How to paint loose Sweet peas in watercolor - Day 11

Hello, welcome back to my channel. Today we are painting sweet peas and it is day 11 of our 30 days of watercolor for our chart and I can't wait to show you this flower today. They are delicate and sweet and beautiful and a little bit wild so let's get into it. So I'm painting light pink sweet peas and so I'm using a really light wash and I'm making strokes that are really kind of spontaneous and random but keeping that fanned feathery shape of the petals that sweet peas have. Sweet peas are anything but uniform so just really have fun with the shape and the petals but the petals on the end are more squared off or rectangular than pointy and so I did do some that had pointed ends to more signify like maybe a petal that's to the side or that you're looking at from an angle but then all of the petals that I imagine I'm looking straight on at have more of a squared off top. Sweet peas are kind of a closed off flower you hardly ever really see their center and so I'm painting these with the petals as if they were pointed straight up and I'm going to be adding the little green base at the end of each of these. So I like to think of petals in terms of shapes because it helps me recreate them. So if I'm looking at these petals I'm kind of creating what I call a funky triangle where the top is wide or maybe it's a little pointed and then towards the tip of this funky triangle it comes down and meets together with the other petals that are also funky little triangle type shapes. And so with this flower I feel like I'm just doing variations of a funky triangle where the triangle base that's wide is the widest part of the petal and then it comes down to a point where it meets with the other petals. So when you think of petals or flowers in terms of shapes like that it can really help you visualize it and recreate it when you're making multiple flowers in that same style. Before your flower petals totally dry you're going to want to add a darker pigment of the color that you used. Sweet peas come in lots of different colors. I decided to use pink so I'm doing a darker pink pigment at the tips to provide contrast and a nice effect of it blending in together. Some of these petals were already pretty dry so let me show you what I do. So after I added that pink at the base I just take a pretty watery clean brush and I drag that color up and through the petal so it still creates that blending effect without really changing the petal color too much. So sweet peas are all connected together on one long stem. So one long stem of a sweet pea has multiple flowers on it. So I'm starting here at the top with some kind of little buds and then the sweet pea stem is actually really quite wavy. Everything about the sweet pea vine and everything is really thin and curved. You'll see we're going to add some really funky spontaneous vines that come off of the off of the ends and so the vine or the stem the major stem itself is also really wavy that the flowers come off of. So right here I'm just marking where everything is coming from and then touching the flower just a little bit. Some of them are more wet than others so it will blend in and then some of them are not quite wet. So for now we are just letting the green blend into the pink a little bit. We're not focusing on creating that leafy green base that the sweet peas have. We will do that in just a little bit but we just want to make sure that while the pink is maybe a little bit wet still we can have some of those blending moments. And like I was saying earlier the sweet pea is really wavy and spontaneous so you can angle these little vines that are attaching the flowers kind of any direction that you want because this one really doesn't have a lot of exact form to the directions that it goes in. So now we are going to add these stringy vines that come off of the sweet pea and they are really thin really spontaneous. If you're looking at a picture of a sweet pea you'll see that they are just kind of all over the place. They have no rhyme or reason and actually my least favorite vine on here that I did was that first one where it was more patterned with the curliness of it. So I would suggest just letting your brush kind of tell you where it wants to go and using the tip of it and just being more spontaneous and random with your brush stroke. Sweet pea leaves are small and simple. They're found along the bottom of the plant mostly and I use the two stroke method where I do a brush stroke across the top and one across the bottom with white space in the middle. That little bulb of greenery where the flower connects to the stem is called the receptacle and then just above the receptacle at the very base of the petals are those tiny little leaves that come off and those are called sepal. I think I'm pronouncing that right but that is what we're painting now. So it's kind of like those little leaves that have opened up after a flower has blossomed and so they're still kind of hugging the base of the flower. Now I'm going through and adding more vining and also using a darker pigment of green to add more contrast and detail and I know I say this in every video but anytime you can go back to a painting and add a darker pigment to the painting to add contrast and details it really bumps up how your painting looks. It takes it from looking flat to looking vibrant and dimensional and just really makes it look more professional. So now that our petals are totally dry I'm going to add even more dimension to the flower portion by layering more petals on the top and this is a pretty easy technique. All you need to do is use a little bit of a darker wash than you did previously and just paint directly over your petals. So to make it look like it's a new petal and not just the darkening of an existing petal you'll want to paint half of the new petal on an existing petal and then maybe above or to the side where there's some white space because then it gives the illusion that it's its own petal but it's just layered over the top of another petal and where those two petals layer together it will be darker so you'll be able to see that contrast. And now that we have finished practicing our sweet peas I am adding them to my watercolor flower guide. I realized that the carnation was the first pink we had added and so I knew we needed to add another pink. Sweet peas are the perfect pink to add and I love having these flowers interact with other boxes. I think that's kind of fun. And that is it for day 11 of our 30 days of watercolor flowers doing the sweet pea today. I really enjoyed this tutorial. If you are following along let me know in the comments below. I would love that and I will see you tomorrow for day 12. Bye!