Don’t Miss This Simple Technique for Painting Watercolor Butterflies & Fall Leaves!

[Music] hi everyone Dian here welcome to my channel and my chain of Consciousness as I traes my way through the thoughts that occur to me this morning as I try to consciously Raise Myself to the surface of the day and it's half 10 and I've just decided what to do for the painting for today um here in front of me I have a scattering of strawberry plants which I gathered from the garden a little while ago you may have seen the video that I did about the strawberry plants and the colors that are in the leaves um these colors are getting darker and sort of more tinged with brown and blacks as they get older they've been sitting in water but they're still drying out because it's that time of year but the colors in them are spectacular I mean if you take that shade of brown that's sitting there underneath that leaf and you turned it into a beautiful knitted hand knitted sweater for example you would be more than pleased with that color so there's never a dull color in nature in my opinion when you look more closely and the other thing that is also always in nature is shape and if you're ever at a loss for what to paint as I am almost every single day uh struggling to think of what to paint just pick something up out of the garden and I mean look look at this and this is where I'm going to start today in fact I already have I've done a little practice sketch and this is this is what I'm hoping to turn this into and on this little twiglet of some plant or other I don't know what it is um just a weed in the garden we've got little tiny round shapes we've got little sharp pointed sticky bits and we've got leaves of every possible Twisted configuration and all the rest of it and lots of different colors so that combined with the other leaves I've got these ones have got holes in um which I think is probably due to the action of some creature but that makes them very interesting as well um and yeah so I have all of that and I'm just what I'm going to do I'm going to take the idea of these leaves and I'm going to put some sort of whimsical butterflies in the design I'm going to do it on this piece of 10 by7 cold press Meen watercolor paper which is 100% cotton if you haven't already tried out me's paper do suggest you go and get yourself some you can either get it on Amazon or direct from their website and the links are in the description below but it really is a very reliable kind of paper and has most of the best qualities of 100% cotton without the price tag attached um so as far as that goes I'm going to put these excuse me these little uh doas um probably be good if you could see them I'm going to move my paint in a minute so I'll just put those there for a sec and the CU I want to show you the paint sorry about the vocal fry I don't know what's matter with my voice today I think I'm blocking up with allergies again um air qualty not good yesterday it was verging on the unsupportable and and um don't know what that means really but that's what they said uh right so let's get rid of that bit here we have um yet another Meen palette you'd think I worked for them wouldn't you I don't um but this is quite a nice one it's divided into three sections um and in it I have put some paint this happens to be Michael Harding I think pretty sure it is but any paint will do and you don't have to paint from a palette like this of course you don't you can paint from your paint box if that's what you've got um or however it suits you if you've got kuraki colors what I would do is pull out the colors you're going to use and put them separately so that you're not tempted to dip your brush into something different because from these colors you can get an enormous range of Shades and you don't need any more than four so what I've done is actually this was a palette I put together for something else but um it's perfect for today because it's got all the colors I need these are the colors swatched out um we've got quinacridone Rose which doesn't look like quinacridone rose cuz I've mixed a little bit of quinacridone gold with it but it is in the middle there that's quinacridone Rose phthalo blue and olive green and those colors together will mix up to make all of these colors I've got here from the strawberry which is obviously concone Rose all the way through to the light green of the still fairly Young bits of plant so that's more than enough for what I want to do and in terms of equipment I've got a relatively small round brush here this is nameless doesn't have a size on it but I think it's about a three or a four probably a three um I've got a slicky gold pen which I'm going to use for some of the embellishments I I quite like these slickies it's it has a pleasant smallness to it it's slim and Powerful It's the Best of Both Worlds and I've got a Pentel or something similar white gel pen any of them are all as good as all as bad as each other actually to tell you the truth I've got my calligraphy pen from um Tombo which is the one that goes thick and thin depending on how hard you press and I've got a selection of uh pigma M crons this one's a08 that's quite a thick and heavy one I probably won't use that I might grab a different different one when it comes to it if I need it so those are the things I'm going to use I might use a bigger brush I'm not sure yet um let me see I should have one handy shouldn't I I don't know if I've ever shown you this brush stand that miden sent me honestly it's it won't be when you see this it won't be it will already have passed but as I'm recording this tomorrow is my birthday and so it's really nice that meiden sent me all these presents this is a brush um stand I suppose you would call it a brush holder a brush container a brush organizer it's it's very good it's an organizer it's lovely dark wood and it's got all these holes in it the only disadvantage is that sometimes the brushes don't fit in the holes um they've made wide ones at the back and smaller ones at the front but most of the time most things will fit in even this this great big fat uh isab B Quil that fits in there alongside my craft mo one um you can't get my craft Mo brushes at the moment unfortunately I can't recommend them um but uh you know any brush will go in there and any brush will do to be quite honest I think um I would recommend if I was recommending any kind of brush to anybody I would recommend Princeton um I use Princeton quite a lot I'm just looking for it I don't know what I've done with it I think I might have packed it in my case to go away with me me I think maybe I hope so uh you know what that feeling is when you know you're going to go somewhere and you get started with a packing and then you can't remember what you packed and then you spend ages looking for it and actually you'll never find it because you've packed it or else you haven't packed it and and you go and you've left it behind I've done that so many times um yeah right so Princeton Aqua Elite I do like those and if I manage to find one I will use it but anyway for now I'm using the craft mode ones that we did last year I'm sorry about that I think the other ones are packed I'm not going to do a sketch for this I'm not going to do a preliminary drawing um I don't think but I think I'm just going to start and I'm using the small brush because I'm going to do the leaves in outline that was my idea anyway so let's get started got nice clean jar of water here and um my necessary I find these quite good this is the top end of a sock and somebody told me this idea and I think it's a good one when you're mixing up your colors you get some water you mix up some paint it's a bit too runny and you can just dab it off on your wrist and before you know where you are you've got a work of art anyway so that can go here I'll just finish my coffee and let's get started I think it's probably best actually one way of starting this would be to just do a line really pale going up the middle of your page and I think sometimes it's really nice to paint without too much uh either concentration or deliberation just do it I have got um a book that I'm referring to which I'm going to put there I hope it's not going to fall off stay oh dear it's such a trial getting organized isn't it what need is this right here we go one of these to hold my pages open one of the problems with books that my friend in England keeps mentioning is how badly constructed new books are these days they don't seem to have a proper spine so they don't lie flat and you press them open and then they go crack and or they Bend and oh dear and then all all the Twigs fall out okay so let's mix up some quinacridone gold with a little bit of phthalo and we'll just drop that into the stem in random places and then think I'm going to go to Pink because there's a lot of red a lot of red in these um leaves and what I'm thinking of doing is doing what I call empty leaves so this is just they don't have to look realistic they don't have to look like anything phthalo blue with um conone Rose does make rather a lovely purple and if you just let it blend and drop in and let the colors run can put a bit more in there you can just play this is what I call playing this is a great way to practice your brush Strokes especially you know the finer the finer brush Strokes practice making thin lines cuz it's not as easy as you know it's not as easy as all that when you start painting like this you don't know where it's going to end up you don't know what's going to happen and I've got all those pens and maybe I'll use those pens maybe I won't I'm going to take this over here now and I'm going to put some slightly broader lines in these leaves just to give us a little bit of variety something very satisfying about pressing down with a paintbrush getting that lovely line then if I want to do some embellish M I can always come in and put dots or something on that broader bit there and we can have more than one color appearing as you press down you know and then you could you could do one or two that are actually you know filled in and change the angle of them so some of them go one way some of them go another way on those days when you feel as if your hands are not going to obey you you know I suddenly had a a sharp pain in my thumb yesterday I don't know why it hasn't quite gone yet I do have the odd thing going on with my hands but I'm very grateful for the fact I don't I know I think there a little bit of rheumatism if anything I don't think I've got arthritis in my fingers yet okay so now we've got quite a lot of leaves there that's quite pretty let's just finish this one off and now I'm going to put in some I will come back to these isn't quite finished yet but I'm want to put in some butterflies and on my one that I did earlier I think I started off with quinacridone gold so I'm going to do really super simple butterflies or moths and I'm just just doing them like this so two triangles and then I mean there's so many different ways you can do them and you can make them much more realistic if you want but um this is what I feel like doing today so we'll have another one here and this one can be a little bit on the green side we add a bit of gold to his back [Music] wings and then for his body I think I think I go with blue and this will run and give us an interesting effect you could do red or you could do uh purple if you mix the red with the blue but I wouldn't I don't think red red isn't quite right because this is purple make the head a bit darker um sometimes if you put red it sort of looks a bit like kind of a bit gory sort of thing so we'll just leave that like that and then we'll put another couple down here let's have a a grayish one and put a bit of pink in the no not too much pink going to avoid that effect that I just spoke about and we'll just let let that run a bit and then we'll put perhaps another greenish one down here small I don't know about you but when butterflies fly around I can't usually see them very well so I quite like to paint them as if they're just fluttering around me you know quite kind of what am I what do I mean I mean you can't see the details very easily sometimes they sit down don't they and you can see them but most of the time they're just going flitter flitter butter butterfly okay and then I think I'm going to put another stem coming in from this side and we'll do some more leaves down here so if youve stick to the the four colors that you've chosen or you could choose five but for something as small and delicate as this I would be inclined to suggest four is enough but you'll see that as they mix and mingle on the paper you're getting lots more colors so you don't need to fret over that look how that's running there isn't that lovely and then when this is dry I might come in with a very very pale and a larger brush and do some solid leaves in the background to I might do that I'm not quite sure yet if that's what I'm going to do I first of all we'll put in the body of this butterfly and this one and when it's dry we'll put in their antenna and some uh decorations and so now we'll take some phthalo and we'll mix that with some red to get a nice deep purple and then remember when I was looking at this I was saying this kind of little spiky things there and the little dots so we can put some of those on um let me see again yeah so just to make sure that's dry we can just come out very fine again practicing your fine line control you need a brush with a very good point for this most brushes these days when you buy them when you first buy them are pretty good but they do lose their points after a little while and I don't want to put my hand in that I think this one's F in you and if you don't want to do it with the brush just use a pen and then I'm going to put some brown so quinacridone mixed with those two colors will give us some brown and then I'm going to put in some circles dots for the sort of floral element you can use those to sort of Link the uh elements together cuz if you're looking at this you know they go over the top of one another they don't all sit separately not necessarily so you want to kind of join things together a bit make sure you space them irregularly yeah it's something we tend to not want to do is go over you know go over what we've done but it it works I did a a leaf painting which we put on patreon um in September beginning of September and uh in that one you can see that technique where I started off with one layer of leaves a bit like this and then gradually built it up by painting into the background basically and we can put some berries on this one too so we'll do those in a dark red I'm going to um pick up some darker of the same so where this is red I'm going to just go in with some darker narrow lines and where it's purple I'm going to do the same to add another dimension and here yeah that's dry I can put my veins in on this one and I think this one needs a bit more they're nearly dry and we can join these together nice and dark the little stalks that are holding holding them together we can just paint over the top of the leaves behind like I said this one wants to go down to here okay and then yeah we can we can give the butterflies the antenna using the same brush technique or you can use a pen and I'm thinking just to emphasize their bodies a bit just come down the middle sort of keep to one side do have to be too picity I think I'll put the and their decorations on using using a pen I think I'm just going to dry this off and the next step then will be to put the background in okay so for this next step once that's dry which I think it is now um what I'm going to do now is um I've got this which I I think is s Green Oh no olive green light olive green could be sap green light as well I'm not quite sure um what you all have that will be similar but it's a yellowish green it could be greenish yellow actually this color um but they're all pretty much the same it doesn't really matter what it is and you could add a little bit of green to it if you wanted to make it a little bit Greener you know it doesn't matter but we I'm working with it fairly light and I'm going to just try it out on here here yeah that's what I wanted something really light like that maybe a little bit more blue to make it on the green side that'll do I think now the thing is um watercolor being what it is and it isn't gouache um if you tried to do this with gouache it wouldn't be so easy but you should be able to literally paint over the top of what you've got on your paper without it shifting what's underneath because there is um Gum arabic in the paint I don't know whether there's Gum arabic in gouache there must be but anyway perhaps the amount is less so um you can now happily paint in some more distant leaves okay so we'll have some of them coming in from the side of the paper overlapping with the ones on the on the uh page already and this will just give us kind of three dimensions a little bit so we don't have to worry too much about the shape of these leaves and you definitely don't want to fiddle with them because you don't want them to move the paint and you can do some stems coming in and some Thin leaves like this or you can do some fat ones whatever and then you can do a couple of layers of this if you want so we can come put a stem like we did before whatever happens to come to mind cuz you know nature is not one layer is it you never look at nature and see it two dimensional to you is always everything is overlapping and over layering itself and life is coming out of every crack and every corner and you can put some stems in without very much in the way of leaves on if you want but you see it doesn't move anything that's underneath it just gives a much more complicated much more complex effect okay so you could leave it there if you wanted to but I think that um at this point it needs something more Punchy so we're going to dry it again and then we'll come in with some stronger elements some just a few leaves really quite dark and you could try sort of try things out with some of your real leaves that you have lying around and I was just thinking you know how am I going to decide where to put the leaves if I'm going to put some extra dark ones in and you could cut them out of paper or you could just use if you have them you could use something that you've got and you can just try placing them and you have to use a bit of imagination here um as to what you're trying to achieve and where they would want to go you can sort of push them around a bit and think about it a bit I'm sorry Leaf I'm going to cut break you to pieces more where that came from so it's probable that what I'll want to do is just put some quite dark accents amongst these existing leaves it's surprising what difference it makes just moving something slightly so it really is a good idea to try these things out and I think the other thing I'm going to do before I go onto the final dark accents I'm going to um put a little bit of decorative work on the butterflies just because that's fun so I'll use my slicky pen and I'm just going to put some dots on them and we can put some veins in they're always very light aren't they the veins in butterflies we don't want them standing out too much just gives it a little bit of texture there's aund ways you could do this I'm just giving them gold tips we're going to call these gold tipped butterflies it's a new breed I think my mother used to smoke gold tip cigarettes does anyone else remember that I seem to remember that I think that was something of a fashion Benson and hedges yes it's funny how things come to mind when you're painting don't always appreciate the visitations that you get from the depths and the recesses of your mind when you paint but a lot of the time the things that come up are good okay oh you need your tips as well I just give you your tips cuz you got frilly arms frilly Wings we thought we'd lost one of our chickens last night tamin came in and she said oh the little black chicken is missing and we're like oh no and she said I was looking for her I can't find her I went into the barn this morning and the darn chicken was still there she hadn't been anywhere I don't know what happened she must she's black so she must have been hiding um somewhere right so and that was good that was definitely good I think we're going to put some just mix some phthalo blue with some quinacridone gold to make a dark and sorry conone gold and red so all three colors together and we just try that out on here yeah that'll do have to be fairly Brave about this but and then if you want to when you've done these nice dark ones you can of course add gold embellishment because you've got a lovely background to put gold on cuz up until then you can't really there's nowhere to put it where it's going to show up some of these I'm going to fill in should we put one up here okay I'm just going to put one up the very top maybe one here small one and I think possibly one here uh how should we do it should we do it coming down here like this and then we can add a few more berries some of these could do with a little bit more dark on them to make them a little bit [Music] rounder not all of them though cuz they're pretty erratic in nature too so we just put a few okay and then the last thing to do is going to be to dry it and then put some gold on those nice dark leaves so we'll just put the vein down the middle and perhaps we'll put some dots on one side like [Music] that sort of rip presents the holes in the leaves rather than actually painting in the holes just indicate them with gold you could go around the other side as well if you wanted to these ones I'll do differently because there a different BR different plant perhaps these don't have to do them all if you think it might be too much just some of them can just have lines down the middle you don't have to do them all but I think that's probably enough and uh I'm quite happy with that quite enjoyed doing that actually and hope you did hope you enjoyed watching it give it a try it's very easy very relaxing I feel a lot better now I've done that and I'm going to let you go and I will see you again soon don't forget to like and subscribe turn on the notifications and consider becoming a member of patreon or of us on YouTube here so uh I hope you join us again soon and I'll see you next time thanks very much everybody bye-bye