Spectacular Watercolor Floral Painting - How to paint FLOWER BOUQUET - easy tutorial for everyone

Today we're going to paint a vase of flowers. They're going to be pink, bright pink, and nothing but pink, maybe a little touch of yellow. That's Lottie barking. And she throws you right off your stride, doesn't she? So what I'm going to do is I'm going to put together a selection of little dishes with all my reds and pinks in, so that they're all close at for when I want to start to paint. So that's five, so I've got seven there, and I've just started here with permanent rose. Talking about these little dishes, we have managed to find a source of them, if anyone's interested in buying them, and I've found one of these. I think this is the Jack Richardson one that's available on Amazon. They're stacking. They fit together like that. That's the top one, that's like the lid, and they come in sets of five or six. I've only seemed to have two of those. The rest of them, these all to me anyway, look like they've been handmade because they're very, very thin compared to this, and they look for all the world as if they've been made in a hand kiln or something like that, so you won't be able to find those, but this one looks a little bit more commercially made, but anyway, Jackson's have got them. They've got sets, but they're out of stock till the end of June. On Amazon, you can get them, and I've put the link in the description below, and I think it's pretty much like this one. That's obviously been broken, but that's the way they are. Anyway, so that's that, which is great. Thank you very much to those of you who pointed me in the right direction for finding the Jack Richardson ones. I couldn't find them searching on Amazon. Anyway, so I'm going to squeeze out the end of this tube of permanent rose, I think. I'm going to try using my, what do you call it? This is for folding paper. It's a, oh gosh, I can't remember what that's called. It's a bone something. I don't know. Anyway, there we go. That's most of the end of that tube. I don't think we need worry too much about the little bit that's in there. So permanent rose, and I'm also going to squeeze out permanent rose deep, alizarin crimson lake, which is new. I haven't used this one yet. That's that one. I keep actually keep that with it. So I know which it is. This is potter's pink, which is a very highly granulating pink, which gives a lot of texture to everything that it mixes with, including itself. This is cadmium red, which probably won't use a lot of that, but that's a colour that gives a lot of life. And we've got alizarin crimson, which we use all the time. So I'll put that in there. I just wanted to put them out freshly and to show you how I did it. Not that it's rocket science, so that you know, well, so they'll all be clean. So we'll find a dish that's not full of blue. Scarlet lake. This is an old tube of scarlet lake, which is a lovely, some of the old colours, you can't get them anymore. That's on the way out, isn't it? Scheveningen rose deep. And this one is, well, that's another tube of permanent rose. So I don't need that because I've got that one there. And I need, for this painting, a little bit of yellow as well. So I'm going to plump for quinacridone gold. And as well, since there's a probability that we might want a bit of green, I'll just grab my sap green, sap green, and we will add to that. So there we go. Right then, so I think what I'll do now is I'll just show you those colours on my pad here so that we know what we're working with. Okay, so not too big of a brush. So we have that pink, which is Scheveningen rose deep. This is, that is scarlet lake. That's permanent rose, which is lighter than rose deep. This is alizarin crimson. And the purpose behind this is so that you can, what's the word, develop your sensitivity to the different shades of the same colour. Remember we did yellow the other day. This is an exercise in potter's pink. That one is. This one is, oh, what's it called? Cadmium red. Very similar to which one? Very similar to scarlet lake. And this here is, hang on a second, did I do the same one twice? We'll soon see, won't we? No, that's okay. So I'm going to suggest that all of those are different shades of red. And here we come with an acridone gold, which will blend nicely, I think, with all of them. Don't see any signs of disobedient grey coming up, do we? No. Quinacridone gold makes orange with all of those pinks, so all of that is good. And we can hopefully make a painting using those colours and sap green, which also mixes well with quinacridone yellow gold. So there we are. That's what I call swatching out, to check that all the colours go well together and that we're going to make a beautiful painting with them. So I'm going to turn you off for a second and I'll get myself sorted and then we'll start on this painting. You haven't missed anything. Okay, it was just a bit low, but there we are. Oh, do you like my bookmark? I made this yesterday after I'd finished recording yesterday's video. I had to cut a piece of paper off of something and to test it out, see if it was still any good, make sure that the sizing hadn't disappeared, because it's an old piece of paper and sometimes old paper loses its sizing, especially if it's been soaked before, which this one had been, because a wash had been put on the back of this piece of paper, or on the front actually, this is the back, this piece of Saunders, what is it? Hang on a second. Saunders Waterproof. Good paper, so I didn't want to waste it and I was just testing. So I thought that would make a nice bookmark if you did it a bit smaller, wouldn't it? Anyway, okay, put that to one side and yeah, I'll be back in a tick. Okay, so I'm going to paint this picture in a slightly unconventional way. Find the biggest brush you've got. This is an Isabelle Petit Cris squirrel hair mop brush, but if you haven't got one of these, then you might have one of these, which is a ProArt mop brush, also squirrel hair I think, but different, slightly different, synthetic probably. That would do too, or if you haven't got that, a small house painting brush would be fine. You just want a little bit of randomness, so I'm going to just paint areas where the flowers would want to be. So I'll just put a little bit of tint in the water, just so you can see that I'm not covering the whole paper. I'm just imagining and using a photo of a bunch of flowers for reference, imagining a bouquet in a round vase. So I'll just put the vase in down there. So I hope you can see that that's very, very light wash. It's meant to be clean water, but it doesn't matter. It'll look fine. So then I'm going to go to my fairly large size 14 round. Yeah, that's the biggest one I've got. That'll do. I'm using that because I think most people, that's probably the biggest one you've got, so I'll start with that, and then what I'm going to do is I'm just going to literally spatter paint onto the paper to start with, like we did with the burnhams, but slightly differently. So I'm going to enter in with some yellow, which is the lightest areas, and it doesn't matter where it goes. Make sure there's a little bit down there, perhaps in the vase, but otherwise mostly up there. And then what I think is the best thing to do is to start with the lightest pink first, so this is Permanent Rose, and just generally pretty much anywhere, and then go one step lighter to Alizarin Crimson, let's say. It's up to you. You stick that in, and then maybe some Cadmium Red, and then a bit of water, and then we'll put that aside to let that run a little bit, and then we're going to do some mixing on there. So I'll put that to one side. So I think it's always a good idea to do more than one of the same thing if you're going to do a very loose painting. So now I'm just going to go through the whole procedure again on a fresh piece of paper, a stretched piece of paper, and I'm going to do basically the same thing except where one painting has got Potter's Pink in it, the granulating paint, I'm going to leave the Potter's Pink out of it, and we're going to see at the end whether there's any noticeable difference once the whole thing is dried. So here we go, and I will let you watch through this, and in one or two minutes we'll go on to the next thing. And this is what it looks like after a few minutes, so we can continue to join up some of these dots to make a random floral pattern. Down here we've got the vase, so we just put a few strokes in to indicate the vase there, let that go off the bottom of the paper if you want, and then maybe lift a bit out from up there, and perhaps that's going to be a bit too dark, and just put the vase in there, and let it go off the side of the paper if you want. So now that needs to dry, so I'm going to not play with that anymore. If you tip it, it'll move, you see that that's going up to the top, so I'm just, because there's quite a lot of water there, I'll just carriage that out to make a big flower up the top there. Now I really will let that go here, and here's the other one that I did. This is somewhat different, so we do the same kind of thing, holding the paintbrush near the end so that we don't get too much control, we don't want too much control, and when this is dry, we'll put stems in and sharpen up any shapes that we feel. You can see that there's nice big blossoms, it's just fun. And there's our vase, and we'll put some stems in there later and sharpen that up a bit. If for those of you who have trouble loosening up, this is the way to go. This is the way to start to develop loose watercolour, okay? You let the paint do the work, and it's nearly half past 12. Time to go and make our lunch, so I'm going to leave that. It will, for sure, need some more work, there's no doubt about that. There's some water that's collected up the top again, so I'm going to do the same thing, just let it spread around a little bit like that. It'll dry a lot lighter than this, you'd be surprised. You can see where you've got nice spaces here where you can put leaves and stems and things in, so it's all very exciting. So I'm going to go away, and when I come back after lunch, hopefully they will both have dried into a nice interesting pattern that we can take to the next level. Isn't this exciting, everybody? So I'm back now to carry on with this painting, and before I start, I just wanted to refresh your memory about the colours that we were using. This is the swatch I did yesterday, and it's completely dry now, and I'm really quite emotional about these colours. I don't know whether it's because it's pink or red, or somehow it seems to be touching my heart, and I've just kind of fallen in love with this. So yeah, it's quite weird actually. I feel like I want to frame it. It's just such beautiful pinks. I'm not really a pink person, really. You know how some people just love pink and they can't wear anything else, but that just to me is just so inspiring. So anyway, here we are again, and I'm going to carry on with this loose painting. I've actually done two of these to make sure that one of them worked out well enough to be able to demonstrate to you the whole thing working out in a successful way, because you can never quite guarantee that things are going to go the way you expect. These have actually come out quite similar. This one's got potter's pink in it, and this one hasn't, and I think you'll agree that you can see the difference. This is a little less clean in the middle here, and that might not be ideal, whereas this one with no potter's pink is a lot more clean, really. I think that's all there is to it. So that's interesting, and so I'm going to work on this one, which I think is better. If by any chance something goes wildly wrong with that one, then I can always swap to the other one, can't I? We could start all over again, but hopefully it won't. There's a couple of different ways that you can do this next step. You could either, well there's about three different ways at least, totally different ways. You could just use this as a background, and then you could paint the petals in wet on dry, you know, just kind of putting petals in. You could wet the areas where you want the flowers to be and paint into that, drop colour into that, or you could wet the whole page and just drop in areas of colour and let the whole thing be a complete wet-in-wet painting. So what should I do? I've activated my paints and I'm thinking I might go for the drop it in and see what happens approach. So I'll tell you what I'm going to do. I'm going to take my spray bottle and I'm going to spray my flowers in. There we are, and then I'm going to take my colours. I might be adding, I might want to add a little bit of cobalt blue to one of the pinks to make it, there we are, there's cobalt blue, make it, so I might add that to Permanent Rose to make a slight lilac colour. I think I might do that. I know flowers aren't really random are they, and they grow according to very definite patterns, but sometimes you get a good effect by allowing them to. It's quite early this morning, I've got started really, a crack of dawn, it's 10 past nine here, because I want to do another painting today. I didn't get one up last night because we discovered a rotten beam in the barn and then we, oh god, I don't want to go into that. Where's my Quinacridone Gold, emphasizing the areas that I made yellow, and that will feed into the green in a minute when I'm going to put the stems in. Okay, so I'm going to use a slightly smaller brush for the green, I think, so let's just mix some of that up, a little bit, and because it's going to be going in and it's going to bleed a little bit, I don't, I think, let's make it a bit more bluish. I don't want it to flood everywhere, so I might have to leave this to dry a little bit. Let me think, it's a little bit too much water up here, don't be afraid to dab it out if you feel, and I'm hoping that we'll get some nice backgrounds and things. I think I might put the colour in a little bit more strongly before I start doing the next step, so let's put some more Mauve up there. It does dry such a lot lighter. I'll keep the Mauve on one side and put pinks on the other side, I think, pinks and reds. This is something that you might find you want to do two or three layers, you can't really tell until you get a bit further. I'm going to put some stems in at the bottom here and draw a little bit of pink up. I'm not sure whether it's probably too soon to put the stems in the middle, I need to let that dry a little bit more, so I'm going to probably go away and come back, so I'll just try out a little bit of green there. That seems to be okay, just indicate the stems where there's gaps. By no means finished yet, I'm going to leave this to dry back soon. So this is the alternative way, or one of the alternative ways, not wetting the paper, and we can come in with colour into the background. So I'm not wetting the paper, I'm just going to give another layer of colour. This is more my normal style, but it doesn't mean to say it's better, it's just I'm perhaps a little bit more familiar with the way the colours work by painting wet onto dry like that, once I've got a background in. So what I'm doing is I'm just adding to the colour that's underneath, intensifying it. I'm sort of keeping in my head the idea of flowers, but I'm not painting flowers, I'm just painting areas of colour, and then the idea is at the end you pull it together, perhaps with the stems. I definitely need to go right over the edge with this one. I'm using mostly Permanent Rose and Pinacridone Gold, and this is Cadmium Red. I'm going to size that a bit more. Now I'm going to start thinking petals a little bit, so beginning to use the paint a little bit more thickly, and I'm thinking flowers a bit more. I'll put some more yellow in the middle, and then let's try for some green. I'm going to put the stems in the vase first, and then bring them up through these gaps, and perhaps a leaf or two, and so now we need to let that one dry. So here we are, here are the two paintings. I didn't do anything else to them after I left them to dry a minute or two ago, I just dried them off and that's it. This is the one that had No Potter's Pink in it, the one I did first, and you can see it's almost a completely abstract version of a flower. You've only got the impression of the colour, you haven't got any real form or anything, although there might be a few little petals peeping out here and there, but this one leaves everything to the imagination. It's just pure joy in colour, so that's really, really nice, and I'm very pleased with that one actually, and I do hope you give that a go because I think you'll really enjoy it. It's very liberating, and you know, burn an incense stick and listen to some music, and leave your husband in front of his TV, and away you go. So that's that one, and then there's this one. I've put a frame around them so you can see them better. This one is the second one I did, exactly the same idea, only this one did have a little bit of Potter's Pink in it, so it's got a bit more form, and what I did here was I did actually put some petal shapes in. I was thinking rose, and I was thinking chrysanthemum here, so you've got a little bit more structure to this one, but it's basically the same, and it's worked out really similarly, so whichever one you prefer. This one was done wet into wet, this one was done wet into dry, and so there we are, two different alternative versions of the same starting point, and I hope you enjoy that. So I'll let you go now and practice that. It's a beautiful painting for the summer. Thanks ever so much for all the lovely comments you've been leaving, it's absolutely marvellous. I feel really buoyed up by all the wonderful comments that you leave, and today I'll try and get around to answering a few more of them, and there was something else I wanted to say, but I can't remember what it was. Oh yes, I know, iridescent paint on black paper is my next thing. I'm going to be doing that tomorrow, so I'll be preparing that today, and tomorrow then you'll see it. So I hope you enjoyed this, and happy painting, and check the description below for links to different things that you haven't already got, and if you give Jacksons a visit, they will reward you with 10% off if you use my links. So there we are, and I'll say bye for now. Bye everybody, bye-bye.