Watercolor Polaroids: Paint Atmospheric Wildflowers

1. Introduction: Paintings ask for careful planning and crisp edges. These ones just want you to add a little bit of water and see where it goes. In this class, we are painting four loose, little watercolor scenes in a bite size polroid format. We're painting a colorful meadow, wild grasses, a mossy river bank, and a dreamy monochrome twilight. Each one clearly has its own mood, and fair warning stopping at four is harder than it sounds. Welcome to Watercolor polroids atmospheric Wildflowers. I am Peggy Dean. I am an artist and educator who loves finding ways to make the creative process feel approachable, playful. Full of possibilities. Working this small takes so much pressure away. If a bloom wanders off somewhere unexpected, you can work with it or you can just grab another scrap of paper and jump right in again. That kind of freedom makes this class a sneaky good way to practice water control. We will cover how to read your paper. We'll also cover how much water your brush actually needs. We'll look at soft blends and hazy edges, so you'll be able to build these dreamy atmospheric transitions without everything melting into a giant puddle. We'll look at mood through color, and you'll see how the palette actually change the whole feeling even in a small scene. This class is for you if you love loose watercolor and you want more control without losing that looseness, maybe you just want a satisfying art project you can finish in one afternoon. Or maybe you painted along with my other polroid classes. And you're ready for even more fun polroid paintings in your life. By the end of this class, you'll have four atmospheric little paintings that you can keep, you could frame. You could tuck into a card for somebody special. So grab your brushes and paint in a jar of water, and I will see you inside. 2. Class Project: Last project, we will build a little collection of four watercolor polaroids, and each one is going to give us a slightly different excuse to play with paint to water ratio. We'll start with a colorful meadow, and then we will move into wild grasses and then a mossy river bank. And finally, a dreamy monochrome twilight scene. I chose these four because they're different enough that you'll keep running into new water control situations instead of repeating the exact same technique four times. We're finished, you can upload your favorite polaroid, all four polaroids. You could even keep going and make a whole stack of them. So that's the project. Four finished little paintings, yes. But also four chances at reading what watercolor is doing while it's happening. Let's paint. 3. Supplies: For supplies, we want watercolor paper, and you want to make sure that this is cold press and you want it to be 140 pound or higher, and that is 300 GSM. The reason why is because you want it to be able to withstand a large amount of water. We're going to be using watercolor washes. And if those aren't if it's not nice and thick, if it's not thick, it's not going to withstand the way that we need it to. From here, because we're doing a wet-on-wet, it will naturally want to warp a little bit on the paper. So we're going to grab some washi tape. And you can use I mean, you can use other types of tape, but I like washi because it's not going to make the paper tear or hopefully not make the paper tear when we bring it up when we lift it up when we're done. We're going to use a wash brush to fully wet the paper. We'll use a large round brush. This is a number 12, and you want it to have a nice fine point. You'll also want a smaller round brush. I'm not really sure if I'm gonna be using a two or something larger yet, but just a smaller round brush is great. If you do have a large round brush that has a nice pointed tip, you probably don't even need the smaller one. From there, you need a jar of water. And your watercolor paint. You might also want to get a hard piece of plastic or metal or something like the edge of card, a bank card of some kind because we're going to actually carve away some of the wet-on-wet as just an extra little thing, and it's not necessary, but it's something that you can do. Okay, now, I want to create little poloids with this, so I'm also going to use my Washi Tape to divide the page up to do that. So we'll start there. 4. Set Up Polaroid Frames: You can absolutely measure this out. So it's the polaroid that you want. The polaroid. You can use a ruler. You can use however you want to do this. I like to eyeball it because I just want to jump in and paint. And to be honest with you, I have never been disappointed in how this looks. The one thing I do want to make sure is that it's about even. It's okay if it's slightly uneven. But for the most part, we want, like this chunk right here to be pretty even. And again, if you want to use a ruler, you can. And then we're going to tape that right down to your surface and go ahead and make sure that's firm. We're going to go around the edges, too, so it doesn't have to be crazy. And then for the tape, don't press down the whole center, just the edges. The reason why is because we want the adhesion to be easy to come off, but we do want the edges to be nice and firm so that paint doesn't slip underneath it. When we're done. Okay. Now, for the actual size of the polaroid, we're going to want the white space above it, but not a crazy amount. So what I usually do is just eyeball, a thin area, so you can see right through my tape that thinner area at the top. Okay. And that's about even. So I'm just going to make sure that's taped really well to my surface and the edge here. I'm going to use about that same space to do the edge on the side. So you can just, like, kind of hold one side down, lift up until it's about right. Make sure that's a nice firm nice firm application. Sure. And then we'll do the same thing to the other side, and I'm just going to lift this up until it looks to be about the right thickness. I'm going to have a little overlap there or a little actually, I think it's going to be fine cause the thickness itself is fine. It's a little bit off, but really, remember, it doesn't have to be straight the whole way down. I'm going to end up cutting the like, they're going to end up being four. And so as long as this area is fine, I don't care if this matches this. Doesn't matter where we put the bottom because it's probably we're probably going to put another piece of tape here. So it's because we're gonna use it as the sizing. So think about it like this. If you want a square polaroid. Then you're going to want to put your tape just underneath that square. If you want it to be more landscape, you're going to want to put it underneath there. So when we're measuring this, think about it like that because all this is going to be white space. This is an example. So if I have this square, let's say about right here, then you could see this would be my square area, and then down here is where I would cut, and that would be that white space. So I'm going to keep this here to be square. I'm going to just press the edges of this part down. And leave the rest because this part's not going to matter. That's the measurement that we're going to leave open for our white space. And then we can drop below there. It doesn't really matter where because we're going to end up trimming that anyway, but this will be the top of our next section, and then we're going to do the same thing where we measure about the same. I understand if you want to use a ruler for this part, but I am, again, just gonna eyeball it. And so the part that I'm going to paint is, are these squares and these squares, okay? So this is basically just letting us work all on one piece of paper, while maintaining. It's letting us work on multiple pieces at once. So painting space, painting space. We'll deal with the rest later, okay? 5. Polaroid #1: Colorful Meadows: So I mentioned we're going to get our pages quite wet, and I want to do this one at a time because while one is in its drying process, we can move to the next. So what we'll do to start is go ahead and get your largest brush wet with water, plenty of water, okay? Make sure that your edges are nice and tape down, and I'm going to come in from over the tape rather than scooting underneath it, and I'll do the same to the bottom. That's just going to make it so that the water isn't being shoved underneath just in case it is better safe than sorry. And what we're going to look for is a nice sheen. So you don't want anything puddling, but you also want it to be nice and wet. Okay, so from here, we can start dropping in our first color. So go ahead and grab your round brush. We're going to submerge that in water. I like to roll the brush on the edge here so that the bristles open up and really let the water go on the inside. And then we'll grab a sky color. So I don't want you to be picky about the color of your sky. I just want you to grab a blue or a purple if you want to do something that is, like, sunsety. It really doesn't matter the color. I just use what you have. And I'm grabbing paint the same way that I grab water. I'm, like, pressing down and rolling, so it gets nice and saturated. And then I don't know where you live. I live in the Pacific Northwest, so there's plenty of humidity. My page is not dry yet, but if you need to add another wash, just go ahead and make sure that it is ready and primed. And then we can just drop in this color, okay? So when we drop in this background sky, I just want you to do something in the middle that just allows it to bleed, then we can rinse the rest of that color off and then just kind of give it a little bit of a encouraging nudge, and that's it. I know it's crazy. While it's still wet, we can grab our secondary color, which is going to play as the background of a watercolor field. This also can be anything that you want. It could be a pretty fuchsia. I'm going to go for a light orange or I guess that's yellow. I'm going to mix some red in here. We can get a nice orange. There we go. It's a little brown. So this one, we're just going to create some sweeping strokes, and they're gonna look messy, and that's okay because they're going to end up blending and that's what we want. Let's go ahead now and just add a few. As it dries, we're going to add a few just darker strokes. To give it a little bit of depth. It's going to dry a little bit more, and we can do that again. But while it's still wet, well now want to go in and add some of our land, like, our grass area. If you're noticing any pooling, like I am, this is because my paper, while even though it's taped down, it's starting to warp because of how much water I put down. So, if that happens, one of the ways that I like to remedy this is to rinse my brush really well and go ahead and just completely I mean, you could squeeze it. We just want it kind of damp, and you can set your brush down to soak some of that water up. And then that should do the trick. I'll do it a little bit on the edge, but we still want that color throughout. So don't get fussy with it, but just if you have a huge pool, you don't want those pools. Okay. Now, let's see. I'm good for grass. I'll go ahead and grab this pile of green that's already on my palette. And I'm going to start to sprinkle that in just right next to the other color. And it's totally okay if it starts to blend into that. I'm going to grab another hue so that I can vary that a little bit. And white space is great or not. It just depends on what you're feeling. Okay, so I'm going to grab another green and just sprinkle this in here. I want a little more depth in some areas. So maybe I'll bring that green over and grab a darker hue. Okay, so now that this is starting to dry a little bit more, we can go in and add just those, you know, straighter lines to add some depth, not throughout the whole thing. So you want to be kind of sparing. I know it's hard because we want to just keep going, but then it's going to end up bleeding into a big pile, which we don't want. So you can see that the marks that I just made with the grass are blending quite a bit. That's good. That's what we want, because we do want this to look really ethereal and have a lot of, like, movement. While that's drying, though, the thing with what on wet is it's nice because you can have the effect of what on what you can have the effect of what on what depending like vary depending on how wet your paper actually is. So this is going to dry a bit more, and when it's, like, middle of the way, I can then go in and add those additional marks and add the depth. But for now, we are in a drying stage. And again, I'm more humid right here, so mine might take a little bit longer to dry than yours. But if you just tilt your head, I'm taped down. But if you tilt your head, you'll see a sheen And that sheen is what we are going to be watching. Okay, so I'm about halfway, and I'm just going to add a little more of these clusters in here. You'll still see that bleed quite a bit. It may not do it right away, but it will enough to where it still feels part of, like, that atmospheric vibe that we're going for. I'm gonna get a little more of an orangy tone. M It also depends on how wet your brush is. My brush is pretty wet with these orangy ones that I just put in. But if I have a little less water, you can see that it's not going to go everywhere everywhere. But again, I'm still pretty wet right here, so I'll give it a sack. If you look at the sheen now, we have that glaze. So this is where I can go in and do those more concentrated marks. We do want the page to be a little bit wet still. Okay. And then once that's in, we can go in and add some depth to our ground area. So I'm going to go in with some green. And I'm going to focus this kind of at where they meet, where the flowers meet the ground. Maybe not the whole way through. I think it would be nice to have some variety there. And that's pretty wet on my brush, I think that was my brush's fault, and by that I mean my fault. But I can then go in and just along that line, push a little bit more of that in. And then there's going to be some areas that aren't as wet as others. And if it's just sitting static, I think this will bleed okay. But let's just say if it was sitting static, I'm going to rinse my brush. It's just damp, and I'm just going to drag it along the edge right here so that it has some water to pull through, too. And then if you have some areas that you think are just too saturated, you can get your brush damp and then lift some of it up, and then you can kind of push that to flow again, but you can see that just created some depth pretty easily. So there we go. What we just sat down is going to be wetter than the rest, but this is a fun time to add some variety of the blooms themselves. So you can pick up a good amount of pigment. We're going to actually cover the rest of the page. We don't want splatter going anywhere besides where we want to put it. So you can grab I have my scrap here. I want to cover the sky. Maybe just like this because I don't mind if it goes up a little bit. And then the rest of this, you can just use any scrap paper. So I'll just use this here, and I move this by room. Okay, there we go. And then I'll take this and just use my finger to splatter. You might want to cover up the grass, depending on how you want this to end up looking. I don't mind some flowers being in my grass. I'm going to get this a little more concentrated. Okay, that's about enough, so I'll bring this up now. There we go. Okay, so that is going to be fun. I'll move all of these. Okay, so you can see that just gave it a little umph. We'll wait for it to dry fully now before we do our final touches on this one. I know that this is the hard part because we really want to keep working on it, but trust me, the drastic before and the drastic after, and the way that it combines is way too fun. And I want you to experience that instead of overworking it. So we'll be working on the rest of our polaroid frames, and then after we're finished with the base of all of them, that's where we'll go in and do the final details on all of them in one go. 6. Polaroid #2: Wild Grasses: For this next one, we're going to do some wild grasses. And so we're going to start the same way. We're going to go ahead and coat our paper with water, so it has that nice shen again. And I'm pulling down from the tape and then up from the tape. And then I'm going to wipe the water off and just go over it one more time. So it just has a shen but I picked up any excess water. And then from here, we're just going to use our large round brush, and we're going to put some color in the sky. And I want this to be really, really light. So I'm just going to bring it through like this, rinse my brush, and then come through one more time. And so this one instead of setting it down, it's more swoop. I'll add a little bit more. But that's about it. So it's nice and wet still, so that's going to do the bleed that I want. I'll rinse my brush off. And then it doesn't matter if we wait for that to dry or not. We're just going to jump right into our grasses. I'm gonna grab kind of a yellowy ochery color, but I'm just again, go to push it over into my mess palette my messy palette so it's not gonna be a big deal if it's the exact color or not, 'cause you can just use whatever you want. Pink grass would be cool. Okay, so we're going to take our brush, and we're just going to do loose strokes that are kind of loopy, just up and down like this. They can be thicker or thinner. It doesn't even matter. And that's it, okay? So that's our first coat. And then go ahead and rinse and then I'm going to add another hue in here. It could be darker. It could be the same color, but darker. It could also be a different hue. I think I might grab. Like a brownish color. And I'm just going to go through here with a little more saturation and same thing, but it's still giving me that peekaboo behind rinse my brush and grab another hue, I could go back to the first one because it's going to communicate on the top a little differently. See what I mean? Where it blends, but you could also grab a slightly different hue. And I'm not going to go crazy because this is yellow, but I'm just going to kind of peekaboo some of this throughout just to kind of give it the variety. It looks so cool when um like a natural color can have that much going on. I think it's so fun. Okay. So this is getting to be a good amount of wet. So I think that it's good to wait for this to dry for a sec. I'm going to speed mine up with a heat tool. So I did that enough to where I still have that sheen that we do need for our next parts, but enough to where it will give me a little more concentration in the next few grasses. And if you put your first stroke down, it looks like it's just blending. It just means that you could use a little more drying time, and it might be different from one side to the other, even on a small painting. So now, instead of the loops, I'm going to actually go up and kind of flick these up. And it looks like this part got pretty dry. I'm okay with it, though. I think that that also looks lovely. We're going to need some thicker or I mean, more concentrated lines anyway. But I don't want to go crazy with those. What you can do is rinse your brush, drag the excess water off the side, and then just kind of go up along the side of what you just painted, and that's going to actually allow that paint to carry a little bit so that it does feel more wet-on-wet. Just a little trick to soften those if you want to. Definitely don't have to. And then I'm going to add even darker just toward the front. I'll grab that same color, and this time it's just going to be less wet, so it's going to come through a little darker, and I'll bring those down a little bit. So that we have some layering. And then I also want some of those more intentional lines in the lighter color. Now that that's pretty dry, I can I would recommend flicking I would recommend flicking upward above your paper until it makes contact because otherwise it might be too thick. So if I flick and then make contact. It's going to be lighter. This is where if you want to, you can use a lighter or a thinner brush if you don't have a super fine tip. Right here, definitely it was still too wet, but up here is where I'm really looking for. So I can fix that in a sack. But right now, I just want these fine wispy lines toward the top. And then maybe. Okay. So I'm gonna fix this just by rinsing my brush and then picking some of that up. And then I can drag this down, so it just kind of blends in. And then I'll do the same thing right here. I just got a little too wet. That's okay. There we go. Okay. Now we let this part dry and we'll come back to it. For our details and move on to our next one now. 7. Polaroid #3: Mossy Riverside: One is going to be a lot of fun. We're going to actually paint some river rocks, and you can use, like, gray. You can use a bluish gray or a bluish black or something that's a little bit more subdued. I am just going to use this blue that's already on my palette. I might add a little bit of a neutralizer. So let's see blue opposite would be orange. I'll just grab some of this, bring it on over. Just to have a little more of a muted tone. And then I'm just going to create general shapes of rocks, okay? And I'm not going to have them touch, which I know is hard. But I mean, if it touches slightly, it's not the end of the world. But let's just have a little collection here of these rocks. And then what we're going to do is when you've got them painted, we will take a darker color, so I will grab a deeper blue. And then I'm just going to at the base of these only add maybe too much water on my brush. We'll pick some of this up now. And I'm just going to add this to the bottom of all of these. And again, it's okay if they're touching a little bit. It's not the end of the world. But we just want a little bit of that blur. Let that dry a little bit, and then we'll add in a few more of those just throughout, so it looks like there's some texture, but we do want it to dry quite a bit more than this. So while we're waiting for that, we can add in the little sandy area just right here. I'm going to do less Less paint, and it's okay if some of it bleeds. The whole idea here is to be a little bit more wispy. Okay? So that's about it. We don't have to carry this the whole way through. It can just be suggestive, and I'm going to actually pick up some of this water to have it fade a little bit more. There we go. Then I might bring some of it up higher. And then I think that we can go back in and add a little bit of that darker color too. A top. I'm just going to do, like, a few little marks throughout the tops of these. And maybe not even all of them. That seems good. So we're just adding a little depth. And then if you want to go back in, add a little more to the bottom since it did bleed quite a bit, to ground it a little bit more, you can. See how it just like the contrast is night and day. Okay. And then on the ground here, I'm going to add a little more water right here since that one, I lifted it up. But it's still going to be pretty light. And then what I'm going to do on this area, I'm going to connect it to the side. I'm going to bring some of that color in here when it dries, but I think that just right over here could use a little texture. So what I'll do is just go in and grab maybe a brownish, more of a neutral tone. And I don't want a lot of water on here. I'm going to cover the area. Even though this is going to be a very small splatter, I still want to be careful not to get it everywhere I don't want it. But I'll cover this area. I'm still gonna leave that open because it's wet, but I'm just going to come real close and just dab in maybe a little bit more of that. Just a little bit of texture in to the ground area. So we do still want it to be a little more ethereal, so this might feel wrong because that's not all the way dry yet, but I'm grabbing the lighter color, and I'm just going to bring it through to the base here. Between these rocks, and there's going to be some bleeding. If there's not, that's okay. But if there is, that's also okay. Now we're going to actually wet the paper now that this part is in because we want the background to really work with wet-on-wet. So mainly, what I want to do is just outside of the rocks, I'm not going to go right up against it because I don't want those to bleed upward. And I don't really care too much about this area. I could go into it a little bit, but mostly we want above the rocks to be that nice sheen and then we'll go in and add some mossy colors. I'll start off with a lighter hue and just dab that throughout, and we're going at an angle a little bit, and it can come into the ground area, but mostly it's going to be concentrated here, and then I'll grab a deeper color. I'm going to push that into the middle and a bit toward the base of where it's coming from the rocks. Okay. Now I'm going to rinse my brush, but not all the way because I still want some of that darker color, but I'm going to put it just at the top of that lighter color. So we have some graduation of color here. And then I can go in once this is bleeding a bit more and add a little more depth just at the base, and then it'll continue to bleed up, but the main contrast will be at the bottom. And then as the rocks dry more, you can get closer. I just didn't want it to bleed into it while it was still wet. And then we can dab in a little bit of that throughout once that starts to dry more, too, so that it has that balance. Okay, we're going to grab we're gonna grab our white paint again, and we're going to do the same thing where we splatter a little bit of white in here. Cover that up. And it might bleed quite a bit, depending on how wet your paper is. We can always come back to it. No. We're gonna let that dry to that, like, not super wet shen, but we still have a sheen. And when we're at that point, we'll go ahead and grab our white paint, and we want that real thick, and we're going to go ahead and cover what we don't want splattered on. So we're gonna make sure these rocks are covered up and then this one here, and we're just going to dab on here. If you're not getting a ton, you can dip it in water real fast, but remember, we don't want a ton of water on the brush. Okay. And then we will also come in with our darker green and just add a few blades of grass in that real thin, use the very tip of your brush. It's fine if it goes through some of the white. And you can do these at varying heights. And if it goes through the white, it's going to give it some softness, too. So we'll have a variety of height and a variety of wet as well. And then once that fully dries, we'll come back and we'll finish the details. You see how this is going? 8. Polaroid #4: Dreamy Monochrome Twilight: Last one, I want to play with a little cluster of color. So let's go ahead and we're going to get our shen going. We don't want it to be crazy wet, but we do want that sheen. I will grab. I know we went with blue, blue, green. Let's go into more of, like, a purplish or lavender, something that's a little bit more dreamy. Dreamy. That's what I'm going to do for my sky. I think that I might put more in here than I have been. It's okay to move that around. You know, it's going to bleed, splotch it through. I know it looks terrible. Don't judge it, let it do its thing, let the watercolor work for you. Then we'll do a thicker clump of that like a monochromatic ish vibe, we'll do a thicker clump toward the bottom. And let's come in from this side. So we're just kind of doing more of an expressive mountainous shape, if you will, but more of maybe a mound because it's going to be closer to us. I have a little too much water on the edge. I'm going to catch that right away by rinsing my brush, dragging my brush on the side here, and then just lifting up the extra and then let that bleed. Alright. That's in there, and I'll go ahead and grab a darker color now. Maybe even just a little more pigment and come into the base and then sprinkle a little bit of that through a couple areas toward the top, mostly in the base. I have a little too much water on my brush, and I can tell because it's getting a little more soupy down here. And so that's just telling me I could go with a little more paint than water. So I don't I don't need to get water every single time that I grab more paint, basically. Okay. Now, you can see already the wet-on-wet is kind of pulling upward and making it look like grasses without us having to do anything. And it doesn't really matter that we have a monochromatic, if you will. See, I know we have analogous colors here, but the sky is lighter and we kept that separation there so that we have that contrast still, which is great. And I'm going to add a little darker Just to the base because I want to have a nice contrast cause I want to have some nice depth, and I'll bring that throughout just a little bit. And then maybe just a couple small areas here. Perfect. Okay. And this one is pretty simple. We are going to add a pop of color. If you want to stay monochromatic, you can go in and grab the same color you were doing and just don't water it down first, and then you can add just a bloom, a bloom. I know it's like it's such a pop of color. It makes it really fun. You could also grab a different color, a different hue and see where that takes you. But that's what I'm going to do and then leave it at that and then I'll come back and do the details on this one afterwards. So that one is really simple, and that's where it's going to start. And now we can go through now that we're done with all four and do our final touches to really make each of these come to life. 9. Finishing Touches That Add POP: Alright, detailed time. This first one, I know that we did a lot of splatter on the rest of these with white. We're gonna do it now on this one now that it's dry, wild, I know. So we'll go ahead and grab the paper to cover what we don't want splatter on. And then grab the white, grab our white paint. And again, we don't want this watery. I mean, we want it watery enough to splatter, but not enough to where it's going to be translucent. We want that bright white, and we'll just sprinkle that in, and that's it. Okay. Now we can take these papers away. And then I want to take you can use the tip of your brush or you can use a smaller brush. I think a smaller brush would be easier to use. So I'll go ahead and switch over to my This is a two and just grab some of my white paint. And then we're going to go in and paint some flowers in here. I don't want you to get you know, think that this has to be perfect, careful if anything is still wet to not run your hand through it. I probably will end up running my hand through. But what I want to do is just create kind of a little sea curvy type of shape and then separate three blobs that are near it. You could even do one blob and then just two next to it. Like, these don't have to take much form, maybe even two blobs next to each other. So they're really just insinuating some flowers. I'm not going to do too many of these, maybe six or seven of them. And nature is not perfect. These petals aren't necessarily going to need to look a certain way, just enough to show, these are some flowers and we're going to add a pop of color within those two. You can grab any color, any medium, whatever you want to do to add a pop of color to the inside of those. Uh, because this is guash, it's really because this is acrylic guash, it won't really let me put watercolor on top of it too easily, but let's see if it will when it's still wet, otherwise, I'd probably just use some guash paint. But I just want a teensy bit of yellow. It's going to make such a small difference, but still that pop, it does something. Okay, so that's done. Now, the last thing we want to do on this one is use the tip of our brush again and I'm on the small ones that's actually going to make it easier for me. I'm going to grab the same color or a dark green, whatever can match ish because obviously the same color for me doesn't mean much since I just really work off of this mess. But I want to have some of these grasses, but just real thin. And so I don't want a ton of water on my brush. That's a big one because when you're going thin, you don't want to pool. So I'm going to use just the tip and I'm going to do what I told you how I'm just going to flick until it makes contact, and that's going to make sure it's nice and thin. And it's okay if it skips a little bit, that just adds to that expressiveness of it. I'm going to do this throughout the whole thing, and I'm going to have them go up pretty high. And if they start looking transparent, that's okay because it's adding to that depth, but you can also go back in and add more paint. Then if you start having areas like this, I'm going to actually get my brush wet and just come up into that so that it blends down because I don't want any of those to be concentrated underneath that green. So just going through and getting some texture in. And they can overlap, that adds more to it so it doesn't feel so concentrated. I actually add some water to this part so that I can have a little bit of that blending. And then we're just going to add some texture to the tops of some of these grasses. And so that might just look like some dots throughout. And so they're like, imperfect, though. So we have some dots in a cluster, skip down a little bit, add a little cluster, skip down a little bit. Skip down a little. Then you have the definition that gives it the finished piece, but you still have all of that energy. Great. The next one is very, very simple because we've already added those hard lines in. What you could do is you could go in with a darker tone of whatever you have in here and add just a few more. I need a little more water on my brush than that. Clearly, I'm leaning into, Hey, let's not saturate our brushes with water. But just a few more so that it has some more depth. But I really like the negative space that we created on this one. And then maybe just a few coming from behind here. Okay. From there, we can add in, like, kind of like what looks like wheat. And so I'll grab the lighter color and just have some marks that are kind of darting outward, and then or angled outward, rather. And same thing up here. This area is a little too wet. If you see any pooling, you don't want that because when watercolor dries, it's going to make those areas a lot more faded, and we don't want these to be faded. We want them to be nice and crisp. This part anyway. And then I'll go in and do a little bit with that darker color, too, just so I have the variety in and not as much, though, just a little bit of texture, a little bit of texture, and then maybe some peekaboos back here. O. And that's it. So that one is super expressive, right? I love it. You could also go in with a lighter color and do even some more flicks coming from the back. And then if you find that the white has lightened, I had too much water on my brush. You can just go through. I'm not going to pull it out toward the outer edge because I like that it kind of fades in, but I will just add that pop right back in the center, so it's a little bit more defined as far as contrast goes. And then for this area down here, you can paint a few more like crisper flowers if you want to. And I'm just doing a sea curve and then a little blob on top of that a blob next to it. It's essentially going to look the same as these, but you're just defining some so that you can put maybe a center color in if you wanted to. You could also add a pop of white on top of what's already there because it's probably blended out a little bit. And so adding some just in the foreground gives it the separation to make it seem like, you know, petals in the foreground in the background, which is nice. And it looks like these grass has held up pretty well. I think that we could add one more layer of that and maybe with more of a neutral and more Yeah, 'cause it's just a little more grounding. I think I need a little more paint on my brush if that's going to be Oh, you know what? I think that that would be fun. Let's do this. Let's get most of the water off our brush and go in with a dry brush. So it's going to be kind of scratchy, which is just a fun texture to play with. There we go. I don't want to do too much of that cause I don't want to take away from the the green. And then for this one, I'm going to use white again, and I just want to create little buds up higher. Like, they look like they're floating, but it's because this is more of an abstract ethereal feel, it does make it feel like they are connected to all of these stems in some capacity. Then for this final one, I'm going to switch back over to my large round brush because I want this one to be pretty loose and more atmospheric. So I'm going to go in with a super dark hue and just add the base here and then come in with the tip of my brush to connect to some of these blooms. And then a little bit in the background. And then from that, we can take that same color or we can switch the hue a little bit. But I think I'm going to use the same color and just kind of create some buds or just a little more concentrated flowers. I have too much water on my brush, and I can tell because of that pooling, so I'm going to pick some of the pooling up and get more paint. There we go. That's a little bit better. And I'm just again, this is just all mark making. And this can overlap over the ones that we've already done. It just gives it the depth again. This one's kind of like a midnight midnight magic garden. And then some little floating buds. And that is it, my friends. We have our fun watercolor meadow. We have more of a grassy field. We have more of like a side of a river, and then we have this like a romantic garden feel. So it creates a very fun mixture of options for us as we continue painting more and more. Florals or fields or landscapes. We have a lot of options, and this gives you that information on how you can use What on wet, how you can use different phases of What on Wt, and also how you can render different results very, very simply. Now we're going to let this dry completely, remove the tape and cut these into cute little poloids. 10. Cut Your Polaroids: Alright, when it is time to remove this tape, I want us to be very careful. I don't want you to rip your paper. And so we're going to do this one by one. I know that's so boring, but listen, it's important. So what we're going to do is I want you to stay flat. And so instead of pulling up like this, if you stay flat like this and you just kind of peel away bit by bit, you're going to be able to see if it starts to lift. You're also going to be able to control it better. And I think that we're gonna be doing pretty well, at least on mine, and I hope that we are on yours. But see, I'm staying really flat to the paper. I don't want to lift up like this. Lifting up like that, you can already see how I picked some paper up. I learned this in I used to do hair and makeup. And in my aesthetics class, this is how you wax. So with wax strips, if you're like, Oh, I've tried that at home before, and it hurts so bad, well, chances are you lift it up. You want to make sure you lift parallel, too. You didn't know that you were taking a class on waxing. This one I pressed a little too hard on, and it's showing, but that's right. Okay, so I mean, it really is the most satisfying part. But for poloids, I think the most satisfying part is actually cutting them to size. Now, if you do lift some of your paper, um, it's okay. That's really what I have to say about it. It's okay. Down here isn't gonna matter. We're gonna cut that part off, but these parts do matter, the rest of them. So the edge, just be kind. Be slow. Once you get to about here, go up toward the closest part again. It's going to give you more control. Slow and steady is your friend. I'm not going that slow because I don't want you to have to watch me do this. I'm gonna tear this one off, no problem, because I don't care about that part. This part, I'm gonna go away and flat. Slow as our friend. Perhaps perchance, I should sing you a song. No, I won't don't want that. Oh, jokes. Alright, so you can already see. Oh, I love this part because you can already see how these scenes have really come to life as soon as you remove all the mess around it, all the mess that came from or that was on top of the tape. Like, it's so crisp. It's so satisfying. Okay. And this last part. And then once these are off, you can cut by hand, you can cut with a paper cutter. Your frames are mostly done because we just need to go right in the center here and then the bottom. So I'll start with the bottom, and I'm just going to leave about this much and that seems to be right. I mean, I like to leave a little more rather than less because that way, I can always take more off. You can't add more back on. Okay, so then we have this part, and then I'll go ahead and cut the top of this one about the same width as the sides. And it doesn't really matter if it's straight between the two as long as the top of the part you painted is straight. So, from here to here, it doesn't matter, although this part is a little wonky, so let's clean that up. Okay. I'll go right down the center. I think we're actually going to end up needing to shave a little bit off the center. Yeah, I'll have to cut both of them, but that's okay. Is you just a little more. There we go. And we have a polaroid. Oh, my gosh, they're so cute. Oh, my gosh, they're so cute. It's like if you can give yourself the gift of looking away for a second, after you cut these, look away, do something, clean up your mess, and then look back at them, and you're like, Oh, my gosh, these are just absolutely adorable. Like, that's the thing I love about painting in bite size. Look at how cute this is. Come on. Come on. Like, it's so cute. All of these like stand alone, totally different vibes. Sort of. I just love them. So there we have it.