Watercolor flowers in rainbow order - beginner friendly!

Hi everyone, in today's video I'm going to show you a super easy beginner-friendly tutorial on how to paint tiny watercolor florals for spring. And because we're keeping the tutorial very beginner-friendly, we're also going to be using some beginner-friendly materials with paper and paint. The paint palette that I'm using today is the Daler Rowney Graduate Watercolor Set. I was really impressed with how creamy and pigmented the watercolors were, and I have enjoyed using them so much, especially when I'm putting together rough sketches. I'm also going to be using the Canson XL watercolor paper, which has a more smooth surface, but I find it very forgiving for beginners when they're trying to lift colors out. I'll also be using a brush from the Princeton Velvetouch line. I have a set of their brushes. My favorites are the size 4 and size 8 long, but because we're painting tiny today, I'll only be using the size 4 round brush. And remember, if you're interested in any of the products I'm using in today's video, the links will be in the description down below. Because today's tutorial is based on painting tiny flowers, I'm actually going to take a piece of paper from this pad and cut it down. If I cut it into four pieces, it gives me about four and a half inches by six inches per piece, and it's the perfect size for painting tiny florals. Throughout this video, I'm also going to explain why painting tiny is the best way for beginners to start on their watercolor journey, because it really does affect the way you paint and how confident you feel. I'm going to start off by painting a puppy, and if you couldn't tell, I'm actually going in rainbow order, painting a flower from the colors of the rainbow. So I started with red. Poppies are a great, great flower to paint. They're so easy, nice, simple curves, keeping the center open. For the base red of the flower, I mixed together cad red with a little bit of alizarin crimson to keep a punchy, intense color. And then I went back and picked up more of the alizarin crimson quin magenta, deeper colors, straight from the palette, and added that around the center while it was still wet. So the goal when we're painting tiny is really to keep all of our brush strokes as simple as possible. For the greenery, I am using a sap green, and I am using the tip of my size four round brush with light pressure to create the stems and the leaf. I'm also coming off the main stem, curving up to the top, creating the bulbous circular shape for a poppy bud, which is just such a classic look that I wanted to include it. Then for the center of the flower, I'm going to take some of my lemon yellow and mix it into my sap green on the palette to get a very yellow-green color and put that right in the center of the flower. We're going to let that completely dry, and I'm going to grab some ultramarine blue, mix that into my sap green mixture to get a bluish green to act as a shadow and contrast in our greenery. And I just need a few swipes to make a lot of impact, and that's one of my favorite parts about painting tiny, just a few nice swipes and you've got so much dimension. For that classic black center in the poppy, we're actually going to use Payne's gray. Sometimes using black reads very dull, but Payne's gray has blue tints to it and can be very dynamic, and so I'm just roughly popping that in around the yellow-green center up into the red portions. Now our flower is pretty much done, but if you want to, you can do another wash or glaze of red in some areas of your poppy petals to make them a little bit different, adds dimension and some character. With our poppy finished, we are going to move on to the orange flower, and that is a cosmos. I am using gamboge and cad orange to get this mixture and making sure to add enough water that it is a light color. Now the flower petals are so fun and simple to create. It is just three strokes with my brush, size four, and it creates the perfect petal shape while also giving us that classic ruffled edge of a cosmos flower, and I just find it so easy and fun to paint. Then I pick up the red mixture from our poppies and I add that to the bottom of the petals surrounding the open center, making sure I'm adding it while it's still wet so it gives a little bit of a bleeding effect. For the greenery, I am mixing together cad yellow and sap green to get more of a yellow green, and then I am creating a curve in the stem to give some more movement and another curve coming up to the right for a bud that we'll add in later. A few simple strokes to represent the more scraggly wild greenery on the cosmos, just using the tip of my brush to give it some texture, and then we're going to use that same orange from our cosmos to do a few strokes for that bud. Then I dipped into the alizarin crimson straight from the palette so it was nice and thick, and I added that to the bottom of the petals as well around that open center. It really bled and spread, which is very pretty, but I did want to keep this flower mostly orange. So if that happens to you, just rinse your brush, tap your brush on your paper towel, and lift some of that color out. Once you have lifted some of that color out, you can always go back in with yellows or other oranges and add the color that you lifted out back in to make it that brighter or more original color. But in the end, I love how much dimension all of these bleeds give the flower petals. The next flower in our rainbow is the daffodil. I think it is such an easy, fun flower. We're going to use cad orange to create the trumpet, which is just a cylinder shape with a ruffle line at the top. For the petals, we are mixing together lemon yellow and gamboge, and we're adding them quickly while the trumpet is still wet so that we get a bit of a bleed. Two strokes, nice and simple, bringing it out to create a teardrop shape for the petals. Three prominent ones, and then two small yellow strokes for potential petals in the back. And that's it! It is such a simple flower, I wish more people painted it. Using sap green, we're going to make a nice curved stroke for the stem, but then carefully watch how I create the leaf. Push down with the body of your brush, curve it around, and then lift off for that tip. Once this leaf is dry, we'll be able to add some shadow color so that it makes it look like that leaf has flopped over. But for now, we're going to let everything dry as we move on to the next. This is not a flower, it is a fern. So in the spirit of keeping it rainbow, I wanted to do something green, and I thought a fern was actually a really fun way to kind of mix it up a bit. Not a flower, but definitely foliage. So for this fern, I am focusing on texture. I started with that center line to help me ground where all of the arms of the fern are coming off, and I'm really just focusing on creating texture and tapering. So instead of painting every single leaf, I am focusing on the arm of each fern being kind of like a triangle, curving and pointing and tapering off at the end, and then being very textured on the edges. I am using all of my yellows, I'm using sap green, and then I will even use ultramarine blue and even Payne's gray to help my sap greens get to a darker place. So one of the fun things about creating something that is all one color is that you get to add differences in texture and depth by adding darker values of color or different colors that make it look interesting. So you definitely want those lighter yellow greens, but then we can add more Payne's gray into our green to create depth, especially as it gets close to that center stem. Using that darker green that I still have on my brush, I'm going to go straight into creating that shadow on our daffodil. So just look at where the curve is, find the line, and create shadow underneath it. I'm still using that same darker green color to add contrast on all of these different leaves, and then I added a bit of my gamboge yellow to the center of my cosmos. So now everything on this left side of the paper is finished, and we're going to finish our rainbow starting with blue next. This is cerulean, and we are going to be painting forget-me-nots. Forget-me-nots are so simple. It's just five circles, five tiny circles, all touching, leaving the center open. But forget-me-nots are in a cluster, it's not just one big flower. So I'd like to create maybe a few forget-me-nots that are that classic forward-facing pattern of five circles with a center open, and then I will tuck some of these half forget-me-nots behind. So maybe three circles with an open center behind a flower so that they look very clustered. Once you're happy with the amount of flowers that you have, we can add a darker center to these flowers as well. So I'm picking up ultramarine blue, adding that around the open center, making sure not to completely outline the centers but leave the lines a bit disconnected. And I love that the Canson XL paper dries pretty quickly for this tutorial because this darker color isn't going to bleed into the lighter petals even though we're moving pretty quick. Using sap green, we're going to create a main stem for the forget-me-nots and then a bunch of smaller lines for stems as we're connecting all of these bunches of flowers together to that main stem. Anywhere there is an awkward gap, I'm going to push down on the body of my brush to create a tiny leaf that could be up top or in among the flowers. I felt like the bottom was a little bit awkward so I did add some leaves toward the base of the plant. And then we're going to let this completely dry before we add any more details. Our next flower is purple and we're going to do lavender. We're going to use purple lake and mix that with the cerulean we already have on our palette, making sure to add enough water so that it is a light wash. Start by creating a few quick strokes near the bottom and then leave a gap and then get smaller and less strokes as you taper toward the top of the plant. So that will give a slightly wider base, a little bit thicker, and then it will get smaller toward the more bud end of the lavender. For the greenery, I like to lean into the more blue greens for a cooler tone. So I've added ultramarine blue to my sap green and I am placing it between all of the flower clumps in quick strokes to create the line that's coming up through the plant. And then you can add a few leaves. So smaller leaves near the top of the plant, bigger leaves near the bottom. I even added some greenery at the top of the lavender to represent a few buds there. We're also going to let the lavender dry completely before we add more details and so we'll move on to our final flower, which is a pink tulip. I'm using alizarin crimson and adding water to it to get a light wash to create pink. I start by forming a half circle on the left for the left side of the tulip and then I tuck in a similar shape on the right, leaving the top of that pointed to represent the points of the tulip, but it's a little bit bulbous down at the end. Then I take some sap green, do a very simple thin stem, and create the long leaf by starting with light pressure at the tip, pushing down on the body of the brush as I bring the leaf down to meet the stem at the bottom. Once again we will let that dry and I picked up some more purple lake to add details to the bottom of my lavender. A few quick strokes at the bottom of these flower clumps gives it a lot of definition and it looks like shadow. And we definitely don't want to forget the centers of our forget-me-nots, so I picked up some of the yellow gamboge color straight from the well and swiped that into the centers of the flowers, which adds such a beautiful contrast with the yellow and the blue. I noticed the green from my stem on the tulip bled into the pink a little bit more than I wanted it to, so I dried my brush and I just lifted that straight out. For the details on the stem of the tulip, I picked up more sap green and mixed it with some of the greens already on my palette to get a slightly darker green, added that to the stem and the leaf, and then while it was still on my brush I swiped a few strokes of this color into the greenery on my forget-me-nots. Back to the tulip petals, I'm trying to create some definition. I add some pink on the side, the little triangle of a petal peeking out the top, but I do struggle a bit with creating the right balance of highlights and shadows and separation between the petals, and I thought this was just such a good example of how forgiving this Canson XL paper is, because you'll see that I rinse my brush, tap it on the paper towel, I lift out some of the colors, some of the pink, some of the green, bring the highlight back. I'm also adding colors especially as the paper starts to dry. I can add colors to create the definition between the petals, more of that deeper alizarin crimson so it's still pink, but now we get the separation between the left side petals and the right side petals and the petals coming out of the top. Thank you so much for being here, for watching this video. I really hope you enjoyed the process of watching me paint tiny watercolor florals for spring in a more beginner-friendly way. Don't forget, if you're interested in any of the products you've seen in my video today, that they are all in the description below. Let me know if you have any questions in the comments, and I will see you all in my next video. Bye guys!