Loose Watercolor Secrets: Paint a Hydrangea in a Loose, Intuitive style with Angela Fehr

hi I'm Angela Fair every week here on YouTube I share tips to help you become a more confident watercolor painter and love your watercolor journey today we're painting hydrangeas in a loose style in watercolor this is an overall floral technique that you're going to love with principles that you can apply to paint your own loose florals let's get started [Laughter] we're gonna start with some bright rows here made by Holbein and the goal in this painting is looseness self-expression getting that feeling of flowers without having to paint every flower hopefully that'll also feel like hydrangeas and not just random flowers so we're gonna start with just some messy big strokes using this lovely quail brush this is a number six rosemary and company pure pure squirrel it's a number series one seventy and rosemary and company will send you a catalog for free in the mail so that you can compare brushes in actual size so take a look at the description below the video for that so I've just started with the bright rose and you can see already I'm seeing those flowers come to life look at how it just they just spill down the paper this squirrel brush holds so much water that I can put just puddles of liquid Beauty onto my paper with one stroke and I still haven't gone back into the water yet and you can see how much is just flowing down the paper in the beautiful transparent way good brush will deliver more water to your paper and in fact I spend more time removing drips with a natural hair brush so we're going to set that as no we're not going to set it aside quite yet we're going to do a little bit of green here and I've got a puddle of green in my palette and all my supplies that I'm using here in this video are linked below so you can take a look if you just have to have everything I'm using today you don't have to feel free to substitute the colors I mentioning with similar colors from your own palette that's a really good way to learn color mixing and I'm just going to use this mix of green it's a little bit of green gold and a little bit of pallet dirt and throw some greens down the pink will bleed into the green as well and give kind of a neutral kind of muddy shadow which I like and after I've placed those brushstrokes sometimes I can add a little will add a little water in let things run other times I might rinse my brush and just use that damp brush to pull out and soften that edge I want to eliminate any white spots white spaces in the painting that are a distraction from the composition that bring the eye away from the focal point and that movement that I want to create wow this is starting to dry we're going to change our brushes up and it's not we're not going to walk away because there's more we can do while the paint is moist and shiny we're going to try out this biggest number 10 triangular brush from rosemary and company and it's got a shorter body than the dagger stripers I often use but I don't think that's gonna hurt me here because I do get that interesting shape with the angled bristles so we're going to just create some shadow areas using kind of a blue violet a little bit of cobalt teal a little bit of bright Rose should give me kind of a gray grayish violet that should be fun to incorporate into the painting right here I've got a lot of water anything I put there is going to dissolve really easily in other areas of the painting we have absorbency the paint papers starting to dry and that color will move less and any new brush tends to have at least one hair that it wants to shed onto the paper just lift it off with the point of the brush I try not to touch my paper with my hands if you really can't pick up that stray hair leave it till after the painting is dry and then you can remove it without leaving a finger mark let's try being a little bit bolder when I'm using working with brush handling I like to experiment with both the point of the brush which I get a really nice fine point with this brush and with the side of the brush to see what it does I use both the point and the side of the brush in my regular painting practice the point creates the lines and the side fills the area let's go in with some pure rose and see what we get I like that shape right there that really looks like the hydrangea petal with I think this particular kind of brush this triangular brush you're going to get interesting shapes just because if you change the angle you're holding the brush shot it makes a lot of change to the brush with the angle changing dramatically I like that idea pop some greens in to create some holes between the flowers and I'm doing it now rather than when I first put the green down on the paper because the pigment has soaked in a bit more and so I have less movement that's going to happen so just because I was doing some green painting before doesn't mean everything that was green should get painted right away and around in the center of the flowers if I'd added that green too soon it would have bled all over my flowers rather than mostly staying in one place it's still trickling down that really moist central area and I'm gonna let it do that I'm gonna let it think it knows what it's doing and I can work with it the other thing I want to do right now is see if I can contour a little bit more around my petals on this side so if it's starting to dry a bit and it's not a lot I can get a soft edge that still suggests flower shapes and you know I think that's kind of working I always work to find a balance between what I intend to happen and what the watercolor actually wants to do that's the part where we say we collaborate with the paint and water because you can't always predict what's going to happen you get different reactions from the paint depending on what kind of paint it is what and how wet the paper is and how what your brush is so there's a lot of factors that come into play and so there needs to be a willingness to adapt your plan if things kind of turn it into an expected direction now I do want to kind of slow down and let the painting kind of mature a bit we're gonna take just a moment to blot the liquid at the bottom of the page that'll help it dry a little bit faster and it'll also let you start to kind of calm down this area which is still the moistest part of the painting most moist there we go and I just use my paper towel to lift a little bit of color gives me a lovely texture in that area and slows that fluidity things will dry a little more evenly if I'd kept that puddle there I would have come back to this painting later with a big watermark in that section because it as it dries and this area is already dry I just created the mixtures of colors that I've used the bright rose and then the cobalt teal are separating in this area I'm going to get closer so you can see it and so at this edge here you can see this little edge of pink that's really beautiful and I love mixing colors because we get that opportunity for some separation that we can use to enhance the beauty of our painting it's a feature of watercolor that you don't really get with other mediums so so far I've worked with just two brushes my big round squirrel quill that's pretty much a tongue twister that one was used to fill in the area with a large shirt strokes and then to create some edges some petals petal shapes without having to do a lot of fussing the triangular brush actually worked really well just using it tilted out its side rather than using the point to create that petal shape over there and we're gonna do more of that once this first layer has dried before I turn the camera on I spent a moment just looking at the reference photo and I squinted at it to see the dark patterns in the painting just a little bit more easily I want to as I develop this painting and I don't want to spend a lot of time on it a loose floral could actually eat up a huge amount of time because there's so many things we can find and pull out and I want to keep it simple but I wanted to spend a little bit of time just studying the shapes of the painting itself and studying the pattern of darks and lights so and those shapes in the paint in the photo are found in those darks and lights so I can use negative painting just like I have just now with some perylene green mixed in my palette with some of my green pallet dirt the previous greens that I was using and just creating that gives me an edge for my for my flower I'm also going to go back to the green golden cascade green so I actually have three different greens there and using this oval mop from rosemary and company I can build up some of those negative shapes and really pull them out of the out from the green in the background and when I do that it brings the flowers forward in a very crisp way and you can see that line just defines my petals really strongly actually a little more strongly than I like so I'm gonna soften I'm right in there I'm just gonna use a little water to blur the line between loose and tight between petal and background and by blurring that gives me a little more open endedness into the painting so need to soften right there so that I don't have a line where my paintings stopped because that's no fun the other thing you can do is when you have a crisp edge like this and it's really seeming dominant but you don't want to erase it one thing you can do is just go into your flower or into your shape that you've just defined and take some of that original color some of that pink here and just add it right in here and moisten that edge and then some of that pink will flow out into your background and you'll get that softness back without losing your dark green and I waited a little longer than I should have there so it's not quite as nice as I'd like okay we're gonna just define a few edges of petals using still our bright rose and the cobalt teal that made such a pretty violet if you want a really bright pure violet then I would go to a cyan or a as your color but I liked a little bit of grey that you get by using the cobalt teal and even just that little line creates the edge of a petal right there I don't want to mess around too much in the center of my flowers because that will give me I'm a big dark spot in the center and I think I want to keep that pretty light so we're just going to take our time and try to develop this painting slowly and loosely and I think we often think loose painting and it feels feels like a rush it feels like something we need to do quickly because it looks quick splashy it's colorful there's blots of color all over the place that's the pure cobalt teal isn't it beautiful and so it can look really casual but there's often a lot of forethought that goes into a loose painting there is holding back really thinking before you place those brush strokes down I like to call it painting to your plan have an outcome in mind and as long as you can see that outcome in your mind's eye you can keep painting and once you start stop seeing it you start to paint a little more aimlessly just to fill the space you know you've gone too far and it's time to stop so let's try to keep that in mind I also don't want to may take a month to develop this demo so that's a bit of a challenge for me as an artist where sometimes I do take months on a painting as I have to wait for it to tell me its next step but we're going to just use the triangular brush to create some petal shapes so I just made a petal shape right here this lovely curve C shape and then I blended it out on the edge feathering it out into the background okay creating a petal edge just with a curved stroke of the brush that gives that hint of more maybe more distant petals on that side a little edge up there there right there I see the little knob of color that little bead that you often get in the center of the flower so we're gonna let that be a shadowed part of the painting anything around that little knob of color to define it yeah that should work and again I found another edge right there we do get locked into trying to see and paint every flower petal and we want to avoid that so I look for a petal that's already established up here I see this petal right there and then I kind of paint that edge to make it pop forward a little bit and then soften out from it and there I have now a new flower petal and then I have this pedal it kind of gets defined and it's a suggestion of activity happening around it maybe curve here to continue developing the flower and a curve here to lead us down into a new flower these petals of the flowers are almost spade-shaped so when I paint a petal I can get paint half of that spade shape like I just did here and that gives me enough information to say this is a flower this is a petal even just a curve of the edge of the speed gives us more information because that as well can you see the flowers coming to life notice that I've really taken my time with this area I haven't done anything actually I haven't even taken my time I've just avoided it and that's for a purpose I don't want to start painting flowers in this very soft area unless I can see them and if I start painting flowers in that very soft area it's probably going to commit me to painting flowers in the more detailed areas so I actually want to avoid putting details in the softest areas of the painting what I might try to do and I'm doing right now is just very very gently hint at some shapes and shadows in that part of the painting so a little shadowed brushstroke here I'm going to cool off our Pink's over on this side a little bit more a little more cobalt teal in there and a little shadow in here a little shadow there and that makes that flower pop forward suddenly so I'm willing to be repetitive if it makes my painting better and it does that's a hint of a flower center I think we're gonna do a hint of a flower center here - that little button a little tiny mini little curve there it's like a fingernail clipping of a brand new baby it's that small and tiny little curve but it gives us that little hint of a flower let's do one in here - I think that should be all my hands starting to shake apparently I'm getting into the walk into the danger zone where your mind starts to fix on detail and it gets really hard to paint loose when you start to feel anxious so I that's a sign to me if my hands shaking or my back starting to hurt it's time to take a break so we're gonna wrap this up in a minute or at least pause just working with a little bit of line right now to again kind of more curved fingernail clippings bigger ones this time but those little curved shapes really help make our flower petals come forward and this is to crisp soften it cuz and I look at my painting it's my eye goes right there I know that's not a good sign I want to keep that feeling of light in the center and that path of light coming down the painting now my instinct as I talked about wanting to finish this painting is to go darker around the edges really make the flowers pop forward in a more powerful way but at the same time I like the softness that's happening here and a little bit of kind of unfinished the willingness to leave this painting open-ended so I don't want to go too overboard with creating strong contrasts also every line that I paint in a strong contrast is another place where the eye wants to go straight to it can make my painting feel it can distract from the rest of my painting so I don't really want to do that I want to see the flowers not the dark shadows that make them pop forward I'm really enjoying this triangular brush it's a series for tea from rosemary & Company it creates those beautiful petal shapes with the side of the brush to create those beautiful strokes yes it has a fine point to create lines the strength of this brush is really in the marks that it makes when you're using it almost on its side to pull and create those interesting shapes just putting a little bit of spatter on my painting using this dagger brush this is another brush from rose marine company and spatters fun to do but it can really easily take over a painting so what you want to do is when you're spattering color you want to use diluted color a lot of the time and it's going to put down a lighter spray so that first spatter that I did was almost pure color and this is a little bit diluted the other thing you can do is after it well first and then tap really gently that's the other thing you want to look for a tap really gently you better off putting too little spatter on than a strong spray and it looks like you've turned the garden hose on it and then the other thing you can do is really go in afterwards and and just soften some of that spatter and I like to blur it a little bit so that there's combination of spatter and softness and that just helps that spatter from taking over and being the first thing you see you can also spatter a little bit of water and that can often actually hit those bits of spatter you already put on and cause them to blend and bleed just a little bit I think the cobalt teal would make a nice little spritz of color as well and again diluted so it doesn't take over and then anywhere it does seem just a little bit still too bright you can blot and lift a little bit it's the give and take it's not really your undoing and erasing mistakes it's just a little bit of come-and-go I have some principles to share with you for your own loops loose floral paintings you're going to want to apply these in your painting journey and I'll share those in just a moment before we do that though I want to ask you what was most valuable to you about this lesson was there a principle that stood out that you want to apply in future paintings leave a comment down below I also love to hear if there's something you'd like to see in one of my Friday night painting club lessons let me know and I'll try to add it to my calendar if you if you like this video I'd love for you to click the like button and don't forget to subscribe I share content to help you become a strong stronger painting here on YouTube almost every week with bonus content and giveaways from time to time as well down below the video I have links to supplies you can use and more content to help you I have more loose floral painting videos here on YouTube I'm going to link them in the description below the video so you can have a little loose floral the painting marathon to help you develop your own loose floral painting style check them out down below so how does this demonstration help you paint stronger loose floral paintings I've got a few key points to help you number one think about the overall shape looking at my hydrangeas I didn't look at individual blossoms as much as that overall flow of color through the painting I build from those major shapes and slowly start to tighten up and simplify it into smaller shapes and that means I get to go from large to small and take my time as I do so the other thing I want you to think about is value convert your photo to black and white if it helps you which it will squint at your reference photo look for those patterns of dark and light in the painting those contrasts in your photo or what you want to put into your painting to move the eye through the scene and make a strong dynamic arrangement of values and shapes as you're painting think about painting from light value to dark value well you want to have your darkest of areas in mind as you paint and I did position mine here I didn't go with my darkest I didn't want to lock myself into the painting i with a strong commitment to immediately putting in those darkest shapes and the smaller shapes anytime you start to tighten up you lose your ability to go backwards you can always get tight but you can't get looser again and you can always get Larker but it's really hard to get lighter in value again so this painting I've actually actually has fewer contrasts or a more subtle contrast than I ordinarily would paint in a loose floral and one of the reasons for that is we just don't have enough time in this video you it takes time to build up those strong dark contrasts and a loose painting and still keep that loose feel I like that I have this beautiful subtlety here and so I'm reluctant to toy with it too much by pushing my dark values and if I pull this painting out next painting session or in a week or in a month I can add more dark values if I feel like it needs it so it's never too late to go darker and that's why I like to take my time working to build up those dark values slowly as you paint think about that overall shape value contrasts build from there work large to small and light to dark and it's easier to stay in control of your loose painting rather than having your loose painting control you you

Channel: Angela Fehr Watercolour

Views: 49,786

Rating: 4.9431615 out of 5

Keywords: watercolor painting, flower painting, watercolor tutorial, angela fehr watercolor, watercolor painting flowers, angela fehr, watercolor painting flowers for beginners, watercolor painting techniques, watercolor painting tutorial for beginners flowers, watercolor demonstration, angela fehr watercolor tutorials, watercolor flowers, free watercolor lesson, watercolor painting lesson, loose watercolor painting lessons

Id: 3y7-UUcRzKg

Length: 28min 8sec (1688 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 30 2018