Day 13! How to paint watercolor lavender flowers. I hope you enjoy! Don't forget to use the hashtag #hellolovelyflowers to share with the community on instagram
Every day for the next 30 days I will post a video tutorial of how to paint a new flower. We will practice that flower until we are comfortable with it and then we will add it to our Watercolor flower guide that we put together in this video. At the end of 30 days you will have a full chart of 30 flowers that you painted yourself and can reference for your paintings.
Hello and welcome back to my channel. Today we are painting lavender and it is day 13 of our
30 days of watercolor flowers. I am really excited to show you this one so let's get into it.
So I'm starting off with a pinkish purple color and I'm doing a light wash to start.
I don't want anything too dark yet but I don't want it too light either and I'm using my brush
to create these kind of teardrop type shapes and if you think of lavender or if you're looking at
a reference picture the flowers on lavender are thicker and bigger towards the bottom
and then they get smaller and thinned out towards the top. So that's what I'm creating here. I'm
starting to do littler flowers more spaced apart and then at the bottom I wanted to just add a
more fullness so I'm adding a few flowers in a light wash down there. Now I'm picking up more
paint on my brush so that I have a darker pigment of purple and I'm going through and adding that to
the base of some of these flowers and this is why I wanted to start with a little bit of a lighter
wash and not go straight into a super dark purple with the initial lay down of color because now I'm
able to add this dark pigment and when the flowers are still wet I'm able to get this really
nice soft gradient where some of the wash is still really light and that can represent areas where
the sun might be hitting the lavender and then the dark purple areas can represent more of the
shadows. So lavender has a lot of variation and not all of the sprigs of lavender are super
blossomy and so I'm painting one that's a little bit more sparse and just has a few blossoms on it.
And for the greenery I really wanted to do a nice sage green. So the trick to getting a nice
sage color green is you start with your bright green and you add red because red is the complementary
color to green. So anytime you want to mute a color and make it less bright you add that color's
complement. So adding a little bit of red makes greens more of an earthy sagey tone. So now I'm
just taking this sagey pigment straight through the middle of the lavender adding a little bit of
little twigs here and there to connect some of the blossoms and then I'm doing this green top
where there's some more of the immature buds. Lavender has very thin wispy leaves towards the
bottom and I am using just one single stroke with my brush to achieve that. So making sure to put
lighter pressure on the ends of the leaf, putting more pressure on the center of the leaf with my
brush. So now I'm adding the greenery to the center of this lavender and I'm following the same steps
that I did before where I'm adding the little stems to attach the flowers and adding this
green premature bud situation going on at the top and then the lavender that has only a few florals
has some green towards the center and then of course the leaves towards the bottom.
I also decided to take a very light pink wash to create a couple of areas that looked like
maybe a highlight or just a really washed out area where you would see lavender and it would
be more of a pink color than such a stark purple and I'm just going through and adding even more
details now that some of the flowers are more dry and I'm taking a darker pigment of the purple
and putting some of that purple towards the base of the flowers again to create more shadowing and
more depth. So for this lavender I wanted it to be even more sparse with the flowers and I wanted it
to be a little bit more curved over and because I didn't want to lose the shape that I had in mind
for the direction that it was going I started with the greenery first on this one and in my
reference photos these sprigs of lavender that had only a few florals had the leaves pretty high up
on the stem and so I wanted to show that. So at this point the composition was looking really flat
to me like here are my three pieces of lavender that are super perfect looking and lavender is
really wild and so I started to add a lot more sprigs doing different things. I felt like the
space with the really long stem was weird so I added another piece of lavender right in the middle
so it's kind of overlapped in the middle of that one and so I'm just tweaking things here and there
as it feels right making sure there's not awkward empty spaces or weird gaps and I'm adding even
more pink and right here I add way too much pink so I used paper towel which is so handy to have
and I just continue to add some light pink areas because I just felt like that really added a nice
contrast to the dark purple and this open space was probably bugging you it was bugging me too
so I did another curved wild looking piece I kind of wanted it to curve in the other direction
to be opposite of the one just underneath it and I think it filled the whole piece out really nicely
and I'm just finishing up the piece by adding even more of that dark purple pigment for contrast
and shadowing taking the details to the next level and now that we have finished practicing
our lavender I am adding it to my watercolor flower guide and I'm painting a few different
variations of the lavender so that when I look back on my guide to reference it I can remember
the different ways that lavender behaves and that is it thank you so much for being here today
while we painted lavender on day 13 of 30 days of watercolor flowers I really enjoyed this one
I hope you did too and I will see you all tomorrow for day 14. Bye!
