not, you know, straight up and down. In some images, it is. It depends on the flower and how it's growing. But I really like in this particular image, how the stem is sort of shooting off to the side. It gives it um, direction and it gives it a sense of movement, which is something I personally love to experiment with in my paintings and try and avoid is stagnation within petals and leaves. So we're going to really play with that and focus on how the bills seem to sort just dangle over and it almost feels as if you were to pick it up, they would just jingle at you. They're so sweet, and I know so many of you have a fondness for them, and it's a very nostalgic flower. So many of you have grown up with them. Um, I unfortunately here in Southern California, I'm not familiar with this flower in person. I've never even seen it, so I'm hoping I do have the opportunity one day to actually put my eyes on this flower in real life. If you happen to have access to it, by all means, bring it into the studio and let it serve as inspiration to you. Again, just another image showing the inside of the flower here. There's some really sweet little pink details that we can add. Mostly, we'll be using our green gold to highlight the inside of the flower though. Okay. So that's that one. I feel like that really helps to illuminate what it is that we're going to do with the flower. But just looking through some of these other fronds, just taking a moment here. This more highlights just the way that they sort of droop over and dangle. And then there's also these sweet little buds at the top. So we don't want to leave out the buds. Those are so special and they help to bring a sense of size comparison, which is really important when you're clustering flowers together, is to have petals that are different size. So in a cosmo, you want some petals to be large and some to be small so that it gives a sense of how the flowers position. With the lily of the valley because they are all roughly the same size. We'll use these buds to our advantage to indicate, just a scope of sizes here. Then we have our beautiful leaves which somewhat dwarf the flower, if I'm being honest. But we're going to try and as much as possible, um, include these beautiful leaves to the best of nature's inspiration. But we'll probably play a little bit and take some liberties with just the sizing of it so that our lily of the valley stem and bells, they won't lose focus. But when I'm looking at these leaves, I notice that they have some really beautiful curvy body to it, so I want to make sure that when we bring that into the mix, I am taking my brush and really sweeping it along the edges here is I'm creating the outside of the leaf, and then also a nice little a point to the top of the leaf. That's something that I'll want to bring in. Again, if you have a note pad or if you're making notes off to the side. These are things that you might want to jot down and just just bring into the process with you. There are some leaves too that overlap, which we can play with. Again, ingestial form, not being too precise here with capturing the color shift so much, but more just the general shape. Then also, there's some riboning veins through these leaves that I really like. Those are the main things that I feel are the most fascinating, interesting, and special that I want to bring into our lessons today, but by all means, if you have something that you've found that special, please bring that in and you'll find a moment to add that. Okay. That's going to bring us to the conclusion of just observing. But if you need a few more moments, you can take those now and then head into the next video as we begin to sketch the bells. 4. Sketching The Bells: Okay, go ahead and pick up your mini detailer size two and then also grab the Jines black and burnt umber and put a little bit of that onto your palette, we're going to make a white mixture. We've done this in previous classes. It's a very simple way of making a white. It's usually done using a variety of either blacks, browns yellows or greens. This is my particular favorite. But if you want a much more in depth class and instruction about how to create white water colors. There is a white anome class, and then I also have a color guide on my website, which you can access using the link in the class syllabus and it walks you through, I think, something like 25 different ways to make white. So it's a great resource. For this one, we're going to mix together the burnt umber and the Janes black, and then it's going to look like this. I'm going to add a little bit more just so that we have enough of it as we are sketching. And I like to make my white on the more of the black side. I tend to add a bit more of the Janes black Then I do the burnt umber. But I like the mixture of the two. The burnt umber is a little too warm for my taste and the black becomes very oppressive if you use too much, but I find when you mix the two of them together, it's the perfect mixture. Then we're going to draw it out one step further. That's more of a broth consistency, and then we're going to dilute it even further. That's going to be about 60% water and 40% paint, and then we're going to use more like 70% water and 30% paint here. You want a nice light mixture. And make sure you mix that thoroughly. We're just going to go ahead and explore. I'm going to give you lots of options. I think that's one of the things that I always try and emphasize in my classes is not a one way approach to painting a flower and it gives you the most freedom to explore which method resonates most with you. Okay. So I'm going to put that off to the side. And one of the things, as I've mentioned before, that really helps me when I'm painting a flowers to think of common objects. And we've already brought in the word bell. But one of the other things that I thought of, and this might be a little bit more obscure for some of you. But my daughter has these little tiny toy characters that she loves to play with and one of them looks exactly like the lily of the valley. It's a baby octopus. And it's just so te tiny and it It looks like the ghosts in the Pac Man game too, if any of you are old enough to know and understand that reference. It looks like the little ghost chasing Pac Man. Bringing those images to mind and conjuring those shapes really does help us as we try to move that information from brain to hand to paper. Just be thinking about those things, little tiny baby octopuses, and then those little ghosts. Okay. Let's go ahead and just start right here. We're going to make two curves to create the bell shape. And then we're going to take our brush and we're going to come up on the toe of it and begin creating the petals. It's a very general rough sketch of the lily of the valley, but that's what I want initially is for us to just get the general shape of it. Don't worry too much about light and shadow and depth or even angling the bells at this point. Let's just try and get our heads around capturing the shapes. Let's go ahead and try that again. Making minor changes. Maybe shortening the bell, making it really petite up here, and then really tiny petite and then maybe taking a little bit of extra paint and curving up those petals the way that we see it here in our reference image. I'm going to just do that a couple times. Playing with the shape here. We have some that come really wide out and then come down. This is probably my least favorite one where the petals really shoot far down just because I feel like you lose the diminutive shape. My happy place is definitely In the middle where we have a nice little round, almost like parentheses up here, and then some really small. Just capturing the general shape. That one is definitely the winner for me. You'll want to experiment here with 60 seconds, guys. It doesn't have to be super expansive. But just taking a few moments to figure out, I really like that shape. Sometimes people will elongate the bell part. I feel like that tends to look a little bit more like snowdrop territory. But again, this is your painting and you can decide what it is that you want to bring out what you see is going to be different from what I see. Just taking a few minutes to use the toe of your brush, moving it around, coming full belly, and then using just the toe. You can really figure out quickly how different shapes can be made. Okay. So that's just the first step in just sketching it, becoming familiar with the general shape. If you need a little bit more time, go ahead and do that. I'm not going to spend too long just because it is a very simple and straightforward flower. The next step is going to be what I talked about when we were looking through our reference images, and that is bringing out the under belly of the lily of the valley. The way I do that, and again, you know my style is gestural, so I'm not looking to capture things botanically. However, I am going to walk you through one slightly botanical way to capture the flower. So we start the same way, get a little bit more water on my brush. And I'm going to make the same shape, and I'm going to use the toe of my brush to do the same thing coming up. Then what I'm going to do is I'm going to use the edge of the brush to connect to the bottom of the petal. And just make a sweet little shape here. Now you can fully see, this is the top of the flower and this is the inside. This is definitely my favorite way to approach and even rate, I did a lot of illustrating sketching the lily of the valley last year. What it does is it provides room for us to have some little special details in the center here. Later on, when we paint this for real, we'll use some green gold to touch upon the center here. Now, if we wanted to bring that out even further, what we can do do the same thing. Getting a little dark here, but that's okay. We're just sketching. Then actually that ones a little bit too we'll do it ahead anyway. But what I'm trying to emphasize here. I'm going to do it one more time is that if you just come up really shallow, then you can really play with the shape here, which is super fun because then you can put some special details in here, and then you have the little stem attached and we'll put all that together. I don't want to load you down with too many steps as we're just exploring the shape. A few of those, and then what I want to begin doing because the lily of the valley don't always sit so obediently on the paper like this, but we're going to be having a stem and having them dangle over. Let's go ahead and paint a few at an angle. Okay. So let's pretend that you know, we don't have to pretend we can actually do it. So I'm going to grab I believe this is a number eight round, and I'm just going to paint myself a very rough stem. Okay. And then I'm going to go ahead and just paint a few. I'm not even really paying too close attention to where these are positioned. It's all just very generic, but I want to have something to build from. So we're going to try and employ some movement here when we're painting, and you saw in that initial image, we have something like this where the bells are dangling. So let's go ahead and attach a few of this shape. Okay. And what you can do is even turn your paper if that helps you. So we begin shifting things. So instead of sitting directly like parentheses, we are shifting it just a bit so that it's sideways. Let's show the inside of this one quite a bit. Then this one we can have just a tiny little bit of the underside. Yes. Okay. So we have a lot of variety here, even though it all looks very similar, we have some that show more of the inside, some that are longer in shape, and that's how they sit on the lily of the valley. I'm looking at the photo right here if you want to have it up in a different window. They look similar, but each one, depending on how it's dangling over, has a different unique body in shape to it. Again, if we were to bring a couple more. We're just turning it to the side just a little bit. Okay. So that gives us just kind of a general feel of the way that the bell is going to sit and situate on the stem. And the next video, I'm going to walk you through a bunch of different ways to approach it, how to paint it, adding those special details, and then we're going to put it all together and begin to add the stem for real in the correct color and the leaves and just bring this beautiful flower to life. Okay. 5. Painting The Bells: Okay. Before we begin painting just a gentle reminder to refresh your mixes, they will start to pool and the pigments will pull apart. Constantly be awakening your piles and then adding a bit from this pile to your light consistency here. I don't want to completely ignore or just gloss over the fact that perfecting a white mixture is tricky. It's a challenge and it's a part of the art in itself, creating just the right blend of colors and adding enough water so that it's light, but that it shows up and it's definitely not too dark. So If anyone's struggling with that, it's definitely a challenge and it's something that needs to be addressed and worked through. If you find yourself at the beginning side of watercolor, don't panic, don't get too overwhelmed. Just add a little bit more water if things are coming out too dark or a little bit more of your paint to add to your beginning mixture. This is definitely more of an intermediate concept. Anytime we work with white colors, it just bumps up the skill set needed. I have my pile here and we're going to begin the same way. With our sweet little bell shape. And then this time, we're going to color it in. Then we'll do the bottom. This does look more like a gray, but as you'll see, it starts to lighten up and it becomes a lot lighter two to three times. This is my favorite way to do a white, but you can also add a little bit of a green gold or a Naples yellow to just change up the color palette. Like I said, this is my preferred white, and then it's even a bit. I would probably do it one more time. Then it's going to dry even lighter. The idea is that you can see what I'm doing too, though. It's not so light that you're having a hard time seeing it. There you go. That's just the general shape. We're just essentially taking what we learned here and then painting it here. This is not my favorite way to do it. But it's just one of the ways that we can use this flower, add it onto here to give some variety to it. If we had flowers that looked just like this and they all looked like that, it would feel very boring and just lack interest to the eye. But if we add each of these components that I'm going to show you, then it brings it all together. And makes for something that's a lot more interesting. Let's go ahead and do that again. Then I'm going to come up really shallow here, and then I'm going to do the same thing, creating a little middle, and then coloring that in. Now, I have a clear defining top and bottom. I can take my brush if I want to and add a little bit more curve to things. But just now when you layer white, it gets darker and darker each time. We'll add some details gesturally to highlight this sweet little shape. But for now, let's go ahead and just leave it there. This time, I really want you to work on a light consistency. I'm using just a touch of the mixture here. We're going to let that dry for a moment. And I'm going to show you how you can make a definitive top and bottom in a different way. So pain and nice. Chunky shape here should look right about there. And we're going to let that dry for just a few moments, and I'll show you how we're going to cut into the shape to create a shadow underneath. Let's go ahead and keep practicing. Let's turn the shape a little bit, twisting it on its side. Then we can do a bit. Really play with the opening here. One of my favorite things to do is to just simplify it in some of the shapes, not do everyone so structured and then just do a nice big y here for the bottom. Okay. Okay. I'm going to add another one up here so that we can do this a couple times too. So you can see this one. It's still the darkest of the male, but it's lightning significantly. I'm going to go ahead and do a couple more because I want to show you guys a few different things you can do and add to the flower. Okay. Okay. Okay. Let's turn one this way. If you need to turn your paper, you can. Let's do another in this direction. So let's say that the stem was coming up and this way, then we would have some ds here, and we would need to twist these flowers so that they situated on the branch the right way or the stem. All right. A couple more. If you wanted to really, really simplify this flower, let me show you how I would do that. I would just do one stroke, two stroke, three stroke. And then one more stroke. That's if you really like things very, Okay. I feel like you lose some of the shape when you do it like that. That's just my own personal opinion. But if you really like that sort of sketchy look, then those are fun. More just like a gum drop. The lily of the valley are a bit more plump than that. I'm going to show you how we can cut. I think it's just about dry the center here. We're going to use our darker mixture. Pick up a little bit of this. Add a little bit of water to it. You don't want it so dark that it's black inside, but you definitely want it dark enough that it distinguishes from the top. Then we're going to break into the middle here. I can see where I am imagining that there is separation. And now I'm going to create that bottom. Blot off a bit. I don't need it quite that dark now. This is a bit botanical to me, only because it's using color to really signify the shape and the structure here. You might love that. I definitely think it has its benefits. Doing it again here, seeing where there might be a seam here. And then And then you can add the little curves if you want. We can do that up here as well, just to show you what it would look like. If it were just a tiny little bit. Again, variety is going to be key here. You may like one of these looks the most, but by employing a few different meaning there's just a little bit here, and then there's quite a bit more here, and then this one curves up a little bit by putting these three together on the same front stem, it's really going to make the painting sing versus if you were to do the same exact flower eight times on the stem, if that makes sense. Okay. Okay. I'm going to do that one more time. I'm just imagining where there might be a split here and then bringing my brush into the center going up and down motions. Okay. And then what we can do pick up your three brush and I'm going to use a bit of the dark mixture again. We can run a few sweet gestural lines through the top part. Just using the toe of my brush to create a few little lines here. You want them to look as though they're sprouting from the top, the base here. You don't want to do them straight up and down, you want them to have a curve, again, like that parentheses and look as though they're sprouting from the top. It takes a light touch. You're really just grazing the paper. You can see by how adding them it's just one more interesting facet. Which you can also do is take your brush. If you have something that's more open in the middle here, you can take the edge of the brush and create some sweet little details along the edges here. Okay. Essentially, you're sketching again, but you're just using a bit more paint and you're emphasizing shadow as well. This is my favorite method. So, these two would be my favorite. I don't so much like the dark on the side, because it also prevents me from adding a sweet little detail on the side. But again, play with this, feel it out, see what you like. I really like the gestural details on the outside. You can do them up top two, and you can add the lines as well. Okay. You can be as loose and free handed with it as you want, or you can be meticulous and, you know, intentional. Okay. Okay. So they have it. There are several different ways that you can again approach this and hopefully, I've given you quite a bit of thought. I'm going to add a little bit of the rich green gold to our palette now, and then I'm going to take our mini detailer. I'm going to pick up a little bit hereting off. I just have a little bit. I don't want too much paint on my brush. Nice broth mixture. Then what I can do is add it to the inside. Just like that. Just a sweet little squiggle, I don't get too stiff or stagnant with it, I just try and indicate that something sweet is happening on the inside here. In some of the pictures I showed you, there's pink in the middle. That really goes far up into the flower. It's higher up. But again, you can take liberties here. If you want to really create a flower that is wide open. So let's just say if we had this one, I'm going to draw it with this. Let's say we had something like that where the inside is really wide open. You can now plug in a little bit of the yellow here right about to the edge of the petal and then put more of a pink up here. So we can do that and I can show you what it would look like. Because this flower is so sweet and diminutive, I feel like adding too many details to it can just take away from the elegance. But my job here is to just show you options. I'll go ahead and do that. If you wanted to add a little bit of pink here, you could. You could even touch the edge of the petal here. If you want to get super abstract and super loose, and then you can add a little bit of the yellow down here. Again, I'm going to pick up my other mini detailer, I have two here. That's why I like to have duplicates so that I can have one color on one. I have the rich green gold on one and then I'm going to have our gray mixture on the other. Let's just see what that would look like if we were to do wet into wet. Okay. Giving that just a second to just sit and situate. We did a lot of that with the sweet peas last month if you took that class. Then we would gently lean into the color here. Let's do that a couple more times just in case you really like this and how it looks to make it a so we have a bit more of a difference here. And again, heading in with a little bit of yellow, brushing it up against the edge of the petal. Making a nice, wide curve here. There we go. It's a nice subtle way of doing wet and to wet. It doesn't pull too far or make a huge impact, the way that the pink is going to. If you really love that wet and to wet, super splashy abstract, nothing's really definitive, then that's definitely the way to go. My happy place is a medium. It's in the middle. It's using gestural and abstract to create something that's intuitive, but also comprehensible. Makes sense. That's a lot of options for you guys. There's so many different ways you can approach it. One note, I wouldn't say combine all of these on the same frond. I know I keep saying variety is key and it is, but you want to find variety within the given form that you choose. If you're doing this, you want to do some that are closed, a little bit more closed than this one, more along these lines. If you're doing this, you want to make sure you have some that don't necessarily have the white showing. Variety. We're going to jump into the next video and continue the fun. 6. Painting The Leaves: Okay. Now I'm going to show you a few different ways to approach the lily of the valley leaves. I'd like you to have two brushes and roughly the same size. So I'm going to have my number ten round and my number eight round. They have a bit of a different shape. You can see that the aqualt has more of a point to it, and this one's definitely more chunky. Having a little bit of variety within brushes is nice, but if you just have two of the same bruh, totally fine. So I went ahead and I put a little bit of the undersea green on my palette, I'm going to go ahead and mix that now. Then I'm going to do the same thing with my other brush. I'm going to take some of the undersea green, bring it over here into a different pile. Try and keep it separate enough from this one so that they don't mix. Then I'm going to pick up a little bit of my rich green cold as well to change the hue. I get a little bit more olive and we're going to use color within these leaves. All right. So I'd like you to have a broth consistency for both. I'm going to remove this paint from my palette so that I have a little bit more room to play here with color value. Over here, I'd like it to be a little bit more watery, not quite so thick on the paint. Okay. Your piles should look something roughly like that. You have one that's more of a broth mixture of 50 50, and then you have one that's more light consistency where it's a 70% water, 30% paint, and then this one as well. With those leaves that we were looking at, they had a lot of body to them. So curves, so I'm going to play with that. I'm going to take my number ten brush. I'm going to start here at the tip, and I'm just going to draw a nice curvy shape and then I'm going to come back and bring it down. Okay. And then I'm immediately going to take the rich green gold mixture and just splash that in there. Maybe even down the middle, maybe here at the top as well. Until the end, that's about all I would do. We can go much further with the leaves, and I'm going to show you again options because I feel like that is the best way to really unleash she creativity. I'm going to do that again. I'm going to do it on this side. Imagining that maybe our lily of the valley is coming up like this. Dipping into the light mixture, now let's create one on this side. A little thin here, so I'm going to fix that. And timing this is key. You need to lay down a nice even coat of paint initially so that it's wet and ready to accept the next color. You can at any point, add the darker mixture. Let's go ahead and do that now. I'm going to put that on my ten brush. I'm going to come here at the bottom and add the darker mixture as well. If you need to practice a little bit with leaf shape, by all means, take a few moments to do that. I'm really just doing one, two, coming in. Let me show you over here. O. Then I come back and do the same. Immediately, making sure that I'm applying the water to avoid those hard edges. I'm going to elongate this just a little bit here. It's a little bit too far out for my taste. Then jumping right in. Okay. You can while things are wet, use your brush to add some lines. They won't be definitive at this point over here is quite dry, but that'll add some special detail to the leaves, so you can take your brush and just run it down the middle. You'll have to gauge if the media is dry or wet and what you want. This was more dry. This is more wet, so they're going to flood into the existing paint. And just keep adding another layer of the paint to the leaves. I can come up here. My favorite is having moments where it's very dark and then also very light, which requires a little bit more tactic and using a little bit of water on your brush to push back the paint to create some bleeds. Adding a little bit of a darker tip here. That's the undersea green just as is in the broth mixture and then rinsing off my brush and pushing back a little bit. You can do the same thing over here, adding a little bit of water and pushing back, but the bleed won't be quite as dramatic if you wait so long. The harder you push into the paper, the more of a reaction you'll get. But you do have to make sure you're nudging the water along or it will just sit there. Okay. I'm going to do a few more leaves. Just refreshing my mixtures over here. Let's do one as it were kind of sprouting out. So coming from the side here. Coloring that in. Nice and wet. Then I can take the undersea green dark. So in that broth mixture, more leaning towards cough syrup. And just run that through the middle. Then we're imagining that the stems coming out here. I'm going to put a bit more undersea green on my palette. I'm running out if you need to do the same. Go ahead. I'm going to use my other brush to create a bleed here. I just giving that a moment, seeing what's happening. This look is what's going to pair best with the lily of the valley and the style that I like. I'm going to show you a few other ways too. You can always drag your brush along the side of the leaf as well if you're wanting to create a lighter side to things. I'm going to take most of the paint off of my brush now and really do a nice light leaf here. Nice water here. I said, laying down that even coat is essential. And then using a bit of the darker undersea green to create a point. And come straight through the leaf. I said, you can run some lines through if you would like while things are nice and wet. And adding another color as well? And then you can rinse the paint off of your brush and push back with some water. You can watch as things are drying and add more layers of paint while the media is still wet. That's my recommendation. Adding paint when things are dry, it becomes a bit more tricky. And you run the risk of overworking something. Things are a lot more when the paint wet. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Pushing back a little bit with the water. You can be heavy with the water and the paint will just pool and move around or you can wait until the leaf is a bit more dry and then plug in with the water. But again, waiting too long, the effect can be a lot more minimal. You'll want to just experiment with that and see result you like. I'm going to move this over Now, let's pretend that we have a stem. Let's say that's our lily of the valley stem. If we wanted to do a leaf that had a curve to it, how would we do that in a gestural way? So what I would do create the base, and then I would curve the tip. And then come back to center here. And connect that to the bottom. Then what we can do here. Once this is dry, we will darken the edge of this just like we did with the lily of the valley to create just a bit of a darker shadow here. In the meantime, we can add a little bit of the rich green gold. We can use the tip toe of our brush to just add in some dots that will. We don't have to do sweeps, we can just add dots. Then let's go ahead and add another leaf up here. And adding a bit of paint a bit more of the undersea green. Let's create that point. And sweep through. And then we can while things are wet, we can add this sweet stems or we can wait till things are dry. We're going to do more of this. In the next video, this is just to kind of get you warmed up. I don't think this is quite dry yet. Possibly. That's a problem with real time painting. I'm going to take a bit more of the undersea green on my brush here. And I'm going to create a little definition between what's happening here and here. Use my mini detailer to finish it off. So this gives the illusion that the really curving over. Another way is to sketch it out. Where you imagine that curve is going to be? And create a bit of space using the white. Then this is where I would imagine it curving over and using a bit more paint to create difference in color value. This would be a leaf that was just coming straight off to the side here. I'm going to grab my other paper real quick so we can do a few more. Again, if we're wanting to sketch out that shape initially, we can use our brush to create the curve. And then waiting a moment. And imagining where that curve might be. This is a bit more of a challenging way. I don't recommend it for beginner beginners because it requires a little bit more thought. I like to just the straightforward using a lot of body and movement. But again, this is me just giving you lots of options. That would be where your stem would be coming out. Then you'd have a nice curvy leaf here running that through the middle. It's something to play with for sure. Okay. Okay. I'm going to pause the video here because it's getting a little bit long and then we will regroup in the next slide. 7. Painting The Hawthorn: And now we are moving into our second May birth flower, which is Hawthorn. This is one of my favorites because it reminds me so much of wax flower, which is by enlarge, one of my most favorite flowers to paint. I use it in so many compositions. It's such a lovely filler flower. And Hawthorn is very similar in that way that it is just the most lovely flower to add to a mixed bouquet. If you're not familiar with it, yet, you're going to be a fan by the time that we're done exploring it. So, um, because this is not a flower that's a focal flower, we're not going to take the normal time that we usually do to do all of the processes starting with observing and then sketching and then all of that. We're just going to jump right in after taking a few moments to just look at the flower, see the different colors, and the petal structure, and just talk about it for a few moments, and then we're going to get right into painting it. If you feel like you need a little bit of practice time, of course, that is something that you can do on your own prior to beginning. Um, You can just pause the lesson and then jump right back in once you feel ready to approach it. Hawthorne comes in a few different varieties. I've selected the white and the pink for us, and we're going to play with some different water ratios and mixtures and just blend the two of these together. There is a lot of pinks within the pink, which if we're observing, that's one thing that that I've picked out that feels fascinating and interesting and something I want to incorporate in the capturing of this flower is that some petals are very rich and dark pink such as this down here, slightly in shadow, and then where the light is touching the flower, it's a lot more soft like ballet slipper pink. We're going to play with that using both color and water ratio, mixing up cough sy consistency and broth consistency, and then also using our white mixture that we used for the lily of the valley. Hawthorn clusters together. So we're going to really lean into playing with angle and the positioning of the flower so that they aren't all face up in just open face staring at us, but that we do really lean into the structure here coming on the side of the flower and tucking some behind the cluster and giving the illusion of depth and dimension. Then we'll also be adding the sweet little leaves. We're going to do that using a brush we haven't used yet. Then putting it together in a bit of a stem cluster. So typically, these grow like in bushes, but just for the sake of our painting, we're going to be mixing them together with the lily of the valley for a birth flower painting. So we're going to take a few liberties in that regard. Other than that, the other special thing that I note here is that there's a sweet little yellow center to the flowers, and then also these beautiful stamen, which come in both pink and white and brown or I should say, come in pink, white, and brown. Mostly, I've seen it as in pink and brown. It's going to be a lot of fun. This again, like I said, is one of those flowers. That's just a great deal of fun to paint. Okay. I'm going to set this off to the side for now. Actually, you know what? I wanted to show you two more So this is this shows the leaves a little bit more. I like the leaves and the other one. I think we'll probably use this shape more so than the leaves in the next slide. I like how they're angled in position, and I think that they'll accompany the lily of the valley well. But there is another option here too that has more of a ridge in like a rose petal leaf and really definitive veins in the leaves. And I like those white ones, the way that they sort of cluster here on the branch and then also another reference image. So again, I'll be pinning these to my skill share pinterest board so that you will have these to refer back to. This is an example of the yellow in the middle and then the brown specs in the center as well acting as the stamen. Okay. I'll leave that out but off to the side, and Okay. You're going to go ahead and put a little bit of the zeno violet on your palette. You're also going to grab your number four filbert brush and begin mixing into the pile. Mix a nice thick cough sir pink. Okay. And then we're going to draw that out decreasing the color value so that we're at a broth consistency. You should have two versions of this color. Then also, using a number six fiber. I'm going to mix up a little bit more of the white mixture. That's the s and the burnt umber. Add a bit more black to that. Then of course, decreasing the value a great deal. Until we have something that looks more like that. Again, we're going to be clustering those together. I'm also going to add in a pop of the green goal just so it looks a little bit different than our other white mixture. Okay. A bit more yellow. But I don't want it so yellow that it's going to detract from the yellow center. Going to keep experimenting here until I find something I like I to touch more of the black. Sometimes it just takes a bit. A bit more black. There we go. And then drawing that out. Here we go. Bit warmer with a hint of the yellow in it as well. Okay, so now we have two brushes. What we're going to do is we're going to play with the color value. We're going to start with the pink hawthorn. And I'm going to have my mini detailer loaded up with the co consistency. And my four brush with the broth consistency. We're going to play with these two color values as we create the flower. So this flower you may have noticed, especially if you have read my book and taken a few of my other classes is very much a pinwheel flower, meaning that it has five petals and they are evenly spaced and they give the appearance of a pinwheel. If you were to look at it. So if you were to look on it head on, it would have one, two, three, four, five. And we rotate these petals and we make them a bit smaller and a bit bigger to give the illusion that the flower is either on its side or turned over or tucked behind another flower. These are just the tricks that we use to make it appear this way. You'll see as we do some open face flowers where just completely head on, and then we begin to cluster some smaller flowers behind these open face. Let's go ahead and just focus on color value right now. Let's go ahead and do two petals in that cough sy consistency. Just like that a little two stroke. Then let's use the broth consistency to finish the flower. Letting those two colors blend together. While things are wet, you can use your other mini detailer to pop in a little bit of the rich green gold. If you want to, you don't have to. You can use just the pink center. To fill that in. I do recommend leaving a little bit of white space. That white space acts not only as a light source, but it gives the impression that there's separation. Let's go ahead and do that again. This time, let's tuck the petal right behind this one. We'll have three petals shooting up. The first one in cough consistency, and then the second one and the third one in broth. So we're giving the illusion that this flower is tucked behind the other. Then we can also pop in a little bit of the rich green gold, which is blending with the pink as well. Let's continue moving along. Let's do one in all broth consistency to see what that looks like. For these petals, just a small little marking will suffice. If you notice, it gives the illusion as though the flower is just grazing up against the other one tucked over slightly. By not creating flowers that look exactly the same with the same color value, we're going to create a of flowers that really beautiful and natural together. Popping in a bit of that rich green gold. Now, let's nestle of flower next to this one. Let's imagine that it's leaning on its side in this direction. So we have touching up against that wet media and then let's finish it with a broth petal. We also make it slightly smaller, we're playing with size here too. All of these are key components to composition. By playing with the size. We also give the impression that there's layers happening and there's depth and there's dimension. You can leave some of these centers white if you want to or you can continue filling them in. It's entirely up to you. Let's continue building here. I'm going to show you a few more so that we have at least one cluster before we move on because we are going to be repeating this process in our final class project. Mm. Again, clustering this petal, this flower on its side here. Then I'm going to do another broth flower. You can add more colors for even more variation. So if you wanted to add a little bit of the rich green gold to the pink mixture, that would bring a peach into the mix. Obviously, things get more complicated as you add more colors, but really beautiful results. Okay, I'm going to add a one right here, touching that wet media. And then I'm just going to leap right into another one. Some of them will have four petals and some will have five. That's one of the other components to play with is varying how many petals you put on the flower. I'm going to do another five. I'm going to add a few more here so that we can continue to build up our Okay. Okay. Okay. I'm going to add one right here. It looks as though it's hiding in there. I'm going to make it nice and dark. So it gives the illusion of it being further into the whereas the other ones are on the outside. And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to create a few buds coming up. So that's just like a sweet three pedal. We'll imagine that we're attaching a stem here. And we can do another one over here. We can do just a two. Variation again is key. And I'm going to do the same thing on the other side. Okay. Okay. And plugging in one more petal here for one more flower. And just because I don't like an even amount of flowers on both sides, let's go ahead and create one more there. Okay, so we have a nice here. Things are trying quickly just because the flowers are quite small. I'm going to pause the video here and then we will resume in the next one and add in those brown speckles to the center. Okay. 8. Adding Details To The Hawthorn: So again, just noting what we've done here. We've created a really nice variety of flowers using petal shape, having a few petals sometimes be bigger, a few be smaller, and then also playing with color value. All of these things lend to a really fascinating, interesting cluster of flowers. You can continue with the cluster, even shooting it out in a different direction. We're going to do that. I just wanted you to understand just the basic petal structure here so that moving into the class project, you're feeling more comfortable, more familiar, and confident with the material. Let's go ahead and I'm going to use my number three brush, and I've dipped into my burnt umber, and we're going to create just a few little speckles in the center here. Let's go ahead and start at the upper left. The way that the stamen sit in the center, it's very circular. I'm going to employ that, but I'm also going to take a few liberties as well, not adding the same amount to each flower. These are the little details that make a difference. If you were to do the stainen in the exact same spot on every flower, again, that's going to detract from the interest of the painting. By making those key intentional choices and doing things just a bit differently, it brings in much more interest to the flower. You can even do more of a circular motion and not so definitive as far as the speckles, or you can keep it as it is in nature. You can do wet into wet, but just take note that the petals will become quite brown if you do, depending on how wet the media is. Okay. We're also going to be doing this with white flowers. But we're going to save that because it is just the same petal structure just using a different color. Go ahead and off your number three brush, and we're going to dip into the undersea green and the rich green gold. And this time, I'd like the mixture to be more on the green gold side. So putting in 60 to 70% green gold and 30% undersea green just so that there's a little bit of variation between the two different greens that we're using since we will be clustering or combining these flowers together in the same painting. Okay. Let's go ahead and add a few stems here attaching them to the cluster. To create a base. I just do a couple gestural strokes here. Just a few little squiggles to indicate that these are connected, and then bring them back to where they naturally lay. We do the same thing on the other side. Okay. And then you can do a few gestural markings up here if you like. Just to bring a bit more interest into the painting. Then I want to make sure your number four Filbert brush is nsed off because we're going to be creating some leaves. Just creating some sweet squiggles. Okay. I'll bring that stem into here. I'm not going to do a stem here because I'm going to end up dragging my palm through it, so we'll do that at the end. All right. To start with this leave, dip into your green gold mixture at cough consistency, and we're going to plug in some leaves where they might benefit the. I'm just taking the belly of the brush and creating some marks. You can do it off to the side too. If you feel like you want to practice a little bit, I like to do one, two, three, and then come to the other side, one, two, three, and then maybe come up to the center here and attach the leaf. That gives you a nice shape. Varieties key, on one side than the other. We can add some of the higher color value to the center here. Sometimes drawing the line first he can do it like that as well. Apologize. You have a nice leaf that way, and then let's do one facing down. You see this green mixture is going to complement our green mixture over here. And one more time. We can do the line first if that's helpful. One, two, one, two, three, and a stem or you can do the leaves. I like to do both because it achieves different results, and so not every leaf is going to look the same. And then you can take the cough sy consistency and add a nice little bleed into there. I can do that here too. We'll leave it as it and then we'll run some veins through these leaves. Trying to take care to not create the same leaves on each side. So smaller and some larger and even some overlapping is nice. Some tucked behind the flowers. Okay. And just looking at what I have here, what might need to be amended, I'm going to add a little leaf up here. Maybe one coming out here. Just aiming for variety here. And now we can take our number three brush and finish the cluster. Adding in just a few little lines to indicate that these things are connecting. Nice little bush here. And then I'm running out of my green mixture. I'm going to do it one more time. That's the undersea green and the rich green gold. That way I can create some veins as well, and it's really going to bring to life. Start here. I'll say it again, variety is key. Don't do the same veins in each leaf. In fact, you can leave some as is. Nature is so generous with the way that it gives variety. I try and bring that into my paintings. Taking care to leave some areas unveined then areas where I'm expanding the veins to go beyond the leaf. You can darken the stem here, add a little bit more thickness, and finish off with There you go. I hope you feel confident and ready for this. If not, you can practice off to the side, both leaves and the hawthorn, and then you jump back in to the final class project at the end. All right, guys. Okay. 9. Class Project 1: Welcome to the class project, my friend. I am so glad you're here. By now, you have gained the skill and the confidence to assemble a painting. But if for whatever reason, you are not feeling ready, please feel free to re review any of the material, work through the lessons as much as you need to, and then come ready because we are going to have a wonderful painting session together. I'm going to talk with you for just a few moments about our plan and then we're going to jump right in. The first thing we're going to do is we're going to create a stem for the lily of the valley serving as an anchor point for our painting, and we're going to do the bells first and then we're going to attach the leaves. Now, if you've decided that you would rather paint your lily of the valley over the leaves, you can definitely apply this concept and approach. Just be sure that you've made that decision ahead of time and make the necessary modifications. If like me, you're going to maneuver around the bells and use this approach where we are weaving the leaves around the stem and then leaving room for the bells. You'll be following along with me and you won't need to be making any of the modifications. Once we've done that, then we will begin to assemble the hawthorn, which is going to come clustering down here towards the bottom of the page. We'll work wet into wet and then also take pauses to allow things to fully dry before we use gestural technique to add details and markings. The last thing, before you begin, go ahead and refresh your palettes, mine were pretty dry. What I've done is I've gathered cough syrup in our versinoviolet and also broth. Then I've refreshed my palette with the whites as well. That's the mixture of the genes black and the burnt umber. Then on a separate palette, which you might consider doing is my greens mixture. That's my undersea green with a touch of the green gold in a cough syrup and a broth consistency. Then this is green gold with a touch of undersea green. Just reversed here. Then we'll for our hawthorn leaves, we're going to use the green gold and the burnt umber. That way we have three different options of green here to work with. I always say I'm a broken record, variety is key. With that, we are going to begin. Now, I'm going to switch to my number ten round brush to create two leaves using the broth consistency in the undersea green mixture. Remember to use sweeping strokes. This should feel like one seamless motion. And two. Go ahead and layer over your stem if you like. And then make adjustments to the leaf. If you feel like it's too slender or the curves are too deep at a point to the top of your leaf. Then we're going to do the same thing on the other side. This time, we're going to make sure we navigate around our stem, and we're going to create a leaf going in this direction. Now, while things are still wet, you can use your brush and the undersing green at cough syp consistency. To splash in a bit more color, I'm going to add a bit here at the tip and then run a vein through the center as well. And I'm going to use my other brush to load the green gold in cough sy consistency and do the same thing. Running up against the edges here and just tightening up some of the details here at the bottom. One more time, I'm going to use cough sp consistency to create a nice dark point and run some veins through while things are still wet. And also begin creating a few of the stems. If you like, you can rinse off one of your brushes and load it with clean water to create some bleeds within the leaves. You don't have to do it. It's not necessary, but it does add a little bit more interest and fascination to the painting. I'm happy with those leaves. Just going to make a small attachment down here at the bottom. Okay. Now using my eight round brush, I'm going to attach a few smaller stems to serve as connecting to the bells of the lily of the valley. Be careful of your palm running through, and in fact, you may want to take a hair dryer or you can even just wait till things are dry before adding them. You want to space them somewhat evenly apart, but not so evenly that things feel too stagnant or similar because variety is key with the way things are laying on the paper. Okay. We will also extend the stem here to create a few smaller buds. Also going to run the stem back through the leaf here, just to reconnect, you don't have to. It can be disappearing behind the leaves. That's completely fine. Then also, I'm going to add a bit more of broth consistency to the southern side of the leaf here. Now, be sure that your brush is completely clear of the pink. If you were using the same brush. If you have a separate brush for the white mixture, then this one should hopefully still have the same white mixed and loaded on there. Be sure that you have the proper water to paint ratio. You want light consistency, which is 30% paint and 70% water. Okay. You'll also need to make the decision about what style you enjoyed when we were experimenting. For example, if you really like the way that we cut in here and created shadows, then you'll need to make the necessary modifications. If you preferred the way that we did it down here where we left some white space and then we use gestural marking to serve as structure, then you will be following along exactly with me. I'm going to start at the bottom and work my way up. Okay. Making minor changes here allowing for a bit more white to show in some of the bells and making others a little bit longer. Reloading my brush as needed and also blotting off the excess paint onto the palette. I'm also playing with perspective, curving some of the lily of the valley flowers in and some are curving out. And then we will use the same brush to create a few buds. We'll wait till those are dry before we attach the stem. The leaves are still just a bit wet, so I'm going to give them another minute. While I'm doing that, I'm going to go ahead and use my mini detail to add in the center of the lily of the valley. I'm again trying to use variety within my markings. Now I'm going to use my number three round brush to dip into the broth mixture. I need to make it a little bit more brothy because it's a. The lines don't need to be so dark through the lily of the valley because we painted it quite light. Just enough to provide a bit of definition and structure. You may want to test this off to the side to make sure that it's the right color and then make the necessary changes. Still a little bit dark. So I'm going to decrease the value a bit. And then begin making the marks. Okay. I'm going to bring you in here at a different angle. So just so you can see, most people are working on a desktop computer, but sometimes you need to work from your phone or iPad, and I want to be sure that everybody can see. Again, it's just to capture the essence of the lily of the valley. We're not trying to grab every single detail. Now, we can use our breaths to attach the stem. And now bringing you back full view, we'll use our Aqua elite size eight brush to add some veins to the leaves. Okay. Adding a bit of the green gold mixture. I can see that leaf is still a little bit wet, but that's okay. If you feel like the lines are too dark, you can always use your other brush to do a little bit of blending. Okay. Okay. There's really no rule here as far as how many veins to add or not to add. It's entirely up to you. I'm going to put a few markings in there. Just my signature style to add a little bit of a curly Q essence to my leaves. You can also add some structure along the sides if you want to. I'm pretty happy with the way things are looking now. I'm going to take a pause here, allow the leaves to fully dry and also refresh my palette to begin painting the hawthorn down towards the bottom of the page. I'll see you in the next video. 10. Class Project 2: My leaves are actually still drying. I added a bit of a curve here on this leaf just to give it a bit more of a playful structure. But where I'm going to be working is dry. I'm going to go ahead and begin putting down the hawthorn. I'm going to load my mini detailer brush with the coughs consistency and then my other mini detailer brush with the broth consistency. We're going to do this in the exact same way that we did when we were practicing, assembling a cluster that has a light source and also depth and dimension, playing with the three petal to two petal rule, where we do three dark petals and two light petals and then also switching that and then doing some that are all dark with just a little bit of a splash of water and then some that are all light. Variety is key. I'm going to turn my paper just slightly so that I can get the correct angle as I'm moving in this direction. And begin with a nice open faced flower. I'm going to touch the edge of the petal here and create a nice bleed. And connect the flowers. I'm also going to while this is drying just a bit, load my six filbert brush. Actually, I'm going to use my four filbert brush, tiny bit smaller with the green gold mixture to pop into the center. You can choose to wait till things are a bit dry so that it doesn't run into the color or use the color while it's wet. Remember to leave a little bit of white space to serve as your light source. Let's continue building here. I'm going to do an all broth flower now. And touch up just against the edge here and do the same thing as they continue to build this. Adding in the green gold to the center. Now I'm going to begin to play with the perspective of the flowers tucking some underneath to give the illusion that there are curves in the flowers and that they're bending in a certain direction. I'm also going to leave a little bit of room for stems here. Okay. Okay. Painting the flowers in different directions also helps. Adding just a touch of the cough syp consistency here. And I'm going to continue shaping this. As I want it to move in this direction. And how did that to be hello. Okay. Okay. With these flowers, it's not so much a worry of running up against the edges as we have encountered those challenges when working through other lessons because these are directly in the middle of the page, and they're so stalwart and not loose and flowy, the way some of our other lessons are. There's not really a huge worry about that. However, you do want to be mindful of running too close to this edge because then it will look as though your painting is not balanced. Just be mindful as you're shaping your cluster to work in this bottom middle portion of the page and leave some room for leaves and stems. Okay. I'm going to turn and twist my paper again just to get the best angle possible and begin shaping in this direction as I want some of my petals and flowers to be pointing down. Also, creating some of three petal flowers instead of using the typical four or five can also add a little bit of interest in variety. I want a nice dense to work with. So I'm going to continue adding petals here until I feel like I've reached the right point. Taking the opportunity to pop in a little bit of the green gold. Can me make paper background, just to see where I'm at with shaping this cluster. Sometimes what I like to do is create a nice dense mixture of flowers and then add the stems and then add more flowers on top that can be sometimes a trick to making sure you maintain the composition. M. Sometimes I like to use the previous flower to bleed into the next one, rather than using my other brush, then I can just naturally take the pigment from the previous flower and add it into the next one. Okay. I'm going to begin adding a few buds here. I want my hawthorn to be angled down and towards the bottom right corner. I'm also going to add a few buds over here as well, just to give the sense of balance and flow. I'm just taking a moment now to look at what I have to imagine running the stems how I'm going to connect everything and seeing if there's anything else I want to do at this point before making my next step. Yes. I like when things are shaped now. I'm going to take a pause, not with the video, but just with adding the flowers. I'm going to begin to add the stems now and also leaves and then see where I need to fill in. I'm going to use the broth consistency that way I can layer over with cough syp later for a bit more definition and structure. I'm going to turn my paper just to get the best angle here and I'm going to begin by creating a stem. And then creating a few more here. M. Now I'm going to use my number four Filbert brush to create a few leaves using the same strokes that we did before when our practice Hawthorn leaves. I'm actually going to turn my paper a bit upside down here. And just begin plugging in the leaves where they feel natural. I'm wanting to move things in this direction, so I'm going to take care to add the leaves so that they are facing in the most natural direction to go with the flow of my stem and also adding in stems as needed to make the connections throughout the cluster. I'm going to pop in a few more blooms here because this is becoming an unnecessary gap. Just to help assemble the bouquet or the cluster and create depth and dimension and density. Just adding a bit of color here, working wet into wet. Now I'm going to use of ser consistency to go over the lily of the valley here to connect them. That way, it doesn't look like these two blooms are so separate. Creating a little bit of a cap at the bottom here. And connecting it back to the stem. Now I'm going to look for some places to add some gestural lines to begin to add a little bit more interest and also to help correct the flow of the painting. Sometimes I like to fill in with these little marks where there's not quite enough room for leaves, but there's definitely room for something. With this gestural approach, remember, we're just trying to capture the essence. You can go ahead and be playful with your leaves and with your stem. I'm going to add a touch of the undersea green just for a bit of a darker color within these stems. I love to layer my greens. I'm also creating shadows in the leaves here so that it looks as though there's a darker portion of the bouquet and then where things are lighter. That's where I would imagine that the sunlight's touching the leaves. Yes. I'm going to turn my paper back around just to check the flow of the piece. To better connect this flower with this one, I'm going to create another branch to come up behind the lily of the valley leaf. I'm going to do that now using the consistency and the green gold mixture. This helps to give a bit of depth and just cohesion to the piece as though they're not so separated. I'm going to keep using my mini detailer brush to add the petals. And also fill in this negative space here with a few more gestural markings. Using a bit more of that undersea green and cough sir consistency to layer once more on top and darken the base of the stem. Okay. Okay. Okay. Also adding in a few shadows where the leaves are coming behind the petals and darkening this leaf so that it clearly looks as though it's over the lily of the valley leaf. I like where that's at. I'm going to head back into my lily of the valley leaves using my aqua te brush and add a few veins with very fine lines, the ones that we practiced, grazing the paper. Another thing that really helps is to stand up. A lot of us sit while we're painting, and sometimes I find that when I'm close and I need to be to be able to see where I'm putting things. I always stand up before I decide that I'm done with something. I pull back, so let's go ahead and do that and take a look together. Obviously, I will have placed my flowers in slightly different places that you have. But you can get a general feel for how things are laying out how things are connected. Okay. I'm going to add a few leaves right here. Then I also like the idea of filling in some of the space was just some gestural markings, curly es. This is something like I said, I part of my signature style. It helps to fill in the space and give a sense of balance and flow. I'm going to use my Ace number eight brush to do that. This helps to make it feel like there's a really true connection happening between these two flowers. A little playful mark here and there really goes a long way. Okay. I really like where this is at now. I'm going to take my number three brush and dip into the burnt umber to add this dam into the middle of the hawthorn. Oops, I did forget to add a bit of the yellow gold to the center of this petal. I'm going to do that. And begin down here. B. Really taking care to add a little bit of a minor difference to each flower. It would be very easy to just plug in the same markings over and over again. But I think it's taking time that we make the painting go from just being mediocre to something really extraordinary. I'm going to add a few gestural lines to these leaves up here. I really like the way that we decided to connect everything. That might not be a stylistic choice that you want or wanted to make. I always invite you to make your own necessary modifications. If you're not loving the way things are being situated and placed, a lot of people like to watch the video beforehand and just see how it's going to lay out. Please, by all means, feel free to rework the pace rework the painting and go at your own pace as far as where you want things to be situated and lay down. But I'm very pleased with how this all came together and I'm feeling good and don't think that anything else needs to be added to it. I'm going to call it done. Um, I also want to just say thank you again for continuing to follow along the birth flower series with me. I'm having so much fun each month exploring these flowers and learning new things along the way. The lily of the valley and watercolor was something new for me, and so it really did bring a fresh burst of inspiration into the studio to play with some concepts that I hadn't yet tackled yet. Thank you again for joining me. I cannot wait to see you next month before you go. If you've already finished your piece, if you would upload your class project and leave a review, I would be so grateful. Happy creating to you, my friend.