I Needed To Hear This Message. Now Let’s Paint Watercolor Flowers

I'm on a mission to bring more peace and quiet into my life and yours. And today we're painting a simple but satisfying floral you can do no matter what else is happening in your life. I'm also leafing through a beautiful book I found in a charity shop which is packed full of inspiration for those of us who love painting flowers and gardens. And I'm introducing a new watercolour paint product from Meaden which is completely original and you're going to love it. So let's get into today's painting. Carrying on with the theme of inspiration and where to find it other than online because I'm actually into a very strong anti-online mood at the moment for various reasons some of which I'll talk about in a minute. I have another hint or another tip for people when they want to start painting. And I've got a book here and this is but this isn't the whole story. This is a book that was published in 1991. I think I got it from a thrift shop or a, you know, secondhand charity type shop. I'm not quite sure how much it cost at the time but it must have been fairly expensive. But it's available. I'm sure you can find this online from people like A Books or so on and so forth. And it's got some really lovely photos in it which I know are genuine real photos haven't been digitally enhanced or created by a computer at all. And so I just kind of picked this up yesterday just at random. It just took me by surprise. I suddenly felt the urge to go and visit my bookshelf and I found two things. One of which was this and I'm going to flick through some of these pages in a minute with you. And the other thing I found was my diary from three years ago when I wrote on the 17th of February about the arrival in my life anyway of AI in the form of chat GPT and the ability we now had to generate text and images using the computer in a way that Google couldn't compete with. Well Google obviously got its act together and this one that's nice isn't it? Quite quickly after that and joined in the race to the bottom. And I know that my videos are supposedly all about being positive and relaxed and calm and cheerful as much as possible. But today I am probably going to sound a little bit more negative but it's not because I'm negative it's because I'm realistic. Anyway yeah so two things. One if you want to paint something I suggest you do something else first. And I've just sat down and done some spinning. Spinning is one of the things I like to do. And so I thought damn it I'm going to do a few minutes of that. So for probably 20 minutes or so I sat and span spun or spinned. I don't know what the past participle of to spin is. I spent about 20 minutes spinning and then I sat down in front of this book opened it random came to the page with some pansy photos on and painted these nice loose pansies which you know I was quite pleased with the way that worked out actually because I discovered that if I use cadmium yellow as my background for a yellow pansy and then drop Winsor purple or Winsor violet in it really blurs really nicely which is quite interesting. And then this one I had some blue on the petals and the same Winsor violet didn't spread as well but on this one it kind of was halfway between and that is that was shell pink which is a holbein colour mixed with a little bit of permanent rose or no wait a minute what was it yes I think it was probably alizarin crimson I think and that kind of showed up the nice little scratch lines that I was doing as well so and then just random greens and allowing them to flow around however they wanted to flow so yeah I felt that that came much more easily and with less stress and I'm really on a thing at the moment about reducing amount of stress in our lives because really I think they're killing ourselves and it's just insane. Anyway so this book is for a gardener it's a great book but also for a painter it's even better I mean look at this look at this. Do you know we have had 50 days where it hasn't rained has not stopped raining it's been raining for 50 days in England and where I am here in France as well it's rained every day for 50 days or more than 50 days now actually since before Christmas it has either rained or snowed it snowed here over Christmas we had snow on Christmas day it's worse than Noah I mean when it snowed when it rained for 40 days and 40 nights they thought it was the end of the world enough said anyway so this book is all about gardening in England of course but the pictures don't really have to have anything to do with England and I started to flick through this and I thought oh gosh how inspirational this book is and you know you can go through it and every now and again every few pages a lot of these pictures are a little bit on the small and dull side but then you come up against these beautiful little cottages and you think oh my goodness and then something like this this is actually a painting somebody who paints much better than I do doing absolutely wonderful examples of how to paint just take my glasses off so I can see better rhododendrons I mean they're brilliant absolutely brilliant I don't know who did them but whoever they were I suppose it might be in the beginning mightn't it um I've been trying recently to do what the algorithm if you like or what YouTube wants me to do and I'm going to give it up because I can't it's killing me it's just killing me artists I don't recognize any of these names I should do I'm sure they're all really brilliant well they are brilliant brilliant credits given to the artists and the photographers here and of course the gardeners and everything so yeah if you can get hold of this book I think you'd find it very inspirational but if you can't find this one then there are plenty of others out there which are just as good oh look at that oh brilliant that is so fun isn't it look at all those different clay pots all those different shapes yeah wow so what am I going to choose I don't know I should spend probably half an hour going through this and seeing what wonderful things there are in here there are lots of paintings actually I didn't realize how many paintings there were perhaps where they couldn't find a good photo of something they decided that they put in a painting this is a painting too wow very impressive okay so the next full page spread I come to this is one of my favorites that turns out to be a yucca that's a painting tricky very tricky to paint something like that oh yeah I'm even more excited by this book than I thought I was going to be now I know it's got paintings on every page look at the detail in this and the amount of work that must have gone into doing this and you know someone actually sat down with a pen not a pen well probably a pen first of all or a pencil and then sat down with a brush for hours painting all those leaves I mean they must have done it much much bigger than that as well it's very impressive and look at these ponds they're so beautifully English garden I used to know someone used to be related actually to someone who had a pond like that in their garden just magic absolute magic and look at the beautiful cottage thatched cottages so Somerset and Devon and Cornwall definitely Somerset and Devon mostly I think anyway so let's try to find a double spread page that is spring-like that we can paint and think certainly surely surely surely surely the spring has got to be just around the corner 55 days of constant rain is going to kill us all if we go on like this okay so where is the first spring page there must be one here somewhere I could never paint anything like that I just wouldn't have the patience I might manage something like that it wouldn't look exactly like that though because well you know what my paintings like today I'm going to use my traditional set again and for people who don't understand what I'm saying that doesn't mean to say I'm never going to paint anything whimsical again it doesn't mean to say I'm not going to use my um Kuretake set again I will I shall I am going to oh look at the daffodils now I'm not going to try that because I just daffodils are just too difficult they are beautiful though beautiful they really make you feel spring-like don't they ah tulips look at that honestly going through a book like this it really does take your mind off of it I found a picture in here uh oh look pinks I found a picture in here which I thought would be ideal roses look at those ideal to work from ah that one yes what about that clematis yes that's what we're going to do that's what we're going to do today I'm going to use that as my inspiration so we'll just move my brushes put this over here and um I'll find some paper I had yes here we go I knew it was here somewhere this is a piece of arches watercolor paper and I need my um painting board which is a piece of glass I put that on there now before anyone gets all disappointed and says oh that doesn't look at all like that I'm not going to try to imitate this beautiful collection here I'm just looking for oh here it is meeden meeden tape to just tape it down just to keep it still there's no doubt about it um arches paper is better for watercolor than anything else well not than anything else that isn't true that is not true um arches or arch watercolor paper is very good I will say very good for um painting on and um as I said the other day and a lot of people agreed with me which is not always the case um that we might as well use what we've got because you never know so what am I going to do I'm going to push that up a little bit because I can't get everything into my camera view but I'm going to try to be a little bit I'm going to try to use my set of um traditional paints in the way that I have been using the Kuretake ones which is not all that easy because these are in little um little boxes little boxes little boxes on the hillside and so you can't get the paint out quite so easily as you can in the big boxes and that reminds me that today I was going to show you something which has just arrived from meeden uh scissors okay right so we're going to have a look at this this is a new product from meeden that they've just released not long ago it's now available on amazon and this is very interesting actually because I've never seen anything packaged in quite this way before what we have here and I haven't opened any of them yet so you're going to see me opening the first one what we have here obviously these are meant to be hung in the shop on a you know pole coming out from the wall so you can see them hanging like this what we have here is a very large tube I think uh I'll tell you that's 15 mils 15 mil tube of um professional watercolor their paints are good I have to say they're not at all bad professional watercolor 15 mils and then you've got a pan a half pan of the same paint and then an empty half pan so I'm going to open this one I hope I'm going to there we go open up and what have we got we've got a small half pan empty and we have a deep green half pan here I think it's is that five mils I don't know how big that is anyway that's that and then this tube 15 mils this must be five um deep green meeden professional watercolor paint and they've got all the colors there are there's rose and there's yellow and yellow everything all of them all of them and you get all of this and there's enough paint here to last you quite a while for $9.95 $9.95 I'm not sure if they're on the British English or Australian Canadian or whatever sites yet they will be coming though it's a new product from them completely new idea new concept never seen anything like this before to me this is completely new so if you check in the description below and I'll have a link there to these on Amazon and why not try one you know no harm in trying one is there and the reason why I'm mentioning this instead of getting started with my painting is that this therefore kind of um takes this to another level you can have a set of if you bought you know 24 48 12 or whatever you can have a set of pans you can have matching tubes so when you want to do something a bit looser you can go to the tube because it's easier to access the paint if it's in a tube and you can make your own mixtures and I think this is a brilliant idea if you have a favorite shade of purple let's say that you normally mix from Permanent Rose and Cobalt Blue for example you could buy the two tubes and then you could mix it up and you can put it in your own little pan and then you can have your own set which has got the ready mixes and then your own mixes in it so that could really customize your whole painting experience and I think that's quite exciting actually I'll open this because I probably will want to use a few bits and pieces of green on this I'm going to put that there I will also make sure I've got plenty of it on my fingers because every good painter should have paint on their fingers um and yes so there we are you might be some of the first to know about this particular product Tamsin spotted it or was it me one of us I never know who um spotted it on Amazon the other day when we were looking for something else and so I wrote to them and I said hey what's this you haven't told me about this product why not and they said oh sorry it's really really new so um they said we'll send you a complete set so I've got this great big box and what am I gonna do with them I don't know anyway I'm going to paint some of these now they've got really nice um centers with all of these little stamens and things sticking out and beautiful purpley colors so I shall relax and do this I do wish that I could play music in the background while I'm doing this because it would really help me to relax and perhaps you too but I can't because of copyright we can put music on afterwards um but I can't actually listen to something at least I don't think there's any way I can do that maybe there is um anyway so following the advice of Hazel Soane I'm not going to wet all of my paints I shall just wet the ones that I expect to use and I'm not um I'm not sure I don't think I've got a great many purples here so I'm probably gonna have to mix some up I don't know I've got this green here which is quite uh dark by the look of it and perhaps we'll use this one perhaps we'll use that one I don't think we're not going to need much yellow but that's the yellow I've been using I think it's cadmium yellow light I'm going to use this Medan quill brush size five because it's nice and loose I don't know what's going to happen I haven't planned this I should have done but I'm not so let's do one here and you press down and lift up as you come towards the center and then you get a space there then okay which is what you really want you want a kind of space in the center so that's purple let's add a bit more stronger and mixed with some blue make it slightly different I know that's a bit lopsided but it doesn't matter I never met a plant that wasn't lopsided to some extent I think that one is actually so we just put in a bit more paint make it a bit darker at this point and next to it here we've got something that's really dark and you'd almost think well perhaps I should put black in with that to make that really dark I've often said this before that some people say you shouldn't use black but I think you can do what you like so I am mixing black in with purple I wanted to tell you about a lady who I've been listening to she's Canadian called Wendy Hughes Wendy Dewar Hughes I think that's her name I'll put it in the description below anyway Wendy and I listened to her this morning when I woke up and she's talking about giving up trying to control what's going on in her head in order to avoid unnecessary stress and she really hit her hit the nail on the head for me actually and I wanted to share that with you because I think it's really really really important that we realize what we're doing to ourselves and honestly things like watching the news and so on I mean why why none of it's true and trying to please people and trying to keep things on track and so on when nobody else really cares all that kind of thing trying to you know for me trying to economize a little bit on the electricity and actually finding myself cold because and nobody else cares I don't not I don't mean they don't care about me they don't care about keeping the electricity bill though I mean they should but um oh I don't know I'm not very good at talking about these serious things while I'm painting obviously because it's not easy I'm going to go over here to so I won't that's enough and go and listen to Wendy's talk and also another one is very interesting for any of you out there who are watching me and if you are actually a creator as well go and watch Nate Black's latest videos because he's just had a bit of a crisis and had stopped creating stopped producing videos for a while because he had kind of hit a wall and um it's very interesting what watching his video I'll link to it below because well so it's not just us old fogies who are having problems dealing with the way things are at the moment no not at all he's I don't know how old he is probably about 40 um but he's having trouble too okay so I'm gonna water that one down I might do some pale ones I might want to come into this after I've done these flowers which couldn't be more simple could they I mean really they couldn't really be more simple they're totally totally I'm sure somebody will say they're so childlike oh well whatever in my second childhood I don't care go join my husband and his that's another thing you know I'm making that one black in the middle see what happens now you never know sometimes um the most peculiar things that you do work the best I'm going to go into this shell pink here and do one over here in that it's all about getting paint onto paper I don't think any of us you know we have roughly roughly about 5000 views on every on average if we average up 5000 views that means we've got 5000 loyal um viewers sometimes it goes a bit higher than that um that's when YouTube shows us to other people but on the on the whole we can guarantee that we have around about 5000 views for every video potentially um and what I was going to say was so that's 5000 people who are watching what I do um and I would probably say without too much hesitation that the majority of them are not painting to sell or painting to exhibit or painting to even give away probably not even most of the time painting to put something on your wall all right there's a hair there there's hairs everywhere in my world that's not going to improve things is it so in other words you're painting to get to relax to enjoy the sense of creativity to enjoy a sensation of putting paint on paper to just stop thinking about things whatever those things are um so just get the paint out and put it on paper and just see what happens and if you get squiggly lines like that all of a sudden from your bamboo stick don't worry about it all of these flowers need veins in the petals starting to feel hungry I always do it around about quarter past eleven it's quarter past eleven in the morning we've just decided to change our um diet actually completely I have been vegetarian for years and um my daughter was starting to worry that she wasn't getting enough nutrition and I know some people are going to say oh yeah you can but um we have also a problem that we can't eat pulses I can't anyway so we can't get protein from pulses and um there's a few other things I'm allergic to which means that we actually do have a perhaps a rather too restricted diet so we've decided to reintroduce chicken and fish into our diet and also to change from eating in the main meal in the evening to eating our main meal in the at lunchtime so that it's easier to digest so that's what we're going to do and I haven't quite got used to it yet so today we're going to have cauliflower cheese it's today is a non non-meat eating day so we're going to have fish once a week and chicken once a week so that means that the rest of the week is vegetarian as before and um I'm going to put some and we'll see how that goes some pink up here just some partial petals like that maybe down here perhaps perhaps over here and now I'm going to go on to the leaves I'll come back to do their centers later I'm not quite sure what with at the moment but we'll put some leaves in now so we use this as our starting point perhaps this dark green from the evening which needs to be toned down and put some black in that too that's a nice color isn't it so this green together with I think that's kind of sap green there does make a nice leaf color so I'm going to do is just put some in in this shade that's not very well done there but you can always cut that off when you're finished I like the screen I think that mixes quite well with that one to make us a nice I might um finish this off with pen work this could be one of those ones that we embellish you know with with pen I think it could well be that might be exactly what we want to do and I might not go too varied on my greens I might just stick with these the black the deep color from maiden and that I'll look that up afterwards I'll look underneath and see what color that is actually because I'm not quite sure but I'm just mixing up slightly darker version now the same three colors I always find that the great thing about having tube paints is that you can pick up so I was trying to say earlier but I don't think I said it very well you can pick up more on your brush and be freer and quicker not that you always want to be super quick but sometimes you know when inspiration strikes although that happens very often and now I might go to the black gonna have to fill that one up they didn't send me any black which is a bit irritating but I do use quite a lot of it so we're just making this into design for a table cloth or something it has actually stopped raining and the sky has actually cleared but there is terrible terrible flooding all over France at the moment terrible I'm gonna put some of this black rather than waste it I'm gonna put some of it in to to these and then I'm gonna get the pen but first of all I'll dry it yeah right so rinse off my brush and I'll grab the hairdryer okay so I think um I need to put some yellow probably in the center of these if we're going to retain any vague semblance of reality I don't want to get too real though do we and then I need to find my pens which I have very carefully put away so this is a 0.3 let's see whether this is uh about the right size to do probably need a thicker one than that I'm going to grab my thick and thin okay this is my Fudenosuke calligraphy pen I believe it is and I think we can probably um use this to do dots and center lines and we will need white as well so I have got my this is my favorite white one and we can do nice lines coming out here this is a zig I was just trying to remember a zig brush white pen and I put some dots in here the the black originally kind of looks sort of ugly but when you start to work on it with pen it looks less ugly so put some dots up here too if you put black next to white of course it makes the white show up a bit more I'm quite happy with that sometimes the white on here has to be squeezed out a bit it's just white ink inside you can get refills come on out you come looks like I might need a refill I have got a jar of white gouache which you can use too if you use a little brush or a brush pen like this that's fine as well so let's do this one the same if you want to do nice big white dots I've just remembered I think this is the one this will do nice bigger dots like that which I quite like could actually improve on these ones too come to think of it okay and the other white pen that I might use for lines in lines is this one I believe I've got a few of these they don't all work all the time oh there we are lucky lucky strike put some small dots around there let's vary it and this one some of these flowers have got kind of curly really kind of tangled up looks like my hair when I get up in the morning and then we can put some dots in the center here and maybe some whoops a few little dots around the outside edges like that they're looking okay aren't they and this one let's do this one with white on the lighter color let them cross over a bit too some of them are different they've all got sort of different centers and things that one's nice and this one over here has got sort of fairly short shorter do that like that and then just got this one over here now my question is at this point in time what to do about the veins in the leaves so we'll start with a dark one okay so yeah we'll do that for the dark ones we'll just do black that's this shade really this one this one here it might get cut off so and as you go along you'll sort of think to yourself do I want to do any stems kind of thing am I just going to stick with this shall I just do the same thing on all of them it does make a difference putting the veins in it makes the whole thing much more complete let's do a black one down here and I might just do a couple of white I hope you enjoyed this I'm going to do some dots on these ones just for fun I hope you enjoyed this I did and I'm going to try and do another one after lunch to go back and do dinner now because we've actually invited some people for Saturday lunch supposed to be Sunday lunch but they were busy so so tomorrow I'm going to have to spend most of the day probably preparing my chicken cacciatore which is what I'm going to offer them on Saturday okay now the thing to do is to take off the tape which is always a relief as you get rid of all of your uneven edges I quite like the pink with that green I have to say so have a look online and see what you think about the the new Medan paints in their new format like this this is Rose hello Rose I think I'm going to probably use those maybe in the next video I might try mixing up a custom color like a specific mauve or something like I said and blue and red and and add that to my selection here because I think I've got too many greens here anyway so I might take some of those out and replace them with some custom colors I think that might be a good idea so there we are this is the original the work the the painting I worked the photograph I worked from and this is my version of it and I'm quite happy with that I think that's quite a nice cheerful morning after spinning for a bit and I hope you enjoyed it and I will see you again soon so take care everybody make sure you do plenty of painting and keep relaxed and have a look in the description below and have a have a visit to Wendy because I'm sure she'd love to see you over there and she's been quite a little inspiration to me today so thank you Wendy and I hope to have conversation with you at some point so bye for now everyone take care and see you soon bye-bye everyone bye-bye