Easy Watercolour Lilacs

[Music] hi everyone and welcome along today we're going to paint some loose watercolor lilacs so grab your paints and let's get started okay so we're going to put some lilacs in of ours and what i like to do first is just plan where my stems are going and then the sort of rough crossover point will be a nice sort of handy reference as to where they are going to sort of suddenly come and sit in the bars so i think we'll go for that so i've got this sort of spray of stems and then i'm just going to draw in a little curve there which is going to be the rim of the vars but that's all we need our pencil for for the moment so we'll say goodbye to that and i'm going to start mixing up some colors so i do have um this cobalt violet which is a really great color for lilacs however i think the best flowers are always done with a few different tones of color so i've woken that one up i'm also going to wake up my cobalt blue deep just here and my permanent rose the hardest working color in my palette i think and we're just going to mix up just an alternative purple color so get all your colors nicely woken up and ready to go and if you don't have cobalt violets it's not the most common color to have certainly in a in a sort of ready made palette then why not play around with the blues and pinks in your palette and create some lovely different tones of the sort of bluey purple variety and then you're good to go so i'm going to begin painting with a size two brush and this is going to be really nice and they're quite loose these flowers look a little hair lurking in there they're going to be quite loose and i'm going to be playing around with the the different tones that i've got in my palette as we paint just the one flower so here we go so we're going to start with this one here and we're going to begin up at the top and i'm going to just use the belly of my brush to start dabbing in some sort of splotches of color and what i'm doing is i'm allowing for little bits of unpainted space but i'm also putting down color and then cleaning off my brush and allowing the wetness of just a very diluted bit of sort of very dilute water there to allow the color to just spread down and obviously we're going to get a bit of an overlap with some of these lilacs so i'm just painting this one in in full first fully knowing that as we move down some others might not all show up quite as much so i'm just following my way down the stem getting that sort of flowery cone shape and then as we get towards the bottom and sort of using my brush to create some slightly of larger brush strokes and we'll leave it at that okay so i'm now going to move over to this one because this one is far enough away from the first one i've painted in so there won't be too much of an overlap just re mixing up some color it's amazing how much you get through okay if you want to turn the page that can be quite helpful just so you can get a sense of the direction you're going in and make sure you sort of keep mixing up the purples you're putting in there but i love lilacs especially in watercolor because you can see you can achieve the quite distinct flower shape with such simple loose brushstrokes i think the most important thing is to just make sure you leave some unpainted space now i've allowed this one just a little bit of drying time but it's still fairly wet which is pretty cool what i want now is some burnt sienna for the stem because they have quite woody stems just waking that up there and i'll get a little bit of payne's grey just to get a slightly darker darker stem and i'm going to use my really small 4 tenths brush just for the moment what i want to do is i want to find it's a bit like how i paint my trees on on patreon when i teach tree painting we're just looking for in these little gaps places to put little branches and because we've allowed just a little bit of drying time it means we get the perfect kind of blend that the brown sort of does get a little bit of a bleed into the purple but as long as we keep a light touch it's not going to spread so far that it really sort of dominates and muddies down the lilacs so what i recommend is paint two purple lilacs once you've finished the second one go back to the one you just painted and pop in the brown stems now the other thing we need to think about is the leaves on a lilac branch now i'm going to include some in my vars of vas of lilacs so i'm just mixing some sap green and i've got a little bit of green gold because the leaves have got a nice little sort of warmth to them and i'm going to use my size 2 brush even though a size 4 would be great i just want to have lots of control because the leaves aren't so big and i just want to make sure they don't sort of get in the way too much so nice simple little leaves at this point i'll just do that for the moment for this first first branch so you can see the more i sort of fill in things on this first lilac the more it's going to impact the other flowers around it so that's why we sort of go piece by piece with the first lie look having painted in the second one so let's pop in the start of the stem for this other one because we've given it just a little bit of drying time and you'll notice that i haven't gone below the rim of the jar there also i'm using that pencil line stem that i drew at the very beginning as a handy little guide for drawing in my pencil my my branch here let's pop in a few leaves maybe ones just drooping over the front so although this is loose this is still i consider this to be in my sort of controlled loose style where we still sort of make the most of the lovely crisp edges drying before we sort of add too much i think we'll pop in a leaf there and then get the stem color a bit more of that darker color there and there we go okay so now i've got these two main ones in i'm now going to sort of carefully fill in the ones that are just a little bit overlapped that are more in the background i've just got one more to paint in and i thought it would be useful to just to get you back for this bit because i am putting this one in in just a little bit more of a diluted tone and i can still pop in little bits of slightly stronger color but on the whole it is further back and a bit like this one you can see with the leaves here it's just a helpful way to show just a little bit of perspective a little bit of difference even with a really loose watercolor painting there's there's no point in not trying to make things look as believable as possible so i'm now going to pop in because we're not going to see a huge amount of stem detail so i'll just get very loose very dilute green for a little leaf there and maybe one more one more there lovely now we do have this little bit here of completely clear unpainted space so what i can do especially because this area has dried quite nicely now so we'll just pop in a little bit there that gives the impression of this lilac here just in the background right now we've got our lilacs looking really beautiful we now need to have a think about the vars itself and the valves of water so this payne's gray is going to be very useful if you don't have payne's gray and i didn't for a long time in my palette um i'd opt to put prussian blue and burnt sienna together and you get a very very similar color a blue and brown mix i mean obviously putting more and more blue in is going to get it closer to the payne's gray color but these colors together actually are both going to be extremely useful because prussian blue with burnt sienna makes an amazing kind of greeny grey which i'm really keen on so let's let's try that for our vars so what i'm going to do is i'm going to begin by using my size 2 brush to just sweep some of that rather dilute burnt sienna prussian blue mix across the curve of the vars and then put in a second i'm just now sort of creating a sort of textured rim of the vase so i'm doing a jar really and now if you want to get your pencil and just give yourself a vague shape you can do so doing some curves down the side and then a curve across the bottom and that's always handy but i'm going to be combining very very dilute colors with some much sort of stronger more concentrated tones to really emphasize the light and dark of glass reflections so let's begin by just using that burnt sienna prussian blue mix to get a an outline and then cleaning off the brush and just sort of using it to sort of come in and then obviously the base of the vars but now it's going to drop in some of that payne's gray sweep it across so that's a really nice start but of course we do have the water in the vars so now i'm going to create a water line again a sort of oval shape and really i'm really wanting to make the most of unpainted space so the white unpainted bits are going to make all the difference here because they're going to look like highlights of light reflection on the vars so just try and keep it so fairly minimal fairly fluid i think now i'm just going to start placing in the back of the vas rim and then with a dilute version of the of the stems i'm going to start to just paint in first the sort of the stem coming in and just before it hits the water and i want to get the feeling that through that glass the stems are just a little bit sort of lighter and fainter because of the way in which light sort of floods in but i also don't want to lose them entirely so i'm just sort of building up the color so i'm mentally just picturing the stems coming in then we've got one there and now what's nice is because this is still wet shooting those stems down in the vas suddenly getting a little bit of a blend but as we know when a stem hits the water then it suddenly looks very distorted the way that the light distorts how something looks through water so i'm just going to sort of loosely paint in these stems and i'm really happy with that actually i don't think it needs an awful lot more i think really with these paintings it's all about knowing when to stop and that can be really hard because we just want to keep going and keep sort of tweaking this bit there and that bit there but i will just pop in a few more lowlights on this fart but i think that looks rather lovely so the only thing left to do is let it dry 100 and rub out the pencil so with my trusty kneadable eraser i have managed to rub out all the pencil um a lot of people ask me surely you can't rub out pencil after you've painted over the top and watercolor well you can it's just there are a few variables to consider painting nice and dilute drawing your pencil nice and light and having good kit so i always use an hb pencil and a kneadable eraser a really good sort of artist's eraser and then what i love is once you've rubbed out pencil then you can sort of see your picture more clearly and i've just decided that actually it would be kind of fun just to add a few just low lights to the base of some of the flowers so all i've done there is just mix up some slightly more concentrated versions of the colors i've been using the cobalt blue deep permanent rose and i just think that looks really cool so don't overdo it but those three in the foreground i think just look really fab with a little bit more so there you go thanks so much for watching i really hope you enjoyed that one i want to say a massive thank you to my patrons for their support because that support enables us to keep creating videos like these that everyone can enjoy and if you enjoyed this one then hit the like button below and comment to let me know how you're getting on and if you subscribe and hit the little notification bell right next to it then you'll never miss another video until next time bye

Channel: de Winton Paper Co.

Views: 116,142

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Id: ggxO7i94WF8

Length: 18min 40sec (1120 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 28 2021