How to paint loose Poppies in watercolor - Day 7

Hello everyone! Welcome back to my channel. Today we are doing day seven in our 30 days of watercolors and it is the poppy. I'm so excited to show you this one so let's get into it. And don't worry if you're not following along with the guide, we are doing the tutorial first and putting it in our guide at the end. The petals on a poppy are really thin and delicate. They're also really wavy and the whole flower in general is pretty open with not a whole lot of layers. And so I just did really open wavy spontaneous petals along the back and then along the front here I'm doing a very thin petal that's going to be covering up the center. So when you do a petal across the front that's maybe covering up some of the inside just make sure you're doing it really thin because we want that illusion that the poppy petal again is really thin along the front. I also added even more pigment into the flower petals that I had already created to create more vibrancy. So in this poppy the center is not visible and the petals are pointed upward and so again I do those wavy spontaneous flowy strokes to create most of the petals and then I'm creating some of these petals that are a little bit more detached. So whenever you're painting a flower it's helpful to imagine the flower as a cone. So the petals are extending outward toward the largest part of the cone and then as they come together towards the center of the flower they get smaller and smaller to the point of the cone, right? So you create these large wispy flowy petals but then as you bring them in towards the center of the flower they get thinner kind of pointier. If you imagine that cone that just really helps in how you create those petals to create that illusion. So for this poppy I imagine that the stem has tipped over the poppy is kind of more upside down now and I created those front petals shorter and I created them first so that I could visualize where I wanted those back petals to go. Again keeping everything loose and wispy gives that illusion of poppies because they just have those really thin petals. And of course always maintaining the white space really again helps with that illusion that there's a separation between the front petals and the back petals and it gives us an opportunity to add the centers in a little bit. Poppies have long smooth kind of thick stems and I created bleeding moments of the greenery on all of the flowers where you can see the stem and the flower connection point. So the only one I didn't create this bleeding moment between the green and the red is that flower on the right side where you're not seeing that connection point because the flower is mostly open. One of my favorite parts about poppies is they have these really funky little buds before the poppies bloom and they're usually curved or all over the place so I do one here that's more straight and then I'm going to do one on top that's a little bit more curved but they're kind of like a square shape. They're not super round and they're not pointed near the top but they have this kind of curved square shape and then at the tip they have these little ends coming out so I just did a couple of dots to represent that. So for the leaves I wanted them pointing upward and I just used the tip of my brush to create these pointy edges and the leaf kind of looks like it has three sections so there's this upper portion that almost looks like it could be its own leaf right but then you come down a little bit further and it has these two smaller pointy little leaves on the side and then it all joins together to come down to the base of the poppy. Now that our poppies are totally dry we can start working on the center and the center of the poppy is a bright yellow and the reason we want everything dry while we're working with this yellow is we don't want any other color to muddy up the yellow. It needs to stay bright as can be and once the yellow has dried we're going to go in with the black and the black is just a huge star of the poppy. It really makes the poppy look like a poppy and so for the stamens we're going to do those long lines with those little dots at the tip and when the poppy is at an angle like this the stamen along the bottom of the center are going to be shorter and the stamen along the top of the center are going to be longer which again gives that illusion that we're looking down at it from an angle and you'll want the dots towards the end of the stamen lines to be thicker and closer together and then smaller and farther apart as you go away from the lines and more up towards the petal. And now that we have practiced our poppies I am going to add them to our watercolor flower guide. I thought it would be fun to have two, one that's closed off, one that shows the center making sure to add the leaves. I also wanted to add a bud that kind of interacts with the other square. But again you have fun with it this is all about you and your guide. Thank you so much for being here for day seven of our 30 days of watercolor flowers. I really enjoyed doing the poppy today and I hope I will see you tomorrow for day eight. Have a fantastic day, bye!