Whimsical Watercolor: Let's Paint a Hot Air Balloon Mini Class

1. Introduction: Welcome to my whimsical watercolor mini class. I am super excited to share this class with you today. We are going to paint a hot air balloon together. I'm going to teach you some real concentrated watercolor techniques. And we're going to make an oversized greeting card together. So let's dive in and get started. I'll see you in the next lesson. 2. Supplies: So let's get started. Let's dive in to the supplies that we're going to be using for today's class. Okay, let's dive in. So we are going to be making this oversized reading card together. We're going to P, I'm going to teach you all the techniques to paint this hot air balloon together. And you don't need any drawing experience required for this class. Super fun. We're going to have a ton of fun. Okay, inside the classroom, there are two downloads. There's a download of general art supplies, and there's also a download for this class. So it's a four-page download. So you're going to want to go in there and download this on to some paper, download and print it out. Actually, the first page is a picture of the project. It also tells you to grab the following from your stash. So these are the supplies that we're going to be using. You just need a simple set of watercolors. Whatever you have in your stash will work. I'm using this small Paul Rubens set. We're going to be using a handful of colors. Pink, orange, blue, brown, and a white. So no worries, just grab whatever you have on hand. I have lots of different watercolors. It's not going to matter for this project whether you're using a super, super high-end watercolor set, or you're using your favorite watercolor set that you use for your paper crafting projects. It's all good. Remember we only need the colors pink, orange, blue, brown, and white. Okay? Now, the other thing that you're going to need is some white gouache if you have it. So gouache is an opaque watercolor. It's got a funny name. We're using white for creating the hearts. This is a finishing technique for the project, but that's what we're using the white for today. Now, if you don't have white gouache, no worries. If you have a watercolor set that has white in it, that can work. You can also use a unit ball signal, a white gel pen or any kind of white pen that you might have, or some white acrylic paint. Okay. That'll work just fine. Okay. Now, you also are going to need a black pen of some sorts. Okay? It could be your ballpoint pen. It could be any kind of black pen that you would have in your stash of sketch Marker. This is a Tombow Mono drawing pen. You could also use a micron pen that you have. You just need it to have that kind of bullet point tip for you to work with today. Okay. You also need a you need a pencil because we are gonna do some light sketching. Okay? And for your brushes, you need some round brushes. You can actually do this entire project with one brush, okay? But I have a couple here, I have a three or a six. Another, that's an eight and this is a ten. And the important thing is that we're using a round brush. These come to a nice point when they're wet. And we'll talk a little bit more about that as we get into it as well. Now, you also need a little bit of glue. And I'm going to talk about the handouts and some of the papers stocks that we're using. Now for the card face. I am using Strathmore ready cut watercolor. The reason why I love this paper is that it already comes sized at five by seven. And it's cold press and it's 100% cotton. But it's okay if you do not have this paper in your stash. No worries. Here are two other brands that are easily available. These are not 100% cotton, but the work great for this project. So it's a Fabriano, 140 pound, 300 GSM. This is technically, this is actually a wood pulp paper, but what I love about this brand is that texture. It's got that really nice texture in it. That kind of similarly look and feel of 100% cotton paper. Now, the Canson XL is easily, readily available. It's also 140 pounds. It's cold pressed. It's a very nice, durable surface. You can see that it has texture. It'll work just fine for the techniques that we're doing today. So again, this project doesn't have to be used like super expensive watercolor paper to be successful. Okay? Now, I have, one of the other things that you're going to need is you're going to need a piece of stock or watercolor paper, a heavy paper to make your card base. This is an envelope. And your card base, the flat size for your card base is 10 " by 6.9. Okay. And then it's scored at five. But when you folded, your final size is going to be five by 6.9. Now, you can use heavyweight card stock or you can use watercolor paper. I'm using watercolor paper in today's class. This is from this set. This is what exactly what I'm using. Some blank watercolor cards. These are 100% cotton cold press paper. These, this set from our Tesla's really inexpensive. I do have that set listed in the download of general art supplies if you're interested in it. But remember, you can just pull a piece of card stock from your stash, okay? But the reason why I like this as if we could actually write on it, but today we're not going to pay on it. We are going to layer on to it. So it gives it some nice heavyweight for our projects. Okay. 3. Class Handout Walk-Through: Now, let's dive in. Let's dive in to the handouts. It's moved to the second page of the handout. The second page of the handout is the watercolor technique sheet. So you're going to want to print this out on my favorite watercolor, whatever you want to use. It can be anything in your stash and eight-and-a-half by 11, print this out. We're gonna do the watercolor techniques before we paint the final project together. You're going to print this out. Or if you don't have a printer, you can always bring in your watercolor sketchbook and do these techniques Alongside the class, alongside me. Or you can pull some watercolor paper and you can do the techniques. The reason why I provide this technique sheet is because it makes it easy for you to have all the techniques in one place. Three hole punch this if you want, and you can pop it in a notebook and you can keep it. As a reminder. You can also take some notes. Keep it as a reminder of all the techniques that you learned in the class. Okay? Now the third handout is the actual line drawing for the, for the hot air balloon. Ok, now you can print this out onto the cart, onto the watercolor card stock. Or there are two other ways. There are a couple of ways that you can transfer this image onto your, onto your watercolor paper. If you have a light box, you can bring your lightbox, put this put this on the light box, put this over top and you can trace it out. Or you can use, this is a piece of graphite paper or carbon paper is what? It's sometimes called, graphite or carbon. This side of it would get, you would take your watercolor paper. So I'm gonna just show this to you. You would lay this down onto your watercolor paper and lay the drawing over top. And then you can trace it out and it will give you a light drawing the image onto the watercolor paper. So this is just one way to take an, take a sketch and get it onto your watercolor paper. So another super simple way is to put this up and tape it to a sunny window, tape this over top of it, and you can trace it right on to that watercolor papers. So a couple of different ways to get the outline onto your watercolor paper. Now, you'll notice that this outline is just super simple. We're gonna be painting inside of it so those lines are going to disappear as we begin to paint. Okay? Alright, there's also some instructions down here on the bottom for tracing this image onto your watercolor papers. Super fun. Okay. The fourth the fourth page in the handout is the complete instructions of all of the steps that we're going to take today in this class so that you have it as a reference. So I'm going to walk through all of these steps as we paint our final project together. So that dives into the explanation of the handouts. Now it's time to do our final card assembly and add in our finishing splatter details. Now, this is still a little bit of wet and I'm going to hit it with a heat tool and dry it up. Before we add it to dry it up just to make sure I don't nod your smear or anything. I'm going to bring this up so that you can see some of that extra dimension. Loving, loving the way this came out. Alright, I've got a good glue. I'm going to use a wet glue. I like using this Gina k designs connect glue. You can use whatever is your favorite. I'm going to add quite a bit to my edges. I like using this glue because it is, Here's really well with watercolor. Because when I use tape runners and things like that, I tend to overuse. I tend to use so much. I just keep tape, tape, tape and tape it. Okay. So I'm adhering this to my card base. Just to finish this up, lining this eyeballing this up. It's a little bit because it's watercolor paper. We have to give it a little bit of push, right? Give it a little bit of push to get it to adhere. And that's okay. I'm loving the way this looks. Can also turn it over and then just kinda smooth your hand over the back of it. Just to get that extra little bit. Ceiling that up your ceiling, all that up. Loving it. It's on our card base. We're almost there. Now we're going to add the splatter. This is our finishing final detail. We've adhered are dry painting to the card front. I'm going to take a little bit of my pink and I'm going to take a little bit of my orange down here. And we're gonna do some watering little bit of pink so my brushes wet. And then I'm just tapping it over my finger and adding that splatter. This is my favorite technique. But the other thing is you can get all the way to the end of your project and you can oversee splatter. I've done that many times. That's okay. The splatter, get a little bit of splatter on your hearts to dials up the whimsy. It also gets all over your surface and makes for, for cleanup fun, right? So here's our final project that we painted together. I am loving it. It's so fun creating this whimsical look and feel with these rosettes and painting these loose washy roses. You've created this really fun painting you can for your oversized card. This mini class is just really fun. A great way to get, learn a bunch of techniques in the context of a really easy going project. And don't forget, you have all of the techniques that we walked through and you have them for a future project. 4. Practicing the Watercolor Techniques: Let's go ahead and get started. We're going to get started first with practicing the techniques. And this is something I like to do in all of my classes. We practice all of the techniques first, and then we paint the final project together. Then we add the details to the final project and do the cart assembly. So it makes it really easy because we're chunking things out in steps one at a time for you to go through the process. Okay? I've got some water here. And it's also really important for you to have either some kitchen towel or this is just a, a washcloth that I use for watercolor and then I just toss it back into the washer when I'm finished with it. Sometimes. So you can see that it's still kinda dirty right now. But the first thing that we're going to do is we're going to start working on these two techniques. First, we're going to do wet into wet, wet into dry. Then we're going to learn, I'm going to teach you my super simple technique for painting loose washy roses. We're going to talk about wash and opaque watercolor effects. And then we're going to come down here and I'm going to talk to you about drawing those whimsical banner details that we're going to do in the card. And that's this whimsical banner that we're going to draw in to our final card project. Okay. So let's get started. I've got my, I have a little Paul Rubens set here. This is just a really fun watercolor sediment. Bring this over. And I'm going to just pop that right there. I've got my water I've got my watercolor. This off to the side here. Just got my watercolors sitting right here so that we can see what we're doing. And I've got some water off to the side and my little kitchen towel while my little tau for my brush. Okay, now we're going to start with the two techniques. I'm going to talk about. The one thing about this mini class series in these mini classes is that I'm going to dive into techniques, watercolor techniques. Instead of diving into all of them at once, we're diving into a concentrated look at a couple of different techniques to build a project together. So we're taking it one step at a time. I've got my brush here. I'm using my number. This is my number eight. And I've got my round brush and it's wet. So I'm going to do wet into wet and wet into dry and talk about that technique first. So my brushes wet, my paper is dry and I'm going to get my paper wet. I'm just painting down some water. And then I'm going to come in here and just pick up some pigment right from the pan. So I'm using a pan set today. You can, if you're using your tube watercolor or a pallet of watercolor, it all, it's all good. Whatever you want, whatever your preference is. We're just using those basic colors that I shared at the beginning. Pink, orange, blue, brown, white, and a little bit of yellow. Okay. Wet into wet. So my brushes wet. And then I painted some wet water, wet water onto my watercolor paper. And now I'm dropping in my color. So this is wet into wet. You can see that my color is just really spidering out. And I can coax it a little bit, but watercolor only goes where the water is. You see how I'm just kinda moving it around and moving it around to show you that it won't go beyond where the water is. Unless I add a little bit more water to make it go. Okay? So this is wet into wet. And what's really fun about this technique is that you can mix up colors right in the water and let them mix and match and blend together. And we're going to be doing that when we paint our loose washy roses. It's super fun way to get that washy, washy watercolor effect. Okay, Now, wet into dry. So my paper is dry, my brush is wet. This brush has a lot of water on it. And if you have a brush where you don't want so much water on the brush, on the tip of the brush, you're just going to take it and roll it a little bit and get some of that excess water off. Personally, I like super wet brushes. You can always kinda play with your water ratios. So my brushes, my brushes wet. My paper is dry. And I'm going to pick up some pigment. And I'm going to start to paint it out. You can see that it's pretty intense when I first start. And then as I go out and keep painting, I've got a lot of water on this brush. So it's allowing me a lot of it's letting me go really, really far because there's a lot of water on this brush. And this paper is really taking the water very nicely. So I'm getting a nice graduated color of dark to light. Hi. So that's wet into dry, super simple. Wet into wet papers, wet, brushes, wet, adding pigment, dropping it in. Watch, this is still pretty wet. I'm going to go in and add a little bit of that yellow. You can see that it's still going to take in some of that color. Love. It, can still kinda go around and play with it. Okay. This is that super washy watercolor technique that's going to come in handy when we paint our news washy roses. Ok. Now, going to move up here. We've just kinda covered the wet into wet into wet into dry. Now I'm going to move up here. I'm going to turn my, my watercolor this way. We're going to move up here and talk about painting loose washy roses and how that's done. And I'm adding in a little technique called brush dancing. We're going to do two versions of this. One that's wet into wet and one that's wet into dry. So first, I'm gonna get my brush wet but clean. So I have a clean brush and I've just got it nice and wet and juicy. Now to paint the loose washy roses were doing a technique called brush dancing. And this is a technique that I made up. It's just called brush dancing. I'm holding my brush pretty close to the tip. Kind of like I would a pen or pencil. This is the feral of the brush and I'm holding up. This is called choking up. I'm choking up on the brush versus holding it back here and painting. And we're going to start by painting in some water and doing these little C curves. So I'm gonna make a little c. Then I'm going to make another little c. And then I'm just going to keep doing these little C curves around the edges here. And I'm going to bring this up so that you can see, you can see the water and these little C curves. Okay, clean. My brush didn't need to be cleaned. I'm going to add a little bit. I'm going to bring some of my paint down here. And then I'm just going to start to drop it in. And I don't you don't need a lot. Just going to start to drop it in the water and let it do its thing. So this is wet into wet. And you can start to see how the C's have come to life here a little bit. I'm going to cook set color around a little bit. Now. Another little c right there. Now this is the, this is the center of the rose, sort of the, the really tight center of a rose. So if I bring in watch, I'll bring in like this is a silk rows which you can see we've got that really tight center. And it kind of looks like a bunch of little c, little c curves. So that's what we're working on the center. And then to move out, I'm going to clean my brush. Clean it up really good. No pigment on the brush. It's not super sopping wet, but it is wet. And then I'm just going to touch the edges of the seas and just dance them around a little bit. You see I'm just touching the edges and dancing them around so that I can get that more definition there. Clean off my brush and using the paint that's already on here. I'm just going to start to do a little bit of C curves. I'm touching the edges of the little sees that I have here. And I'm drawing that color out a little bit. So you can see that we're starting to get the shape of the rows. And this is a wet into wet this mix. This is one of my favorite techniques because it's super washing. My brush is wet, there's no pigment on it. I'm using what's here. And I'm just dancing my brush around in this following that C curve and just pulling it out to get that look of that really soft, beautiful rose shape. It's not super hyper-realistic. It's got a definite shape to it. And it has that romantic, very flowy look to it. Love it. I'm going to leave it. Okay. So now that one was wet into wet. Okay. So we did this one wet into wet to create that. Now I'm going to show you this brush brush dancing technique where we're doing it wet into dry. So my brushes wet. I'm going to pick up some pigment. Gets some pigment down here. And the amount of paint I have down here is sort of like it's a milky texture. So it's not a lot of water, it's quite a bit of pigment. And we're going to do that C curve and dance the brush around. We're not going to, we're gonna get more of a definition. So here's my Cs. So I just start doing some C curves around. And then maybe a little bit, I'm using the tip here. But then maybe just kinda put a little pressure right there on the, on the bristles, on the brush to just kind of create that shape. Let's come around here with some C curves. And you can see I'm just dancing this, dancing this brush around a bunch of wide C curves to create that shape. And I could leave that alone. And this is going to be important in the end because we're going to do this technique over top of these loose washy roses to give them a little bit of definition. Now, this was wet into, wet into dry. You can also go back in, clean your brush. You could also go back in and move that color and give this a little bit more of a washy look. Just working with what's here. And just kinda pulling that color out and giving it a little bit of a mix. So this is super soft. This has a little more definition in our seas, but I am adding just a little ice. You can see I'm just dancing the tip of this brush around just to add a little bit of softness to it and make it a little bit washing. Okay. I'm gonna move this out, tidy this up a little bit so that I can move this over. And we'll talk about the gouache and opaque watercolor effects. Now. Gouache is having a moment. Gouache is coming back in full force and a lot of people are starting to use them, use it. But one of the things I'm going to share is that you can wash his basic gouache is opaque watercolor. And there's lots of different brands of it on the market. So wash is great. I like to use whitewash for splatter. I like to use it for my techniques. I'm going to show you how you can take just white gouache. You just take some white gouache? Well, you could do this with white acrylic paint to it just a little bit of a different kind of texture. I'm going to take a little bit of this pink. Put that right here. Just kinda show you. I've got the white gouache and I have the peak watercolor, that magenta watercolor. And I'm going to take a little bit of this white wash and pop it in here. So the beautiful thing about watercolor is that it's super transparent. When you add watercolor gouache, you get an opaque. So here's my opaque. Now the reason why people like to use wash in their paintings, and I love using it. I love using it with watercolor because you can get that opacity. And you can use it for details over top of your really super transparent looks. So in our current project today. We're using it to create these hearts. So we're creating all these levels of texture and dimension without any height. So you can see that we've got some 3D look and feel here with our final project simply by just altering our techniques. And in this case, it's gouache using gouache. So one of the things I recommend is when someone asked me, Oh, I love gouache, which sets should I get? I always recommend just get some white and use your watercolor set that you have and mix it. Right, So that I made that gouache was a little bit like light pink. If I add a little bit more of that magenta watercolor to it Look, I can get an even darker color. So really you only need a white. The other thing I really like about gouache is not only the opacity that we can get, but you can, if you like your paintings to have a little bit, to not be super transparent. You could use gouache, but you can also add water, cleaning my brush. You can add water to this and you can lighten it. So you can get more milky. It's a more of a milky look and feel versus a super transparent look and feel like we get how transparent this is. Gouache is gonna be our friend today. And we're going to use the gouache for the hearts that are made today. Okay? Again, I'm going to clean up my surface here so that we can talk about the illustrations. So let's go ahead and let me just put a little water here and clean up my surface. That's the beauty of this glass surface and working on it, you can really put your mediums down on your surface and work with them. Now, let's talk about the banner details that we're going to do. I have just got a mono. What do I have here? I have a pigment, sigma, sigma, sigma Pigma pen. Now, it's a Pigma Micron. So super fun. And I'm going to grab this. I'm going to use this mono drawing pen. Okay? Now we're going to be doing this in pencil, but we're simply going to be drawing just simple curved lines. Then on the curve, we're going to do some wonky banners. And they're gonna be super simple to draw a line, draw a line. And then we're like creating that triangle effect. And we're going to, we can extend them out a little bit and make one side shorter than the other. And then all we're gonna do is simply color them in. Now, you can watercolor them in if you want. Or you can use the peak. You can use the gouache and watercolor them in, but the intensity, we want to get that intensity and that's solid. So that's what we're doing. Super simple. It's a banner. So here's our line. That's gonna be our curved line. We're going to draw a line, draw a line, then go up and then go down. And you can have some fun with this super simple shapes. And we're just going to color them in for this project. And don't worry, we're going to walk through it together. I'm not going to color that all the way in, but that's, that's it for drawing are super simple whimsical. Enter details. And you can see I've got a little example of it over here on the handout. Okay. Now it's time to get started, friend. 5. Let's Paint a Hot Air Balloon: We're gonna get started. We've walked through all the techniques. We're going to get started on painting our hot air balloon and doing our cabbage roses. Or are loose roses are rosettes. You can call them whatever you'd like to call them. And we're going to start by painting them in to the hot air balloon. And then we're going to move to painting the basket. And then drawing the banner and the heart-shaped details. And then we're going to come in to the final details and the cart assembly. Okay? So we're gonna get your brush and we're going to start, we're going to paint roses and alternate colors. So we're going to start with our magenta and then we're going to do some in orange. So we're going to start with the magenta first, and we're going to paint different sizes along the way. So I'm going to start in the middle ish area and paint a few. And then we're just going to fill in. And we're gonna vary our sizes in. What I'm going to paint here with the roses so that we get a different levels of texture and dimension. So I'm going to start by getting some pigment. I've got my brushes wet, I'm getting I'm dipping it right in here. That's some pigment down here. The first thing I'm gonna do is some wet into wet. So I'm going to start out with painting a little bit just to get started painting some of my S curves. Can see I'm just going around in a little circle here in a little more water. And this first rose, a lot of water there. This first rose is going to be kind of big ish, going to be bigger than maybe some of the other ones that we're going to paint. But let's say you can do whichever way you feel works for you. And there's no getting this right or wrong. And I really want to encourage you to experiment with each rows that you paint. You can see that these seekers are not like perfect little c's are little crescents. And I want to just bring this in just to remind you of the C curves. So you're just making these little C curves. Just to kinda create that shape. In the center of that flower. This flower is got some shape and it's wet into wet. I'm going to clean off my brush and I'm just going to go in and just pull out some of that color. Lovingness. So pretty just pull out some of that color. And it's kind of it's kind of tight. It's kinda got a little tightness to it. If I want to loosen it up, I'm going to just come out here and loosen this up by getting my brush wet, super clean and just letting some of that that flow happen. Okay. Now, while this is still wet, I'm going to come in with a little bit of yellow. And I'm just going to drop a few bits. Few bits. I'm going to drop just a few drops of yellow in there and let it do its thing and leave it be. Okay. Now I'm gonna go up here and paint and just do this, repeat this process and start to paint that yellow. I'm going to turn this around and feel free to move your project around is your painting. I'm going to come in here and do, instead of doing wet into wet, I'm going to come in here and just do some wet into dry. So my brushes wet. I'm painting in these little C curves. And then I've got a nice little tight C curves here. I clean off my brush. And now I'm gonna go in with my wet brush and just touch these edges and just bring that out a little bit. Bring that out. Now, if you've printed out your hot air balloon on like a inkjet printer, and you touch the edges a little bit, don't worry. It's going to blend in that little bit of ink from your inkjet printer. I'm doing a little brush dancing here is going to blend in very nicely with your projects. So I'm softening the edges. My brush is clean. You can see I'm just pulling this out. Softening those edges. I'm leaving that detail in there. I've got the tip of my brush. I'm just kinda going in and dancing around, just lightly touching it and letting it softens as it comes around the edges. Now, over here, I can I can always go back like if I don't like the way things look, you can always go back and soften those edges and bring them out even more. I'm kinda digging that, loving the way that looks. So I've got one here and one here. I'm not going to drop some yellow into that one. I'm just going to play around with that wet into wet. Now, I'm gonna come down here and do another flower and I'm going to touch it right up to the edges here. You can see him varying my sizes of the flower. I have a pretty big one here and then a smaller one. But the technique is the same. You're just varying the different sizes that you're creating here. I'm gonna go in and I'm gonna do wet into dry. So you can do a combination of different techniques here, wet into wet and wet into dry. This one, I'm just going to concentrate a lot more pigment. And I'm doing my little C curves and coming out around that edge. Right down there. The hot air balloon that we kinda got away from me a little bit with that. Okay. Then I'm just kinda doing my seekers. It might feel and, or look like a hot mess. But don't worry. It's going to be pretty, it's gonna be really pretty. That does look like a hot mess, so just see curves. But that's okay. My brushes clean, I'm going in and I'm just dancing my brush around in that same way with those seekers. I'm just kinda following those seekers and just kinda mashing them together a little bit. So I'm just really lightly touching it with the tip of that brush, softening up that center really nicely. And then the outer edge, I am just coming in with my brush and just softening and pulling out some of that pigment. I love it. Okay. Kinda wanna go in and soften a little bit more here. Just playing. I get a little bit of yellow. Drop, a little bit of yellow into the wet areas. Just let that be loving that look at that. You can see as the watercolor is drying, it is fading back a bit, which is fine because we're gonna be adding a layer over top. Now I'm going to go in. I feel like I'm gonna do a little tiny pink cabbage rose up here. Then we're going to add, and we're going to do some orange ones. So let's repeat the process. This time I'm gonna do my brushes clean. I'm going to paint in some water. You can see because my water is like tinted now a little bit with all that pink. I'm just going to paint in some water S curves here. And then I'm gonna go in and just drop some of that pigment. And just kinda let it do its thing. Now, depending upon what watercolor set you're using, you'll see some watercolor sets will whoosh, no, run the run right in to all the different areas of the water. And some like this particular set whooshes. But it's, it's a controlled whoosh. Whoosh too much. I have to coax it around. So you can always just clean off your brush. And then kinda coax it around and to get that real soft, romantic kind of washy look that you're trying to get. And I've got the tip of my brush here and you can see I'm just kinda moving that color around using that little squishy. When I talk about using the tip of the brush. I'm gonna do that right here for you. So here I'll do a couple of S curves, right? Just to kinda create that look. Because I want to give this a little bit softer feel. My brush is clean and I'm using the tip and I'm just lightly touching it and just kinda going around. And this is what I call brush dancing. Dancing the brush, just that very tip of the brush around in the paint and in the areas just to smooth it out. A little. Brush dancing, It's super fun. I love it. It also just dials up the whimsy a little bit for your project. Makes it super, super whimsical. Adding a little bit of water here around the edge, just to pull that out. Okay, So we've got varying sizes of our cabbage roses or our rosettes. Now I'm going to come in and just tidy this up, just a smidge. I'm going to come in and get some of my orange watercolor. Just put some of my orange down here. My brush is clean and I'm just dipping it into my orange watercolor. There we go. Okay. Now I'm gonna go in and start filling in the other areas with the same technique, but with the orange watercolor. So let's start up here. And I'm doing my little S-curves. My brushes wet. I've got a lot of pigment. And I'm going to just keep doing these little S curves. And even like have them kind of touch into the neighboring flower that's there. Now you could leave that if you'd like that graphic look, you can leave that alone. Let that be. Now I'm just gonna go in with my brush again and I'm just softening out my edges. My brush is clean. And I'm just softening my edges a little bit here. A little more pigment. And I'm doing a little bit of brush dancing in the center here just to kind of some of that color around. So these two, this beautiful flower is now meeting up with its two friends for lunch. I'm gonna take a little bit of pink and drop that in to some of the wet areas just to add a little bit of extra. That's that wet into wet technique. When it's wet, you can drop color in and add a little bit more. Love that, loving the orange. Okay, I'm gonna go in over here and do kind of a big orange ones In this area right here. So you can see just by varying the sizes were really filling up that shape pretty quickly. Pretty quickly, you could do them all the same size. If you really wanted a concentrated look, you could do them all the same size and you'd have a lot more roses in there, which would be fine. Which we really pretty. Okay. I'm gonna do the same technique again. I'm doing my S curves. I'm going to come out pretty wide on these little tiny S curves, moon shapes. And you can see that I'm also going into the neighboring flower a little bit and coming up the top. And just doing this little S curve because I really want to get that in that space. Now I'm cleaning my brush and I'm going to start from the center and I'm just doing a little bit of dancing. Little bit of dancing, dancing the brush around, cleaning it up, go out to the outer edges and just kinda pull that color out. Very soft, softly touching with the brush. Getting that shape. And just kinda blending out those S-curves. Just a smudge. A bit. Pretty slick. And so pretty take a little tiny bit of pink drops and P right in that area where there's some water. And just let that pink kind of commingle and adds a little extra texture. So we're really getting this filled-in pretty nicely. It's really looking nice. Okay. So now I'm gonna come down here and do another big orangey light in. Actually let's do this one. We're gonna do this one went into wet. My brush is clean. My brushes clean. My paper is dry. But I'm going to paint those little S curves and go a little wider. So I'm painting in. So you can see I'm bending the tip of my brush to just kinda get a little bit of a bigger feel here. This one's come out a little wider and a little more water. The 100% cotton papers are very thirsty, so they're really will take up, this, will take that water and they'll say give me more, give me more. So that's what's really nice about them. Because you can do a lot of watery techniques. So I'm just dropping this peak, this orange watercolor in. And then I'm going to take and do a little peek trap, a little pink in there to just let the water do its thing, let it flow into the water. Now, I kinda looks a little bit like a hot mess, but that's okay. Clean off your brush. And we're going to do that little bit of brush dancing just to kind of. Blend these out a little bit, get a little bit of something going here. I'm going to blend this one out. I'm going to pull this one out pretty far because I'm kinda want it to come down. I want it to go into its neighboring flower. But I also want it to come down into the corner of my balloon here. Take a little bit of pink and drop that in. Loving that I'm gonna turn this to its side so I can really, you can really see it, but I can really get brushes clean. And I'm just pulling that color out. I'm going to let that just kinda occupy that space right there. Okay? Now, I'm going to turn this around here and kinda focus my next one here. This one's gonna be an orange one. And I'm gonna do this can be a medium Hawkins sized one. This one was a big one. We're gonna do a little medium. Okay? So I've got this going here, doing my S curves. And I'm kinda coming out pretty far. You can see it's just really just like a little less curved, super simple. And the more concentrated your S curves are, the bigger the more it liked abstract it'll look too. So we got that really abstract look and feel. Loving this, okay. Brushes clean and wet. And now I'm just dancing over what we've done and just kind of lending it out. These edges, these wider edges I've got going here. I'm just going to take a little bit of water. Just come out to my edge here. Let's see. Coming all the way out and filling in spaces. I'm just coming around here. Loving this, loving the way this looks. And I'm just doing a little bit of brush dancing. Here's another thing that we can do. I call it the swirl, it because it is a swirl. So my brush, I'm just my brushes clean. Got the very tip here. And I'm just gonna do a really quick light swirl. It just kind of just kinda pull some things together. Alright, I'm loving that. Now. I'm not going to worry too much about this little guy right here. We're gonna be coming across doing our banner. We're going to come across here, we're going to come across here. I also have my white hart and we've got our finishing details. So any area that you have that's a little bit open, don't work, don't worry and don't resist the urge to fill it right away. Okay. Let's take a quick drink. Resist the urge to fill it right away because we're going to be doing some other layers on top. So don't worry about it. Okay, now I'm gonna come in, I'm going to put another pink one here and a little baby pink one over there. So let's do our little baby pink, baby pink one. We're just going to add a few. You don't need many S curves here. Adding a few s-curves right there. Cleaning up my brush. My brushes super wet. But it doesn't have any pigment on it. Going back-and-forth with my brush. Doing that little bit of brush dancing. And just kind of letting these colors commingle with their neighbor. And I'm leaving that there. We've got some really nice texture. You can see as the roses dry. We've got the texture and dimension and we've got that, that abstract feel of the rows and the rows that, but you can start to see our shape of our hot air balloon is coming together and it looks amazing. Alright, I'm going to come in here and do the same. We're going to make this next one pretty big. Next little rows right here. I'm going to come in here and just start from my center here and I'm doing my little S curves. I'm holding my brush pretty close. I'm choked up quite a bit because I really want to have a lot of control over the S curves that I'm building here. As you can see that I'm going out pretty far. I'm going to bring this out relatively far in this direction. And I'm going up into the other rosettes right here. And just creating that very last large Rosetta right there. Cleaning off my brush. Then coming in and then just softening my edges and letting them just touching, just touching the edge and letting it do its thing. See how that watercolor is running a little bit. Now I'm doing the same thing for the incentive. Dancing my brush around, my brushes clean. You might want to clean it a couple of times as you're dancing. And I'm just touching the water to the S-curves and dancing it around. And you'll end up with some of that water and that pigment on your brush. I'm pulling it out to the edge. And that's okay. Now this one has a little bit more of a graphic look to it. And I'm digging it. I like it. When it is going to soften, then that's fine too. Now, I met one of the finishing techniques that we're gonna do is we're going to soften around all of the edges of the, the, the top of our hot air balloon. And I'm gonna, I'm gonna start that process. Now that we've finished painting the hot air balloon, we're going to move to the basket and then drawing some of the shapes, drawing our inner shape them. But before I do that, I'm going to just go around the edge very gently with some water. Okay. And I'm going to this is just adding a little bit of water around the edge. And I'm softening up my edges of my hot air balloon. You can see that some of the pigment is coming around the edge here. That's okay. This is wet into dry, can see a mixing some of that paint out. And I'm letting that just kinda soften the edge there. So we don't have such a hard line. It's a lot softer. Just adding a little bit of water. Don't worry about blending this out because it's going to fade back significantly. And you can also come in with your towel. Just kinda dry it up a little bit. Don't worry about it. It's just all we're trying to do is soften and let some of that color, you can see how some of the colors starting to bleed off a little bit. That's the effect we're going for. We want it to bleed off the edges. So I'm just taking my brush and kinda scrubbing it up against the edges just a little bit. And letting that color and the peat that's here just kinda reactivate and just soften those edges. You can see that the p is reactivating and bleeding out and blending out. Don't worry about this because we're going to come in and just soften that up a little bit. We're going to let that dry. I'm going to let all of that dry. It's just adding a little bit of extra to our painting. Now we're gonna move to painting the basket. And I'm going to bring out our whitewash. I'm going a little bit of white gouache down here. And we're going to paint our basket for the upper part of our balloon. It is super, super transparent because we've used watercolor. The bottom part of the balloon. I wanted to create a little bit more opacity. So we're going to be painting and mixing our gouache in here. So you can see that we have a really transparent top. And then our bottom of our painting is super whimsical, but it's also opaque. Okay? So I'm going to take a little bit of marbles, blue watercolor, my blue watercolor do and blues. I'm gonna get a lot. This is ultra marine blue. So whatever blue watercolor you have, just getting quite a bit of this pigment down. I'm going to take some of that white gouache and mix it in. Keep mixing it in to get that desired look that I'm looking for. Which is kind of I want it to be kinda pale. I'm going to keep mixing this white gouache and I get that pale look that I'm going for it a little bit too. So let's go ahead and mix all of that white in. Really nice opaque look here. Just at a smidge. Get that book. That really pale look. Okay. Now this is this super simple part. We're literally just going to follow our lines and paint in a little more. Just follow our lines and paint in our basket. So you can just follow the lines right in. Just do the lines, go around and do the lines, and then just go ahead and paint it in. I'm actually liking this color mix. I did originally wanted a little bit more blue, but it's coming out a little more lilac. Negative. I like it like the way it looks. Okay. I'm going to go ahead and just paint that in. So you can see we've got a lot of transparency up here in the top part of our project. The bottom part of our project is with the basket, is very opaque and I love it. Now we're gonna move to our brown. And I'm going to, I'm leaving all of my colors over here on my palette. Just going to get some of this brown. This brown is called Burnt Sienna. I love it. Great brown. But whenever Brown you have in your stash, just get quite a bit of it down into your brush or onto your palette. I'm putting it down here on the glass mat so you can see me picking it up with my brush. So this technique, we're, we're just going to be outlining. We're going to come in here. We're going to follow the lines and just outline the two lines with the tip of your brush. If you feel like you need a smaller, thinner brush, you can always grab a smaller thinner brush, which I which I can do to show you. So I'm just coming in, but your rounds will really get come to a fine point. If you choke up really well and just use the tip of the brush. Hey, if the color bleeds in a little bit to its friend underneath, that's okay. If that bothers you, just take your brush and wipe it away. Then add a little bit of the opaque color back in and shampoo you good. Now I'm going to move to a thinner brush. Brush with a really super fine point. You don't have to do this. You can use the point that you had. Dip it into my pigment, into my watercolor here really well. And we're gonna do a little crosshatching. Okay, So what I mean is we're going to make these little exits just to kinda create that texture. So we're graphically painting in those little cross hatches. Going to turn this a little bit. You're just gonna go, I like to do it this way, sort of like in cross stitching. You go down one side and make all your hash lines, and then you go back the other way and make your hash lines. My turn this upside down. Do the same thing over here. Just go with the tip of the brush. I'm holding choked up on this brush pretty significantly. That's q. And just drawing out those little hash lines. Perfect. Love in the way that looks okay. Now I'm gonna come back in. You can see that I've got a little spot right here and come back in and just add. The beautiful thing about the gouache is that you can go back over anything that you've painted, add another layer. And it's just going to give you more opacity. 11 that if you feel like if you got some color in your basket that you don't want there, you can just go back over it with your gouache. Okay. So now we have painted the hot air balloon rosettes. We've painted the basket, and we've painted the details in the strings for the basket. Now we're going to work on drawing the banner and the heart shapes and then adding some of our final details. And we'll be ready for our cart assembly. So I'm gonna go ahead and tidy up my little, pull some of this color out so it doesn't end up in our project. So this would be a good time to kind of shift and clean up your surface. If you are working in this same way. Just because we are going to start to do a little bit more work up here. Now because we've let this dry. This is pretty dry. So it's ready to take on some more work to it. If you feel like it's still wet or damp, you can always take your heat tool and kinda zap it and let it drive it because we let it dry. It's true. It dried most of the way while we were working on here. Now I'm going to take a light pencil. We're going to draw in. Let's grab my pencil here. Really light pencil. You can wing it too. If you don't want to use a pencil, you don't have to. But I'm going to draw in just a little line that goes here. So a little, like a little S curve, C curve. So we've got one here, here. We're going to come across here and end there. And then we're going to come across and down and around and loop it around. So I'm holding my pen out and not choked up. I'm holding my pen out here. So you can also see, just have fun with this. Coming down and around and looping. Just a little loop right there at the end. Okay. Really super simple. I'm going to come in with my come in with my mono drawing pen, any kind of drawing pen. And you're going to be able to draw over this watercolor and it's going to be fine. Now, one of the things that I do visually to help me, It's just draw a little dot there, a little dot here, a little dot here. And that gives me my visual where I'm headed with my pen. Also dials up the whimsy and the project. So because I'm a left-hander, I'm going to turn this out. I'm just going to follow my line that I just drew. Like connect my dots. Turn my paper, connect my dots. Turned my paper again, connect my dots. Just follow my line. Just stop my pen and turn around again. And just kinda do my little S curve there. Now that looks really pretty. But we're going to just kinda come in and draw a little line underneath it. Vary the thin and the thickness of what you drew. Just to add a little something extra here. Turning this around. Because that line that the first line that I drew was a little thin. So I'm just coming in and drawing a parallel line. Then adding a little bit of line work, they're just filling it in, draw a parallel line, sort of fill it in. So you're varying, by doing this, you're varying the lines in your thickness of the line, which is really nice. Okay? Drawing and other parallel line. Little bit, right? You can vary how much of that parallel line you want to draw. Okay? Now I'm gonna come around and do the same thing here. There we go. Alright, loving it. Now before we put our banners and we're gonna put our hearts and we're going to put a heart here and here and here. And then we'll do our banners around the heart. I'm back and use my pencil. And we're going to draw a simple heart shape, but it's kind of an elongated shape. Now, this is just too far. Everyone knows how to draw heart. And you want to just elongated a little bit, right? You get a little height here. And that dial is up the Wednesday of the heart. Just kinda gives it a little bit more of a whimsical effect. I'm just going to light pencil drawing that heart. Drawing that part right there so I can see it. Draw my heart rate here. Draw my heart rate here. So there's my other hurt. And then I'm going to draw this heart and it's going to be a little smaller. Heart rate here. Heart rate here. So it kinda comes out to the edge a little bit. Kinda fun. Now, this is where the completely opaque watercolor is going to come into play. So I've got my gouache. Or remember you can use your white gel pen. And we're just going to go ahead in and paint over what we did. So I'm just gonna go in really gently and get my, get my outline of my shape here. If you're using white acrylic paint, that will work too. Little work really well. So I've got my outlet of my shape and I've got like, I don't want to have a lot of water on my brush. Got a lot of paint, and then it's a super thick consistency. Because I want to, want to jack up that opacity because I am gonna be going over and painting over that black line. Now you could also, if you wanted to put in the hearts first, you can put the heart's in and then you could draw your black line in. If you're using, like if you're not using white acrylic paint or the white wash. You could use and you're using a gel pen. Excuse me, draw your hearts in first, and then do your your black pen work. Okay, we're gonna go ahead and still in the other two. Alright, but the one in my outline, you can see that I don't have a lot of water on my brush, so that paint gets super dry real quick. But that's okay. I'm doing it on purpose. I really want that thick, opaque consistency. Loving this, this heart. I'm going to come out a little bit kind of elongate shape, a little bit more. Loving that. I'm going to clean off my brush because it's got a little KCI and it will get a little KCI. And let's do this. Last little heart gets this. I'm adding a little bit of water. Kind of get a little, sit out the consistency of the squash a little bit. Because it is a little humming around. Just doing my outline. Sort of like if you're working in a coloring book, outlined my coloring or the image first and then I did my color work inside of it. Same. Then we've got our three little opaque carts. See a little bit of black kinda showing through up here. It's okay. Just add a little bit more white to it. That's okay. I'm loving that. It's color, it's covering that up very nicely. Now, while this dries, we're going to come down here and add a little bit of my basket detail. This is straight up, going to be doing some cross hatches with some of the blue, the ultramarine blue. And a little bit of this blue down here. A little bit blue. And I'm going to just do with the very tip of my brush, go one way and draw these lines and don't worry if they're not straight. Don't resist the urge to get your ruler out. You don't need to, because it's whimsical. We want it to be whimsical. And then you're just following those lines, the tip of the lines that you just drew. That's a good guide. And then going in the opposite direction and doing a little cross hatches. I love it. So it's styled up the whimsy there. Now to add a little bit more to this, you could take a little bit of that wash on the tip of your brush. Then just add a little boot, little, little tiny polka. The center of a few of those little cross hatches. This little diamond shapes that you've created. Just kinda use your, use your eyeball to eyeball it out and see where you'd like to put it. Okay. So we've got our details in here. We've got our details in the basket. Now we're gonna go back up here, check on it. This is still a little bit wet. You can see that my hearts are still a little bit wet, but that's okay. We're going to go in and we're going to draw in our banners. And I'm going straight to drawing them in with my marker. Just going to freehand it. Now you could take your pencil if you want to. I'm going to have to clean this up here. Let's move this out because I don't want my pen. I'm a lefty. So. Don't want it to end up in it. Just going to draw a couple of these banner shapes right over top. I'm going to draw them all in first. And then remember they can go in different directions. They can be wonky. You're just drawing like line, line, line, line. But what, it's really a w, which is drawing in a couple of w's creating the banner. You can go, why? Having some fun with these W's, I like that. Maybe a little teeny little one here. So these are just some fun little banner slides. I'm going to do a little one over here and just to kind of extend it off a little bit, standard off the edge a little bit. Come down here. Draw my w, draw in a little w right here. And then a little w right here. Then for my end, I'm going to turn this out. Draw that little w right on the end just to kinda finish that off. Now we're gonna go back in and just color them in. Loving the way this looks. Okay. This is such a fun project. It's a great little mini class projects. So you learn a bunch of different kinds of watercolor techniques, along with some additional techniques. Some mixed media techniques along the way. Like using are using our pizza and using our markers with your watercolor pieces. You're just coloring all of these in. And then all in the context of making a really fun greeting card projects. And you hand painted it. Now you could take the greeting card, you don't have to make the greeting card. You can always just frame what you've done. Sentiment to it. Grabs something from your stash and adults sentiment. Just had fun with it though. Just another way to craft your joy by creating really fun whimsical watercolor projects. So you can see that I'm really digging the way this looks really fun banner here. Filling in my W's, that one was a little bit wide. Let's see how that comes out. Turn this a little bit this way. Just kinda fill in in. You know what, you could also, if you don't have a black marker, you could use a Sharpie. Sharpie would work really well. A black Copic marker would work really well. Just happened to grab these because I really liked them. Here's my Pigma Micron. What are the black pen you have in your stash? That's really that you really like your favorite journaling pen, your favorite black marker. Just to add a little bit of something to it, I'm going through like all my markers here just to kinda show you. Okay with putting in these last little bit of w's here or m, depending upon which way you have it. Adding that color block in there. From the last two. You can see I'll turn my project around a lot when I'm working on it. And that's because you can and I feel like you get more control. I get more control over what I'm trying to achieve. By turning my project room. Loving way this looks, It's looking so good, so fun. I hope that by this point in the class, you've really tapped into joy and you're feeling it. Okay. All of the black marker work is done, loving the way this is looking. Now, we've drawn in our banner and our heart-shaped details. Now it's time to move to our final details and our card assembly. So the first of the final details that we're going to do is a little bit of graphic brush dancing in the rosettes. So you can see that the rosettes have faded back. They look beautiful. They've got that really romantic whimsical look to them. But what I'd like to do is some of the areas of the rosettes. I'd like to bring a little more texture and dimension, the forefront of the card projects. So I'm going to take my brush. I've got my number eight. Use whatever brush you have. And I'm going to dip my brush into my magenta pigment. And I'm getting it nice and super juicy. So I've got a lot on the tip of this brush. Then I'm gonna go in and do some brush dancing and do some of this S curves again. And just tip of my brush, a little wet. And just kinda brushed dance around almost like in that little circular motion I talked about. In that little swirly motion that I shared. Just adding a little bit of detail to the two to that one. Now, it's a little harsh. So I've cleaned off my brush and I'm going back in and I'm just doing a little bit of swirling just to kinda bullied it out. Bleed it out, just a smidge. But I've got some definition there. You can see I'm just bleeding it out. But I've got a little bit of definition in texture for that one. Rosetta. I'm gonna do it up here for my orange ones so that you can see. I'm gonna do the same thing. That finishing detail. Just kinda do a little bit of brush dancing. Add some S-curves, go pretty wide. Now add some little bit of graphic quality to the final project. It's one of my signature things that I like to do in my paintings. Once I've completed, like the underpainting work, I've done all these rosettes. I like to go in and add a little bit of graphical work up top because it creates a little bit of level of texture and dimension. We have things moving forward towards us and things going back. We've got the banner, we've got the hearts, we can see the rosettes. So we've got all these different layers of texture happening. I want to do one more down here. Just to add and dial up some of that brush dancing right there. We've got a little burst dancing right there. Just to add a little bit of texture. My brushes clean and I'm just dancing that wet brush around and just pulling that out a little bit. This technique is also like you're doing some glazing, some layering. So we've got all of these different textures going right now. Digging it, loving the way it looks. Okay? Now. 6. Assembling the Card +Adding Details: Now it's time to do our final card assembly and add in our finishing splatter details. Now, this is still a little bit of wet and I'm going to hit it with a heat tool and dry it up. Before we add it to dry it up just to make sure I don't nod your smear or anything. I'm going to bring this up so that you can see some of that texture and dimension. Loving this, loving the way this came out. Alright, I've got a good glue. I'm going to use a wet glue. I like using this Gina k designs connect glue. You can use whatever is your favorite. I'm going to add quite a bit to my edges. I like using this glue because it is, Here's really well with watercolor paper. Because when I use tape runners and things like that, I tend to overuse the tape. I tend to use so much. I just keep tape, tape, tape and tape it. Okay. So I'm adhering to my card base to finish this up, lining this, eyeballing this up. It's a little bit because it's watercolor paper. We have to give it a little bit of push, right? Give it a little bit of push to get it to adhere. And that's okay. I'm loving the way this looks. Can also turn it over and then just kinda smooth your hand over the back of it. Just to get that extra little bit of ceiling that up your ceiling, all that. Okay. Loving it. It's on our card base. We're almost there. Now we're going to add the splatter. This is our finishing final detail. We've adhered are dry painting to the card front. I'm going to take a little bit of my pink and I'm going to take a little bit of my orange down here. And we're gonna do some script lettering. A little bit of pink so my brushes wet. And then I'm just tapping it over my finger and adding that splatter. This is my favorite Technique. But the other thing is you can get all the way to the end of your project and you can over splatter. I've done that many times. That's okay. The splatter, get a little bit of splatter on your hearts to dials up the whimsy. It also gets all over your surface and makes for, for cleanup fun, right? So here's our final project that we painted together. I am loving it. It's so fun creating this whimsical look and feel with these rosettes and painting these loose washy roses. You've created this really fun painting you can for your oversized card. This mini class is just really fun and great way to get, learn a bunch of techniques in the context of a really easy going project. And don't forget, you have all of the techniques that we walked through and you have them for a future project. 7. Thank You + Final Thoughts: Thank you so much for joining me in today's whimsical watercolor mini class. This class was so much fun to create and share with you. I'm so grateful you could join me. Please feel free to watch this over and over and over again. Stop the video as you're doing techniques so that you can master them along the way. And I really hope you enjoy creating your hot air balloon with me today. I'll see you in the next class. Thanks so much for joining me.