Watercolour Flower Painting - Step by Step Apple Blossom

1. Introduction: Hello, welcome to my watercolor Skillshare course on color. And I weren't here on my home studio, which she told the family farm were incorporated, which is in the northwest of England. In this particular course, regards to looking at painting flowers in watercolor. I've chosen to do apple blossom because it's out of the moment and it's very pretty. You could use a little flower if you would like to. Anything that's just available there. The main thing is I wanted to talk through virtually the drawing and obviously the application of the paint. But with any flower, what you really want to look for first is the overall shape of the flower itself. Don't start with a detail. Don't start with individual petals. Start with a shape of a whole flower. Break everything down into nice big chunky shapes. I'm really, that's how you should start any drawing. If you were doing a person, you start with just the shape of the head. You wouldn't start with doing the detail in the eye. That's what we really want to be looking at with the drawing. I'm going to go through it step-by-step, which will give you time to listen to all the hints and tips. And I've got to stay along the way. And I'm using very few colors. I've already used for four or five colors. I think. I've just like I said, to do the Apple Blossom, kept it very simple composition and they're very loose light background just to make those pop forward. I've also used at the end some pencil just to pick out a little bit of detail, particularly on the focal flower here. Which you can do as well if you like. Don't worry, if you haven't gotten any pencils, you can use either the watercolor pencils that I use. So I could use ordinary cranes. And if you haven't gotten it, just use a nice fine brush and continue that little bit of drawing in detail with your paint. Perhaps make a stronger mix of paint at the end as well. You've got some brighter colors. Okay, so we'll go ahead and now we'll talk about the materials that we're going to use first of all, before we go ahead to the drawing. But before you do that, really do make sure that you're comfortable. You got a nice comfortable space to work in, plenty of room. You've got your flowers. Interval's quite a distance in front of you, at least about major, I should say, in front of you so that your eyes are nice and relaxed whilst looking at them. If things are too close, do you tend to be straining your eyes? And likewise, if the farther away, such as try it out, whereas the comfortable position for you to sit and maybe pop some music on in the background. But let's go ahead and find the materials that we need. First of all. 2. Materials : Before you begin collect together everything that you're going to need so that you're not looking around for it later once you're halfway through your project, I'm going to be used in this Bockingford block. This one is a £140 in weight and it's not pressed. I always use either a £140 or above. Anything less than that becomes a bit trickier to work with really. But definitely go for over a £100 if you can. This is a nice size and it's gummed all the way around, so I don't have to worry about fastening it down. Of course, if it's not gummed, you would want to tape it to a board. Then I've got a nice eraser. This is a DO on one. Do just check that you're using a decent eraser and clean it off before you use it on some scrap paper or something, you want a nice soft one that works where you can get some really cheap, awful erasers to try and work with a good eraser and a pencil. So this one is just your HB. I'm gonna be pressing on quite darkly with my lines so that it shows up to the camera. You want to do your drawing very lightly. So just have a light touch so that you can erase the pencil lines later on. Then you're going to need some brushes. Of course, I've got three different sizes here, but you don't have to just work with what you've got. If you've only got one, you want something in a medium-sized with a nice point on it. And then you can get into all the small details. So if you haven't got a smaller brush, you want something that's got a really nice tip on it. So this one is a size six, That's a size ten. And I think that's a three. So we've got a nice range there. You're bigger one for applying more water and these for doing the detail. Then of course you're going to need your paints. I'm using this Janelia travel set. You can use whichever paints you've got. Again, if you buy the artist quality Ron's, you're gonna get better results because they've got a higher concentration of pigment. If you're using student quality paints, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that, but you might find that you need to lift more color off the pallet to begin with in order to get that intensity of color on your painting. I've got a nice palette there. This is a nice heavy ceramic one, so it doesn't move around on the table, which is really handy to have. But of course you can use anything you could use a food container or a plate if you're using something like that, do try to stick to something white so that you call us show correctly when you're mixing them. If you use a colored palette, a colored plate or something, your colors aren't gonna be right to the eye when you're preparing them. Then to two jars for putting your water in. Just some old jam jars. And you always have to or I always have 21 for washing your brushes out with a one for picking up the water to actually apply to your paint onto your painting. You really need to jars on the goal and swap them as often as you can, clean them out and put freshwater. And as often as you can, keep your painting nice and fresh, always have your kitchen roll or tissue handy. Not just for mopping up spills if you make a mistake or an accident. But also it's very handy for lifting off some color where you want to perhaps light and you're paying team. Today I'm going to be using these watercolor pencils on the top of my finished painting. Just around a little bit of extra detail and color. But you don't need to have these if you've not gotten and you don't need to go out and buy an each justice was just a little added bit of drawing on the top with these nice colors. But like say, don't worry if you haven't got them. Once you've got everything together that you think you're going to need. The most important thing really is that you make yourself comfortable. You want to have a nice comfortable chair and a nice seating position. And the flowers that you're drawing, you want to put them a good distance in front of you. Not really close up to you so that your eyes are relaxed and not straining too much. And you find it easier to measure and you'll find it more comfortable. If you've got them a little way in front of you. I can't actually do that on this setup because I've got my camera and the window right here. This is just how I have to work for the camera to get the best light. But for you, if you sit at a table and put your flowers a good distance ahead of you. I actually like to pop some music on as well. Whenever I'm working, I worked in music just in the background quite quietly, nothing to too loud, but it's nice to have a little bit of something going on in the background. And I think you relax into your painting when half of your brain is listening to the music. If you get everything ready and we'll go on to the drawing stage. 3. Pencil drawing : Before you actually begin your drawing, have a really good look at the subject that you're drawing. In this case, it's these lovely blossom. But really study it and have a look at it and use your eyes and measure things just visually, not literally. And maybe you might even want to get a scrap piece of paper and have a quick go at doing some little sketches of it first, just to get a feel for it before you actually dive in and do the whole thing. Especially if it's something you're not familiar with, It's much easier to draw things that we're familiar with that we see every day than it is something that we've perhaps not studied. And I often find my sketches are better than the second or third time around when you've really got into that subjects. Because the more you look at something, the more little things you notice that you might not have noticed at first glance. If you can draw, do your drawing slightly bigger than the actual flower itself. That way it gives you more room to work with your paints later on. So the size is entirely up to you, but it's easier to sort of either double or triple your measurements. And then you can just make it easy for yourself rather than doing it by times 1.5 or whatever. If you just double it, it makes it very easy to do your measurements later on. So have a quick study of your subject and also think about what you're going to draw. Are you going to do the whole thing with the vars? Are you going to just do one little flower on its own? You're going to include the leaves. Are you going to include every flower or leave some out? You don't have to draw everything that's there. You're doing a painting, you creating an artwork. You're not necessarily just doing everything that's there. So if there's something that you perhaps want to leave out to make a better composition then do that. This is the Punjab picture is actually a very nice composition just on its own. And I've had a look at it from a few different angles. I've decided to do it as I've got it here now. To begin with, don't dive in by starting off in the central flower, the flower and doing all these little details of the seats and things, break the whole thing down into shapes. The shape that I'm seeing the most at the moment is the central flower. And I'm actually going to turn my paper this way up for this one, looking at the composition, it's gonna be much easier. I'm going to have more space to work if I turn it into portrait, the central flower, and I'm not going to do anything of the vase. I'm just going to completely ignore the vows. Fits inside a circle. So if you look at that flower is going to fit inside a circle. Again, my lines are going to be darker than yours because I wanted to show you the drawing process. I've got a central flower there. And then I've got another flower of a similar size, but it's at an angle. So for angles, circles would draw ellipses. That flower is going to fit into this. So we're not doing every petal at this stage. All we're doing is positioning the individual flowers. I've got another one here that's on a slight angle, but it's a much smaller flower. And then I've got another large one. Again, an ellipse shape because it's pointing away from us up here. And then there's a little bit of a gap. We've got one down here. That's a complete ellipse because it's sort of pointing downwards. That looks nothing like the flowers at the moment, quite obviously. Now we can place the leaves. Again, we're just doing the outline shape. We're not going to put all that detail of the spines and everything in. If you look, I've got that wrong. Me or not gonna be seeing this at the exact same angle attack I've got it at anyway, but these two line up here. So when you're drawing, look at where don't just look at the shapes of the items of the flowers and the leaves. Look at the shape of this, the negative, this is what we call negative space. If you've got that distance there, right? You've got the fact that that gaps, that shape, right? It's going to all come together. You've got another leaf going behind this one. Again, we're not putting the whole shape in it. We're just not put in all the detail in rather we're just putting this actually a tiny little one in here and there's another tiny one behind that. I'm gonna leave out. Gonna make it a much easier thing to draw if we leave those tiny little ones out there, not really adding to it the compositions metal quite nicely with these ones. And then this little one going off to the back here, it's nice to add because it's just going to give us that extra bit of green behind the flowers there. And there's one coming down here that I'm going to leave out two. So this one, look at where the stems going. We've got a stem going up behind that flower. This flower here has a stem going up behind that flower. You can hardly see the stem. It goes in-between the petals here. This is where we come to put the detail in. We've got the five leaves there and we've actually got five flowers. Yours might be different depending on what you decide to use our pick. Let's start with the first one. And in the center there we've got these little seeds. And then if we look, they've all got five petals. This petal is coming up. Look at it carefully down there. And it's all fitting into that circle. Look at each line on its own. So this one. The lines going up there, but it's actually curved over and we're seeing the underside. So if you just look at that very carefully and it's going in and out because we're seeing the backside of that petal lower, it's curled, then tips over and it curls down again. We've got quite a gap between these petals. It's nice and open. It has been flowering for quite a while. Some of the petals are closer together than others. And it's forming a cup shape. And again, we're seeing the outside edge of this swarm. When you draw in your flowers, the not a 2D object. There are 3D object. If you imagine them as a cup, the petals are coming around that cup shape. They're not just laid flat like that, are they? So you need to try and get those curls in of the petal coming up. And some of that comes from getting these shapes in where they're actually turned over. So if you can see that they're just do one of these ellipse ones and then I'll go on and put all the rest of the detail in here. And I'll obviously, once I've got the details of the petals in and all the edges of the leaves and everything. I will take out these guidelines with my eraser. This is why you need a really good quality, nice eraser. And also the quality of your paper effects that as well. If you have a poor quality paper, you will find it isn't as easy to erase from it and sometimes you can tear your paper, etc. If we look at this one here, we've got a little petal that's completely with its back to us. We've just got the back of that one coming away from this edge of this petal here. We've got one that comes out and again, we're only seeing the back of it. It's all fitting into this circle. It's very different shape to this one. We see in the back of this petal. A tiny bit of the inside. We've got one here coming right down to the bottom of the circle here. And again it's got this lovely curly frilly edge. And don't worry if every curl and freely isn't exactly as it is in front of you. You getting a feel for the subject that wants to kind of copying around like that. Then we've got another one that line's wrong there just to test out. Another one. That's quite twisted up this way. Again, lots of curls, lots of edges showing. And then one out the back here actually that goes slightly further out than I've got it on. All these little measurements and the way that the garden and everything, as long as you've got the correct number of petals. And then looking at the copying up and they're looking like the blossom that they are. Don't worry if every little detail isn't exactly right, because whoever is looking at your painting later isn't gonna have that exact blossom in front of them. What you're going to be showing them is the fact that it is an apple blossom. Did I say cherry be flopped before? He's actually apple blossom? So once we've done all the flowers at all the leaves, with the leaves again, make sure you get those curls if you can see this one's got a damaged bit. And of course if you didn't want to do the damage, but you don't have to put it on and you'd see in the back of this one as well. So that's got a lovely shaped down there where you see in the back. And of course this is gonna be important later because those are very different colors to the ones at the front. And I've actually missed out now looking at it, I've missed out this little board. We've got a bud here. I think it will be quite nice to put that in because it's a different color, because it's a bud, it's sort of all Titan. Still very pink. So I'll do that in more detail in a moment. Once you've got them done, how much more detail you put in is really up to you. You might want to just some little delicate veins in the flowers themselves, but you probably want to just put those in with the paint later rather than drawing them all the same with the seeds. Actually, you could maybe indicate where the seeds are so that, you know, you've got to paint them later, but it probably easier not to do too many pencil lines in there and just do that with a paint later. If you're a bit more confident with your drawing, I will carry on and do this in detail and get rid of these lines and I'll come back to you when it's finished. 4. First paint layers : To begin with, I've made up two colors. This is read with plenty of water added to make it very, very pale pink. And this is just some yellow. The leaves themselves are nice and summary and it's a very yellow green. And so what I'm going to do is choose, put this yellow all over each leaf. What I'm gonna do with a pink is put it all over each flower. Now you'll notice this is very, very pale. The petals and set the cells, although they appear white in places they're not really white. There are very, very pale pink and this will dry much, much lighter than its going on. And that's going to provide the first layer of color. You need to do the whole thing or sorry, I should have said also that I'm going to put the yellow in the centers of some of these flowers as well. And it's not quite yellow. It's much more of a brownie color in the center there, but I wanted to just cheer it up a little bit. And those browns can come in on top of the yellow afterwards. And it just gives us shows us where those lighter areas are to begin with because this is all going to be built up. So you're working from your lightest close to your darkest as you go along with your highlights, you could lift them out. If I'm looking at it now, there's very few areas where it's where it's actually white, the highlights or more of these very, very pale pink color. And don't forget when you put your new town and it's going to dry a lot lighter. I'll go ahead now and put that on and then leave it to completely dry. That's drying. Just a couple of things to talk about. They're really, one is, you'll notice that my colors are run into each other here. I didn't wait for the yellow to dry before I applied the pink. Now, if you want to avoid that, obviously you just do one color at once and allow it to dry. If you don't mind these running into each other, which I don't because I think it's just given us this unexpected little bit of light on the edges, some of these petals and even where the pink is going into the yellow, don't forget, we're gonna be putting more color on top of that. It's all gonna make it a bit more interesting. You're going to have light and more light and shade where you've got these closed merging, etc. If you don't want that, like I say, let them dry if you do if you don't mind it like that and I don't mind it like that. Make sure that your two paints are the same consistency. If you've got one of them that's much more water than the other, you'll find you make a mess. So just keep them the same consistency and that'll be fine if they touch. The other thing to say is now that once that's dried, we've got the shapes of the flowers. They're more because we've put the paint on, we can do a little bit more erasing and get rid of some of these lines once that's completely dried. And there was something else I was going to say, yes, do be careful that you've got all your stems going to make it look like it's attached. It could look really silly if these aren't attached and if they're just floating around in space. So get those stems in and make sure that they're all going to essential point because they're all actually fastened behind the central flower. If you look at that little ball, careful of blossom there. 5. Leaves part 1 : Now I'm going to keep the leaves quite simple because really the focus needs to be on the flowers and this central flower in particular, they're the things that catch your eye and not necessarily the leaves. Now in watercolor, there are all kinds of ways that we can get the highlights. And if you're looking at this book and now some of the highlights or the lightest areas I should say, are they actual veins of the leaves? Now, one way to do this would be to put a wax resist on. Another way would be to use masking fluid. The way I find the easiest actually, if you're painting wet on dry is just to leave that area dry because you paint won't go onto it. If it's left dry. You can of course, lift out as well. Some colors are easier to lift out than others. I'm gonna do a little bit of negative painting. So the veins, I'm going to leave yellow and paint around them. If you haven't got that patients, you might want to put those in, like I said, with a masking fluid and you can use masking fluid either first or before your first layer of paint or you can put it on top. That's absolutely fine too. Now I've got the green striped. I should show you. I've used this green, which is quite a bright green straight from this little scenario set. And to make it a little bit more natural looking, I've used the color on the opposite side of the color wheel, a little bit of the red, which is the one we used for the pink into that just to make them more natural leaf color. Of course, we're also having that yellow from behind as well. Because like I said, the quite a nice light summary leaf, they're not too dark. This first leaf is probably quite easy to do because it's looking straight at us and it's not really curling over much. It did have a big chunk out of it, but I've not done that. I've pretended that we've got a chunk out of it. Now, again, how much detail you do with the the veins themselves because they branch off from the central one. And then there's more and more is again entirely up to you. So I'll do this stem a little bit down one side and leave, leave a bit of light on the stem because they're capturing the light as they go around. You'll see when I was painting this initially, you'll see the importance of having a really nice tip on your brush. Here. We're gonna go leave that little bit in the center and then leave a couple of gaps all the way to the edge. This of course is going to take quite a while. But it's a really nice way of doing it and get that when you're coming in with your paint, get that really frilly edge of the leaf. They're just sort of jiggle your hand about and let it do it itself. As you go up, you just put in blocks of greening. And you might want to leave some extra little bit of the branches that are going off. You're gonna have more time than may perhaps to get every single little vein in. And I'll just do some of the other side of this one as well to make it show you where that central one is and then it's making more sense what I'm doing. You could actually easily get lost during this and make mistakes with a should've had a little gap there should not. Just a lot of patients required. Can you see where I should have had a gap here for that stem to join up. Or we need to do with a damp brush is very, very gently. Lift that out. When you're lifting out. Use a dump brush, not a wet brush. Again, if you want, you could use a little bit at tissue. We could really spend hours getting all these veins in Mechanical going around the side of your petals that you're not going on to where the petal was. So carry that leaf on in a minute, but I'm just going to move over to one of the other ones and show you. So here we've got a curling over the back of the leaf is much lighter than the front of the leaf. So you're going to want to get that edge there and leave this here. And I'm actually just gonna do curly edge of it. It's going to help define it a bit more. And it's got some veins going up the back, which because they're on the back or actually dot so that's the back. And then this in front of it is going to be the green. We might come in darker steel with another layer after this has dried. Again leaving that little bit where the veins are. This is gonna take a lot of patients, especially where things are curling. Whether a bit more interesting was that dries that once put in there. I'll carry on now and do all the leaves just in this one color. Like I said, we might come back and put more color on that, but we don't want to be too detailed in the leaves, lead the detail for the flowers. 6. Leaves part 2 : Those leaves a completely dry and I'm going to go ahead and put some more color on those just because there's quite a few areas where it's slightly darker when it a bit more light and shade. And you could carry on doing that. And you could go very, very detailed. And you can see the importance of having a nice tip on your brush to do those shapes. This isn't as detailed as you could have it. I'm not a details person. I usually work with much bigger brushes and I get bored doing detail to be entirely honest with you. But you might be the kind of person who really, really likes all that detail. So in that case, but every little vein in and everything and you could really spend weeks doing this. So you just building up the layers carefully, one color at a time and going darker with each step. Now one way to go darker is just to put another layer of the green on. You can see some areas where it's a little bit darker, where I've been a bit more heavy handed with the paint. Or actually what I'm going to do, I'm gonna put a little bit of blue in that paint now, just to make them all blue-green and make that a tiny bit darker. So just the same same paint that we've got left on the palette. So always make plenty of color before you begin. This is the thing about watercolors. Have your paints ready, have everything ready. So if I look at it, I mean, I've gotten several light source is so I've got shadows in different places. Your shadows with whatever you've got in front of you are going to be different to mine. And if you're working from a photograph, just really look at where those darker areas are and some of those are formed by the fact that the leaf itself is curling and Caston shade on itself. So by adding those shadows, you're gonna get more of a shape to the leaf. So not everywhere, just in certain areas. And you've just got to enhance it. Like I said earlier, you really want the flowers to be the center stage, not the leaves. But just adding this little torture shadow is going to bring those out. And you could go on and on for ages getting every little detail and that's already made this leaf better. This leaf, the first one that I did, and I think this is the same with a lot of things you do with your artworks. Tends to be first thing in the morning when you're just getting going. You make mistakes and you don't get it right first time. So the first leaf isn't anywhere near as nice as some of these others. I don't think I'm a little bit freer with some of these others. So it's got a bit of a shadow up here. It's slightly curling over on the top there. And you'll notice I'm not going with every single shape and I did actually get a little bit lost on this one and went wrong. It's casting a shadow on itself there. Where it's curled over. The lightest area is the underside of the leaf that we're seeing here. And it's dark down this side because it's slightly twisted so it's casting a shadow on itself. And you can see how that's kind of bringing things to life a little bit more and making more of a shape. The corps aren't exactly the same as the coolers in front of me. Just work with the paints that you've got. You could spend time mixing more colors together to get those right shades. But I quite like these greens are nice and fresh and light. This one's quite dark. It seems to be in shade for mole of polar flowers, this one, it's quite dark all the way around. Subtractive enhance the shape that you've already got there. Don't obliterate those early lines. Don't forget your watercolors are transparent and those colors are going to be coming through. You still got that lovely yellow coming through from underneath, making a nice light bright painting. I was wanting to avoid doing anything too dark. You can actually indicate some of those extra lines with the paint. Then this one is quite dark here because this flower is casting shadows. So you can see here we went, we the pink paint running to the yellow early on, but now we can't really tell that that's happened. It's much darker down this side where it's again, it's curling over. Just be careful around the edges of the flowers. In the urine. Hansen that shape you're not spoiling the shape that you've already got there. And keep a note of the colors that you're using so that when you come back to this painting in a day or two's time. And you think something needs a little bit of adjustment. You've got, you know, which colors you used. It's gonna be dark under here because it's flowers and everything else are cast in shadow. You can keep this color and put another layer on afterwards. If you wanted to. Perhaps need to get a little bit more of these curly edges to give it more of a feel of the apple. Okay, I'm going to leave the leaves, the leaves and carry on with the flowers now. So let them completely dry. 7. Flowers part 1 : So now we come onto the petals and actually the petals are completely different to the leaves, whereas the width, the leaves, the veins were lighter than the rest of the leaf. In this case, the veins themselves are actually very pink. So that's an easy thing to do. We can just do that with the paint and we need it. Like I said, nice tip on there and we can just put the veins in. Now, you remember me saying earlier about the shape of the cups of these petals. Look at the veins. The veins really make the shape of the petals to whether the face and right towards you or away from you, etc. And again, I'm not putting every single warning. I'm just going to give an impression. The shape, where the going rather than every single one on that, helps build the shape of the petal because they're coming around the petal around and up, forming that cup shape and they branch off at the edges as well a little bit. So I'll give you an impression of that. Undo the whole thing, and I'm not going to carry on and do everything there with you because you'll get bored watching me do that. But again, on the backside of the petal, It's much pinker. So this little boat here. So this is also where you're going to be putting some extra color in. There has a lot of pink, also, the backs of some of these petals. So you remember when we were doing a drawing to begin with. So again, it's the opposite way round to the leaf because with the leaf, the backside of the petal was lighter. With the, sorry, the backside of the leaf with lighter with the petals, the backside is darker, it's the pink of the two cars. So go ahead and do that and then you may want to come on and put some more on, as well as having the veins is little blushes of pink here and there as well. So we might put those over the top ones that's dried as well. I might even add a tiny touch of blue to this at some point because it's a bit of a purply pink that we've got there rather than what I've got here. But don't worry too much about the accuracy of your colors. Unless you're a botanist and you want it to be completely right. I don't worry too much about color. It's more about getting an impression and a feel for the objects that you're doing. In this case the flower there earlier on I made a mistake with the drawing of the stem. It was behind or in front of it. And it doesn't matter because as you come along, putting those colors on and building the close-up, that all kind of fades away. So I'll carry on now and put all this detail on and then come back to you a little bit later on. 8. Flowers part 2 : I've just added a little bit of nice violet to the pink. They're red, should I say? I'm going to put this in some areas for a little bit more detail. Just carefully looking. This is gonna help pick out some more shapes of these petals. Say Hey you where the yellow came over before. It's not really a problem now. Darker in the center there. By putting it up again, start the petal, it brings up metal forward. Don't put it everywhere. Just look at where is the absolute darkest. Very sorry about the hammering going on outside. If you can hear that, I'm not sure if you can pay. And again, like I said, with the leaves, It's really dependent on you how much you put in of the detail and the extra layers of color. Light should I say? Tone. Could really build it up by, he could do ten layers and just build and build and build. And you'd have a very, very detailed botanical drawing at the end of it. That's all part of developing your own style as well. In my style isn't detail. I do think maybe I'll have more patients in 20 years time and maybe do some very detailed work. But we'll see I'm not a patient person. I've gone slightly arrived with this one. I'm not sure I like this little flower here. It's seems to have lost its shape of it. Let's see if we can get some of that shape back. This is only a tiny little one and that's not the focus. Your focus is in the center there. I think that's enough color for those for now. I could say you could emphasize that if you really wanted to, we need to get the centers of the flowers. And I've got a little bit of background to that. But what I'm gonna do first is do some background. Let this completely dry and then we'll come back and do some background. 9. Background : Now although everything else we've done is wet-on-dry, and that's a really good way to build up detail and layers of color and laser, layers of tone and shade, light and shade. What I'm gonna do with the background is do it onto wet paper with a nice big brush. Wet just into the center. I'm not doing the whole thing. But you weren't really well. I went with this one too. Let the flowers look as if they're still on the tree rather than an inner vows in my studio. So choose carefully. And again, although this is a big brush, It's got a nice tip to it just carefully with some nice clean water, probably cleaner than mine if truth be told. Go around that central area but not write out to hear how quick this water dries is going to depend on how warm the room is, how warm the day is, etc. You might find you need to reapply paints, sometimes reapply water rather. Now, I've still got these colors left on here. So what I'm gonna do is make it look as if we've got leaves and things in the background and just drop. You're not really painting. Just drop in that color into that water that you've put there. And don't worry if it looks quite strong at this point. It's going to dry lighter and you can always add a little bit of extra water if you're worried about it. Being too bright. You don't just have to use the green there. You could add some yellowing to get some nice areas of light. And just teasing around with your brush but don't paint with it. You just drop in in color. You can even add a little bit of the pinky colors. Just so maybe there's some flowers off into the distance behind it on the next branch. Now that looks a little bit messy at the minute, but that's going to dry. Lighter and we're gonna put more detail onto the flowers here. Again if you want, I think did we have, you can always paint in as well. Lecturer areas or lift out. So if you've decided it's a little bit dark, I think maybe it's a bit dark here while it's wet. Just lift it out. Or you could lift a splash of light out as if it's a leaf behind somewhere. Okay, then just leave it alone. This is one of those things where you could end up messing it up if you went on to far managed to get a bit of green on here, I just wanted to tease it up a little bit towards this flower and it's not looking quite so Apache there. That flower looks a lot more impressionistic now because it's set against that very loose background. Leave that to dry. 10. Pencil detail : You can see how much lighter that's dry behind there. And it just looks like there's maybe some leaves and things behind. Even some of these have actually made some leaf shapes. So that's a really nice little technique just to make it look a bit more natural, like it's Ines outdoor setting rather than its sat here in the studio. I'm going to use some of my pencils to make some detail. You don't have to do this. You could carry on with a very small brush and do this in paint to that absolutely up to you. And I quite like using these. And the reason I use watercolor pencils is if you make a mistake, you can lift them off. You can blend them in with some water. You can make them a little bit softer. With the brown one, I'm going to put in all these little tiny seeds and the kind of an oblong shape going in all different directions out from that center. Some of them overlapping where the petals are. Some not. You need to do that for every one is, it has got some kind of darker ones and then some lactones as well, which perhaps they're not just as mature shapes there. This bottom one, this bottom flower. With the warmth in the studio here, it seems to have opened up more than it was. And I think that's where I was finding this little one tricky before as well. The shapes change from when I did the drawing. Two, when I've been doing the painting, one thing you can do, which I would recommend that you do is to take a photograph of your flower before you set off just with your smartphone. And then if they open, open, if they change shape as you're going along with your drawing. Especially if you need to come back to it tomorrow or whatever. If you take a photograph, you can just have a quick look at that to see how where things were. This lighter one, I'm just going to put one or two large ones in the actual stems stocks as well. Because you can't do this in paint. There's no reason why you can't. Some of these were actually a little bit like drink cola. You might want to use the relief technique that we used for the veins in the leaves. I always find this easy. It's an easy little trick to just do a little bit of drawing over the top. I'm not gonna get carried away with every little seed. Again. It's an impressionistic feel altogether really. Behind here we've got some little bits of green where obviously the flower is attached to lack a bit of a, I don't know what you call the back half of it where it's come out from the don't like that green. Just erase that. It's very bright. Can you see it? So I can, and I'll sit acid green. I'm just gonna go for this darker wall. You could do with this width paint. Can you see how it's just making a little bit more? It was shaped to the flower. Could use it for the stems. This little flower here, and it needs a bit more detail in a little boat. Here you've got the curly petals. Now everyone likes outlines. I like outlines alike, making the shapes. But you don't have to do this. These are just ideas. Still don't like that a little bit. Let's get rid of that. It's really just these tiny little leaves here that need the detail. I'm not going to use this on any of these, perhaps just here we need an edge. If you wanted to do some of these edges, you could just pick out little bits of detail here and there where you feel it needs it. But I don't want to overdo it with the green. So now to the pink and I've not gotten going to use this one. They scrapped purply color, but it's got a nice point on it. And just pick out some of the shapes. This is a lovely little board here. It's getting the shaping of that's quite nice. Whoops. This central flower. I'm not gonna outline. Every single petal, I'm just pop in lines here and there you can see, I'll outline this little bit where it's curled over PECSA, these lines in. Not going to outline the whole thing. You can correct things that you've gone wrong with your paint. If you've painted over some way, shouldn't have missed a line out, you can just do that with these pencils. See how the whole thing is coming forward now. So you could just put the focus on this one or not put any detail on the list. I'm just going to put one or two lines on, on these, but try and leave this as the central guy. Where the detail is. This is a lovely petal here the way it's gonna curled up by having this darker behind that shows up more again here. And do you remember here we went over with the yellow, so it's quite nice just to pick that petal out and bring that one to the four. It's knowing where to stop at this point. You could do this for every petal on every leaf, putting all this extra detailing. Not really detailed so much as emphasizing the lines that are already there. But actually if you do that, you lose your focus and I think the focus wants to be on there, so I think that's enough for the rest of them. Overall. I'm not entirely happy with the leaves, especially this one over here. Can you see here it looks a bit messy. And this 11 thing you could do if you weren't happy. Just to make that disappear a little. Because to my mind, my eyes go into this rather than here. Just pop very carefully. Don't forget, this is completely dry. Pop very carefully, a little bit of water over there. And it's just going to soften the whole thing. That looks better altogether. And again, down here, I think those colors were a bit taken the eye away from the center. Just soften it and make it a bit more impressionistic. As if they're kind of molded into that background that we've got. And that little bit of light they're created. By taking that out just makes it look like the sun's bouncing around as well. So if anything, I think it perhaps needs to be darker in the center behind all the way. It's a very open plans. If we look at it, the, there is a lot of light coming through between those stems and leaves and petals is quite open, but by having some darker colors behind it would have brought the whole thing forward a little bit. But like I said, don't particularly like these colors of the two greens. They would need to do that in paint, put some extra behind here. In fact, I'll do that now. If I can find my brush. I'm sorry if I'm rambling a little bit now, but you know, Romain just getting those darker areas behind that, he's gonna perhaps pop that out a little bit more. I'm just going to go with a damp brush, just touch the edges of those bits of paint that I've done there. And that'll just soften it off and it'll melt into the rest of that background that we already put Tom. You won't really be able to tell the difference. Now that's all completely finished and dry. One thing I should have said is before you put your pencil lines on, that, you could have arranged your original pencil drawing. You could do that as you go along, as you build in your paint layers up, of course, you're letting it dry in between each layer. So at any stage you can go ahead and erase your original guidelines. Minor hasn't completely disappeared because I was very heavy-handed because I wanted it to show up to the camera, but that's not really a problem. Yours will be a lot lighter, lighter touch than I put on there. Now if you wanted it to be lighter in places, when you get to this stage are all kinds of things you can use to get some white back. You could use white ink. You could use a white crayon wax pastor or one of your white pencils. Chalky IV. And there's all sorts of ways you could get some whites and light back into that if you wanted to. If I did this painting again, I would have made my initial wash of the pink, the red. I would have made it a little bit lighter. But other than that I'm over overall, I'm quite happy with the drawing. I like these little lines that we've put on at the end. I think that's lifted the whole thing and brought it to life. So I'll be interested to see how you do and what differences we have in the different flowers that you choose to pick and draw and paint for us. And actually, I think you could do what I've done and keep a very limited palette if you think about it, we've just got a few colors in there. All I used out of here, and I'll just show you is this green, which is a very grassy green, isn't it? We added a little blue to that at 1. This is the red, and we added some of the violet at the end. So we've just got those four colors, then the addition of the pencil. So that's kept at a really nice simple painting. 11. Conclusion : I hope you've enjoyed doing that project and I really look forward to seeing the finished results when you upload your work and I will give you some feedback on that. If there's anything you want to ask along the way beforehand, just give me a message on Instagram. That's the easiest way to contact me. Of course, you can also contact me through my website, through WhatsApp if you go onto their website or on contact details there too. Just to conclude, there are a few things I would change. I'm hoping that by showing my mistakes and telling you how we do things differently another time we're all learning from that as well. Obviously, as I've said all the way through his portable a lot more detail and then I could've built up a lot more layers. You could spend a month on his painting if you really wanted to import all those tiny, tiny little details in that depends on your style. And really with all of these courses, I don't watch too much influence your style. That's a personal thing and that's something which you will develop over time. If you use your watercolors every day, if you do a little bit of sketching every day, eventually your style will come through. And it depends if you're a details person or not. And whether you like lots of color or whether you're lucky, very subtle and loose. It's all very, very much a personal thing and I don't want to influence up too much. I just wanted to give you the tools and the hints and tips that will help you do get there if that makes sense. Okay, so the Horner's two things I would change about this, like I did say earlier, I would perhaps have made the first initial wash of the pink a little bit lighter so that the paper was shining through that a little bit more. Doesn't really matter because at the end of the day nobody is going to have those flowers next to these paints in my new seats. The other thing is now looking back at it. I've actually got this leaf quite too big. Just dominates a little bit. It would've been better if it was about here somewhere. And just little bits of things with the drawing app wraps rushed. But like I said earlier, you've got time to sit and do those measurements. I'm measuring person. I never measure anything. It's a bit silly me diction using you should measure things, but as you getting going, I didn't measure things as a beginner. It is a good idea to measure just to double-check those things. And it doesn't really matter so much where the plant, because you're gonna have some big petals, some smallest and bigger leaves and small and these progressive do that into a personal, something that the measurements are really out of or into matter. If you're not confident with, you're just using your eye and you want to measure them. Do so. Like I say, I really look forward to seeing all your work, anything that's all you want to ask, please do so I'll be back again to see you soon with another Skillshare class. Bye Bye for now.