Five Top Tips to Paint a Watercolour Rose

Hi guys, welcome along. It's the big one today. We are looking at watercolour roses and I have five top tips that will help you paint the perfect watercolour rose every time. So get your kit and let's get started. The rose is made up of essentially a single brush stroke and that is our well-known and loved C-curve, which we've practiced many a time. However, the most important thing is that your C-curve is a little bit messy and waggly. When we look at the petals of a rose they are frilled, they are uneven, they are beautifully sort of organic, aren't they? So instead of a perfect crescent moon, you need to waggle your brush a little bit more when you come round on the C-curve. So you really want to create a bit more of an organic shape. So the first thing I would say is practice imperfecting that C-curve and you want to get the contrast from thick to thin as extreme as you possibly can. I love to use the biggest brush I've got even when I'm working on the really small bits in the middle because this allows me to get a really broad centre of the stroke and fine tips on the end. Once your C-curve practice is done it's time to start the rose but the most important tip I can give you is starting in the middle. I always talk about roses or flowers or stems of any type starting in the middle. Now we can use a pencil to help us out, quite often I'll draw a stem and then a little circle like that that gives us our central anchoring point but also you are very welcome to just start this one off on your own. The way I create a centre without pencil, let's turn the page over so we've got a blank page sometimes quite a daunting thing, I'm going to take some of my pink colour and the C-curve strokes that we just looked at we're going to start with three little C-curves to create a little bundle in the middle of the page. So watch me with one little C-curve, looks more like an apostrophe doesn't it? Then another one, it's all blending into one another and then I finish to make a funny little bundle that has essentially got a few little white bits in it but what I want is a little ball around which I'm going to start to build my C-curve strokes. So that is the next very important step starting in the middle with three little C-curves. Once we've got our middle the next step and the top tip I have for you is we've got a whole load of colour in the middle so we don't really need much more on our brush, we're going to start wrapping our C-curves around this initial bundle. Now we've already talked about making our C-curves a little bit wobbly and a little bit uneven but the other important thing is how we position them around the flower. So I'm going to start with one that wraps quite far almost almost all the way around it's more of a sort of three quarters because when the petals are closed in tightly in the centre of a flower they are wrapping around really quite far whereas the ones towards the outer edge of the rose are only covering maybe a third to the quarter around the distance around the edge of the rose. So I like to work in threes because I'm working slowly with this I'm going to be adding a bit more colour to my brush but we'll talk about that in a second. So I like to work in threes so I like to find sort of where the previous stroke has finished I like to find a sort of broad point where I'm going to dovetail and start my next brush stroke and finish it off there but what I don't want is to have a sense of left right left right building up so I'm going to quite quickly just add for my third layer for this particular stage of the flower I'm just going to put one over the top there as well. So what I'm talking about not doing just get a little bit of scrap paper in here we'll pop that rose up there what we don't want to happen just give us a starting point of our little nucleus okay so what we don't want is this because I don't know about you but I have never seen a rose that had perfectly symmetrical petals okay we're avoiding that because that's just one two one two one two instead we're working in thirds so let's try another set of three to build up this rose here we go okay and it's kind of easier to think in threes once these petals start to sort of get covering a little less distance because we need three to really get a full coverage going around the edge so what we've found we've started from the middle but we're making sure that we're working in threes the next top tip for your roses is to make sure that you get the little white gaps but you don't make them too big so you're not focusing so much on making sure there are gaps because you can see even where the petal strokes overlap there's still a little bit of definition so when you're building your petal strokes round we want a little bit of distance there we go a few little white gaps there a few little there what we don't want which I'll just finish this one here and then we can look at what we don't want what we don't want down here so we're working in threes that's nice but now I'm so worried about my brush strokes touching that they are so far away from each other and what starts to happen is our brush strokes start to look like little worms rather than lovely broad broad and waggly petals it's it's easier to then suddenly fall into the trap of this which you know it's there's a sort of stylized world where that's kind of a fun rose but that's not really the rose that we want to paint so that's the next tip is although you want the little white gaps don't get so fixated on them that you end up with a rose that looks like it's been blown up and has exploded all across the page the last tip involves me painting a rose from start to finish so let's have a look and we can just talk through what we've talked about so far and then when we get to what I'm talking about we can cover that as well so starting in the middle and I'm starting with a little bundle that I've created from three funny little sea strokes that blend into each other and we don't worry too much about it but essentially we want a ball now what my last tip is is you don't need much more color on your brush so once you start working with really nice wet color and you start to get a little bit of a bleed and a blend with your rose petals there is all the pigment on the page ready for you and the other lovely thing about that technique is it allows for the rose to actually look rather like a real rose that blends out from the side I'll just smooth that one in a little bit more a bit more water on the brush so starting with lots of color on the brush lovely and concentrated and then just allowing the remnants of that pigment to bleed out and create a beautiful rose so that is my top tips on creating a loose watercolor rose it's the perfect starting point and don't you worry we will be looking into this in much more detail very soon thanks so much for watching and those five tips will honestly help you out every time you paint a rose you'll perfect the technique the more you do so keep painting roses and very soon I'm going to be doing a full rose botanical study for you to paint along with me so don't forget to like subscribe and comment thanks so much and I'll see you again next time bye