Watercolor Tutorial for Beginners: How to Paint Easy, Fun Flowers with Watercolor Markers

[Music] hey guys welcome back to my channel today i'm going to show you how to use watercolor markers so let's get started so today i thought i would show you how to work these watercolor markers they're called brush pens and it's really cool i'm using a brand called arteza this is the only brand that i've used so far and i seem to like it some some of the markers work a little bit better than others but i was going to show you how to do just a couple generic florals today using the watercolor markers in case anyone's ever interested in purchasing them i got a pack of i believe 50 so there's a lot of colors here and then it also comes with this brush here that you just fill up this bottom part this tube with water and when you squeeze it the water comes out so you don't even need other brushes you could just use this one if you want i find that when i squeeze the water just comes out a little bit too much so i don't really have control over the flow so i'm using my normal brushes that i use i use uh grum grumbacher um and i have them in pretty much all sizes the one size that i'm going to be using today is number seven so if you wanted to follow along with me and i also have my arches watercolor paper and i think i said this in one of the other videos but the art arches watercolor paper is actually one of the best paper watercolor papers that i've ever used it blends beautifully so i'm just going to show you some generic flowers today and i'm just going to show you i'm just going to play around with how these watercolor brushes work so i'm going to start out with a simple flower let's do this one in orange um so what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna do three little dots you can follow along with me if you want to i'm just gonna do three little dots kind of in like a little triangle pattern here and then i'm going to get my my paint brush damp not completely wet but damp and i'm going to start with and i've got a little blue on my brush i'm going to get that off i'm going to start with the center and i'm going to work it all the way out so that the middle of the flower is going to be the darkest and as i come out it's going to be it's going to blend it's going to be a little bit lighter and i'm going to do that with all three of my dots and if you have to turn your paper go for it i find that i always turn my paper around even if i even work upside down once in a while my paper is upside down it's just easier for me so i don't have to maneuver my my wrist too much and you're just going to let it bleed out and you can make these petals as big as you want and this is just a really really easy flower [Music] and if you want a little bit more just go back in with your paint marker and just deepen up the centers a little bit and it should it should start bleeding all the way through the petal and if it doesn't you can help it out a little bit so that's one flower i'll put a little stem on it and one thing i really like about these watercolor brushes is the points are so fine that you can really get some nice detail and then you can lightly you don't even have to go over it if you don't want to it just kind of looks like a marker but once you add the water to it you can see the effect it gives you and i outlined my leaves in this one you don't need to outline your leaves it's a little bit more of a whimsical look if you want a little bit more realistic look don't outline them i'll do one and show you what i'm talking about so i'm just kind of starting it i start my leaf and then i go in with my damp brush and see how this one's not outlined so it looks a little bit more realistic looks a little bit more realistic [Music] and you can add other colors in there too if you want to you can add a little bit of a yellow if you want a little bit more of a limey color okay so that's one generic little flower i'm gonna go on and show you let's see maybe more of a pansy type flower okay let's do it right here okay so i'm going to start with the yellow center and i don't have any water on my paper i find that when you put water on your paper first to do wet on wet with these markers it doesn't work out really well you just kind of have to put the color down first on a dry on your dry paper and then blend it out it just doesn't work very well the other way the color is just not as dark the values of the color is just not there and then i'm just taking my damp brush and i'm working my center out so the yellow the darker part stays more on the inside and i left a little negative space there just for a highlight you don't have to if you don't want to but i did okay now let's see i'm going to pick up a purple color and the pansy kind of looks like this so again i am not going to outline it i find when you outline your petals it doesn't look as realistic it looks a little bit more stylized so i'm going to take my damp brush and i'm going to work the petal out now pansies have all that little veining going on in there so that doesn't bother me all that veining that you see there those lines it does not bother me at all but you can keep reworking them if you want to get rid of them so see how it's not outlined it looks a little bit more realistic so i'm going to do the same thing to the other one so i'm just kind of starting more towards the center of the flower and i'm taking my damp brush and i'm working it out that and you can make it as dark or as light as you want when you get to the end of the petal the centers of the flowers are usually a little bit darker i mean depending on what flower you're looking at but usually the centers are a little bit darker and you can let that blend into your yellow a little bit also now i'm not looking at any image right now so i'm just going off of memory so i'm sorry if this doesn't exactly look like a pansy i'm just kind of remembering what it looks like and i think it's got like that bigger petal coming more towards the bottom here so i'm gonna go ahead and i'm gonna put in my bigger petal okay and again with my damp brush and i'm just gonna work it out from the center out [Music] like that and then you could bring a little bit in if you want to back into the yellow part just so it kind of bleeds a little bit with your yellow and if you don't like all that veining that's going on there in the middle then just keep working it i'm gonna bring my petal out a little bit like that and that petal is really big so what i'm going to do is i'm going to make these top ones a little bit wider so i'm gonna a little bit more purple there let it bleed in [Music] like that and you can make those petals as wide as you want i'm just going to overlap my other flower a little bit it's okay and then i think it's got a darker a petal right here in the back so i'm going to do a little bit of a darker petal in the back and if you're playing around with like a lot of different colors it's good to have a couple different um jars of water or cups of water um just so maybe one could be for your cool colors one could be for your warm colors or you know your lights and your darks depending on what you're what you're working on but it's always good to have two or three cups of water around okay so i'm going to add a little bit of let's see a little bit of this more of a violet color just to see what happens yeah see that's punching it out a little bit it's giving it a little bit of a different color a little more red to this and i'm just dabbing it a little bit in the centers clean off my brush so i get that purple off there and i can start working that more violet magenta color and you can put in as much as you want you could even put in blue i've seen pansies all different colors shades of blues and purples in magenta pansies are actually really they were never really one of my favorite flowers but um as i'm painting them and i'm studying them a little bit more i'm really starting to like them they're really they're cute little flowers okay let's see um you know what i'm gonna add just a little bit of do i have an orange yeah i'm gonna add a little bit more just a couple little orangey areas in the center there just to give it a little bit more detail and then if it's too much you could just do a little wash over it and it kind of moves it down a little bit excellent all right so those are two little generic flowers so far so as you can see these watercolor markers are really i like them um you can get pretty detailed if you want to like i said the tips on these watercolor markers are really fine you don't want to press too hard on them um obviously i think it would ruin the tip of the brush but yeah i mean if you just drag it lightly across your paper you're gonna get like fine little lines okay i'm gonna do more of maybe like a sunflower type let's do it up here in the corner okay so sunflower's got that little dark middle so i'm gonna take a dark brown and i'm gonna just go in a circle and i'm just dabbing it i'm just kind of pouncing it on my paper here i'm going to leave some negative space just to give it a little bit of a highlight and you can bleed that out a little bit i'm taking my damp brush again and i'm just going more towards the edge of it and i'm just going to be pouncing my brush on my paper just to get some of that pigment pushed out but i'm not really going in the center too much um because i kind of want to leave that nice and crisp and i'm going to take a yellow and it's gonna be like one of those little mini sunflowers so it's not gonna be like a sunflower sunflower i'm just gonna do one of those little mini ones and i think they have five petals so again if you wanna outline your petal you can it just won't look as realistic so i'm just going to start with the middle here make sure all that brown is off my brush and i'm going to take my brush and just kind of dab it out and as you can see the center of my flower is a little bit um the the value of my flower in the center here is a little bit brighter and so there's one petal and then let's do another one and if you want to um outline your flowers with pencil that's totally fine also you just want to make sure that your pencil marks are nice and light because obviously watercolor is translucent and you will see your pencil marks or you can just um what i've done before in some of my other videos is i i'll do it with a pencil especially if it's a little bit more of a detailed image and then just go ahead and erase your lines okay so i'm just kind of playing around i'm really loving the way this the watercolor markers look on the arches paper i've used it on canson as well canson watercolor paper and it works just as well the only thing is it doesn't uh it doesn't bleed it doesn't blend as much on the arches paper it just it's got a softer look it's definitely got a softer look okay so you just kind of have to get used to this if you want to try them it's a little bit different obviously than your traditional watercolors that you squeeze out of a tube or if you use the pans it's a little bit different because you're kind of going back and forth with a brush and the watercolor marker um but i like it you can get some really nice values i'm sure there's other brands out there of the watercolor markers but like i said i'm using the art arteza i think that's how you say it and i i'm i like this one i think it looks nice and i got the set i think it comes in all different um sets that you can you know different number of brushes you can purchase and i think i purchased 50 because i've got a lot i haven't used them all yet but okay so i am going to pull in a little bit of a darker yellow now and i'm just going to go in the centers of my flower just to give it a little bit more pop in the center and you can just leave it like that if you want to or you could just take your brush and help it along so it blends in nicely i was a little skeptical at first when i bought these i wanted to try them out i you know i had been seeing them around advertised and i thought they looked really cool but i was a little skeptical i'm like ah they're just like markers um but i'm i'm really starting to like them okay i'm gonna take a little bit more and put sunflowers have so those little dots the little seeds i'm actually growing some sunflowers in my garden right now i'm excited they're about two inches tall [Music] all right so there you go it's like a little generic um sunflower i'm gonna do some thistle i think that's how you call it it's a really cool um it's like it's a wildflower some people might call it a weed i don't know but i really like it i'm gonna do it in purple i'll just do it right here in the middle okay so thistle is very um spiky it's like a spiky little spiky little ball so i'm gonna take my and they're usually purples and blues and stuff that's normally what colors they are but it's kind of like a little egg shape and they're really spiky so i'm just barely touching my paper i'm going to try and maneuver my hand around here so that you can see on the video i don't want my hand right in the way but i'm barely touching my paper and i'm just starting from the center of that egg shape and i'm bringing out my thistles those little bristly things so it kind of looks like that okay then i'm going to take my damp brush and you can leave it like that if you want but there's a little bit too much of a contrast between the white paper and the um the watercolor marker so as you see i'm blending it out in the same motion i did with the marker and it's covering up some of that white space and it's softening up your flower and you can bring some of those thistles out also past what you just did with the watercolor brush so it gives it that light and dark look so it looks like highlights and shadows and if you want to add a little blue in here you can also like i said some of them have kind of like this really pretty like blue gray look um i will pick up let's see i have this kind of bluish gray look it's called well this one's called periwinkle let's see how it shows uh it's not really showing up too well maybe if i had started with the periwinkle i'm just going to do the ends a little bit just to give you a little bit of that periwinkle look on the ends of the flower maybe if i had started with the periwinkle first and then did a little bit of that purple color would have been better but maybe next time okay so that's what the thistle looks like i'm gonna give it a little stem see how nice and crisp that line is and then the thistle's got like these little leaves that come down like that and i'm outlining these just because these are a little bit more of a difficult shape to get and i've got a really shaky hand on this the leaves are very rough looking they're not smooth leaves they're really rough looking so you want to come in with a little bit of a rougher hand just like shaky like you drink too much coffee or something okay so i'm putting a little bit of green more towards the center get that purple off my brush and i'm gonna be bringing it out like that and you don't have to outline them the leaves you get like i said you could do it with pencil um or you don't have to do it at all you could just start how i was doing the flowers before just start with a little bit more towards the center and bring it out on the leaves i don't think it matters as much and i'm going to bring in a little bit of this blue color i'm going to put a little bit of blue more towards the centers and blend that out i'm just going to go over my stem just a little bit because i don't really i think it looks nice i mean they're supposed to be watercolors so i think it looks a little nicer when you do blend it out otherwise it just looks like a marker all right i'm gonna do a softer flower um let's see here i will do kind of this yellowy color i'll do it down here in the corner so it's more like a little daisy but not a daisy i know daisies are more white petals with the yellow interior i'm just going to start with a little yellow and i'm going to leave a little bit of negative space again because i like a little highlight and let me make sure my brush has got all that green off it i don't want a green flower all right and then i'm going to start pulling out from the center and i'm actually going to be making the petal from the center color because i want this flower to be really light i hope you can see it and it's just going to be another generic little little flower i don't even know what it is but i'm pulling the yellow from the inside out and you can also darken these up a little bit if you want to [Music] and put a little bit of that whatever color you're using i'm going to darken it up a little bit because i don't even know if you can see that i'm gonna help it along a little bit okay and then blend that out a little [Music] bit um i am going to take a little bit of a maybe a little bit of this orange just pop that center a little bit more and i'll help it a little bit along [Music] and just blend it out like that i'll use that yellow one more time now if you wanted a really light flower you would just kind of leave it alone just because i'm not sure you can see this on camera i am going to put a little dark value on one side of my petals and i'm going to blend that out another way to make your flowers pop if you're doing light flowers is having a darker background um that'll definitely make a lighter flower pop as well okay let's go ahead and put a little stem on this one too all right you know what and i'm gonna just experiment and put a little leaf behind this guy let's see what happens here let's put a leaf over here too [Music] and you want to make sure that your petals are pretty dry when you do this when you're putting in your greenery because otherwise it will bleed right into it so this is a little bit different like i said than traditional watercolors it's kind of like you're putting down your color and then you're blending it [Music] rather than just picking it up right away with your brush so it's a little bit you got to get used to it but i like it it's different see now if my flowers were still if my petals were still wet the green would be blending right into that petal so you want to make sure that it's nice and dry and i think i'm going to add a little bit of blue to this one as well just to darken it up in there a little bit and then you can always give it some veining also i know some of the leaves you can see veining veins on them a lot of detail and you can get a lot of detail with these markers now if i went ahead and did the veining right now um it might be it might bleed because my let's see yeah i mean you can still see it but it is bleeding because my leaf is still wet so if you want a nice crisp line wait till your leaf dries because it is bleeding a bit let's go ahead and make one more over on this side so start like this you put down your color then you pick it up with your brush and i just wanted to do some generic flowers for you today so you can see so if if you are thinking about purchasing these i i really like them i've used watercolor pencils um which i really like also it's different um but these markers are really fun to play with i got a little veining in this one too let's see the now my leaf is a little too wet right now because i just did it so the veining is not even showing up so i would have to probably wait a couple yeah it's not even showing up so but you get the idea let's see let's do one more of these little easy flowers i'm gonna do it in let's do it in blue we haven't done blue yet so let's do blue so this little flower is really easy you just lay down a couple little dots and oh that's pretty and you work from your center out this one you can really see there's not that many blue flowers out there but gorgeous that's really pretty so start from your center out [Music] and you want the end of the petal to be lighter and you can just kind of wiggle it around also if you want to and if you think you have too much pigment on there just pick it up with your brush and wipe it off on your paper towel let's make this one a little bit bigger and let's see let's say we wanted to pop that center a little bit more then i would use a different color i'm going to do a dark blue oh yeah i like that and then if you want to help it along you can help it along a little bit as well just kind of blend it out and let's put another little stem on we'll have this little stem coming this way and i'll come this way i'll do some little [Music] leaves [Music] yeah like that all right so let's see um [Music] if we could try a rose let's see if it'll work let's do a darker let's do a pink i'm running out of space here but let's do like a pink little rose down in this corner and see if it works so you're gonna do kind of like these little sea marks like little half moons back and forth um this color is working okay so like i said before some of the colors work a little bit better than others let's get that green off my brush let's see how this one blends and then you're gonna do kind of blending it out in the same motion that you had just done that c motion now this is a little bit more of a whimsical generic rose obviously it doesn't look realistic at all but it's to just give you the idea these were just supposed to be easy little flowers today and i'm trying to pick up that pigment and it's not picking up that easily let's see if we can do a different see if this purple works put a little purple in there maybe more towards the center yeah that pink didn't do what i wanted it to do but that's okay we're just experimenting [Music] not loving it but that's okay let's put a few more little petals on if we can help it a little bit i don't want to cover up my other flower too much yeah this pink one didn't work as well but that's all right a little bit darker purple maybe in the middle a little bit stuck let that bleed out [Music] a little bit better so anyways um today i just wanted to show you some generic little flowers uh using these watercolor brushes i really like them i recommend you going out and purchasing them if you've been kind of on the fence about trying them or not the brand that i'm using is arteza but i know that there's a lot of different brands out there but i like them so um just and then the arches watercolor paper it blends a little bit easier than the canson paper or any other paper that i've used so if you want a little bit more of a softer look go ahead and purchase this arches paper and if you want to leave in the comments um other ideas that you want me to paint and show you how to paint that'd be great too thank you for watching my video i hope you enjoyed it and learned a little something and if you're thinking of going out and purchasing watercolor markers i really recommend it they're a lot of fun have a great day

Channel: Tanya Leintz

Views: 235,946

Keywords: art, watercolors, how to use watercolors, watercolor markers, painting flowers, how to paint flowers, how to use watercolor markers, art lesson, art tutorial, flower tutorial, free art lessons

Id: RuUdHW1UIl8

Length: 34min 12sec (2052 seconds)

Published: Fri May 29 2020