Watercolor Loose Floral Bouquet: Compose & Paint Step by Step

1. Introduction: I'm Pooja from by the Lakeside Art Studio and I welcome you to my fourth skilled shared class. In today's class, we will compose and paint a simple watercolor lose flora book game. If you took my earlier classes, which focused on leaves and flowers, this one will be fairly easy to follow. I consider this class as a natural progression. After practicing all the book game elements separately. In this class, we will focus on book game compositions, color combinations, placement of flowers and leaves, sizing of all the elements and lots more. Through this class, you will be able to compose and paint your own lose style book game, choosing the right colors and come up with your own beautiful version. Are you ready to paint with me the simple and easy rose garden book game? I'm excited and I can't wait to see you in the glass. 2. Supplies: To paint this bouquet I will be using Arches Cold Pressed Watercolor paper. I'm using the eight by 10 block. Feel free to explore any brand, but please try and use a 100 percent cotton paper to get good results. If you're using a loose sheet of paper you will need a masking tape to hold down your paper so it doesn't buckle up as you work on building the layers. For paints, I have narrowed down a very specific color palette for this bouquet. The exact shade names that I've used in this painting are as listed here. Feel free to pause and take a screenshot to have a look at all the colors in detail. However, if you decide to change the color pallete, I would suggest to work with swatches before finalizing it. I will share swatches of all the colors I'm using while painting the bouquet. I will be using round brushes of the size zero, 2 and 6. Princeton and Silver Black Velvet blushes work best for me to get those nice tips and round shapes. Lastly, we will need a pallete for mixing colors. I always use a white dinner plate. It is easy to clean and you can mix colors without beating. A jar of clean water and paper towel to clean your brushes and dab the excess color. Now that we have all the supplies, let's get started. 3. Planning The Composition: For this bouquet, I want my central rose to be around here, the next rose I want somewhere at the bottom, and then on the sides of these two roses, I plan to fill up some fill-up flowers, some leaves, and some more fill-up flowers which are the smallest on this side. That's pretty much the composition that we are going to try and achieve here. For reference, I have painted this bouquet before, it's painted on 9 by 12 paper. I'm going to use a similar arrangement for this painting today. We will start with the roses first, and then we will start with the yellow flowers. Then, we will go down to the blue flowers on the top and here to balance out, and then leaves on the sides. 4. Starting Out With Roses: [MUSIC] For the roses. I will be using a very old and rusty shade of red color called by the name English red. I picked the shade from the white knight set and it is a beautifully saturated color and it is warm enough to qualify for this vintage style bouquet that I plan to achieve. Watching the darkest and lightest values will give you an idea of how your rose will look like. If you want to use any other color, feel free to tweak this color valid. Let's begin by painting the rose in the center first. I usually start off my bouquet compositions from the center and then go on adding the elements around it. [MUSIC] By drawing the roses first, I will also get an idea of the size of my roses, and accordingly, I can decide the size of my fellow flowers around it. [MUSIC] If you took my earlier class where we paint roses in detail, you will notice that I'm using the same technique of C-shaped curves here. We start off with the darkest value of the color to represent the inner most and tightness petals of the rose. [MUSIC] Then as you go outwards, start diluting the color by taking the pigment of your brush. While doing this, load some water onto your brush to make the petals on the outside. [MUSIC] Make sure you don't add too much water on your brush, else you may get watery petals instead of soft petals. [MUSIC] Each time I paint a new layer, I dilute the color a bit to show the lighter faded petals on the outer edge. Once I have the first layer of petals ready, I'm going back to add slightly darker value on the inner sides of the petals to show shadow and color gradation on the petals. [MUSIC] Don't forget to soften the harsh lines using a clean, wet brush. [MUSIC] Once you're comfortable with the size of the rose that you want to achieve, stop adding layers. [MUSIC] Feel free to go back and darken your inner most petals to give your rose some finishing touches. [MUSIC] I will now proceed to paint the second rose in our composition that will be placed below the first rose. [MUSIC] While painting this rose, I will use the first one for my size reference and try to make it somewhat of the same size. I want this two roses to be the central point of focus for my bouquet, and so this will be the biggest flowers in my piece. Everything else I paint after this would be one or two sizes smaller than these roses. [MUSIC] I'm painting these roses is in real time just to show you exact steps of layering that go into painting a rose. I hope you'll be able to paint with me and experience the joy of layering your rose one petal at a time without too much hassle of going back and forth in a speedy manner. Once you practice a couple of roses, the entire process of painting a rose will be a joyful experience. [MUSIC] That is my only intention to show the process of painting two full roses in real time. Now that you have your roses is ready, let's move on to adding the fellow flowers around it. 5. Adding Yellow Filler Flowers: [MUSIC] I want this bouquet to be bright, yet to warm, and hence, I'm choosing a yellow color that will complement the other red color be used for the roses. I'm using a deep shade of yellow from the Prima Tropical spalet, and I think it will pair up great with the English red. [MUSIC] There are two things to keep in mind while composing your fellow flowers around the main flowers. One, they will look good if you use an appropriate color scheme to complement the main flowers in your bouquet. Two, this should be of the appropriate size, so they will balance, and enhance your mean flowers. Keeping this in mind, I will be painting the very basic five better flowers which don't have any layering petals. Their simplicity will compliment the complex layered roses. [MUSIC] I will add these flowers around both the roses, and they will still keep my roses as the center point of the bouquet. [MUSIC] While planning your composition, if you're not sure about the placement of the flowers, you can always sketch your options on a piece of scrap paper, and then choose the best one while painting your final piece. That way, you'll avoid surprises, and this method will make you less anxious while adding your find bouquet elements. [MUSIC] We will come back in the end to work on the centers of all the yellow flowers. For now, let's try to fix the placements of these, so we can move on to the next set of elements. [MUSIC] 6. Adding Blue Filler Flowers: To add my next batch of filler flowers, I will use a mix of indigo and Prussian blue. I'm using quite a dark mix of it to add a pop of blue color to my bouquet. With yellow and red flowers, I realized that my bouquet is looking quite warm. At this point, to bring in some contrast and coolness to the bouquet, let's paint some blue flowers. To keep things balanced, let's paint simple five-petal flowers. I will slightly vary the shape to differentiate them from the yellow ones. As far as the size is concerned, I will keep the blue flowers a little smaller than the yellow ones. To ensure this, I'm using a small size 2 round brush. I will begin painting these in one corner of the bouquet and add just about three flowers. Since it is a darker color, I will limit it to only one corner and see how it turns out. While painting your filler flowers, try and keep them close together to show a cluster tied together with leaves and small stems. If you notice, I'm painting the blue ones close to each other, but I left some space between the roses and the blue flowers. I will paint leaves in this space and it is always a good idea to plan things ahead. Keep in mind that you need a good mix of leaves to balance all your flowers with each other and hence, I'm leaving some white gaps around the roses. All right, now let's proceed to the last set of filler flowers. When I planned this bouquet, I tried a couple of different colors for these, but somehow I decided to go ahead with the same blue. There are some color palettes that give you plenty of room to try out various colors. But for this one, I felt I shouldn't play too much and stick to these primary colors. That was my thought process before I decided to go for these small blue flowers. You can always try out swatches and see if some color strikes you. But don't go way beyond the color palette that you've chosen in the first place. For example, a dash of opera pink or any other pastel color just won't look good here. Well, all this comes from my understanding and you are free to experiment with the widest of color palettes and it may even work out great. It is all about trying it out and putting the color puzzle together. Of course, there are beautiful bouquet all over the internet to use as references. 7. Adding Leaves to the bouquet: Let's start by adding the innermost leaves surrounding the roses. Once we have the leaves in the center in place, we will then start filling up the outer leaves. For the center of rose leaves I'm using Green Apatite Genuine from Daniel Smith. This color has a tinge of brown to it and creates beautiful granulation. So I don't feel the need to mix it with any other color. I'm painting simple two stroke leaves that we practiced in the 20 types of watercolor leaves class. This bouquet has a lot of white print flowers, and hence, I feel it is not necessary to include green foliage of various type. To make sure that it is not overwhelming, I'm sticking to this basic leaf shape to balance the bright flowers. I will paint them in various sizes and thickness. That should bring about enough photo ID that I'm looking for. If you'll notice the white gaps we left earlier while painting flowers are now getting filled up with leaves and bringing our flowers to life. Adding leaves between two different types of flowers is a good way to plan your composition. For my next shade of green, I'm using Sap Green from Mijello Mission Gold and mixing some draw hamper to it, to make a nice shade of olive green color. This color is one shade darker than the previous green apatite genuine but I'm sticking to the same greenish, brownish, leafy shade. Let's paint a quick swatch of it to see if we got the right shade. I think it looks good and we can now paint the leaves around the yellow flowers. Make sure to take pauses and look back at your bouquet to check for big white gaps where you may want to add small leaves. To achieve leaves that are sprouting in different directions, I'm going to move around my block to get that comfortable angle. If you have deep tube paper, you will have to move your wrist very efficiently to get those leaves right. I'm turning my block again to add leaves to the top portion around the yellow flowers. To add leaves between the yellow and blue flowers, I'm just painting a stem with slender leaves. You can also overlap your leaves behind or in front of the flowers to give depth to your bouquet. For the third shade of green, I'm using the shade called by the name green from the white knight set. It is lovely dark green color to which I'm adding tiny bit of sepia to get a deeper shade. Using this color, I will paint small leaves around all the blue flowers. I also added some leaves and twigs, but on the smallest flowers on the top right. At this point, I'm going back to see if I need to add more leaves around the flowers, and adding a few more to my bouquet starts to look fuller and it comes together. Once I have all the leaves in place, I'm going back to work on the centers of all the fellow flowers. I'm mixing sepia and a bit of ivory black. Start by stippling some dots in the center of the flowers. Then add stamens and add the dots to finish them. For the blue flowers, I'm simply going to touch the centers with the same shade of sepia. I'll now finish off the yellow flowers by adding the stamens and add the dots, and there you go. Our loose garden bouquet is now ready. 8. Project Ideas and Conclusion: As we come to an end of the class, I hope that the ideas I've shared with you for approaching a bouquet will provide a good starting point for you to make your own unique compositions. As a project, you can paint the same bouquet with a different color combination like I did in this one or make a new composition with different flowers altogether. In the beginning, if you feel anxious, refer to photographs of real bouquets or visit a flower market for inspiration. Be sure to compose it in your style and add your signature elements and colors. Lastly, do please let me know in the reviews if you had fun in this class, and I can't wait to see your bouquets. If you upload your project on Instagram, please tag me @by_the_lakeside and I would love to feature your creations in my stories and feed. Thank you so much for taking this class. I will see you again in my next class. Until then, keep creating.