Watercolor Petals Made Simple: Paint Stunning Flowers in 3 Easy Steps

1. Introduction: Hi, I'm Lena Traskos watercolor artist and illustrator. I love creating classes, which I post online, and sometimes I have workshops in person. Also, I love illustrating children's books, and we have the entire book series, which I illustrated and my husband wrote, which is called Tales from Magic Gold Forest. So in today's class, I want to show you simple steps how to paint beautiful petals. And we'll be painting a very simple flower. You can find the drawing template of this flower or you can draw your own. The drawing template is in the resources of the class. So I'll draw it first on your paper before we start painting. If you're new on this channel, thank you for joining and welcome. There is a full of bottom. Put the temple on the bottom. And let's get started. 2. Supplies and Colors: So for today's class where we'll be painting petals and end up with this flower. We'll be using following supplies, watercolor paint, water, paint palette, war car paper, paper towel, and the medium wcarbush. This is number four. And for colors, we'll be using magenta, mostly magenta, pretty much all the time. And then for middle of flower, we'll be using a warm yellow. Sometimes it's called golden orange, and for western we'll be using green. And sin see. 3. Painting Petals in 3 Steps: So today, I wanted to show you a few, very simple ways how to paint petals. And for that, I'll be using just one color magenta, and I'll show you a few ways how you can paint petals. So let's take some magenta. And we'll just mix it with one drop of water in paint palette. So I paint I drew a very basic flowers just to show you how to paint petals as an example. So we will put a paint very close to the middle of the flower. Like this, quite a bit of paint. Then we wash our brush and take some clean water and we start dragging this paint. On the entire length of a petal. Not the entire length, about two thirds. And then we wash the brush again and we dry it in a towel and we drag the rest of it. And if it's too dry, you can add a drop of water. But this will create a very, very light end of a petal. Like this. And if you don't like the shape, you can fix it a little bit by dragging a little more paint on the edge here. Also a dry brush. Like this. This is one way we put the paint first, then water, and then we dry and brush, and we finish the petal. Some petals are darker on the top and lighter closer to the middle of a flower. So let's try to do that one next. Then we take some water. And when we get to the last ford of a petal, we wash with brush and dry it in a paper towel and smoothing with age. A All right. So for this one, you see the petal is bending a little bit. So what we do in this case, we add the paint along with bending. Thank you. The color goes first, along with bending. Because it's living with shadow on a petal. Then we take water, And then we dry and brush and finish this. For the bendin we take a little bit of paint and just shade it a little bit on a bot with wash a brush, dry and add it upcold with a little bit more paint. Dry a brush. And smooth. Smooth, smooth, Make it smooth. So if we lost a little bit of this contrast between the bending and petal itself will take some more paint and will darken this contrast. Just a little And again, let's make that I just move. Wash brush, dry. And let everything in. 4. Painting Overlapping Petals: So here we also have bending and we also have overlapping. So in this way, because the shadows fall on this petal, we'll be adding the darkest paint here. And I'm leaving a teeny tiny white line just in case. When we take water, I forgot to put paint along the bending like this. And when we take water after them. And when we drive a brush, Now, let's let you try a little bit and do this one the same way. Water. More water. And fried brush. Let's let it dry and do this one. So once again from the bending, we'll have some shadow, like this. Let's add water. And dry brush. And here we have some more overlapping, so we need to make it darker under this. Dry brush and blend everything in. Let's let it dry. 5. Refining the Petals: Once it's dry, we can add a shadow underneath this. Like dry brush, we plant everything into a smooth wash. Some color here. Just a little bit. Add a little bit here. Now, our petals are pretty much done, but we can add few more details to make a flour all look mornished. 6. Adding Texture and Final Details: So after the petals dry, we can add few more lines for textures with pretty watery color, just add some lines if you want to. It's a very seaful wash. So first, we add shadows, and then we add with texture. That's always the rule. Sometimes it's just enough to press your brush a little bit. And now let's paint a middle of a flower. I'll use this golden orange or yellow. Like this. And well, let's take some green with a green. Just to make it look a little more finished and couple dots of green in here. And this is how we paint petals and flowers. 7. Thank you!: Thank you so much for joining me in this class. I hope you had a chance to paint with me and to follow all steps on painting beautiful petals in watercolor. If you're sharing your artwork on Instagram, please check me so I can see your beautiful artwork. I'll call you back. And I'll see you in my next class. Bye.