Watercolor Summer Flowers Loose and Easy - Sketch and Paint Tutorial to help you find your own style

Hi everyone and welcome. I'm Diane and my passion is painting and creating nature-inspired watercolours in my studio which are easy for you to do too. I share all my paintings with you on YouTube and on our website dianeanton.com you can find free downloadable sketches for all the videos to help you make the most of your painting journey. And if you'd like a little bit more we also have channel memberships with loads of perks for you So welcome on board, click subscribe and turn on notifications and let's learn to paint watercolour. Hi everyone, Diane here. Welcome to my studio. I hope everyone's well and happy and enjoying their painting journey. I'm going to have a scribble today and see if I can paint some kind of flowery thing. I often like to start at the bottom of the page when I'm doing a sketch and I don't know why really but sometimes it just feels easier to start from the bottom and work up and I'm thinking of putting... I've got an image here that I'm using to give me the idea of a lupine and so I'm going to try and paint some a lupine here on the side. They have sort of upside down heart-shaped flowers on little short stems so something like this and obviously as you go down they get kind of bigger and this is going to be very loose because loose is me, loosey-goosey or whatever. I'm drawing with a watercolour pencil this is a Staedtler Carat Aquarelle watercolour pencil and this will run a little bit but doesn't matter, that's what I want and I don't know if I'm going to put some ink on this at the end. I might in which case the pencil will become irrelevant but if I don't then the pencil might be quite important. Now lupines have long thin-ish legs, they don't have legs at all do they? Leaves, sort of nice swirly shapes like that so we'll just pop in some of those and maybe we'll put another one towards the back there and they sort of come from one point don't they, so like that. I don't know if we want another one down there, I don't think so, maybe put one in the background later and then this image that I'm working from has got next to the lupine it has a sort of daisy kind of thing, I've forgotten what these are called, I should know, oh I don't remember but it's got a sort of, the picture that I'm looking at has got sort of quite a big head like that, I'll just take those away there, so there's a daisy and maybe I'm trying to go away from the idea of everything having to be a rose so we'll put another lupine in here. I used to love lupines when I was one of my earliest memories and I know you'll all have earliest memories of flowers for yourselves but my earliest memory of anything floral is when I can't have been more than two years old, I know what house we were living in so I know how old I was when we left there, can't be more than two years old, walking through the garden and experiencing the lupines being taller than me, so I must have been quite young mustn't I because lupines aren't that big, so there we are and maybe we'll just have the hint of another daisy in the background here. Okay so, so far so good, that's five minutes in and let's grab a fairly big brush, this is a number 14 draw well and I'm going to use my gallow paints and I've got a border of washi tape around the outside of this paper and I'm just going to come in with a brush fairly boldly and do a background roughly and so we'll start with the periwinkle blue and as we go across we'll just add a tiny bit of warmth to it with a little bit of red, blend that in a little bit, so we just want a an uneven wash for the for the background, it doesn't have to be exact at all, so just kind of bring it into the flower, the flower's going to go over that just like it would in real life really and then if we just gray it down a little bit, not perhaps quite that much, as we come down and have a nice mix of blue and green there, that green I picked up there was orange actually, added orange to a periwinkle and we get quite a nice, almost a granulating sort of effect there, so we're just painting around the flowers, lots of water, do the whole background, I'm standing up for this because you need a reasonable amount of elbow room to paint loosely, now I'm just going to, excuse my dry throat, leave some space there, right now I need a slightly smaller brush I think and let's go for a pinkish red, that's almost dry, right at the top you're going to have a little bit of greenish yellow, try that again, a yellowish green, let's call it yellowish green, that's better, I've used fig green there and then we're going to bring in some dots for the flowers and keep them darker on one side and lighter on the other side, so the light's coming from this direction perhaps and then we're going to pick up some bluish grey and pop in the stem, going all the way down and then the first layer for the leaves, let that dry and then this, I will remember the name of this thing in a minute but I haven't yet, so we could just drop in a little bit of blue for the shadow on the petals and then in a second when that's a little bit dry I'll add to that and then let's do the stem in a sort of orangey green and then the leaves, keep the green a little bit on the muted side, a little bit blue and another one of these flowers over here, just really loose, a tiny touch of blue for the petals and then we're going to come back to the other lupin, I start off with this fig green and then pink and I did say we would pick up a little bit of the orange just to give a bit of warmth up here, reflected into the flowers and perhaps darken that a little, a few more dots of red down here, slightly different red and pop some yellow and blue into the stem. Okie dokie, so we've got that far and I think the thing to do now is probably to wait for it to dry and then I will take a photocopy of it, try out the two options going forward, we can either do line, so make it line and wash or we could, well three options, or we could do pencil work or we could just come in and do more brush work so paint it up to another level, so we'll see. I like using line, I always feel it adds a lot to the painting and I don't have the patience to do fine detail with a brush, I prefer the detail to be pen, I don't know quite why but I think that's probably what I will opt for, so we'll see, I'll dry that off and we'll come back. Okay, so I've done a photocopy of this and I've just sort started to play a little bit with lines and I'm thinking that looking at it, I can see from looking at the photocopy, I actually quite like the painting so far, I've taken off the what do you call it, the washi tape and I think what I'm going to do actually before I do anything else is probably add a little bit of dark red to the backs of some of these little flowers, just some hints of darker red, a few of them, not too much, just a little bit, I don't want to spoil it, of course you always have to remember that whatever you put is going to come out lighter because when it dries, so you don't need to worry too much about it seeming a bit too dark, chances are it'll probably be okay once it's dry and similarly for the leaves down here, we might want to just put a few strokes in behind there a little bit, not too much because I rather, I think, quite like the fact that this has come out really quite what they call high key, it means without too much shadow on it, so very basically delicate and I'm not normally a delicate kind of person, that's not what I'm accused of being normally now and it's very easy to sort of spoil things by adding colours and things and thinking, oh that would be better but it isn't, so we won't do that. I will just darken down a tiny bit in here, just a few dots for that side because we have definitely got the shadow on that side of the plant and I'll just put a few again of these darker bits in here and maybe one or two, really just not much at all up there. I might make the other flower a little bit darker and what next? I think probably, I don't really want to do very much more to it, a little bit of stem in this one, I don't think I did that before, if I did it ran into it so you couldn't see it, maybe a little bit of green here, a little bit more green in the background perhaps and we could, I suppose, have one or two. I think scatter is probably going out of fashion these days so I don't want to do too much of that, do we? So there we are and you could, I guess, use the pencil to just sharpen up one or two of the lines if you wanted to, it would give you an opportunity to put in some veins and things like that. I don't want to rub it with my hand, I don't think I'll do anything with the flowers because they're delicate enough and they've got enough pencil lines on them already, maybe just a little bit down here with the stalk. It's surprising actually how just tiny, tiny little marks can make a big difference. Okay, so there we are, one quick very, very loose, very, very impressionistic painting of some lupins and a couple of cone flowers for you to have a go at. If you've got 10 minutes you can do this. The idea of taking a photocopy and trying out line work on it is a really good one and you might find that you enjoy that. Also it'll sometimes point out to you little things like, I noticed on the photocopy the tonality was a bit weak here so it prompted me to come in on the actual painting and put some more darks in, so that can be a really helpful little trick. So if you enjoyed that, give us a like and subscribe, don't forget about membership to the channel and Patreon and I'll let you go now, have a lovely evening and I'll see you again tomorrow. Bye everybody, bye-bye!