Paint These Beautiful Little Cherry Blossoms #watercolorcherrytree

Hi everyone, today I'm playing with a little cherry blossom tree and this is a really simple way to get that fun cherry blossom tree look. I'm actually using a little straw because I'm feeling playful today. So let's go ahead and start. I've got my artisto pad, as you know my absolute favorite. It's the perfect size. I even like their cover. I mean look at how beautiful that is. And as you know I like it because it comes in those rings and I can save these and even make them for every day of the week. I am playing with a little bit different camera angle just to see how this works so hopefully this doesn't drive some of you bonkers. But we'll see. What I'm trying to do is give you a glimpse of my palette and my paper. So that's kind of my reason for that. I'm using, which I'm just noticing my paper needs, my paper, my water needs to be changed. I've been painting a lot today but this is that beautiful Needon 2 Well water dish that I absolutely love. I'm actually also using their palette but, which is really nice. It's very heavy and what I mostly like are those huge wells. If you don't want to listen to this supply stuff just skip forward. I'm putting date stamps in here but for the beginner I really like to share these things who may be new to some of these supplies. And then today I'm going to be using, let's see, I think I'll go ahead and use my Princeton. No, I don't want to use that one. I'm throwing my brushes around. This is a Zen Art brush that I'm playing with. As you know my favorite is Princeton and I'm really, because of you guys, branching out a bit. And I actually am really liking it which is surprising because it's quite soft but they're made really nice and the handles are gorgeous. So I will link that for you. Let's go ahead and get started. The cherry branches that I like to paint are rather dark so let me just go into my paints here and I think what I'll use is the Van Dyke Brown. I'm, by the way, using my My Ling paints because they're a Van Dyke Brown so I'm picking up quite a bit of paint there. I'm going to put it in my palette here and I think what I might even do is, one second, I want a quite a dark brown so I'm adding in a tiniest bit of Payne's Gray to that because I want a rather dark branch. Add some water to that. Okay, so here we go. This is what I'm going to do. I'm going to start to draw and this has got quite a bit of water in there. I'm doing that intentionally and then just washing and rinsing my brush to get that brown dark paint out. Now let me grab my straw here and I'm just going to blow. Okay, we add a little more paint. It's been a while since I used this technique. I'm just going to kind of start it and I want to use quite a bit of water. Just get some of those branches. Let's get a few moving down this way. Now this is one of the rare times I'm holding at the back of my brush. There we go. So I'm letting it kind of squiggle like that and there we go. So you can use your straw. You can do it however is funnest for you. I like getting these random little shoots like that. I think that's kind of fun and it looks very cherry tree-ish. Now the next thing I'm going to do, this is really fun, and let's use that. This is where soft brushes are really nice, this ZenArt one in particular, because they can hold a lot of water and a lot of pigment. So I'm going to go into, if you're using Winsor & Newton, you could use their, gosh, you could use Quin Magenta, Opera Rose, whatever color you want. I'm using the Milang, so I'm using their Rose Red and I'm making it quite wet. And then I'm just going to splatter here because I want some pretty big droplets. So I'm picking up a lot of paint, which is easy with this ZenArt brush and there we go. Now what I'm going to do is rinse that brush, get all the paint out of it. Let me grab my paper towel here and I'm going to take a little bit of that out and then I'm going to go around and use water. If you saw my short, this is how I did it. This is how I created the little blossoms. And look how easy and fun. And I actually had a card series that a girlfriend of mine worked on because her relatives live in Japan and she's seen these beautiful Sakura's. So I'm just adding a lot of water and this is the magic of watercolors. You can do this. You can let it do its own thing here. Look how, I mean, just that alone is gorgeous. But what I'm going to do is I'm going to go in and pick up some pretty creamy thick pigment so I've got a lot of pigment in there. And now I can go in and either splatter and let the paint do its own thing like that, which is a lot of fun. Or I can dab in with the tip of my brush, but I really like doing it like this. Now the last thing I might add in here might be some little green leaves. So let me pick up, let's see, I'm going to use, this is equivalent to a Winsor Newton's Sap Green. Grab my palette here again. It's a really pretty green. So there we go. And as you can hear that Meaden palette is absolutely wonderful. It's really heavy duty. And I might just go in and I want to do this while it's wet because I want to get a little bit of that blending. See this beautiful blend because it's touching into the green. I mean, and look how easy this was, you guys. Oops, now I do have a little water issue there. Let me pick up some more paint. And just go randomly, like add in these little branches. I'm sorry, feathers. Oh my gosh, feathers. Sheesh. You know what I mean. These little leaves. Like that. Beautiful. Now mine is pretty full. What I might do, which I don't have time to wait for that in this video, because as you know, I don't know how to edit. But when this dries, I would probably go in and add a few more little dark. Well, it's kind of working here. Something like that. There we go. Just to play with those values. Now I might start overworking this. I want to stop here. But there you go. That is my version of a cherry tree. Very easy, very fun. This would be a beautiful card, don't you think? And I feel like I want to extend this over here like that. And again, I kind of used this squiggle by holding my brush at the top and very loosely. You might even add in some more. Again, I can tend to overwork my paintings because I'm just having way too much fun. And there you go. I'm going to stop there. So I hope you guys enjoy that. I did a short on this. And I know a lot of you asked me how I did it. So there you go. You just need a straw. I don't think I need to link that. And then I used this fun Zen Art 12 round brush. And I use just a tiny bit of my Princeton for some of the smaller things there. And that's it. All right, guys, have fun.