Welcome Spring in Your Botanical Sketchbook

1. Introduction: Spring is a fickle season. There's no deny, nature is waking up again and things are beginning to grow. But winter can often be reluctant to relinquish its cold. The abundance of summertime can seem a far a ways away. Cabin fever has us anxious to get outside, but that's not always possible. Hi, I'm Anne Butera. I'm an artist known primarily for my botanical and nature inspired watercolors. I'm creating this class during a global pandemic and maybe you're taking it then too. Many of us are on lockdown and some of us are even confined to our homes. I'm fortunate enough to be able to get outside, walk in the neighborhood was my dogs and dig in my garden. But I can't deny I'm impatience with the slow progression of the season. At times like this, my sketchbook can be a refuge, although I love capturing the joys of the season in its pages, it offers me so much more than just a place to observe and record. I can dream and imagine, I can experiment and explore. In this class, I'll share examples of pages you can create, no matter the character of your springtime, I'll demonstrate nine example pages, starting with simple colors swatching, building with mixed media, and finally, creating a carefully rendered watercolor illustration. My aim is to inspire ways to embrace the possibilities of the blank page. There's no right or wrong way to keep a sketchbook. No matter your reasons for turning to its pages, this class will help you welcome your own spring with joy. 2. How to Use This Class: A student from my Winter Botanical Sketchbook class commented how, although she wasn't compelled to copy any of the pages I demonstrated in the class, it helped her to look around her and see inspiration everywhere she looked. That is my main aim for you. I want you to be inspired. I want you to be able to look around and no matter what your situation, find something that inspires you to create. No matter what level you're creating at, I'm hoping this class will give you something to help inspire you to create in your own way. Feel free to skip around through the example pages and try something different. When I first started making art, I was really intimidated by sketchbooks and I think that's one of the reasons I'm most passionate about teaching classes to help you embrace and enjoy working in your sketchbook. This class is no different. A lot of the demonstrations I do are created outside of my sketchbook. That's simply because I don't have a book whose watercolor pages work with what I wanted to demonstrate. Whether you're creating inside or outside of a sketchbook's pages, I hope you will feel the freedom to create without pressure of perfectionism. I especially love my beginner students when they're first experimenting with making art after years away from it. The specific supplies that you'll use aren't important. I want to encourage you to use what you have. I'm going to be using watercolor and a lot of the example pages. If you don't have watercolors, feel free to try a different kind of paint, if that's what you have on hand. Even using a child's set of simple watercolors will allow you to create wonderful and fun pages in your sketchbook. You don't have to have a set with lots and lots of colors, and in fact, I think the fewer colors, and the fewer supplies you have, the more creative you are. If you are using watercolors, all you need is some sort of watercolor paint, a jar of water, a paint palette, even a plastic plate will do, some brushes, and it's helpful to have something like a paper towel or you can use a rag to dry off and blot your brush. It's also helpful for blotting your paper. A few of our example exercises are done with pen, and I'll show you a lot of different pens that you can use. Don't feel that you need to have these certain pens that I show in the class. If you use a ballpoint pen, if you use a sharpie, if you use a child's marker, any of those things, as long as you are creating with them, are the perfect supplies for you to use. Collage, I think is the most freeing and fun ways to create in your sketchbook. It doesn't matter what you use to create your pages, found objects, things that people might think of as trash or papers that you've created and colored yourself. That's also something great to do with your children. So if you're stuck at home and have your kids home with you too, you could create a collage together. I'm so excited to be sharing the content of this class with you. I'm really hoping that it will inspire you. Thanks so much for choosing to take this class with me. Let's get started. 3. Mixing and Swatching Greens: We're going to start with some color mixing. I know for my autumn class and my winter class I had you go outside and look at all the colors that you can see. Right now, here are some views of what's going on around me this spring. There aren't that many colors. What we're going to do is just mix some greens and browns. These pages that I have are samples of swatches directly from my pans of color. The greens that you get in your sets are often very unnatural looking for botanical cells. If you're painting directly from your pan or tube, if you use tube colors. You'll often need to either mix something into your color or mix your own greens to have a really natural looking color. I made these watches just as examples. These Brown's too. You don't get very many variations with the colors of brown. Let's mix some of our own colors. We're going to start with green and for this demonstration, I'm going to start with filling a couple wells with yellow. I'll just be using one yellow, one blue, and a little bit of red. It does not matter which colors that you choose to use. You could also use more than one yellow, more than one blue and experiment and see what you come up with. Here's some yellow with a tiny bit of blue. I think this is a beautiful spring like green. Mixing colors like this I find it to be a great way to warm up. It's also such a joyful and fun process, especially if you don't have the pressure to recreate a specific color. If you're just playing and experimenting and seeing what happens on your palate and on your paper. If you approach it with curiosity and a sense of playfulness, and just enjoy the color. You can arrange your swatches however you want to. You don't have to make circles. You don't have to line them up. Just fill your page with different colors and see what you can come up with. I've sped up the video here because it's not important to be copying me exactly. Here's a little bit of red. I like to add red to my mixes of green, to deepen them. It pushes them a little more towards the brown side of things. But if you look in nature, so many of your greens are verging on brown. Just playing around with how much blue, how much yellow you have in your mix can give you so many different variations of color. Here, this color is looking a little too blue to me. I'm just adding color to the page. Some of this brighter green, just dabbing it into that swatch and mixing it around on the page. You can do this for all of your swatches if you want to. Let the colors mix on the page and not just on your palette. Or you can go back to other colors that you've already swatch and change them up a little bit. It's really up to you how you decide to play with color. This is certainly not a rigid exercise. I really want you to enjoy it. The other great thing about any color mixing exercise is that it helps you to learn your paints. Then when you go to mix specific colors, you have the knowledge of how different colors react when they are mixed together. You'll know which blues will give you a more warm green. Which blues will give you a brighter green. Which yellows will make the color look brighter. Which colors will make your color more opaque. Getting to know your colors is really important. I know it was a step in my development as a painter of that. I didn't at first take enough time for. That was really brown and I added some more blue. That's what happens when you're mixing colors like this. Sometimes a color skews too much one direction and you have to add a little more of the opposite color. Sometimes you get unexpected results. Or adding too much of one color will be a nice surprise and you get some amazing color that you hadn't intended to get. I just hope that you will enjoy the process. Here's a page of greens. I'm going to let it dry and we'll mix some browns. 4. Mixing and Swatching Browns: In the last lesson, we build this page with all different colors of green mixing with just two or three colors. In this lesson, we'll do the same thing, but with browns. I think this time we're going to use more than just the two colors. But I'm going to start out with that same yellow I used in the last lesson. I think here's a little bit more of that blue. I am going to add some blue to these small wells on my palette and maybe that will help with color mixing. That way I won't be just having to return to my paint palette. With all the paints. We'll see how that goes. I'm planning on using lots of blues. We'll start out with this one. You of course don't have to use as many colors as this. Let's see, to make browns, you need three colors, red, yellow, and blue, so that's what we'll be mixing. Here's my first swatch. It's a pretty warm color a little bit more blue to that first color and swatch that out right here. Now I'm going to try with a different yellow. Doing this with multiple colors and not just a limited palette, gives you more options. You don't get to learn each of the colors quite as in depth. Let's see. That's looking interesting. Let's swatch that here. That's sort of a top color. Let's see, I'm speeding up the video here. Just like I did in the last lesson. It's really the process that I want you to take away here. The process of taking a limited number of colors to make a new color. You can see those first two colors, the blue is separating out. That's something that you will learn when you're getting to know your colors. Which colors will granulate out, which you don't like staying mixed and that can be a really neat effect to add to your paintings which you'll see in another lesson. Here's another brown. Some of these browns are similar and that's okay. Oh, that's a gorgeous blue color. I'm going to capture this on just a scrap of paper. To that color, I'm going to add some more red. It's purple-y. Purple and yellow will create brown and that's again the red and blue and yellow. Because there's red and blue in the purple. Just going back and forth, adding some red, adding some blue. Red, yellow and blue will also create grays. If you want to capture some grays on your paper in your sketch book. That's great too. Here's a really orangey-red. Of course, you can use other colors to create your mixes. That's a lovely orange. I'm going to capture this one too. It's really up to you how you want to work. That's a beautiful chocolaty-brown. As I was saying, it's up to you how you want to work. Part of it is dependent on what your intentions for your practice are. If your intention is to get to know your colors, you may want to be a little more methodical. You might even want to take notes as to which colors that you used for each mix. That's a lovely warm brown, a rusty color. If you just want to play and have fun, it really doesn't matter which colors you use. If you want to match specific colors exactly, you'll want to be more methodical again and again you may want to take notes. Paying attention to what your intentions for your practice are is important too. That's one of the things about getting comfortable with your sketch book. If you have clear intentions for what you want to be doing, there won't be tension between what you want and what happens. Here I'm going to add another color, exploring a bunch of different reds here, different yellows. That's another beautiful orange coming up here on this palette. Capture that as well. Those oranges and that blue aren't really spring-like colors necessarily. But they're very beautiful and just being able to enjoy the process, I think, is so important. It's important during difficult times, but it's really important for all of your art practice. That's a beautiful dark, deep brown. Getting to know your paints, enjoying the process of mixing colors, it's a great warm up exercise. It's a great learning exercise. My intentions for you are that you enjoy it, that you create in a low pressure way and that you build your skills. I think if we put too much pressure on ourselves, that's when we face resistance. That's when things get difficult. But if we are open, if we explore and play, if we're curious, if we have fun with just the magic of color, then the process becomes joyful and it becomes fun. Here is one more page of color. I've got a page of browns, a page of greens. When this brown page is totally dry, we'll do something else with both pages. If you need some more practice with mixing colors or you want to spend some more time learning about it, you should take my color mixing class. Here are my two pages. I'll let these dry. We are going to do something else in the interim and I will see you there. 5. Sketching on Swatches: So with these little swatch pages, you can leave them as is in your Sketchbook or you can embellish them, which is what I will be showing you today with inspiration from the little Seedlings, that I have planted this year. So thinking about little sprouts and little seedlings, I'm going to embellish these circles, and just using a pen, I will sketch some simple sprout shapes. It's fun to have the root come out of the circle and these shapes are really very simple to draw. You don't have to worry about being exact or copying any specific shape when seeds sprout, they almost always have the two-seed leaves, which are called Cotyledons and those are the first set of leaves to come out of the seed. They often do not look anything like what the leaves on your Plant, once it's grown, will look like. So they're really simple shapes, often a teardrop, maybe an oval and you can look at actual sprouts. If you're growing things for your own garden, under growth lights inside or even outside, if you look at what's coming up. I know every year in my garden, I have lots and lots of little weeds that grow and one of the things that's most common are little baby Maple Trees. I forgot to tell you this is a Tambow Calligraphy pen, but definitely use whatever you have, something that'll stand up if you're using paper that has a rough surface. This one is doing pretty well on this rough cold press watercolor paper. So the little Maple seedlings that grow every year in my garden, I always pull them out and one-year, I fill the page in my sketchbook of little baby Maple seedlings, little sprouts with their too. On the Maple seedlings they have long skinny sprouts. So have fun with either making up sprouts or if you can get outside in your garden, or even if you don't have a garden and aren't going to be growing a little baby seedlings, you can sprout seeds in a sprouting jar that you can use for making sprouts for your salads or I love eating sprouts on a sandwich with maybe some harness. That's a really easy, fun project to do, and you can even sketch some of your little sprouts that you grow. If none of that really appeals to you, simply make some things up. There're really simple shapes to sketch. So some leaf shape on top coming up and then a root with some little root hairs coming out the bottom. I like to have the root overlap outside of the circle and make different shapes. It's fun to have them all slightly different. Filling up the page is just another way to make your page a little more interesting and give you another fun thing to do with your Sketchbook. So you can go in, add a few more details if you want to. Little veins on your leaves, maybe a little texture. So that's the green swatches done. Now for the brown swatches, I'm just going to get some little creatures in the garden. So some Ants. Here's a little Worm, and I'm not really worrying about being too realistic. Snails are always fun to sketch. So any kind of creatures that might be living in your soil that you might see when you're digging in the garden. You could do totally something different here, if little Bugs and things don't interest you, you could sketch more sprouts. So here I've filled up the whole page with different kinds of creatures, just having fun with it and just giving another dimension to these swatches. So there's my browns and my greens inspired by the Garden, by spring, by the awakening of life. It's so joyful. You could also sketch all the way around all of your circles, have things overlap. You could use other drawing instruments, pencils, markers. So here are the pages that we've done so far, and they're all fun and quick and low pressure ways to create. That's really a great way to start, a great way to build momentum with your practice doing simple, quick activities with low pressure. So here's another sketch book. This was a collaboration with artist Dana Barbieri. We shared a Sketchbook and took turns filling up half of it. I always did the right hand side of every spread and she did the left hand, and here's a page I did of Moss. I used watercolor on this page and painted all kinds of fantasy Moss swatches. This isn't watercolor paper, but the watercolor did well on it, it's mixed media paper and it's similar to these little abstracts that I painted. So you could do something similar. Paint some Moss, either imaginary or based on what you find. Here is a page of dirt. So different dirt and splotches and some other creatures and they're my Ant looks a lot more realistic than the ones I did on my brown swatches, as just some more inspiration for your own Sketchbook. 6. Watercolor Flower Pots 1: In this lesson, we'll be painting some watercolor flower pots and I painted lots of water color flower pots and I created a fabric with this design. I'd love to show you how I paint them. So we're going to start out by mixing a color that I love using, and I've mixed lots of colors and this one just works really well for me, and I'll show you why. This be starting with this cadmium lemon color. It's a really bright, cool yellow. Of course, you can use any combination of red, yellow, and blue that you want. Try playing around, mixing like we mixed the browns and come up with your own mixes. What I really love about this mix is that the blue I'm using, which is cobalt turquoise light, is a very granulating color and it does not want to stay mixed in the mix of paint. So here's the orange that I created and if I add this cobalt turquoise light to my mix, it makes it closer to the color of a clay pot, a Terracotta pot and just the nature of the paint, the blue will not stay mixed and it'll give you a really interesting textures and color variations for your pots. I'm adding a little bit more red here and sometimes, as I've already shown you, you have to go back and forth a little bit until you get the exact color that you want and I'm sorry that the swatches didn't quite fit on my screen here. So adding a little bit more of that cobalt turquoise light. Other granulating colors that you could use are anything with cobalt in the name. I know spirulina blue also will granulate out and ultra marine. So experiment in C, I'm going to add some more red and when you have pans of watercolor in a palette and they don't want to stay put, you can use a hot glue gun to glue them down. I just haven't done it yet with this collection of paints. So a little more yellow. I want to have a lot of paint on my palette because we're going to be painting a lot of pots. So one more test, which I'm sorry, you can't see here. But as soon as we start painting, you'll see, and you can see already the colors have unmixed on my palette. So I'm mixing them back up and coming in for these flowerpot shapes. I'm not worrying about being perfect. I'm being a little more careful than I have so far with what we've painted with our swatches but I want my flower pots to be somewhat wonky. I want them to look like they're hand thrown pots and I want them to be interesting. So here the paint is very wet, which means that it can push around on the page. So I'm just using my brush to push around and I'm going to take another brush here that's just somewhat damp and I'm going to push all of the paint over to the right-hand side. Now that right-hand side is going to be the side with the shadow and I can drop in a little bit more pain if I wanted it a little more dark. Just come up and push that paint, I'm leaving the center empty. If I were to paint the centers at the same time that I'm painting the outside of the flowerpot, we'd end up with just a blob, one single shape. So I can come back and paint the centers and it will give the hint volume of three-dimensionality for these pots. I could also be painting that rim, letting it dry and then coming back and painting the bottom part of the pot, which I'm not going to do here. It's fine. We'll add a little bit of some details later. So again, just pushing the paint over, adding more paint if I see it needs it. I want to have a variation in color, a variation in darkness of the paint to create that sense of shape. Then for these pots, I want them to be lots of different shapes. I want to have lots of different sizes, I want them all to be a variety of shapes and sizes and maybe some of them aren't necessarily realistic looking. Here you can see some of that cobalt turquoise has already started to come out of the mix, which gives us such interesting texture and it gives it more of a color. So varying my shapes here. Another thing you need to be careful about when you're painting these is not to put your hand in wet paint. So since I am right-handed, I'm starting on the left-hand side just so that my wet flower pots are not in the way of when I paint. So I can come back, push the paint around a little bit more. Some areas if it's dried, you're going to be moving paint back into the dry area, which is okay. Pull it up a little bit more. You can create really messy, interesting textures on these pots. Because if you study flower pots, and I'm thinking about specifically flower pots that have been used, so not the brand spanking new pots that you find in the store, they're going to have salt stains, they're going to have maybe a little bit of lichen growing on them, those are the ones that I love they're so interesting and I just really enjoy that warn look, that lived in look. So I've sped up the video again. You probably are getting the idea of how this is working. I'm just going to do the same thing for all these pots. Varying the shape, varying the size, and the paint on my palate, it continually unmixes. So sometimes what paint ends up on my brush will be a slightly different mix of colors than I've used before, just because of the way the paint has unmixed. So we're also going to be painting the insides and thinking about shadows there. The interesting thing about the shadows for the inside of your flower pots is that, the shadow is on the opposite side. So you can see this one, the colors almost brown. I'm going to make it an even longer here. But that variation of color is so interesting in here. It changes even with each time I dip my brush into the paint on my palette. So adding some more paint on that side, dropping it in, smoothing out my sides. This pot is probably not a very realistic shape. It may fall over, but I think it's a fun shape. So pushing the paint around to give you a sense of volume, your sense of three dimensionality and you could go back into any of these pods, add more color. You could also add single colors. Let's say drop in some of the cobalt turquoise by itself or maybe dropping some of the red by itself or even which is fun, drop in some white paint to give that color of the salts that have come out when you have an old pot. If you're a gardener, you'll know what I'm talking about. So you can work these as much as you want or as little as you want. This is meant to be a fun exercise and filling any page with the same type of object over and over and over again is a fun thing to do in your sketch book. So it doesn't have to be flower pots and you can paint them in a pattern like a fabric design sort of pattern, a repeating pattern, if you wanted to. Some of those other patterns that I created, I made watering cans, I made tools from the garden. So if you feel like filling up a page with something like that, go ahead. Or something like leaves but what I really love about this is how this mix of colors will give you that texture, will give you that variation of color, just by the nature of the paint itself. So anywhere that you see the paint needs some smoothing, you can go back and do that. Sometimes making the paint a little messier will give you really interesting textures and give you the sense of these flower pots. So filling up the page here some more. Something else that I haven't mentioned is the fact that when I'm usually painting, I will often move my page around to make it easier to paint. So feel free to move your paper as much as you need to so that you don't strain your wrist so that it's not awkward for you. But always keep in mind where there's wet paint because you don't want to smear the wet paint. So I'm liking how all these shapes are turning out. They're really fun and some of the shapes I'm repeating. I tend to like these tall thin flower pots and that needs a little fixing on that side and then push the paint. So let's see what I want here about something big and wide. I think the wonkier they are sometimes the better and if you prefer, you could sketch everything out with pencil first and then go in and fill it in but these shapes are fairly simple and it's fun just to wing it and play with your water color. As you go your composition may end up looking a little strange if you don't plan it out first, but that's okay. So here my last pot, filling in the shape, smoothing out the edges. I'll let this dry and then we'll paint the centers. 7. Watercolor Flower Pots 2: I've let these flower pots dry, and you can tell when something is totally dry, if the paper no longer feels cool to the touch, and you can see here how some of these pots, the cobalt turquoise has really granulated out, giving some interesting shading. It all depended on how much of that was in the mix that was on my brush. I like these wonky shapes. They're a little bit messy. Now we'll go in and paint the centers. Now my paint has dried. There's still a little well of water in the center and you can see how the colors have separated. I don't want to mix it too much, and I'll bring a swatch scrap to test out my colors and see if that looks too red. I'm not sure. I'll mix it a little bit more. This is very dark, and I don't want to have it quite so dark. If there's little more water, it'll be lighter. I think I may just start painting and see how things go and we can adjust as we go. The shading inside of these flower pots is going to be on the opposite side of the shading on the outside, because the pot is shading the light. It's getting in the way of the light that's coming into it. It's going to be darker on the left side, on the inside instead of on the right. I'm starting out, I'm going to be more careful painting these centers because I don't want them to be too messy. I want to paint in that oval shape. This is looking pretty red. I may want to mix the paint a little bit more. I'm painting this the same way, so starting out with more paint and then pushing the paint to the side where I want the shadow. I'm going to mix it a little bit more. Here, the colors are mixing a little bit better. I don't want too much water in here. The more water you have, the less control you have and the more you'll have to push the paint around. Because when it's wet, it wants to just spread. We can push the paint with our other brush again and coming in here you see the color is different for this one. I'm moving this page around a lot because that gives me better control of my painting. I want the tip to go in the right spot. I'm making sure there aren't any holes or any white spaces, and then pushing the color. I can dab in a bit more paint and smooth out any edges and push things over to the side. I'm going to try and not paint where there's wet paint. Again, like we have so far just keeping an eye, especially when you're moving the page around a lot, just being aware of where the paint is wet so that you don't smear it. Because you'd hate to spend a lot of time, even though this is a sketch. You'd hate to spend a lot of time on something and then have a big smear of paint. You can see that things are unmixing in the palette again. Here, this is a really dark brownish color that's coming out now. I like this variation. I like having the centers also have a lot of variation. It's okay if the center color does not match the exterior color perfectly, especially if you're creating more of a shadow on the center, than with the exterior. I've sped up our video again as we go with this same technique, filling the interiors of our pots, moving the paint around and pushing it to create our shadows, dropping in more paint if we need it, lifting up anything if there's too much. Our colors are going to granulate out again, so we'll have texture and we'll have lights and dark's with these flowerpot interiors, just like we do with the exteriors. Here we go. I'm moving the paint around a little bit more, and keeping aware of how your wrist moves, I'm moving the paper to make it easier to paint. Because you want to be able to be comfortable painting and get your angles correct and not have your painting be awkward or uncomfortable. We're just doing the same thing here over and over again, which I think is a bit meditative and it's calming to do something like this, repeating shapes and repeating the same movement over and over again. But also having lots of variation and keeping things interesting. This one is a really dark pot, so we want the center to be really dark too. If there's too much water, you can use your paper towel. This is a very well used paper towel and just dab at it and then come back and spread things if you need to. You can see how much these colors are changing as the paint mixes and unmixes. That's what is so fun about this color combination to create these pots. If you had colors that were a little more uniformly mixed, I don't think it would be quite as fun. If you're trying to paint something that you wanted a uniform color a paint mixed like this would be so frustrating. Again, getting to know your paints and how they work, how they react is so important. It doesn't have to be a real studious exploration, but just remaining open, remaining curious, observing what happens when you work with your materials. You will learn. You can take notes if you need to take notes, right in your sketchbook. Sometimes I will do that. I'll write notes about the page that I've created. Sometimes I'll say that it's not very good or something like that. But keeping notes about your experience, it's helpful when you go back. We're getting close here, just a few more to go. Be very careful at this point, we've got a lot of wet paint on this page and I've got my hand carefully positioned so that I don't have an accident. The wetter it is, the more it wants to spread. You can control the spread by controlling the amount of water that you use. Of course, with this mix, you got to keep mixing it up some more. You're introducing more and more water. But I think it's just fun to work with and the process as I said before, is meditative. It's good to be so focused on something, especially in times when you're feeling stressed. Being able to get in the zone and just work on something like this, it can take you away for a little while. A little more paint spreading. I've got my centers done, and now I'm going to paint some details on the pots to give a sense that the rim is separate from the rest of the pot. I'm going to test my line. These long pointed round brushes have a very nice point and they'll paint a fine line. But if there's too much water on your brush, your line is going to be thicker than you want it to be, so it's good to test it. This one, it's very wonky here. I don't want it to be too dark. Actually, I like how wonky it looks. Just looking around at your pots and seeing which ones need a bit of definition, a bit of detail, and which ones don't. They don't all have to have this detail line, so just look around and see anything that has a larger rim or a sense of a rim. As I mentioned earlier, you could also paint the rim separately and paint the body of the pots separately. Paint one and then the other, let it dry. Whichever way you want to work. Again, these are sketches, so it's okay for them to be messy, it's okay for them to be imperfect. Actually, I really love the imperfection of these pots. It gives a lot of interest and makes things more fun. You can always also go back over any pots if you think they need a darker shadow, you can add some paint and then spread that and use a little bit more clear water to even things out. You can even do that with a different color if you think you need more of a blue or green shadow on there. Just smooth things out. Of course, that's not necessary. Let's see. I think I may need one more, just one more little bit of definition right here. Now I think my pots are done. I see so much potential and joy in a collection of empty flower pots. It's a great spring thing. But if you want to fill your flower pots with plants, that is fun too. Here are some of my paintings of plants in pots. I hope this has been fun for you and inspiring. 8. Daffodils in Pen: In my garden, the only daffodil I see is covered with snow right now. For this page that I'm going to do of daffodils, I have a printed sheet of photographs. I'm going to use pens for this. I've got my photograph page that you can also download and print if you'd like. Working with pen and sketchbook is one of the easiest, most fun things to do outside. If you can get outside, I love to go around my garden. Here's one for a few years ago of some daffodils, the first daffodils of the year. Then here are other pages with pen. Some maple seeds, this page I love of all sorts of different things I found around the garden and updating pages is really helpful for this. This page of clover was really fun clover, something you really overlook, but it's fun to put it in your sketchbook. It's really simple. All you do is take a book and a pen out to the garden with you and you're good. It's the most portable way to create. Here's my page. You can download that and print it out if you need to. Using a book for references is also great, if you have a flower book, this year in flowers from Floret Farm is so beautiful, lots of flowers laid out for you to look at, observe. You can use that as a reference, and of course, with copyright, you're not going to want to copy exactly. I've got my pens. I've got some pens that make different sorts of marks. Anything from the brush pen, a roller ball pen, to a micron pen, the Tombow calligraphy pen, which we've already used. This can also be a great exercise for trying out different types of pens. Let's see. I think I'll start with the calligraphy pen. This can make a variety of marks. For my first flower, I'm going to start by sketching out the trumpet shape, and these flowers can be mostly head on. The trumpet is somewhat circular or tubular, circular viewed from head on, but the edges are really wavy. It's fun to sketch this wavy dark edge of the trumpet. Then when you're sketching, think about how the flowers put together. Here's the center part, the stamen and pistil, there's a little shadow there from the center where it comes out. Then the petals are radiating around that center, and they all attach in the center. When you're sketching your lines, think about them all converging in the middle of your flower. I'm sketching these two first because they're above the other petals, and then the one behind it. Sketching like this is a great observational exercise, it's great to do when you're in the garden or somewhere with a flower in front of you, it's great to observe. This last petal is behind the other two, and the edges all line up in the center, which we can't see, they're hidden behind other petals. I'm just going to sketch in some very light, somewhat broken lines, just barely touching my pen to the page. These lines are the veins of the petals. Sketching them gives some texture and a sense of three- dimensional shape to your flowers. Observe your subject as best you can. If you're working from a photograph, it's not always possible to observe perfectly because not everything is in view or in focus perfectly. You may have to forge things a little bit, which is okay. This is a sketchbook, so it's supposed to be experimental and fun. I'm going to add some textural marks to the trumpet shape. All these veins converge in the center, so this trumpet is a tubular shape, and these marks will help give the feeling of that shape and give it texture, somewhat ruffled. I'm trying to convey that with pen marks, making the trumpet a bit darker than the exterior petals. Then I think, darken some of these center bits to help them stand out a little, and then darken this edge. This calligraphy pen is great because you can make thin and thick marks, just varying how you hold the pen on the page. The last thing I want to sketch here is the stem. Just like the petals, the stem lines up with the center of the flower. I can darken my stem by overlapping my marks. Think about how you want to lay out your page. Do another flower. I think we'll change to this brush pen, it's really fun to use. Do another flower down here and have the flower oriented in a different direction. That first one was head on. If you're sketching from life, you can use the same flour and sketch it multiple times from different directions. I'm looking at my reference photos and choosing different flowers as my reference, but you can do whatever you want. There's so much variation in daffodil shape that it could be fun to record all of those different shapes. Again, this is a sideways view, but the petals all will converge in the center, the trumpet shape is attached in the center. Think about where things line up and make your marks accordingly. This pen can make very dark marks and it's very wet, so be careful of where you put your hand. You don't want to smear the pen mark like when you're working with watercolor too. Just be aware of the wet ink on the page. Just barely touching the page will give me very fine, delicate lines in contrast to some of the darker lines and I'll add a few to our trumpet. This flower has a different feeling to it than the other one because of the variation in line weight. Then for this stem because it's sideways, we're going to see a bit of the papery wrapper that surrounds the flower bud and attaches to the stem. You can see how dark and how thick of a line we can create with this pen in contrast to the other one. We've got two flowers here. You could also sketch out leaves if you wanted to. I am switching to this roller ball pen with liquid ink and we're going sketch this one on the side. The petals are going to have their shape be abbreviated so you can't see the whole petal. The shapes are different and the way they line up, although they're all connected in the center, they look differently. We can see more of that side view of the stem and that fun papery wrapper, and then the stem comes down. I'll have it go behind this flower. You don't have to sketch the stems if you don't want to. Just like I suggested, you could do leaves, you could just do flowers without the stems. It's totally up to you. Adding these details give texture to your flowers. They help give a sense of three dimensionality and they make the sketch look more finished. For this fourth flower, I'm using a micron pen and this flower will be facing the ground somewhat. For this flower, I'm going to have somewhat different petals, so there are going to be more petals and they're going to be shaped and oriented somewhat differently. Daffodils are such interesting flowers with so many different shapes. Sometimes they have those six petals, sometimes they have more petals. Sometimes they're really roughly, sometimes the trumpet shapes are really roughly and frilled almost like roses. For this one, I think I'm going to put the stem, let's see. I'll have the stem more straight and have it come down here, again, that paper wrapper and then with the micron, especially if it's a narrower tip on your micron, overlapping your marks will give you a darker color of your pen marks. Then adding our petal definition, the textural veiny marks, you can add a lot or you can add just a few. Experiment and see how your different marks make your flower look differently. Also, this is a great test for your pens. You could do a test page that just has scribbles and marks and experiment with all your different marks or you can do something like this. Sketching out the same thing over and over again, or similar objects over and over again, it's a good reference. You could even write in on your page which pens you used for which flowers, so you can know what effects you get from the different pens. That way, if you're working on a piece and you know you want to have a certain look, you can use that writing instrument. Having a page like this is great practice, it's a great reference, and it's just fun and meditative a bit in the way that I talked about with the flower pots. It's a great exercise at observation and you can get lost in the moment and really enjoy the process and enjoy working with your pen, observing your flowers, even if they're just on a page. I think I'll write spring daffodils down here. If you're in the garden, you can write where you saw your flowers or if they were the first daffodils of the season. I'm using this brush pen because I really enjoy the different marks that it makes. This could be also a good reference as to when you saw your first flowers of the year and you could also date it if you wanted to. I hope you enjoyed sketching some daffodils with me. 9. Tulips in Watercolor and Pen 1: So much like with my daffodils, my tulips are hiding under some snow, the flowers have not come up yet, just some leaves. I don't have any open. Here I've got a couple of sketchbooks for examples. We're going to do something like this, with some loose watercolor tulip shapes in the foreground. This is with very wet paint. Then in the background, sketching out some tulip shapes with pen. This is a really fun activity to do, combining pen and watercolor in your sketch book is great. This is another example with some paint swatches, mixing colors, keeping track, and observing the flowers, doing some pen sketches, as well as the watercolor and the watercolor when it's this wet, I find it hard to work with. This is right after I have mixed my colors. It's hard to keep the petal shapes all differentiated and separate, but we're going to work with that today and create a fun page. Here is my palette. I'm going to start doing some color mixing and one thing I didn't mention before is that if you're doing color mixing, you should use your brush that is not your good brush. Something that you're not going to worry about ruining the point on. I'm starting my leaf color with this oxide of chromium. This is a Winsor and Newton color, you can use whatever you have. This is a green that is fairly opaque, which is one of the reasons I'm choosing it. It's also a more bluish green. I'm going to work with that blue cast and the opaqueness, I want to include that in my painting. For my mix, I think I want to add some more blue and I'm choosing a color that I know will granulate out a little bit because I want to have that interesting texture, so I'm adding some cobalt blue and then I'm also going to add a more opaque, cool yellow and mix that in. When I use greens, I always mix a few more colors with my greens. Let's test this out. I'm liking how that's looking and I will mix some red. Clean my brush a bit and then think about with reds, I'm going to start with a really warm orangey sort of red and when I use reds with watercolor, I usually combine a couple different colors. That way, if I'm using a cooler color and I mix a little bit of a warmer color with that, the undertone of the red and when it's more transparent and more diluted, the cooler reds are sometimes a little duller, so adding in a warmer color will give you a warmer base. I just combined three of my reds together and I'll see how this work. Maybe a little bit more of this one and we'll test it out. On unto my scrap of paper, see how it looks. That's still a nice bright, warm color and I think I want one more color for my flowers. I'm going to mix some yellow. Starting out with this cool yellow that I used for the leaves, and see that my brush was not completely clean and that red is mixing in with the yellow, which is okay because it's going mix together on the page anyway, I'm not going to worry too much about that.I'm going to swatch that out. Then I think it would also be nice to see how the two colors mix. There's my red and then I'll add in some of the yellow. They're spreading, the reds really spreading into the yellow, which is fine.I just want the yellow to be a subtle addition. Now I've got my colors mixed. I had let them dry and now they are rewetted. We can begin painting and want to work with fairly wet paint here. I've got my photographs of the tulips. You can also download and print that out to use as your reference or if you have flowers. Got my water jar, I've got some brushes, paper towel, and I'm ready to start painting. You could sketch out your flowers first, so that you know where you want them to be. But I'm just going to work really loosely and quickly and start painting. I think I want to have three flowers in this page. I'm starting out painting petals separately. If I were doing a finished painting, I would keep my petals all separate. Let each one dry before painting the one next to it, so that the color doesn't spread everywhere. Like with our flower pots, I'm moving the paint around a little bit to give lights and darks. I'm going to let those two petals dry a little bit before painting the petal in between there. That's really dark, this first petal, so, pushing the color around on the page. This paper that I'm using is hot press,so here. I'm dropping it a little bit of the yellow to let it spread. Then continuing on with the petals. With this hot press paper, it reacts differently than cold press. You can see there's a bit of texture when the paint reacts with the paper, which can be a little disconcerting. It almost looks like the paper's balling up underneath when it's wet. Coming back here, I'm painting that center petal and letting the paint spread a little bit and trying to save some distinction between the petals without taking the time to let it completely dry. So leaving some space there will keep the petals separate looking. We can go back and fix things if we need to. Doing the same thing to this second flower, painting in this center petal. The petal is being overlapped by the other two. I'm trying to give that feeling. I'm going to move the paint a little bit on both of these to keep from having a total uniform look. Now for my third flower, I wanted each of these flowers to be facing a different direction and then this one, I think I'm going to put the flower oriented slightly differently so that the petal in the center is not overlapped by the other petals. This center petal is overlapping the petals next to it. If you had a flower in person, you could move it around and observe from all the different angles. Let's see. I'm going to go back and try and fix some of the messy parts where things are flowing in ways I don't want it to flow and smoothing out where the wetness of the paper and paint is uneven. Just using my brush and rubbing the paper. This is my sturdier brush I'm using. That's all flowing in together. I'm going to just leave it for now and we'll see how things go. I'll just fix a couple of these other spots where there's a clear line between where the wet paint dried and where it was not yet dry. Just rubbing the tip of your brush against the paper will help smooth that out and we'll also lift up more color so you'll have some more lights and darks. You could fix it more completely by putting another layer of paint on after things dry. For each of the bases of these flowers, I'm going to add some yellow. That yellow is going to also spread into the stems. With a green, I'm coming and pulling down the paint into a stem shape and then painting a couple leaves. Tulip leaves are messy looking and you don't really have to worry about having a really complicated shape. You don't have to worry about having any complicated veining for your tulip leaves. So you have some freedom to be a little messier when you're painting them. I'm just smoothing out that edge there and lifting up a little color. For this second flower, I can figure out how I want the stem angled. Tulips have a lot of movement to them and if you've ever had a vase of tulips and watched them over a couple days, you'll see they open and close and they bend in one way and another way. There's a lot of movement to the flowers and I'm trying to convey that sense with the positioning of the leaves, and the stems, and the flowers. I'm trying to vary the sizes of the leaves and, the heights of the leaves, and the directions that they flow and the same with the stems, and the same with the flowers themselves. They're not all faced the same way. For this one, I think I'm going to hug this flower stem inside this leaf. The leaves have a folded shape, and so this stem is folded inside the leaf. Then the second leaf I'm having come over on the other side and hugging the other side of the flower, can smooth out some of that contrast between light and dark. You could come back in and fix more of the leaves or you can just leave them be. I'm going to add a little more detail to these flowers. I'm going to paint in the petals on the opposite side to give it more of a three-dimensional look. These are going to be a little bit darker they're behind the other petals. Fill in a little bit of that white space. You could also go in and paint some vanes or more details on both the flowers and the leaves. But again, this is a sketch and you can go as complicated or as uncomplicated as you want. On this one, I'm just painting a pedal back there. I'm not sure that works because this, in the front, it looks like those two petals are one, the way the paint spread. So I'm just going to smooth this out and we'll pretend that that was one petal and then not worry about showing the petal on the opposite side. For this last one, I'm coming back in and adding two petals behind. I'm just leaving this pretty loose and a bit messy, and I'm not going to paint more details. I'll wait and have a nice contrast between the pen and the water color. I'll let that completely dry before I draw in the other tulips with the pen. 10. Tulips in Watercolor and Pen 2: This page is now completely dry and as I've shown you before, I can test it out by touching the page and if it's cool to the touch, it's still damp. But this isn't, so I know it's fully dry. The next step will be to take a pen and sketch in the tulips behind the watercolor tulips like in this other sketchbook. You can use whatever pen that you want and I just wanted to show you here a couple of finished, carefully painted tulips. So you can see the difference between these loose watercolors and the more carefully-rendered ones. So for a sketchbook, it doesn't matter how messy you are. But I really like having this contrast of the loose watercolors and the more detailed pen sketches. I'm using the Tombow pen, which I've already used in a couple of the other examples that I've shown you. I'm sketching these tulips behind the painted tulips. I'm carefully following where the lines would go and imagining that those lines of the stems and when I do the leaves, that those are behind the painted ones. So it'll look like it's a continuous line and not just sketched in front of the painted tulips. I'm adding some detail, veining, and textural marks like I showed you in the daffodil sketches. I'm just sketching these out without much of a plan. I'm figuring it out as I go along and I want to fill up a lot of the page and have things overlapping. So I think I want to put another leaf over here. Again, I want to create a sense of movement and vary the heights, the shapes, the directions of all the elements, the leaves, and the flowers. I think combining the watercolor and the pen in this way makes a much more compelling and interesting page than if it was just pen or just watercolor. If your lines go over your painted marks, that's okay. Again, it's a sketchbook. If you make mistakes or make a little bit of a mess of what you're doing, that's all right. More than anything else, I just want to encourage you again to enjoy the process and to get lost in the joy of creating something beautiful. So here this stem is twisting behind not only the painted tulips but that other sketched tulip. I really like creating what looks like a tangle of leaves and stems and flowers. Then I need another leaf to come back over here. So I just hold the pen above where I've painted to continue the line as if I were sketching that so that I know where the line should go. I'm just going to continue along here; adding flowers, and stems, and leaves. I'm sketching out the petals similar to how we painted them. So there will be overlapping petals and petals behind and then some veining. An alternative that you could do in your sketchbook is to put sketched pen lines on your painted tulips. So you could go in, leaving the background completely white and just outline your marks that you made with watercolor using your pen. You could also add details like veining to your watercolors with pen or you could add veining and other textural details with an additional layer of paint. So I'm going to go back after I've sketched all of the shapes, and add some painting to my sketched tulip leaves but I wanted to just put them in place first. You can work however you're most comfortable. If you want to plan out where everything goes, you can do that too. I think I want one more flower and put it over here. Again, I'm varying direction of my flowers and creating a sense of movement. This flower, I'm going to make a little bit more open. If you have an actual flower to observe and work from, as I mentioned before, you can turn it and study it from all different sides. You can also watch the changes as the flowers open and close, and capture your flowers in different states of openness. So I want this leaf up here to go pretty tall then have this leaf come behind here. I like the mess of the tulip leaves and the stems and the flowers to all be tangled up and entwined. Now, adding a bit of veining with some somewhat broken lines, following the lines down like I did with all the other parts of the tulips. I want to add just a sense of texture and a little bit more interest and a bit more contrast between the rough watercolor sketches and the more detailed tulips done in pen. You can of course do this with other flowers if you wanted to. There are just so many options for creating in your sketchbook, and once you start playing and experimenting, the ideas usually flow and you can just keep going and going. I think really getting your momentum and starting a practice of working in your sketchbook and keeping up with that practice will help so much with coming up with ideas. The more you work in your sketchbook, the easier it will be, the better you'll get, and when you face the blank page, you won't be wondering what to fill it with, because you'll have lots of ideas. You'll have things you'll want to try. You'll have things you want to experiment with, things you want to capture. So just a few more textural lines here and then you can go back over any of the areas that you think need to be a little bit darker. I think I want to add a little darkness to some of these areas where things overlap just to give more of a sense of three dimensionality, so that it seems like the forward petals are popping up a little bit more, that they're in front of the other petals. Then I think you can darken any lines that need darkening, or if there's a line that's too broken and you want to add a little more continuousness to it. I think I'm also going to outline these lines a little bit, make them darker, the ones on the edges of the leaves. That way they'll just stand out a bit more. Of course, you don't have to do this. You really can do whatever you'd like in your sketches. If you wanted to leave your page of tulips in watercolor and not the pen mark, or if you wanted to do a whole series of pages of tulips, some in watercolor, some in pen and some with a combination, working your pages as a series is a good way to come up with ideas and it's a great way to practice and get better at each of the elements that you're working on. But always, I think it's most important to enjoy yourself to get lost in the moment of creating. As I mentioned it before, to be in the flow, to be in the moment. Working like this on any project where you're going to be filling the page can be so meditative, it's calming, and it really lets you focus and be present in the moment. So here's my finished sketch that combines watercolor and pen. It was really fun to do, and I hope that you will make one too. 11. Daffodil Collage 1: I want to show you a few examples, we're going to be doing collage now, here's an example from another collaborative sketchbook that I did with Dana Boyd Barry. These are daffodils done with collage. Collage has so many options, you can use found papers or you can create your papers. These tulips were made with papers that I colored with marker. I love the texture that the marker gives. You can create your own papers like this with marker or even crayon, these are also some marker pages. You can paint your pages and then cut things out, and it's just such a fun process and has so many options for making it your own. These are some spring bulbs. We're going to be doing some daffodils in this lesson. Here is an arrangement of some found papers that I've collected, here's some painted papers, you can paint your own, here's some wrapping paper. I'd like to just hang on to things, here's some graph paper and paint chips are always fun to use, scrapbook paper. This is a piece of printer paper that I painted, you can paint watercolor paper with just different colors. Hold on to interesting things that you come across like from magazines and catalogs, lots of options there. Here's a postcard from Uppercase Magazine, has a fun pattern and texture to that. I love using maps in Collage. They have such fun textures and I like the text. Then here's a garden catalog that was really fun, it's got these old fashioned illustrations inside, black and white unlike newsprint, and the outside has lots of great colors. I'm sure you can find lots of found objects around your house that you can use, like here's some paper bag that I just crumpled up. This is something from a sewing pattern, scraps of fabric and yarn work well in collage. Here is a collection of some things. I'm going to organize everything, sorted by color, and then we will come back and work on putting together the collage. Here are my sorted piles, by color, and it helps to be organized like this. We can start by creating some leaf shapes, I'm just going to use the scissors and cut out a variety of different greens for my daffodil leaves. We didn't sketch daffodil leaves in the sketching exercise, but they're pretty simple shapes. Here's some leaves that I cut and some stems. I'm going to put these aside, grab my sketchbook, and we're working directly in the sketchbook, orienting it to the side like this. You can orient yours however you'd like. I'm going to start by gluing down something to be the ground. I'm just using some crumpled scraps of paper bag, just gathering everything brown that I want to use, then crumpling things, tearing things a little bit more. I wanted to look a little messy. I'm taking my glue stick and just putting some glue directly on the sketchbook page and then coming back and arranging my soil, crumpling things up, cleaning it a bit three-dimensional. I have bits that are sticking up, bits that are overlapping, this process is so fun and you could spend hours working on a collage, figuring out where you want to put all the bits. This is purple and dries clear, this's Elmer's school glue. I've sped up the video a little bit, while you watch this process of gluing down at the base of my page. This is the ground, the dirt. Then once you have that glue down here, oh, a couple other contrasting bits, some fabric. I like all the texture involved in these, so then once that base is done, you can start arranging your leaves. I'm going to group them as if they are distinct bulbs underground, and I'm going to combine different colors, different textures in these groupings. I want a variety of heights, a variety of directions for the leaves to be facing, I want a variety of different textures of the papers. Although in nature, daffodil leaves are pretty much all the same color. I think it's much more interesting to vary the colors. In this process, organizing things, you can arrange things, trim things, group them how you want them to go before you glue them down. This is really the fun part that you can get lost in and work for ages if you want to. You can also be more decisive by just going in and gluing things down right away. I have a tendency to arrange and rearrange, and rearrange, and rearrange again, but, do whatever feels right for you. If you want to really get lost in the process and have fun with the process of arranging, creating interesting contrasts, interesting arrangements, it's up to you. You could create a number of different collages. These are all lined up, I think I'll have three distinct groups here, as if there are three bulbs underground. I'm going to go back in, oh, let's put some stems here, so for each of these groupings of leaves, I want to have 2-3 stems, then 2-3 flowers, you can trim up your stems if you need to. The stems are also contrasting greens. I don't want too much uniformity, so let's move everything and we'll start glowing some things down. I'm using a scrap of paper on which to apply the glue so it doesn't get all over my table, and then arranging things on the page, weaving it through what's already there can be a little tricky. You may want to put it on top of the base and then you can go back and add more of the brown on the bottom. You could also start directly with your leaves and then put the base on afterwards, whatever works for you, whatever seems to flow most naturally for your process. I'm doing a little bit more rearranging as I work here. Gluing them down, finalizing my design, just letting things be organic and interesting, nestling the stems between where the leaves are. I want to vary my heights of things, so everything's not lined up exactly. Add in anything if you think you need it more, I'm going to glue down the rest of my leaves, and I'll see you back in the next lesson and we'll finish the collage. 12. Daffodil Collage 2: I'm back. I've glued down all of my sets of leaves and my stems. I need to add a little bit more of the brown paper at the bottom to overlap where some of the stems and leaves have gone on top of my initial layer. This final layering, you could just keep going on and on with your layering. You could alternate between adding stems, and leaves, and dirt, and just keep building your layers, building complexity. Here's some pages of some grasses, some winter grasses that I think will add some nice colors and textures. I'll just fit those in there. We crumple them. Sometimes I would tear my papers, sometimes I would cut them. It's really up to you what you're comfortable with, and what you enjoy doing, also, how much time you want to spend. You could do this quickly, or you could do this more slowly. There's my base, I've got my leaves, I'm going to start creating some petal shapes. I'll take some yellows and cut out. We've already studied the shapes of Daffodil petals. Here, let me sketch out a really super basic Daffodil. This one's pretty much head on. I did this with only five petals. I don't know if there are any Daffodils in nature that have five petals, but this one is going to. I guess that's also the fun of collage. You can make your collage super realistic or you can take some liberties, have the wrong number of petals, definitely, have the wrong color of leaves or flowers. I want to turn that around so you can't see any pencil marks. Then here, just like with the leaves, you can arrange, and rearrange, and figure out where things want to go. I'm going to use another yellow, or a different color for my next flower shape, sketching it out again. This time, the map, I think, will provide us with a really fun texture. I love having the text. Pittsburgh right in the center of our Daffodil flower. Again, varying colors, varying shapes, having as much for variety in your collage as you can, makes it so much more interesting. Here's our Pittsburgh flower. We can finalize the arrangements as we go. This is another map but a different color. Sketch out the petals, then cut them out. You could also sketch on the opposite side. I didn't really plan that well. Just figure out where you want to put things, what colors you want to use. This, I think we're going to use the opposite side of this wrapping paper, sketch out a sideways Daffodil flower, where you can only see three of the petals. Some of these will be mostly towards the front, some of them will be facing up, down, to the side, just like with our sketches. Then this is when, maybe I'll just cut this first, this deep, warm yellow. Maybe another one. This would be a good flower bud. You can cut more than you need. Here's another sideways flower, or you can cut just as many as you want. Again, arrange and rearrange to your heart's content. You may want to keep certain colors separate, or put certain colors next to one another. Then also, when you add your trumpet shapes in, things will change, and you can rearrange. So let's see. I think I want one more. This one will be another somewhat head on flower and are varying sizes as well as directions. So sizes, colors, directions. They say, "Variety is the spice of life.", I think it's also the spice of art. One last thing I want to add before we do the trumpets is that papery exterior, that wraps the buds, and then is behind the flower, this sewing pattern paper works great for that. I'm just going to take that, cut it a bit, and then we can arrange it not on all of them but on some of them. We'll start over here and just twist, and crumple, and wrap. If you need to rip things, or cut things some more to make them fit better, go right ahead. But this, I can pull up a little bit and put that behind. So that gives more dimensionality, and then just wrap and twist until you're happy with how it looks. Then some of that will be hidden behind the flower. We'll trim it a little bit. Some of that will be hidden behind the flower, and not all of the flowers will have some. But it just adds another layer, another dimension, another bit of interest. We can glue that flower down. Actually, I've glued all of the flowers down here and I'm ready to move on to the trumpets. You can use some oranges and reddish oranges for this. I'm just going to pray it by here. Cut out some different shapes, and arrange, and rearrange. I don't have a master plan of what I want each flower to look like, so I'm just going to go with what my gut tells me, and what I think looks good at the moment. Again, if we're not gluing them down right away, we can change our mind, and arrange, and rearrange. Now, I'm not quite sure if I like those two colors that are so similar. Maybe I'll switch and turn that over. Yeah, that looks interesting; more patterns and textures. Just like with all of the other parts of this collage, I'm going to cut the different shapes, take my time arranging, and rearranging, and figuring out how I want my layout to be. Then I'll glue it all down. For this one, I think I might make a forward facing flower. I'm sad to have our Pittsburgh go. Here I will take some text, cut the center. We'll have a contrasting center of the trumpet, so it'll be two toned. I'm not sure. No, I don't think I like that either. I don't think there's enough contrast there. Maybe here, or here. I like the light and dark; contrasts with that better. Maybe we can preserve that Pittsburgh text. Looking through my scraps and finding colors that I like and I'd like to use. Again, I can change my mind and try different things. That one carried our Pittsburgh too, but I like how it's even darker. Maybe, let's make this a bit on the side. Our trumpet is slightly sideways. We can preserve some of that text, then, so the center will be slightly tilted to the side too. It's like you're looking into part of the center. There's the two colors; the lighter and darker. We can put it so some of the text is still visible underneath. Maybe we'll also do the same with this one, trim it a little bit so that it's slightly to the side. It makes a more interesting arrangement. Then I'll cut out more and glue them all down, and we'll have a finished collage. Here is my finished collage. I've cut my shapes. I've arranged them and rearranged them. There's a variety of different colors. Let's move this a little bit there. It's more to the center. There's a variety of colors and textures. That one even has a green center. I varied the heights, I varied the direction things are looking. On some of them, there's that papery outside, some of them not. I just really like how it turned out. But what is even better is the process, it was such a fun process. I hope that you will take some time to create your own spring bulb collage. 13. Watercolor Faded Tulip 1: This is a tulip that was in an arrangement I got earlier this year and I thought that the faded dead flower was so beautiful that I saved it and I think I want to paint this with you. I'm going to start by just observing the colors and then doing some color mixing. If you feel good about your ability to mix colors you can skip this lesson and go onto the next one. But if you want to watch my process I hope you'll stick around. What I love about this is that the faded tulip is not going to require our perfection and the imperfection is where the beauty is. I see so many interesting colors in here and I think it'll be a lot of fun to mix. The first color I see is this tan color and I'm going to start with some yellow ocher. You do not have to have this set of paints you do not have to use these same colors. You can paint whatever you want if you have a tulip that's past its prime and you want to use that flower, great. I also have a photograph of my flower if you want to work from that. Just getting some yellow ocher on my palette. I actually think I see a few different versions of this tan color so I think I will fill up a couple more wells with some yellow ocher and then add some colors to it to create my mixes. As I've shown you before, sometimes I go back and forth and back and forth to create the colors that I'm looking for. I think it's just a fun and joyful process as well as necessary for narrowing down an exact color. I'm going to start in this well and I see a greenish version of this tan and I'm going to add some olive green to my yellow ocher. I like using greens in mixes, the straight greens instead of using them on their own. I'm going to add a little blue. This is cerulean blue and the green I see here is more of a bluish green so I think this will help take us closer to the color that I see. I'm going to add some white and white is often frowned upon in watercolor circles, but I think it makes some beautiful color mixes especially when you want your color to be more opaque or if you want it to have a creamy look. I see it's really bluish green on this tip here, I'm going to test out my color on my scrap of paper and see how this looks. I know on film it's a little hard for you to capture all the subtle color differences that I see in person. I also think that this green maybe watered down can look nice for the stem, maybe also mixed with another version of the ocher. I'm going to leave this mix and work on this next mix which I think I will just add some white to the yellow ocher. I like adding white to yellow ocher to get a tan. If I was painting the wrappers of the daffodils that I talked about earlier that color will work well so I like that. We've got two tan colors this one I think I want to be a darker brownish color maybe like this stem. Instead of adding brown I'm going to mix a brown starting out with some blue this one I think is the Russian blue. I'll test this out I like that. I think I will mix one more color here. Instead of turning that to brown I'm going to keep that bluish green color and make another well with brown. I love it when you unexpectedly mix a color that really works for what you're looking for or that is just really beautiful. Let's see. I'm going to add that blue to the yellow ocher again and then some red. This is madder lake red I like to use that in my brown mixes. Just mixing this color together and I think we need more ocher. Sometimes as I've said I go back and forth as to what I'm going to add. That's the color we're looking for a darker brown that's a bit warm. I think I'll just mix it a little bit I'm going to test this out and see. Testing your color out on paper helps so much. No, I don't think that is quite what I have in mind so I'm going to add a little more ocher to warm it up a bit because that's looking a bit cool on the paper and maybe some of this brighter, warmer yellow too. I think that's Hansa yellow and I need a little more red and we'll test that out. That's a gorgeous brown and I think that'll work for our painting. Looking around at the colors, I'm seeing the next color I want to mix is purple. I'm going to start with some red this is carmine red which is a bright pinkish red and I know that this works well to make some really beautiful purples that aren't really dull. Sometimes your purples can be dull depending on what reds you use. I'm going to use this Russian blue again and that is a gorgeous purple color so beautiful. I'm going to test this out on our color swatch strip now that's beautiful but I think we need a little more red. Oh, look at that. See, I could mix colors for hours it's so joyful. That's a beautiful, beautiful color. Next, I want to mix a color for those centers the really dark blackish center. I could start with black but I think I want to take purple as my base so a similar color to what we just mixed starting out with that bright pinkish red. Again, experiment with the paints that you have and do your own mixes. You don't have to have the exact materials that I have and I know you can mix so many colors. I'm going to start with this yellow ocher adding that in there and see where that takes us. Because what I'm aiming for is a purplish dark brown, which is a close color to black but not black exactly. That's looking a little bit too blue for what I have in mind so a little more red. This is taking a really nice dark color and that's looking good but I think we need to go a little bit further and make it a little warmer. I know you can't really see the subtle differences of color on film. Oh, look at that. Really, really lovely. A little bit more blue. A nice deep dark color and I think that'll work well for those centers. Maybe a little bit more red. Let's see. Yeah, that looks really nice. I think those are all the colors that I'm going to need for this tulip. I'm going to get my materials together, setup my space and I'll see you in a little bit. 14. Watercolor Faded Tulip 2: I've got my arrangement set up. I have a piece of watercolor paper that I'm going to sketch on, I've got my flower over here, my paint here, and I'm ready to begin my sketch. Observing this, I'm going to sketch up a leaf that comes up like this. I think I want two leaves, the second one twisting around. Here comes the flower stem. I know that what you're going to see while I'm painting and what I see will be different. The angles are going to be different. Here, the petals hanging down. One of the nice things about this as a subject is that it's already somewhat messy. As I mentioned before, you don't have to worry about perfection. If your sketch, whether you're doing it in a sketchbook or outside of the sketchbook, if your sketch is messy, that's okay. There's also those little center parts which I'm not going to sketch in, we'll just paint those. I've just used one single line for that stem even though I know it's going to be thicker. Next, before I start painting, I'm going to use my kneaded eraser to lighten my pencil lines, that's my secret weapon. Just dabbing the paper with the kneaded eraser will pick up the graphite and make your lines a lot lighter. Once you paint over a line, it's there forever, and if your colors are light, if you don't want to see them, lightening your pencil lines as much as you can is the way to go. I'm just starting by adding some of our lightest ocher color to our leaf shape. I'm just pulling down the color, adding that first color, and then I'm going to take some of this green for the tip of the leaf and drop in that color. I'm just using my brush to blend the colors on the paper and adding more colors. Down here, I'm adding the brown and blending it. This is a wet on wet technique, and that first layer of wetness is that lighter color. Everything is going to blend and bleed. I can control the way it blends a bit by pushing the pen around on my page. I can build up my color, adding more paint because all of this paint is very wet, I've just mixed the colors. They will be more transparent when they dry than if I was working with a dryer mix of paint. This part is really fun, just letting the colors do their thing on the page and adding more color, and I can take my brush along the edge and drop and push the paint. It won't spread all the way, so you'll get some nice gradations of color. I really like how the green looks at the top of this. You can use as many or as few colors as you want for something like this and just keep adding until you like the way it looks. Also, when I'm working on my actual finished paintings and not just a sketch, I would add more layers once things have dried. I'm going to move on to the petals now, and for the base color of the petals, I'm going to use that same pale ocher color, and just pull down the color like I did for the stem. It's okay that the pencil lines are here and you can see them pretty clearly under my paint because we'll be adding that purple paint. I'm going to be painting these petals one at a time and making sure not to paint a petal that's directly touching another until the paint has dried. That way I can have more control over each individual petal. These three petals are not really touching one another, there are other petals in between. I'm going to switch to another brush now, a smaller one, and add my purple. I'm going to make sure I have a good point on here. I don't want it super wet or else it'll spread everywhere, but then I'm going to take just the tip of my brush and begin adding the purple on the edge, and that's going to spread beautifully along the edges where I touch the brush. If I move my brush quickly, the paint won't spread out as much as when I pause and dab the edge with the brush. Dabbing it like this will spread more paint and moving it quickly will just give me a finer line that doesn't spread into the petal as much. I'll come to my next petal and do the same thing. Again, with this subject, if your petals end up looking messy, that's okay because they're messy in life, dead and crumpled. Using the same technique for each of these petals, and you can see how the first one has spread more already than the other ones. I can just keep going in as long as it's damp and adding a bit more color. I can also go outside of the lines a bit to refine the shape and add more color. The dryer it gets, the less the color will spread. If you want to add a darker edge, you can do that even after the paint has dried. Dabbing with the brush will spread more paint out into the petal. Those last two petals, I'm going to wait until everything has dried before I paint them. But while we're waiting for that, this leaf shape is still wet, I can come back in and work on refining the color and the edges a bit, adding a bit more of this brown at the base and along the edges. Of course, getting really detailed with your painting is not necessary if it's just a sketch for your sketch book, unless you really want to get into it and enjoy your process, which is also fun. That's the great thing about a sketchbook, you can decide what you want to do in it, how much time you want to spend, how detailed you want to get, you are in control. Just deepening the color, refining the blending, refining the shape a bit, you can do that while it's still damp like this. Going back to my flower, observing some more, I can look and see what else I want to add. In the petals, I can see some green near where they connect to the stem, so I'm going to add a little bit of this green to the tops of the petals. Coming back here, I don't want my brush to be too wet, and I'm going to just add a little bit of green that gives one more bit of interest and that's a little bit too much paint, a little too wet. I can just dab it like that to refine my lines and my color. It's almost like a shadow of this green color. I can come back to these other petals and add some of the green as well. That's one of the beauties of watercolor, how the colors all flow into one another, they're transparent, there's variations, and you can just keep working and keep refining. I'm going to let this dry completely before we move on to do the other leaf and petals. I'll see you in the next lesson. 15. Watercolor Faded Tulip 3: This has dried. I know that the leaf is still damp, and although this still feels cool to the touch these petals, I don't think they're wet enough that we have to worry about things bleeding. I'm going to just continue with the flower and paint the other two petals that we have to paint. This petal on top here, I'm adding that ocher color and it's overlapping the other three petals we've already painted at the top there. I have to make sure that it's fully touching each of the parts that overlap so there isn't a gap. Adding in my color and blending and pushing the paint, just like we did already in the other parts of the painting. I think I can paint this other one that's below here. Again, we're going to paint right up to where it overlaps, so that it really does look like it's a continuous petal behind there, and just smoothing all of my edges. I can continue to refine things. I think this bottom part, since I didn't use a lot of water, this is dry enough to start adding some other purple, if it's too wet when you start adding your second color, this second color will just spread everywhere. You have to be careful about both the base color that's on your paper already and the paint you add, you don't want it to be too wet, either of them to be too wet, and it come here along the edge. Sometimes it can be hard when there's two parts separated to make it look like it's all continuously one, you want the colors to blend as much as possible and look like it's a continuous blending of paint and color. I think that's pretty good. This is too wet to continue. Oh, that leaf is still wet. I left a finger mark there, and you don't want to go back in when it's wet like that. But while we're waiting for these things to dry, I can go back to the petals that are already painted and add a darker edge. When I look at my flower, I see that there's a bit of a darker edge and there are some tiny veins. It's really up to you to have detailed you want to get. But I can add a darker edge and then just a few textural marks with the tip of my brush. Just blending these very fine lines in with the edge. You can just continue to build color and texture, if that's what you want or you can leave it as plain and simple as you'd like. When you're adding this darker edge like this. You can also refine the shape a bit and smooth out any roughness. Sometimes when you're using cold press watercolor paper and your paint is wet, the edge can dry unevenly just because of the nature of the paper and the texture there. Coming back to this petal and adding a darker line around, I think the petal that's behind there is dry enough that this additional purple I'm adding won't bleed into it. I'm just adding some fine textural marks here too, just with the very tip of my brush. I'm not going too far into the petal. Now, this petal, I think, is dry enough that I can begin adding the purple, and working just as we did for the other petals. Paired, starting to blend, dabbing in my color and pulling it down. Again, when you move the brush quickly without stopping, you'll have a finer line, but if you pause with a brush, there we go. Things are spreading a little bit better now. Pausing and dabbing your brush will spread the paint. It'll bloom out into the other color. It's really up to you how much of each color you add. I'm going to go back to this other petal here, add a little bit more of a darker edge,and just refine all of my shapes. Of course, adding more and more details is not necessary, as I've said before. This is your sketch book, and you are in control of what goes in. I'm going to move my paper here and I'm going to do the stem, and that top petal was still wet, but because I'm using the same color, I'm not too worried about it spreading in a way that I won't like. I'm just taking the very tip of my brush to where it meets the leaf and smoothing out the color, adding the ocher first and then some green, and pushing the color up. Now observing my flower, the stem is thicker at the bottom, and then where it attaches to the flower crumbles and shrivels up. I'm trying to reproduce that with paint here. Then I'll drop in a little bit of brown because where that neck of the stem is, I see some brown and a little bit of green. I'll just let those things blend together, and I think I can begin painting my other leaf here, the one that twists and curls behind the first leaf. The part that is behind, just a small pointed tip here. I'm adding that first ocher color, and it's going to go right up to that first leaf. Then where it comes out on the other side, goes right up to that leaf and curves around. I'm just following my pencil lines as reference and smoothing right up to the edge. It does look like it's behind that first leaf, and I can continue to add colors with the same process that I used for the first leaf. Dabbing in the brown, dabbing in some green, and letting the colors bleed and blend. I'm just pressing very gently with the tip of my brush to push the paint around on the paper and dabbing in more color where I need it. Heading a bit more of the green to that tip and some brown. Looking at my painting it's still pretty wet, that petal, this is fairly dry behind petal. I'm going to dark in the purple on here, paint a bit of an edge definition and right where it overlaps so that it looks like it's behind. Actually, I'm going to cover that whole spot was more purple, make it darker so it looks like truly behind that front petal. So there's more of a definition between those two petals and they completely look separate. I just put my finger in some wet paint, luckily it didn't smear. I can add a little bit more purple to the edges of that petal that's behind there, in that way it pops out a little more. I'm going to drop in a little bit more brown here at the neck of the stem where it attaches to the flower and just dark in all a little bit. I think we need a little more color on that second leaf too, just dabbing the paper and adding some green. I'm just changing the shape slightly of that tip so it's almost like it's curled. Now everything has dried, and I'm going to come back and paint the few last details. Starting with those center dark bits, and since I didn't sketch them, I'm just going to wing it. It's really hard to tell in my actual flower where they are. Because when the flower lays down, the pedals go up, and the shape totally changes. So I could observe directly or just come in here and paint them where I think they should go. This really dark color will cover over my other paint that's on the paper. So if they're going to overlap the other petals, that's okay. I think I put one up here too. The whole flower is coming apart instead of that closed cup that we painted in the other lesson. So rinsing off my brush, I'm going to change to the other purple, and add the darker line on this last petal. Once everything is dry, you can continue to add more layers and more textural marks, more details, veins and fine lines. You can get as detailed as you want to or not. It's totally up to you. As I've said again and again, this is your sketchbook sketchbook, this is your art practice. Although I'm doing this on a separate piece of paper, I'm thinking of it as a sketch. So coming back, I'm just adding a little bit more color to all of these petals to just define everything a little bit more. I was talking to alive class of some painting students and talking about how there's a fine line between overdoing things with your painting and not adding enough detail. Just a little bit extra detail can really make things look more finished. I'm going to go back to this leaf now and add a bit more color and smooth out the edges, because things dried was an uneven edge especially where the two leaves were intersecting. I'm just going to smooth that out. So just rubbing with my brush. I changed to a bigger brush here. Rubbing with the tip to just smooth everything out. Also adding a bit more color will deepen the color of my leaf. This, of course, is not necessary. If you are using a different paper, a smoother paper, you might not have the rough edges from the really wet paint drawing on your cold press paper. If you go over where your paint is, you can just deepen it by adding more paint. I'm going to add some green to this last petal that we painted because it hasn't gotten any yet, and then just add a little bit more to each of the other petals. Just one more a little bit of detail. So I'm going to call this done. Now it's totally dry, and I wanted to show you another painting that I did with another class. I refined the shape of the leaf. I think this first leaf was a little too thick, I made this one thinner, and I changed how the second leaf was oriented. So going up instead of coming down. I added a lot more detail, a lot more textural mark with this. Some veining, more texture on the pedal too. That's just to show you the contrast of what adding a bit more detail can do for your painting. One of the great things about a sketchbook is it allows you to practice and try out your ideas and refine them. 16. On Your Own: Now that I've demonstrated many different ways of creating in your sketch book inspired by the season of spring, whether you can get out and enjoy it or not. I hope that you will turn to your own sketchbook and begin creating too. If you need a few more ideas for your sketchbook, here is a page from my winter botanical sketchbook class, and that's done in colored pencil. You could do something like this with spring branches. Here is an example from my sketchbook, that's a rose branch that's just beginning to leaf out. So you could look around your neighborhood or your garden and find other branches that you want to sketch. Here are some example pages from my gouache class. Gouache is a fun medium to use in your sketchbook, and something like a spring bird and dandelions and other spring weeds are really fun to do in your sketch book too. Violas are one of my favorite spring flowers, and in my first botanical sketchbook class, I demonstrate how to sketch them in pin. I also have a class on painting them in watercolor if you want to try that too. I hope that gives you a few more ideas and inspiration for your own sketchbook. I know that in terms of my own art practice, my sketchbook is a private place for me to create and I don't often share its pages, except sometimes with my students. If you don't feel compelled to share your pages with me, and with the rest of the class, that's okay, but I would love to hear about your experiences. If there are things that are frustrating to you, if there are things that you discovered that were amazing, or interesting, or strange, let us know and we can discuss them. One of the great things about Skillshare is the fact that it's a community. Students help each other, encourage each other, and I know when I first started making art, although Skillshare wasn't around then, and I wasn't taking any classes at all. Being able to share my creations on my blog and have people comment and encourage me was so important to my development. If you do choose to share your pages, which I hope you will, please ask for feedback if you want specific feedback. I'm always encouraging in my comments and I make sure to visit every student's project and give some feedback. So if you have specific question, let me know and I'll answer it. I'm so grateful for you for taking this class with me and I hope that it will inspire you to create your own art. Please be sure to follow me here on Skillshare, and you'll always know when I have a new class, or when I'm offering a fun contest with all fun prizes. In the past I've given away a year's membership to Skillshare to the winners of my contests. Following me is a great way to know when that's happening. I'd love for you to visit my website too and get a hold of your own copy of my free PDF of getting started with your sketchbook. Visit mygiantstrawberry.com/classes to download your PDF. That will help you and outline all supplies that I recommend and I enjoy using. It will also give you lots of inspiration for creating your own pages. It also gives you a little bit more of my background story and my experience with sketchbooks. Again, I'm so grateful that you decided to take this class with me. I can't wait to see what you create.This class will help you welcome your own spring with joy. What are you doing? [inaudible] Silly. You are silly.