Watercolor Painting: How to Paint White Flowers that Pop on White Paper

1. Introduction: My favorite medium is watercolor. Because of the translucent paints, it can capture the most delicate and detailed effects. Perfect for flowers. Hi, I'm Helen. I'm a textile designer, and I love to paint flowers. I've worked as a designer painting flowers for over 20 years for fashion fabrics. And I now own my own brand, Helen Love Day. Selected items are now available from my collection at the VNA Museum in London. Painting white flowers in watercolor can present a bit of a challenge. You may have some questions, Like. Can I use white paint? Can I use gray for the shadows? Should I outline all the petals? We can't use white paint as our painting disappears on the paper. If you outline your petals with too heavy a line, the fragility of the flower is lost. To make matters worse, using gray paint can make your flowers look dull and lifeless. To capture these flowers in watercolor, you need to have good strong observational and creative skills. We'll be delving into just these topics in our class. Watercolor painting, how to paint white flowers that pop on white paper. We'll talk about how to take good reference photos so you can get really inspired to start your painting. You can use your own photos or you can use my reference and paint along with me. You'll need the basic watercolor essentials, paints, paper, brushes, all outlined on the downloadable materials guide. We'll mix colors from the very basic hues so that you'll get a better understanding of how to create the subtle tints and tones that you'll need to paint delicate flower petals. We'll begin painting in layers, and I'll show you how to break down the painting into simple stages. This will give you a guide so that you'll be able to plan your painting, making intentional decisions about what effect you want to create. I'll show you how the light source affects color temperature so that you can place subtle tints of color creating depth and breathing life and luminosity into your flower. I'm really excited to see what you can create. Let's get painting. I'll see you in the next class. 2. The Project: Welcome. This lesson is going to be all about our project. We'll go through all the steps you'll need to creating your own luminous white flower in watercolor. I've prepared some downloadable guides to help. You can find these under the projects and resources tab. First, a materials guide outlining my recommendations for watercolor painting materials. Next, a couple of my flower photos, which you can use as your reference if you'd prefer not to use your own. The glass slides are also available. Now with this style of painting, it's not possible to give a stroke by stroke instruction, like it might be with a simple looser style watercolor. You might well ask, where do I even begin? It looks so complicated. But we can simplify this botanical style painting into more manageable layers. We'll break down our reference image into three sections, the highlight layers, which are the very lightest tones, the mid tones, which are the middling tones, and the darkest tones. You can do this on any image by simply mapping it out with a printout and a felti pen. This way, you can naturally build up the tonal values and details that you want to with these three stages rather than experiencing the overwhelm of what to paint next. I've included as a download the breakdown of layers that we've used in this reference, which is covered in more detail in the class. I've also attached my finished project as a download so that you can see roughly what your project can look like. Once you've downloaded the resources, we'll need a reference flower to work from. I won't go into depth about flower photography in this class, but we will talk about what makes a good reference photo. If you don't have the right photo, don't worry, feel free to use mine. I took these on a trip to the Botanical Gardens at Q. Painting a white flower is great for practicing the foundational skills of observation. We notice more delicate details in tone depth, and texture without a bold color dominating. I'll also encourage you to take inspiration from other artists in how they depict white subjects. This can help us think creatively about how we would like to represent our reference. Okay. Next, we'll dive into materials, and I'll explain why I think these materials are best for the techniques that we're using in this class. Once we have our materials to hand, we'll start mixing some colors from scratch to give ourselves a base of tints and tones to begin work. We'll use a simple technique to work out our composition. I'll show you some techniques to transfer your painting to paper, either tracing or free hand drawing, whatever works for you here, there's really no right or wrong. Once our painting is transferred to paper, we'll cover our flow in a very light, even base layer. This is just to take the very bright white off the paper to stop it looking unnatural. We'll then add our highlight layers, which will comprise of some color and our lightest shadows. Next, we'll move on to our mid tone layers and we'll build up the shadows and strengthen the colors. Then we'll move on to our darkest tones in the flower, adding any color pops and the deepest shadows, building up the tones until we feel our flower is fully formed. Once our petals are painted, we'll move on to the leaves and stems. Lastly, we'll tackle the background if you would like to add one. The next important step is to take a photo of your work in good light and upload it to the project section under the projects and resources tab. This is a creative project, so it will be personal to you. Anything goes, so I'll be looking for excellent creativity and observational skills. If you get stuck, you can't find something or have any questions about the class. Please reach out and message me on the discussions tap. I'm here to help. As well as white flowers, there are so many other inspiring white subjects you can directly apply your new skills too. From snowy winter landscapes to white furred and feathered creatures, the possibilities are endless. I'll be so happy to see what ve painted. Let's get started with what makes a good reference photo. I'll see you in the next lesson. 3. References: Welcome, and in this lesson, we're going to delve into what makes a really good reference photo to work from. We'll be looking for high resolution images with as much detail as possible and a clear light source, and most importantly, a flower that we just can't wait to paint. I definitely recommend getting out and about and seeing what flowers you can find. You can never have enough flower photos. Botanical gardens are a great place to get inspiration, but you can also use shot boat ones or even ones from your own garden. It's best to take quite a few photos from different angles to give yourself a range of options. Once you have lots of lovely photos to choose from from different angles, which one are you going to use for your reference. Here are some of the photos I've taken that will make good options. Let's start off with why I've chosen these particular reference images. I really like this angle, as you can see, the lovely shape of the flower well. I use two guiding principles when I'm choosing a reference photo to paint from. The first is to take a clear picture, not blurry with high resolution. You can decide this by zooming in and checking if all the details are clear. Why do you need this? Because the clearer the images to us, the more details we can accurately paint without guessing, which will create a more realistic look in our work. Now it comes down to the lighting. Good lighting is a must, not so dark that you can't see the details and not so bright that the details are bleached out. These top two pictures are quite bright and in the first one, lots of the detail has been bleached out by the light. Also, if you notice in these ones, the light is quite diffused. Although we can see that highlights and shadows, they're not as defined as they are in the last pictures. Narrowing it down to the second two pictures, You can see they have a bit more contrast between the lights and darks, but to my eye, the last image seems to be the most defined with a greater depth of tonal value. The light source also seems clearer to me in the last image coming from the top left, and this will make it easier to place tints of cool and warm colors in the right places. Now that we've selected our main flower, which is going to be the focus of the piece, we can also include if we like some birds leaves and maybe some supporting flowers around it to set it into a scene. This will help to make it a bit more natural and I do have some pretty images that I'd like to include. I use the same process of selection with these ones as well. Now, I like to print out my reference photo onto paper. Archival map paper, you can see here has very rich color compared with a photocopy. So that's my preference, but you can also use a table or screen as well if you want to. I'm going to show you how to break down your image into layers so that you don't get completely overwhelmed trying to paint the whole thing in one go. So to do this, we'll need three printouts, photocopies of fine, and a felt pen. The reason I suggest using this method is that when I was a beginner, I always used to paint over my highlights and over my mid tones with darker shades than I meant to. And it's really frustrating because the beauty of water color is preserving the whiteness of the paper for the highlights. You really can't over paint in white. And once you've over painted the lightness of the paper, it's gone. So you can't really recover from that. So it's really important not to paint over your highlights. And this method will train you to remember where your highlights and your mid tones lie. So with these painting stages, we'll start off with what I call a base layer. This is an incredibly light wash over the whole surface of the flower. So the next layer we'll work on is what I call the highlight layer. So this isn't the very brightest white highlights, but this is the next layer down, and this is still incredibly light, and it's made up of the very lightest colors and the lightest shading. This area here will be the base layer. And these areas here, I'm now just drawing round. I'm looking at my reference, and I'm seeing which appeared to be the very brightest highlight, and I'm just going around them with a marker pen now sectioning this off. So this is the area that will be our highlight layer. And if we look at the highlight layer, it will cover most of the surface area of the flower. So we'll be very careful not to paint over these areas. The next layer we'll move on to is called the mid tone layer, which will have the mid tones in it. If we look at our flower, this area indicated here will be covered in the mid tones, and we'll take very great care not to paint over either our highlight layers or our base layer. So we'll leave all of this unpainted when we're working on the mid tones. So what we're going to do now on our second photocopy is we're going to mark out not only the very brightest highlights, we're going to section off all the highlights. So as you can see indicated here, these are the areas that we're not going to be painting, and this area, the pink area is what we will be painting with our mid tones. And in this layer, we'll really start to build up some strength in the colors and the shadows and our flower will be getting quite a bit more defined. Moving to our darkest tone layers, here's our flower with the different layers on, and our darker tone layer is going to be, only in this area here. So as you can see, it's a smaller area of the flower. We won't be painting over any of the other underlying layers that are our highlights in our mid tones. We will just be painting now our very darkest tones. So now we're going to use our third photocopy. And I'm going around now with my Pelt tip literally marking out just the darkest tones that I can see. And you can see indicated here, This is the area that we'll be painting our darkest tones on, and we'll be incredibly careful not to paint over any of the other areas with our base, our high light, and our mid tone layers. We'll leave those untouched, and we're only going to be painting our darklest layers onto the areas indicated. I've used the threshold feature in photoshop to determine my tones. And you can certainly try this if you have photoshop available. And I'll be referring to these images in my class. But it's really not a necessity. You can do this just as well by hand. If you have a reference that doesn't have that many mid tones, and this might be the case, especially with a very light coloor flower. You can just mark out your highlights and your darker tones instead and forget about the mid tones. So I'd like to talk next about color references. One of my favorite pictures using a white subject is by John Singer Sargent, and it's the Carnation Lily. What I love the most about this picture is his use of color. He hasn't just used gray tones to depict the white. If you have a painting that you really love, definitely check it out and just have a really good look and see what the artist has done and how they've used color, especially in relation to using warm and cool highlights to kind of to give a perception of depth. So now that we have our reference flower sorted, what materials are we going to need to paint with? We'll find out in the next lesson. 4. Materials: Welcome, and in this lesson, we're going to talk about what materials you'll need to get started. If you haven't already, download your materials guide from the resources section. I think we should start off with the paper as it's a key component in the way our painting will turn out. Which paper is best for watercolor? Water will buckle or wrinkle thinner paper. As you'll be adding watery layers of paint to your paper, it's best to go for a heavier weight for watercolor painting. Watercolor paper comes in quite a few different varieties in terms of the texture. A cold pressed paper has a little texture to it, and a hot pressed paper is pretty smooth, so imagine it's been ironed. So which paper for watercolor. I have three options here, all of which I've used before, and all of which I recommend for this style of painting. The first one is a cartridge paper. This is a really all round in general paper. You can use it for painting watercolors, sketching in pastels. It's only 220 GSN thick, which is still nice and thick, especially for a cartridge paper. What I love about it is it has a very nice smooth surface. The next paper I can recommend is a watercolor paper, which is cellulose based. This is 300 SM thickness, which is nice and thick. It's hot pressed with a smooth surface, not as smooth as the cartridge paper, but still incredibly smooth. It's a more general paper, but it is specifically designed for watercolor painting. Lastly, the watercolor paper that I'm going to be using for this class. This is a cotton based watercolor paper. It's 100% cotton based. It's 300 SM thickness, so nice and thick. It's a hot press, so it has a nice smooth surface. The paper absorbs the paint, so once it's dry, the colors do seem to tone down quite a bit. But this also means that you let each layer dry and then you build up the intensity of the color and this gives a really lovely luminous quality to your painting. I know that it's traditional to stretch a paper to stop it buckling. But if you do find your paper buckling, what you can do is use a gummed block instead. If you paint your painting completely and let it dry before removing the piece of paper from the block, it really should prevent the paper warping. Next, I recommend a mechanical pencil with a 0.5 millimeter lead. So why not use just a regular pencil you might ask. I just couldn't capture the level of detail that I was after, but now I'm using these fine pencils, I can. The same goes for the eraser. I will also use a regular eraser, but this fine tip one is great for precision with erasing finer details. This putty eraser is also something I've been using more recently for lightening up my sketch before I begin painting. If you are a tall heavy handed with your pencil like me, you may end up with darker lines than you would like, and if they're accurate, it's a shame to get rid of them completely. That is where this putty erasor comes in handy. If you roll over your sketch like this or just dab it into darker areas, hey press you now have delicate line drawing. The next piece of equipment I'm going to recommend is an artist glove. If you use your bare hand, you'll end up leaving marks on your paper, and this will show up as lighter areas when you paint as you'll leave a greasy residue in areas which repels the paint. These gloves are perfect and you don't feel scared to rest your hand on the paper. Now on two brushes, I bought one expensive brush in the hopes that my paintings would be transformed. This is the size three Windsor and Newton series seven brush. I have to say, it didn't do quite what I expected. So until further notice and maybe a bit more practice, I don't have any particular brush to recommend except for a round brush with a pointy tip. Anything from a zero zero up to a size ten, depending on the size of your artwork will work well. A minor acrylic apart from this one. I've also recently bought some new watercolor paints. These are Windsor and Newton from their professional series. As I'm testing out these paints, these are all the colors I will use in my painting, Hookers green, Magenta, Turnus yellow, and indigo, and I might pop in an orange later on. We'll just see how we go. I'm using an intego which is a very dark shaded blue, and this will be to darken my colors for the shadows. I've also got a new porcelain paint palette, which I really like. You can set your pans of color around the edge and then use the central flat area for fine tuning your mixes. Lastly, a water jar. You can even use two if you want one for washing and one for adding clean water to your paint mix and a blotting paper to blot your brush or to take off excess paint. Kitchen roll works well. Now that we've got our material sorted, let's mix up some colors that we can paint with. I'll see you in the next lesson. M. 5. Color Mixing: Welcome, and in this lesson, we're going to be looking at mixing up colors. I want to play around and mix up a selection of colors that I can use in my painting. I'm not going to be using these directly on my painting. These will be some base colors to work from, so I don't have to keep starting from scratch every time I need a new color. I'm only going to work, maybe five colors just to demonstrate the variety of colors that you can achieve with a limited palette. But you are of welcome to use additional colors, whatever you have to hand. Always try to test the colors on the same paper that you're used to paint your artwork. That way, you'll be sure the color will be the same. Here we have the four colors that I'll be using to mix with. With tubes of paint, if you let them dry out in your palette and want to use them again another day, they reactivate better when you've added a little water to them when they first come out of the tube. Let's take a closer look at our flower reference. What we'll do is first mix up a very pale wash that will cover the entire flower. I like to do this as I think completely white paper with no tint doesn't look very natural even for the very brightest highlights in our flower. Here I'm taking a little magenta, a little yellow, and diluting it with water, and I'm going to test this out now. I think I'm going to add a bit more pink and test it again. So now that will do for the first wash over the whole flower. I'll mix up a tint of more yellowy wash to start building some of these yellow tones we see here. I'm taking a splash to the first color, just get started with a bit of yellow and magenta and watering it down. If we take a look at our yellow tones again on the reference, we can see that these yellows are taking on quite a greeny tinge. These line mostly in the shadows, so the tint is cooler than in the yellow at the center of the flower. Here's the color temperature wheel. The cooler colors on the left hand side tend to recede and add depth to your shadows. The warmer tone colors tend to bring objects forward and are great to use around the lightest areas of your painting. So now I'm going to mix up a greeny ellow tint using yellow, an att of green. Adding some water now and a bit more yellow, except I've picked up too much on my brush, so just getting rid of it here, washing my brush and adding some more water and adding some green to the mix and a bit more yellow and now testing out. I think this looks nice. So I'm just going to add a little yellow and indigo together because I think I want even more intense green yellow as well. Does come up too pale, so I'll add some more yellow and indigo to strengthen the color. And I'm just testing again, and I think that does look better. So now that we have our pale washy tones mixed, we can move on to mixing up some grayish shadowy colors. Now I'm adding a little bit of indigo to my palette. I'm going to take a little bit less and add some water here. Adding a little bit of yellow to this mix, and a tiny bit of magenta as well, and giving it a really good mix. I'm testing out this color now. I'm going to have another go with another blue tone, so a bit of indigo, a bit of water, and a little bit of magenta. Having a good mix around this has gone quite purple, so I'm adding a bit of yellow. Adding a tiny bit more indigo, a little bit of yellow, and a bit more magenta. And I'll just test this color out now as well. So I'm going to add a little bit of magenta and now some indigo, a bit more magenta, and a bit of water. Tiny bit of yellow. Just testing this out on the page, and this is quite a bit more pink. I'm going to take a little bit of this mix and make something new from it, a little bit of indigo, a little bit of yellow, a bit of indigo. A bit more yellow. A bit more magenta. Oops, quite a bit more indigo. That's very blue now. And more yellow, more magenta. I'm just trying this paint out now. This is looking quite purply pink, and I'm going to have another go. I'm going to take a little bit of this mix now and water it down and paint it on my test strip again. Here we go. We have a selection of colors to work from now, very pale, pinky yellow washes on the left, and some green tint yellows, some blues and purple shadow colors, and some pink tones for the tips of the flowers. In this lesson, we have our starter colors mixed. In the next lesson, we're going to start with our drawing. I'll look forward to seeing you in the next lesson. Ah. 6. Drawing: So welcome in this lesson, we're going to be drawing our flower. So in this lesson, we'll have a little look at composition. We'll try transferring our image to the paper. And lastly, we'll try some free hand drawing as well. I find it helps to print out my reference images in a few different sizes, so I can kind of judge looking at my paper, how big I actually want my flower. I print out the accompanying flowers as well, the buds and the leaves. I'm just going to cut random and I'm just going to choose all the elements that I'd like to include in my flower. I'm just going to lay them out on my paper once I think I've got the right scale, and I'll just have a play around. These don't need to be perfectly cut out. They can just be haphazard. It's really just to see about the placement on your page. So I'm just laying these out now. I've kind of got rid of a few because it was looking a bit busy, and I think this is pretty much how I'm going to leave it. So once we think our composition looks pretty, we're going to move on to transferring our image to the page. There's a few different methods to do this. And first of all, I'm going to show you the tracing method. So I'm just going to take tiny bits of masking tape and tack down my cutout images onto my page. And I'm going to use this trace down paper. So this is a kind of I don't know, graphite paper, I guess. You can reuse this many times. So be super careful with this because you can get graphite everywhere. And all we're going to do is to draw out our image onto our paper. So I'm just going to check what's happened. Nothing has happened. I've managed to draw absolutely nothing, but I have made some smudges, so that's not particularly good to start. Now I'm going to try with a harder pen. I've now got a byrow and I'm just going to start drawing now slightly more pressure than I could make with the very fine pencil. I'm going to draw a few shapes now and I'm just going to check how that's looking. That looks too heavy to me. Also not good. So now I'm going to use my rubber to try and rub this out. I'm going to try using my putty rubber to rub this out and I'm going to try rolling over it. Oh, dear. Now I'm going to show you something which you definitely don't want to do, and that is called indenting. So I've actually managed to press so hard through my tracing paper that I've managed to indent the paper. Unfortunately, I've tried to carry on drawing over the top, but this will not work because you can still see the nasty kind of indents through my drawing, and that will just be visible even when I've painted over it, so I'm going to have to scrap that and just start again. If you can make a better job of it than me, which wouldn't be hard, you can definitely consider tracing out your image. A few bits of advice when using transfer paper. Try using a regular HB pencil. Keep checking your drawing as you go and keep your tracing light. But visible. The other option I'm going to suggest is just free hand drawing your image onto the paper. All I'm doing is looking at my reference image carefully, really closely. I'm using my very fine mechanical pencil. I'm starting from the middle of the piece and I'm just literally carefully going round and hand drawing my image. So one thing which is really good to make sure that your flower petals are kind of in the right places is to make sure that you are looking also not only at the flower shape, but also at the negative space around it because sometimes that can really help to make sure that all the lines that you're making are in the right place. I'm plussing out and adjusting as I go. I'm using my eraser to get rid of marks I don't want. You can certainly start off your drawing, making use of circles and semicircles and things like that to make sure that your petals are all in the right places and making the right shapes. I haven't really bothered with this one, but I am using my pencil to measure roughly the angles of the petals and the size of them in comparison to the rest of the flower. So there we go. That's complete now. I'm quite happy with that. It doesn't have to be an exact replica of the reference image, as long as it looks similar enough for you to be able to paint it from the reference image, that will work fine. So now that we've drawn our flower and we have a beautiful depiction of our reference image on the paper as our guide, we're now going to be moving on to painting the very pale highlights of the flower. T see you in the next lesson. 7. Painting Highlights: In this lesson, we're going to be painting our highlight layers using very, very washy mixes. We'll paint a ground wash, underlying color tints and lay down our very palest shadows. Looking at our reference, what we're going to do is paint a very pale wash over the entire surface of our flower area. Now I'm mixing the first two very palest colors in my palette together because I'm going to paint the whole surface of the flower. I'm going to need to make up a little bit more quantity of the paint that we made in the previous lesson. And I'm adding a little bit of magenta and a little bit of yellow to this. Strengthening it up a little bit, a bit more yellow. And a bit more magenta. And I'm actually just going to transfer it to a deeper well because I'm going to add quite a bit of water to this. It needs to be very, very, very pale indeed. And I'm going to test out this color now on a test strip. And you have to be patient and try to remember to let it dry. Because if you are using cotton paper, it will dry quite a bit lighter. So I'm going to be using a size ten brush to cover this area. It's a round brush. My painting paper is roughly an eight three size and my large flower covers most of the surface of it. Start at the top of the painting so that you're not rubbing your hand over wet paint. Now adding the very pale wash to it. If it helps, work in petal sections, so one petal or group of the flower at a time, and this stops you getting an uneven coverage with water marks in the center of your petals. So I'm going from petal to petal covering it in as evenly as I can at this stage. I didn't wet my paper, first of all, because this is such a pale wash. It actually will hardly show on the paper. It's really just to take the very bright whiteness away from the paper because I think that it looks unnatural. So now we've done our ground wash. We're going to start painting the underlying color tones. We'll now be starting to paint a highlight layer. We won't be overpainting these small areas where the base coat will shine through. So, if we look at our reference flower, I'm just highlighting the color tints to you. There's some kind of greeny yellow tones underneath and some kind of warmer tones in the center of the flower. So now I'm using this yellow here that I previously had, and I'm adding some water to the yellow mix, quite a bit of water, because this is all going to be a very pale layer. I'm adding a bit more yellow. Tiny dab of the green yellow mix. Trying this out now on my test watch. And I think this is good. I'm going to start from the center of the flower, feathering the color outwards from the center of the flower out to the tips of the petals. I'm not going to go actually to the tips of the petals because the color doesn't really go that far. I'm adding a little to my buds now. As you can see, I'm using my size ten brush. This really doesn't have to be particularly accurate as long as you're painting within the bounds of the flower. You don't really want any hard edges. Now that's finished, I'm going to apply some very pale shadows. I'm going to add some water to this. I'm going to reactivate the gray mix, and I'm going to mix it in to the gray mix next to it because I will lead a little bit more than this, and I'm even adding in a little of the purple gray mix. This is what I mean about not actually applying these colors to the paper. I'm just using them as base colors to actually mix up the shades that I want to. Now I'm painting the flower. I'm adding lots of water, and I'm just going to try this on my test strip now. Yes. Now it's dried. I can see. That is looking nice. And it's not too dark. This really does need to be a high light layer. You definitely don't want to be going in with any dark colors. So also really make sure that you are paying attention to your tonal map that we've drawn out. I am being very careful not to overpaint the outside edge or the outside edge of the petals. So I'm staying within my pencil lines. And I found a shadow here, and I'm not going to father this out because this is a defined shadow, which I want to keep into this painting. Just adding a little bit of strength now. And I'm just using some water to really feather out this flower. So on the main flower, as you can see, we've completed our base coat. On top of that, we've added in some of the yellow tints and tones, and we've also started building up our shadows. You can really start to see the form of the flower take shape. Everything is very smooth, and there's no hard edges. So next, we're going to work a little bit more on the color tints. We're going to deepen the greener yellows and we're going to deepen the warmer yellows within the flowers. If we look at our reference again, we can see this distinction between the cooler yellows at the bottom, if a yellow can be cool, the greenier yellows and the warmer yellows at the very center. So I'm going to add water and reactivate this green mix. I'm adding a bit more yellowy green, a bit more yellow and a bit more green. And adding some water now, and this is very green. Adding a bit more yellow, and a bit more green. So I've watered this down. I've added it to a deeper well. I'm just testing this out on my test strip now, and I'm just comparing it against my reference image. So now I'm going down to a size six brush because we're getting to slightly finer detail. And now, wherever I'm seeing this kind of greenish yellow, I'm carefully feathering this in. My brush isn't super loaded, but it's wet enough to be able to flick the paint along and make fairly long strokes along the petals. Make sure that you have your reference image either printed out or on screen as big as possible so that you can really see all the details at every stage. It will really inform your painting. So I'm adding some little bits of detail now. I see that along this edge, it's quite a bit stronger, so I'm going to add that in now. And there we go. So now we can see the effect of adding these greenier tones underneath the flower, which are the cooler tones where the shadows lie. So now we're going to work on the warmer yellows at the center of the flower. So if we look at these tones here, this is kind of where the light is shining and the yellows are really warming up in this area. So we're going to start with this mix again, and we're going to add some yellow. And this time, we're going to add some agenta to warm it up. And I'm trying this out now, is a very pale shade. I'm adding a little bit more magenta, not quite warm enough. And a little bit more yellow, quite a bit more yellow, actually. And I'm testing this out again now. And I'm using the same size brush and I'm just going to go round very carefully now, adding the little flicks of e the warmer yellow where I see it at the center of the flower. So I'm blending out the edges with water in this feathering technique. And I'm keeping in mind my color reference image, the carnation lily and just thinking about how the yellows were used with that white subject and how effective they were for the warmer tones. So I'm making sure not to over paint any of the petals over the petal edges. I'm just adding this in, really making sure that I'm not painting over any area, which I shouldn't be of the base layer. And there we go. Now you can see I've added my warmer and kind of cooler yellow tints onto the flower. And if you compare it with the reference image, you can really see how the light is beginning to be captured. And even though it's very subtle, it's all starting to take shape. So now that our high light layers are completed, in the next lesson, we're going to be moving onto our mid tone colors. So I'll see you in the next lesson. 8. Painting Mid Tones: In this sst we're going to be painting our mid tones. When we're painting the mid tones, we'll be building up the colors and we'll be creating stronger shadows. If we look at our reference, we've covered the base coat, we've covered the highlight layer, and now we're moving on to this mid tone layer and we will be careful not to touch this area here, which is the base coat and the highlights, we will try very hard not to over paint this area, preserving the white of our paper. It's a great idea to paint with your tonal map to hand. As you can see here, there's some slightly pinkier grays and there's some stronger tones of pink. I'm going to reactivate my yellow mix again, and I'm going to add a little magenta to this. I'm reactivating the pinky yellow shadow and adding that to the mix as well, and I'm trying that out now on the test strip. I'm applying this now with a size six brush and I'm just being very light with this layer. I don't want to overdo it. So we're not doing very dark pink. We're literally just giving the tips of the petals a very light blush color. One tip is to keep the strokes in line with the direction of growth. So if you can imagine that each petal grows out from the bud and unfurls, I'm always painting in that direction. I'm looking at my reference, making sure that I don't add too much pink into the whiter areas, watering down my brush and pulling out the color so that I get a nice gradient. Now I'm pulling the color out with a more watery brush so that I get a nice gradient effect. I'm also adding a little on the inside of the flower tip where I see it appear on my reference, and I'm being really careful with the direction of my strokes. Starting from the center and working my way outwards. I'm petal by petal, being really careful with how much color I'm adding. That is how it's looking now with a little bit of pink added for definition on the edges of the petals. Now we're going to build up some stronger shadows. You can see on the tonal map where these shadows lie with the mid tones. I'm just looking at my reference. Just really going to make sure that I'm not over painting any of these highlight areas, that's really important. Now I'm adding water to reactivate the gray mix, and I'm giving it a good stir. I'm adding a bit of yellow now. What I'm going for here is just a slightly darker shadow than I've used on my highlight layer. I'm adding a bit of indigo. I'm adding some magenta, some more yellow. Now I'm just testing out on my test strip. That's not too bad. I quite like this color. I'm adding a bit of water to my brush to dilute the color because I think it probably is just a little bit strong for a mid tone. I'm just going to test it out now on my paper. I think this is better. It's quite subtle, but I think we need to go subtle for this white flower. And I'm starting to work on deepening these shadows where I see them, blending as I go and keeping my strokes as fine as I can, little lines, all parallel so that it looks neat. Another tip would be keep layering to add depth to the shadows. Because remember, you can always add, but you can't take away with watercolor. I'm just really carefully blending this very watery mix down through my petal, keeping all the strokes aligned. I'm adding a little bit of gray in this darker shading part underneath the petal. Just have a look at the reference and make sure I'm adding this in the right place. As you can see, I've already painted the top petals with my darker shading and now I'm working from the left to the right. I'm being exceedingly careful here not to go over my high light colors. But I do want to give each petal a bit of definition and make sure it's separated from the next petal. Now I've added some shadow. I see that the greens need strengthening. This is all part of the process, and it's just about adding a layer, evaluating and adjusting as you go. Looking at my reference carefully, I'm just going in with the slightly darker green. I'm adding this in the areas where the shadow is falling. I'm adding a little bit more of this in the shadow here, a very light version of it. I've let that dry and I'm even going back again and adding another layer of this greeny yellow mix. I'm carefully keeping my brush strokes all going in the same direction. I'm strengthening this area of shadow here. Now I've made that adjustment with the green. I'm going to continue with my shadowy mix. I'm just adding a little water now to my brush so that I can feather out and blend this area where the lines have got a little bit stripy. Although we want lovely little feathery lines, we definitely don't want it to be stripy. Another tip is to keep the edges of the petals need when you're using feathering strokes, you can always outline a darker shade just where the feathering meets the edge. Careful not to go too dark, and then brush off your paint brush so it's not too heavily loaded and flick out the color into feathery strokes so that it all looks really neat. You can blend that color up the shadow up carefully into the rest of the petal. I've just noticed something that I don't like on my painting, actually. I made the mistake of drawing in the shadow with my pencil line, probably a little too hard. And now I'm having to work furiously to try to get rid of this pencil line where I've marked in the shadow. So if you do need to pencil in any shadow marks, just make sure they are ultra light because it will be difficult to remove them once you've painted over them. So I think I'm going to have to put up with mine, unfortunately. And here we go. So this is what the flower looks like when I've completed the mid tones. I've added more shadow, and you can tell it's really turning into a three D shape. The petals are lifting away from each other. I haven't over painted my highlights, which I'm really pleased about, but it definitely needs a bit more strength around the shadows. So now that our mid tones are completed, in the next lesson, we're going to be moving on to painting darker tones. 9. Painting Darker Tones: So welcome in this lesson, we're going to be covering how to paint darker tones onto our flower. We're going to be darkening the shadows and we're going to be darkening the color details. If we look at our reference again, we've covered the base layer, we've covered the highlights, we've painted the mid tones. So this is really a continuation of the mid tones, but layering in more depth and more detail. So we'll be really careful not to paint over our highlights or our mid tones. So I'm adding some water to reactivate the gray mix, and I'm adding a little indigo now and some yellow. I'm going to be mixing up a stronger gray shadow color. I'm adding magenta, quite a bit of magenta and giving it a really good mix around. I'm adding some more indigo, an awful lot of indigo. I'm mixing that in thoroughly, and now some more yellow again to take my mix back to a more neutral color. Add a little magenta here and a little bit more. I'm taking a little bit of the mix out here and adding it to a well as I've got too much paint going on, and I'm going to add a bit more yellow. Just trying it out now on my test strip, and I'm adding a bit of water because that's very dark and I'm seeing what it looks like when it's diluted. Not quite right. I'm adding some more indigo, and I've added too much indigo. Just taking some out and mixing this again. I've added some agenta As you can see, it's taking quite a bit of fiddling around to get to this color that I'm after, but don't be tempted to rush color mixing. It really is better to take your time and get it just how you want it before you apply it to your painting. Now I'm trying this out on my test strip, and I'm adding just a little bit of water to my mix because it is very dark. This is looking quite pink. I'm just mixing a tiny bit more indigo into this mix, and I'm now having a look at this. Little bit more magenta again, and a bit more water, giving it a go on my test strip and adding some more water to the mix to see what it looks like when it's paler and even some more. Now, I think that's looking like a softer tone of gray. After all that color mixing, I finally have the gray that I want. The other ones have just gone a little bit too dull and flat for me. I like this slightly pinker tone. I think it will blend in better with my flower. So now I'm using a size three brush. I've gone down a size because I'm going to be doing very delicate detailed work for this. I'm concentrating on this area where the shadows are darkest. Carefully layering up the paint, deepening all the shadows, looking at how the shadow is falling here, very carefully on my reference. Don't be afraid to adjust and strengthen tones when they've dried as they will dry lighter especially on a cotton paper because it will absorb the paint. Just looking at this shadow now on the right hand side petal of my flower, giving it a little bit of extra depth. And I'm just carefully observing my flower as it dries and just popping out and strengthening shadows where I need to. Checking my reference carefully to make sure that the balance is right, still with the same darker shadow mix. I'm going in and adding this purply pinky gray shadow where I see that there needs to be a darker color. Now I've completed the darker tone strengthening the shadows. Now I'm going to move on to darkening the color details. I'm just going to go over now the very tips of the petals. You can see when I enhance the color on the reference image that the very tips of the petals all have the darkest color. I'm adding quite a bit of yellow and some magenta. I'm adding the yellow to the magenta. I'm adding a little bit of indigo. I'm just going to test this out now on my paper test strip. I'm just comparing it with my image, and I'm adding a little bit more yellow because I think this is a bit too blue. I'm trying it out again on my test strip. Adding just another little bit of indigo here. It's going a little bit orange and trying it again on my test strip. Adding a bit more yellow again and trying again on my test strip. If we just have a closer lit, we can see the different tones here, where I've added indigo, and where I've added yellow. I do think this last tone is going to work the best. With a much finer brush, a size two, I'm very, very delicately drawing the finest lines at the edges of my petals, and I'm just feathering that in now to blend it. I've got an incredibly delicate line of color. Just tipping the edge of the petal. A close up here so you can see how this is working. I'm just doing a feathery stroke, giving the tip of the petal and the edge of the petal a bit more color, and I'm strengthening it on this side. I'm drawing a very fine line. I'm just feathering it along so it looks more natural. Here you can see I'm doing just the finest delicate detail, giving an intense color to the very tip, and adding a stronger tip to the petal to give it a focus. I'm just doing this on most of the petals. I'm checking my reference though to make sure that I'm not doing the same on every one. It starts to look really unnatural when you just copy and paste. You really need to adjust the technique to each petal. It's a really fine balance between adding definition and making sure that it's all blended nicely. So I'm just adding a stronger tip here to give it a point of focus, and now I'm going back in with the pink. And I'm basically repeating this process with each petal tip, but I'm adjusting my technique to what the petal tip looks like on the reference. I'm not just going over and adding the same amount of paint to each petal tip because each one looks different. Just remember you're trying to capture the natural variation in the flower. And if it looks too homogenous, it won't look realistic. We've added the darker shadows and the darker colors, and this flower is really starting to pop off the page, so we are ready for the next stage. So now that our darker tones are completed, in the next lesson, we're going to be moving on to painting details. 10. Painting Greens & Details: So welcome in this lesson, we're going to be covering how to add very delicate details to our painting. We're going to complete some final delicate details to the flower, and we're also going to be painting in the green leaves and stems. If we take a close up look at our reference flower, we can identify some of the really delicate details that you only notice when you look very closely at your reference. We can translate some of this very fine detail to give our flower a more realistic look. So I'm going to echo some of these lines we see here on the petals. I'm not going to go as far as actually drawing in the veins. I'm going to use an effect with the shadow mix that we already have for these details. So I'm using my very finest brush, and I'm literally with my shadow mix going down and adding very, very fine lines along the petals. So these lines are not blended. They are visibly defined lines. But they are in a very light shade, so they're hardly noticeable, and I'm being extremely careful to keep them very neat and go exactly in the right direction along the line of growth so that it looks very natural and in keeping with the flower texture. I have to say, I wish that I'd practice on the bud because the lines on the bud look better than the ones I've started with on my flower. So there's a good tip for you. Start in an area that's not the focus of the painting, practicing your fine details, and once you've perfected it, move onto your main image, I've unfortunately done the opposite. So now we're going to move on to painting the greens. So I'm going to use what we have in our palette. I'm mixing the yellow and pink together, and I'm adding some water to the green. And I'm adding a little bit of yellow, and I'm actually mixing this up in a well. Adding some more yellow now. Testing this out on my test strip. I'm just looking at some of the green on my reference image, and I need to make it a little bit more muddy looking, I think. I'm going to add some pinky red to this mix and try this out again on my test strip. This is looking slightly better, but I think I'm going to add some red to this and a little bit more of the dark green and a little bit of yellow. I'm just going to test it out again on my test strip, and I'm going to add a bit of red and a bit more yellow. And I think these colors are quite a nice little range of brownie colors and green, slightly muddy looking, and I'm actually just going to mix in this dark green now from the previous mix and see that this complements the colors really well. And I'm just doing a final adjustment to these colors. I'm adding a little yellow to the bright green mix, and I'm adding this yellow to the brownish mix. And I'm going to start painting. I'm looking closely at my reference image. I'm starting with a slightly lighter color, which I can build up. And now I'm carefully blending this in with water, and I'm layering up the color Just going to paint a little bit of this brownie mix in now to the center of the flower. I'm using a little bit of this darker green mix at the base where the shadow is. Now I'm going in with the green again, and I'm adding some green stripes. I'm adding the detail in at this stage to the greens, and now I'm adding in red stripes. If I look at my reference image, I can see that this veining here appears on this greeny petal. I'm just trying to capture this look. Now I've got some green. I'm adding some indigo, and I'm making an even darker color. I'm adding this where the shadows lie. Now I'm using my size six brush and I'm going to use my mid green mix, and I'm going to paint this little bud here and filling in some of the green now because this is mostly a green bud. And I'm using my dark green now starting from the base of the bud again and working my way upwards. I'm checking my reference carefully to make sure that I'm following where the shadows are so that I can build up the form correctly. I'm using this red now and I'm painting back down the petal, strengthening the red areas where I see them. Now a bit more dark green. And there we go. Now I finish my bud. I'm really happy with the way this is looking. I definitely haven't painted over my highlights, which was the main aim. The white of the paper is really shining through. So now that we've completed our delicate details, in the next lesson, we're going to be adding a contrast ground to really make our painting pop off the page. 11. Painting the Background: Welcome, in this lesson, we're going to be adding a contrast background so that our painting will pop off the page. For the background, we will start off under painting with colors, and then we'll paint in some darker tones, especially around the flower to create depth, and this will give the illusion of the flower lifting off the page. If we take a look at our reference photo and have a look at the background, it's made up of lots of kind of pretty leaves and dark tones and stems. So I think I'm just going to start drawing, looking at this photo for inspiration. I'm not really going to be too careful about matching it exactly like I was with the flower because after all, it is a background, and I've taped around the edge of my border so that I can paint up to the edge and still be neat. But I'm just going to start drawing now. And I'm just having a look now, and I'm just marking in some of the leaves that I've seen on the background that I like, and I'm adding a few that aren't on the background. So this can just be loose. It really doesn't have to be any particular way on the background. So I'm adding some water to my yellow mix. So I'm putting on what seems like some quite bright color, but I'm just toning this down with some red and I'm adding a bit of water now. And I'm going to add a fairly dark background, so it won't matter that these colors are quite bright. They'll just be subtle shades. Be really, really careful not to overpaint your beautiful flowers. I'm not painting right to the edge of the flowers yet with this larger brush. I'm adding some water to the purply gray mix now and I'm starting in another corner. As you can see, I'm not going right up to the flower. I'm just really loosely working quickly so that I don't get lines in my paint. I'm adding some indigo to this now. As you can see, I'm on purpose, painting cooler tones around the shadowy areas underneath the flower, and I've added a warm yellowy to where the sun is shining from. I'm carefully painting around. I'm not going right up to the edge yet of my flower. I'm just carefully painting around the flower. I've got a little bit of the green mix now, and I've gone down to a slightly smaller brush. So one way to make sure that an element blends in with the background, if you don't want it to stand out too much, is to underpaint it with the mid tones of the background first and then paint the details over the top. So as this stem is really lying in the shadows, I don't want this to pop out like the flower above. I want this to fade away into the background. So now I'm using some of the dark green mix, and I'm adding some dark green to my digoy color. I'm painting in what is going to be a sort of vague leafy shape. I'm now going in with this tuquzi green color. I'm very carefully adding some depth here underneath the flower, and I'm using this finer bruh. And I am now very carefully going closer to the edge of the flower. I've added some intego to this mix, and now some dark green. And now I'm carefully painting around this bud. I am now touching the edge of the painting, but I'm being extremely careful. I'm adding some water to the yellow and adding a bit of pink to this and adding a bit of red to this, which is giving me a yellowy pinky shade, a little bit more yellow, and even a little bit of dark turquoise. I'm making a really browny ky color here. I'm adding it at the top right of the painting, very carefully going around my flower and making up some more vague leaf shapes. I'm adding some indigo to my mix, and I'm adding some water to the yellow. Now I'm using this blue color, adding a little bit of yellow and giving it a really good mix. I'm going back in and adding an even darker shade here, carefully going around the outside of my flower. I'm back to my size ten paint brush and I'm blending this out with lots of water. I'm really furiously blending now, making sure that this doesn't have a hard edge and not too many brush strokes are visible. I'm now working on this leaf here, building up some shadow here. I'm using my size four paint brush here, and I'm working on the other side, adding some deeper turcos blue. Underneath the flower again, I'm building up some of the depth. I'm blocking in another leafy shape here with some green. So it could be a reflection or it could be a leaf shape. I want it all to be a bit uncertain and look a bit watery. Now, I'm actually going to add in a little bit of orange just to really warm up this top left area of the background where the sun is shining from. Now that's stride, I'm going back in again with my size four brush and I'm strengthening this color, this shadow on the leaf. I'm adding a bit more of green in this area. I'm toning down this orangey color a bit using my larger brush to do the watery blending. And now that's stride, I've assessed it again. The background is all looking quite nice and watery to me. And I'm going in and adding more shadows. I'm using a dark olive green here. And I'm going around the edge of the flower and this contrast between the background being dark and the flower being light. I'm really amplifying because it will lift the flower off the page or give the illusion that the flower is lifting off the page. So this color here is made from red and green, and I'm using this now. It's kind of a minky brownie color. It's still a fairly warm color. And now I'm adding some red magentary color into the turquoise. And I'm using this darker tone now to build up strength, even more strength and shadow underneath the bottom right hand corner of the flower, which is the most shady area. And I'm just going to show you now, I've noticed a small mistake on my painting. If you accidentally paint over an edge, you can minimize the mistake. So wash your brush clean, dip into clean water, and very carefully scrub over the affected area with the brush and then blot it with a clean paper towel. And it should lift off quite a bit of the paint. I'm gathering a little bit more indigo on my brush and mixing it in, which is kind of just I can only describe as a sludgy gray color. And building up the shadow on the right hand side behind the flower. I don't want to use my very cool tone, I'm using a little bit of the orange color and mixing it actually on my paper. And now with my back with my indigo again, I'm going round some of the shapes building up more shadow in definition. Adding a little bit of shadow. So I'm using my fine paint brush size four paint brush, very pointy. And I'm so delicately and carefully going over these lines, making sure I don't over paint. So I'm using this indigo now and I'm adding some yellow to it. I'm adding a little bit more yellow. I'm trying it out again on my test strip, a bit more magenta and a little bit of orange. And trying this out now. So now that my background is pretty much finished, it's time to let it dry and evaluate. And I can see that actually my flower probably needs a little bit more shadow in definition. And now I am done. It is dry and I am removing the masking tape. It's dry and this side of the painting is dark. The light is coming from this area, and it's all working together to give that effect. So now that our flower painting is complete, we've got one more lesson to go, which is going to be a concluding video where we're going to kind of review our painting and see kind of what worked and what didn't. So I'll see you in the next lesson. 12. Conclusion: Welcome and thank you so much for watching this class. So there's only one more step you need to take before you're completely finished, and that is to show me your project. Take a photo of your project in good lighting and upload it here under the projects and resources tab. Once you've uploaded your work, I'll be able to see it and review it, and I promise I will only say nice things about your work. If there is any particular element that you would like to improve on, you can ask me under the discussions tab separately. I know that it's scary sharing your work, but I promise that it's inspiring for me and other students who might even decide to try out this class just because they've seen your work and feel inspired. In this concluding lesson, we'll briefly review some key takeaways from the class, and we can also spend a few moments evaluating our project. So have we answered our original questions? Let's start with the white paint. So you can paint with white paint, but you really don't need to if you use the white of your paper for the highlights. I think the beauty of water colors is in the translucency of the color, and white paint is opaque, use it sparingly and for tiny details. Can you use gray for the shadows? Yes, you can, but make sure they have tints of color? Otherwise, your flower will end up looking lifeless and unnatural. Lastly, can I outline all the petals to make them stand out? Yes, you can, especially when you're drawing. Approach it with a bit more subtlety when you're painting. Avoid lines that are all the same thickness, and try contouring with shading rather than actually outlining the edges of your petals. In the class, we have learned how to select a good reference photo. Draw our shape onto paper, mix colors, paint tonal values from light to dark, carefully observing our reference, adding warm and cool colors to add depth to our highlights and shadows, and finally how to add contrast ground to make our white flower pop off the page. It's always a good idea to come back to a painting after a few days to see what you think of it. Looking at my painting, I think it's dried quite light. I think I'm not completely used to painting on pure cotton, and I'll bear that in mind next time and not be afraid to paint darker and richer colors than I might do on a regular watercolor paper. I also think, which is an extension of the same issue, that I could really have been a little bit bolder with my colors. I see this violet color used quite a lot and it does look really pretty. I also think next time I'll try not to be afraid to use it more strongly. Same goes with the oranges. What do you like about your painting? What could you improve if you did it again? Note down some points and save in your sketchbook to read before you start your next project. I do hope that you have a white flower that you're proud of. It's your choice, how you represent it. You can be as creative as you like. Once again, thank you so much for watching this class. If you'd like to see more floral painting classes, follow me on Skillshare and also on Instagram and Facebook as I regularly share artwork and inspiration. If there's one thing I hope you can take away from this class is that you can paint white subjects in color. So goodbye from me and I'll see you again soon.