Easy Mothers Day Card Ideas for Beginners/ Watercolor Flowers / Step by Step Tutorial

Hello everyone. Welcome to my channel. My name is Ellen Camille Trent. Today, we're going to make some simple, beautiful floral cards. One's for like Mother's Day, one's just for a thank you, or whatever you want. You can make it birthday, thank you, sympathy, but I just put thank you here. You can just take that out and have it for anything you want. And they're very simple. It's just teaching about composition and some simple thing to do for a Saturday. So let's get started. Okay, so let's go over some supplies. I have a piece of bee paper. It's a seven by 10 inch paper. It's 100% cotton. I found this at Michael's. Actually, I got my paper on clearance, which is amazing. It was $7 a pack, which is so super cheap. And I just fold it in half. If you are very limited on funds for this kind of paper or the watercolor paper that I use, arches, I would just take just one piece of it and then put it on top of a cheaper piece of paper, so you're not wasting expensive paper. I have my paints here, my paper towel over here, my water jars up here, and my paint brushes. I'll go over as I use them. I've mixed up some rose with some medium red in here. I've already activated some of my paints. I got this brownish yellow because I have medium and light yellow mixed with a little burnt umber, and I have some medium and hocus cream mixed with some burnt umber. For this composition, we want to keep the flowers all to the left, and maybe if you want to have a spray of flower to the right, but you want to keep it all to the left. When you're thinking of paintings for cards or just paintings in your home or gifts, whatever, you might want to think of different compositions that you want all to the left. You want it all to the right. Do you want it in the middle? Do you want it covering the entire page? These are the things you think about, and when you think about just to the left, I did the tutorial of World of Friday that you saw. It's like this one. So I had this grouping here, and this is sort of kind of in the middle. You want to want a grouping that's all to the left. I could draw out the grouping. You know, you'd have the big flower here, some spray runs here, and small ones here, and you just kind of like going like this to the left. The flowers would be all in this like curved area, all in here. So let's get started. I've shown you how to, you know, you make this. We can make similar flowers than the ones I did here. We can put that five petal flower right here in the middle, which I am painting, just drawing in there, and then I'm just going to paint. You can paint the same kind of flower if you want to keep it white, but I think I'm going to make mine today more colorful. I'm going to take some rose and make it fairly wet. It's creamy now, but I'm going to really get it wet so it's even lighter, and dab it on my paper towel like I showed. Take some of the excess off. Now it's looking a little dull, so I want to make it brighter, so I'm going to add in some more of that real rose color, and then lift my brush and just dab this so it's lighter. I'm going to go in and wash in the similar flower that I did for Floral Friday. It's like a five petal flower. It kind of has a heart-shaped petal, as you can see, and I'm just going to wash that in. I might leave some white areas, but I didn't on that particular petal, and I think on the rest of them I will. I'm just going to wash in this flower real quick. Now you could bleed in some other color if you want, if you take some of the darker crimson, and you want to... See, I have this darker crimson here, and I'll just tap it in on the edge of the middle and have it bleed out. It's fairly wet, so it might have that spider beanie, which is doing a kind of bleeding scenario. So you want to push it around like so. Again, we're going to be working with a flower here, a flower here. I might want to put in... I could put the yellow in. I might want to add in an orange tune, so I've grabbed my medium yellow. Also for this exercise, I've shown you how to do the dry brush technique with the poppies in one of my tutorials. Go check that out. That would look lovely here. If you don't have expensive paper, a dry brush is a good way to go to create some pretty flowers without having to worry about spending a lot of money on 100% cotton paper. So we'll put one of those orange poppy type flowers here, real simple. This is just funky little leaves. Again, we could change this color. I'll show you again, like I did yesterday. Put one up here, balance it out. I'm just making this really simple. Anyway, I'm using, sorry, a Princeton No. 8 Velvet Touch brush. The Velvet Touch series is great. So it's, I think it's really too much orange, right? Don't you think so? So sometimes as you're painting, you're like, the thought of it sounded good, but I don't like it. You can go in and take your rose paint and you dab it in there and it's going to bleed and it's going to change the color tone of this. Now obviously if you don't have the 100% cotton paper on this particular exercise by dabbing in the color, it's not going to have the same effect. It's just not. It's just a different kind of paper and it won't create that bleed that you're looking for. Sad to say. Sometimes paper means everything. So therefore I would just, like I said, stick with the dry brush. So now I just changed the orange to a more peachy, pinky orange because I wasn't liking that orange. And the picture showed some nice blue flowers. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to take this cobalt that I have, same consistency with the paint, and I'm going to paint a cluster of little, just four petal flowers. Now it's getting fairly wet. I don't like how much water is on these. Four petal, simple, and you can cluster a bunch of them together and you can put a few out here. Oh, that one I made a five petal and at the end over here, that one kind of blipped, whatever. So now I'm going to grab my greenery. Now, like I told you, I mixed some medium green, medium green, kind of get that on my brush and dab it on my paper towel. I'm going to start making some leaves and stems. So again, we want to keep it in that swoop kind of scenario, but we want to put leaves in. So we're just going to put some leaves in. I'm going to leave some white in the middle, on the edge a little bit. Put some leaves out here, some stems. You can put a stem out this way. Now I have the tape holding this down so it doesn't, you know, it's easy to paint. Otherwise it's, how are you going to control holding that? Put leaf connecting to the stem, leaf on here. This card could be great for birthday, anniversary, Mother's Day, thinking of you, sympathy, you name it. Wedding, you can make more whiter flowers. I showed you in that tutorial, like I showed you the white with the gold. That would be beautiful for a wedding card. Many people are inside right now, quarantined. So this is a good thing for getting your mind off of stuff and, you know, creating something that's fun and pretty. So I'm just keep adding some leaves. Again, we're doing a swoop. Now I want to change up the leaf color. I'm going to add some yellow because I want to have some variety in my greens. Again, so this is a little limey color. I'm just going to dab out some of this lime green, put some over here. This is such an easy exercise. And whoa, what a beautiful card it would be. Like I said, you could just leave it all like that. You can add a floating one up here. You can add, I'm just going to curve it up like so. You want to make your compositions interesting. So like I said, having it on one side. You could have all the edges painted in the middle empty. Think about it. Think how you'd like it to look. If you were in a store, what would you buy? What's attracting to you? So now this is fairly dry, this pink. I'm going to grab a darker, it's the Crimson Mix it Rose. I'm going to fairly get this creamy mixture, not super loose like we did before. I'm going to dab up my paper towel to take off the excess because I don't want it super watery. And I'm just going to feather in, I call it feathering in, marking in lines from the inside outward. This is why this long round brush is great. It has this beautiful fine tip and you just go like this. Simple swooping arm movement, hand movement. You can add a little rough ones out here, but you see that really pops that flower out. People ask me, would I like to paint more flowers or this thing, birds and whatnot? I guess it's flowers. I paint a lot of flowers. Flowers, I like flowers. Who doesn't like flowers? So now we want to do the similar thing to the orange poppy type of color flower. We're adding in some deeper tones, just feathering out. I call it feathering out. And the one up here, I use that same color that I use in here on the one up here. It's a great variety and it keeps the tones similar. Up out here, we can add in some little buds with that rose, some little buds over in here. This is how you build out the composition. In the blue center, we can keep it blue. We can add in the gold like we did yesterday. In the center of the orange and the pink, we can add in the burnt umber, or the darker mixed with the yellow, so it's like a golden brown. And I will do that. I'll fill that in here in the center, same thing with this one and this one. It's still fairly wet, so I don't want to put in the extra added lines yet. I'll work on my leaves. I'll add in some hookers and some sap green, creamy, thicker than the loose paint and add in a little burnt umber. You can add in a little crimson, make it even darker. I'm just going to darken up my leaves, shadows, put some stems in there, give this a variety as well. You're playing with tone and color, shape. There you go. So you add that in. Bring up your brush. This is still a little wet, so what I want to do is dry it and come back. Okay, now that it's dry, I'll go in and add the details. I'll take this, you dark the golden yellow brown, and I'll add out the lines that go outward. I'm going to add a little more of this burnt umber and medium yellow, just feathering out lines from the center. Still, if it looks a little too light, you can go in and add some more burnt umber. I'll show you, get in the detail, and if you want, you can add in black if that helps you see it better. So I've added in black because it wasn't dark enough, and now you see it better. Same thing with this orange one, and the lines, the dots, and you've had that beautiful terius stamen that the poppies and those flowers have. For the blue, you can add ultramarine or just a deeper, darker turquoise in the center. It's a little too wet, that's when we need a really intense, concentrated, still too wet. Brush has too much water, that's why dabbing on the paper towel is good, just putting in the center. Now we didn't have a blue one down here, if you wanted to add that, you could, you don't have to. I'm stepping back and looking, what does it need, I feel like it's missing something. I'm going to add a little more greenery coming out here, just little bits and pieces like that. You can even take some of the front umber, the branch, and down here, I might add in some buds, some blue, some blue buds, just to change it up a little bit. Now you can go in and add some gold accents, it would be pretty, I guess cards have gold accents, and I showed you yesterday, oh well, floral Friday, I use this Liquitex acrylic ink, I love the consistency of it. It's great. Open up my brush, and you just add some really pretty gold accents throughout your design. Oops. If you don't have this ink and you have a gold pen that works, it just adds another element that's really pretty to your card. You could even put a line of gold out in here, if you wanted to do that. Just adding a nice little shimmering accent, because this gold is really thick, which is great. See, just doing little dashes of color, and you can see that. And up here you could write, you know, thank you, mom, whatever you feel like, thinking of you, you can do it in gold, whatever works for you. I don't know if I would do mom or thank you, or thinking of you. You could even put a little butterfly or dragonfly up here too. You know, before you write the words, I would take a pencil, and I would pencil it in, so here I might write thank you on this one, and I might do it in gold. This brush is so great, it's such a great brush to create all this, and I have to add some more gold, and like I said, if you can't write words in your brush, grab one of those gold pens, that will work just as well. So now we'll work on another card that's a quick, easy, fun Mother's Day card. Okay, the second card is super fast and super easy. You write the word mom, M, big O, and M here, right? You can do that. What we're going to do for the O? Well, it's not going to be an O, it's going to be a flower, it's going to be a rose. And I showed you how to do roses so many times, but let's show it again. We will take Concentrated Alizarin Crimson, and I'll get a creamy texture, and we're going to just put a line, maybe a dot in the middle, a line here connecting lines, I'll zoom in. Pushing down, I'm using the velvet brush again, right? So then we've got these lines that are connected, touching, like so, and I'm going to clean off my brush, and I'm going to take some water and push that. Now this paper is... I've got to hold it down because it's moving this way, which means it's going to start flowing that way. So you might want to tape it down. So you're just creating those rose petals, like so, and that's your O. Your O is the rose for mom. Now the letters on the other side, I suggest they make a different color. I wouldn't keep them in the pink tone. And if you want to have greenery for your rose, coming down here, it's so wet, the brush is being very difficult today, here, you might not want to make it green either. So what color would look good with that? Would it be orange, would it be brown? I'm going to do like a light turquoise. You see here, the turquoise goes well with the pink, no, turquoise goes well with the pink. So I'm back out. You could do gold too, but it's not going to show up as much. So I've got turquoise pink, going to make that creamy texture. I'm going to dab my brush in the paint and tell how good this time because, as you saw before, or you can make it black if you want to, I want to do blue. So you're just doing your M. If you are not good at freehanding the letters, I suggest you trace it from, you can print out, type from your computer, and then trace it with a pencil and then just paint on top of that. So I've got my M. I'm just going to fill in this letter. I'm kind of used to painting this stuff freehand, so for me, it's easy, everybody else might not be. So you just make the word Mom. Now you could put a gold border around here, put some little ditzy flowers down here and over here. You can add a flower or two over here. I might take my greenery, I might add a little flower, a ditzy bud over here, and something up over in here to balance it out. See, you want to balance it out, this angle kind of going here. And I'll take my pink and I'll make up a little bud, a little bud here. And that, like, itself is just so simple. Now here, it's dried a lot in the middle, and I want it darker and deeper, so I'll add some of that darker crimson, just giving it darkness there. And for the word, the letters M, I'm going to take some deeper turquoise, I'm just going to put a little pattern on the letter, just to give it some more oomph. Just a little stripe, it just changes it ever so much. But look how pretty that is. Mom! It's that simple. And again, I might go in and grab that gold paint, because I already did with the first one, and add some gold touch accents, why not? Mom deserves it. Next to the letter, just to give it a little oomph, I'm just accenting everything. You want to go overboard, but you want to make it look pretty. And there you go, simple as that. When that's dried, then you can erase your pencil marks. So there you go, we have a beautiful Mom card, and a beautiful Thank You card, and I hope you enjoyed this. It's a pretty easy, simple tutorial, and this one's a little longer than this one, but you get the idea. So thank you so much for stopping by, thank you so much for being my friendly and wonderful YouTube viewers, I appreciate it so much, and for those who are new, thank you for coming to my channel. And I hope you have a great day, take care.