Watercolor Flower Tutorial: Morning Glory

Hey guys, this is Niall. Welcome back to my channel. Today I will be painting morning glory flowers using the wet on wet technique. So let's begin by drawing it out first as usual. Firstly, I will be drawing out the flower facing the front and this is actually quite simple. The overall shape is basically just a circle and then within that circle I try to draw out a very thin five-tip star shape. Make sure that you know where the middle point of the circle is. If it helps, you can also draw a small circle to mark the center first, then draw the star using the circle as a midpoint. Then I mark out the middle of each star tip and also do additional lines or edging around the outer part of the circle to represent some frills and you can also add additional wavy lines for the outline of the flower to help emphasize the frills. Now I'm going to show you one with a slight angle, in which case the base shape of the circle would slightly be narrowed down a tiny bit but not so much that it resembles an oval and you can draw the star shape with a very slight curve according to where the flower is facing. And then to finish it off, I'm just going to add the additional details of the frills. As you can see, the one on the left is facing the front but the one on the right is facing the right hand side, so hopefully you can see the difference when they're right next to each other. I'm also going to draw out a more extreme angle so the curve can be a bit more visible to you and you would also be able to see the cone shape at the back or the side of the flower. So instead of a circle this time, I'm going to draw this as an oval as it's more angled. As for the star in the middle, it really helps to draw the center first which will become a bit of an oval too and here hopefully you can see the curves more that I'm creating for the star shape so it looks like the petals are slightly curved out. After that, you can finish off with the cone shape connecting the flower petals and the stem together. I'm not going to paint this later on but of course you can do a few of these angles first if you want to include that in your final painting. The last angle I'm going to draw out is when you see the back of the petals at an angle and for this silhouette is basically the same as the previous one that I drew out with the cone at the bottom and the top slightly curving out but instead of drawing the front face of the petal with the star shape, that part will instead be hidden and you'll only be able to see the back side of this and to emphasize the shape of the flower petals I just added some curved lines. Once you understand the basic shape of the petals, you can try bunching them together and see if you can create a nice composition by just using the flower petals. Next, I'm going to move on to the leaves. The leaves are quite wide and I personally think that it looks a bit like a heart shape and you can also try to draw this out in different angles. I'm going to keep this simple and just rotate it slightly instead of adding folds and things like that but if that's something that you want to give a go, you can also try it out. If you're more advanced, you can also draw the leaves facing different ways with folds and even some foreshortening but you can see that by just tilting the position a bit and creating alterations with that, then bunching them together, you can also create a nice composition. Next, I'm going to draw the fillers for this and that's just basically budding flowers at different stages. If it's slightly bigger, I'd like to draw or paint it like it's fanning out slightly but still smaller than the fully bloomed flowers. I'm also going to maybe add smaller leaves and a few curly vines here and there. The fillers just depend on what your painting looks like and paint them to frame the focal point nicely but those are basically the elements. After this, you can draw a rough composition that you're going to use for the final painting and you can either paint it using the light outline of the composition or paint it freehand like I'm going to later on. If you're painting it freehand and you're not so accurate, it really doesn't matter as long as you have the focal point down, the rest of the fillers can just follow with what you have painted. So it doesn't have to be exactly the same as something that you've planned out. Before we move on to the final painting, I'm just going to go over the colors and the colors of the flowers are quite simple. I'm going to use Compose Blue and Ultramarine Deep and then mix that together. Then I also added a little bit of white to make the color more pastel but if you prefer the flowers to have a bright vivid blue color, you can skip the white. And then for the center of the flower, I'm just going to use Permanent Yellow Deep but if you don't have an orangey yellow color, you can just mix a little bit of red into your yellow. And then the only other element are the leaves and the vines and for this I'm going to use three colors to vary the green mixture. I'm going to use the colors Auraline Yellow for bright transparent yellow, Olive Green to mute the green color and Hooker's Green to act like a cool dark green. You can try to swatch out the different greens you can create using those three colors and the variables. When I tried to mix the Olive Green and the Auraline Yellow, it just warms up the Olive Green a bit more and it makes it a bit more vivid rather than muted. And if I add Hooker's Green to the previous mixture, it cools it down and it becomes more of a sap green. If I add Hooker's Green with Auraline Yellow, then it becomes brighter because it doesn't have the Olive Green to mute it and if you add Auraline and Hooker's, it becomes a really nice neutral green. And then the last mixture is if you add Olive Green together with Hooker's Green, it becomes a really deep and rich green. So those are the examples but I'm pretty sure you know that if you change the ratio within those colors too, you can create even more tones of greens. So if you're new to this, you can try swatching it out first before using it to paint the leaves. Now I'm going to go straight into painting. I'm going to paint it freehand so I'm going straight to my brush but if you're not yet comfortable, please outline lightly with a hard pencil just to map out the composition. I'm going to first use a large brush and paint a circle using clean water or you can use slightly tinted water if that helps you see the wet area. I want the water to seep into the paper so the area stays wet for a while. So once you've painted the silhouette with the water, I'm going to get a thick consistency of the permanent yellow deep first to mark out the center of the flower. If you notice, I also switch to a smaller brush because the paint will easily spread across a wet surface. After that, I clean my brush and take a thick consistency of the blue mixture for the flower and I start painting the star using the tip of my brush. I'm being very light-handed because the paint will spread as I mentioned before so when you draw the star, make sure that you also leave enough of a large white area for the inside of the star. And once I've painted the star, I'm going to apply the same blue on the outer part of the circle to create something like a vivid border around the silhouette. I'm also making it imperfect with some parts just poking slightly out to depict some of the frills. Then using a clean brush, I pull the paint from the outline inside and each time I pull the paint in, I paint a low stroke until it reaches or at least it's angled towards the middle of the flower. After I do this for all of the sides, I then reapplied the darker blue to make the space in the middle of each star tip to have a more distinct line. As you can see, the lines became a bit too thick and it starts to stand out too much against the flower because the texture has blended over time. So I'm going to add a bit more strokes for the frills to balance out the lines but this time I'm not making it as long as the one in the middle of each tip so the line still subtly stands out against the rest. Because I've been spreading out the paint, I also feel like the blue is now a bit too light so I reapplied more of the consistency paint but this time with a little bit less white along the sides again and I'm just going to adjust it accordingly. If some of the white area of the star is somewhat closing in and you'd like it to be a bit wider, you can also use white gouache to paint on top to correct certain areas. Next, I'm going to show you another way of painting the flowers and you may use either one of these methods or try both and pick what you're most comfortable with. So to start, I'm going to do the same thing as before and that's to wet the surface and paint the yellow center. If you're painting an overlapping flower like mine, be mindful that the first flower is completely dry. If not, your paint will run and it might become a little bit messy. So to make sure if the surface is still slightly wet or not, you can try to use a hairdryer just to take it to a very dry state. So for this one, instead of painting the star first, I'm going to paint the border and I'm going to create five lines around with a gap in between. The gap will be the space I leave out for the star and once I have all of the five lines, then I pull the wet paint again like last time but as I'm pulling, I'm also painting in the negative space of the star and then I just adjust the lines and the frills after I've painted the important form. If you find that the star shape is blending a bit too much with the background, you can redefine it by adding a darker tone of blue right next to the line of the star and that way it will bring out the shape a bit more. I also adjusted the yellow of the second flower since I feel like it has spread out a bit too much. So I added a touch of rose matter to the permanent yellow deep to create an orangey color and I'm going to paint a small oval in the middle of the yellow area. I think I'm okay with the flowers for now and I'm going to move on to the leaves and fillers. I'm going to first mix up the color for the leaves and for this I used a lot of auraline yellow with a touch of hooker's green and a little bit of olive green to create my base green color. With this base color, I'm just going to do a flat wash of the leaf silhouette and that's as I've drawn before with the heart shape. I'm going to stick with one first and I'm going to add a little bit of detail using a darker tone of green and that's by mixing the hooker's green and the olive green and here I'm just going to paint some of the veins and the midrib of the leaf. I like the surface of the leaf to be a little bit uneven in terms of color so it doesn't look too flat so I also use the darker tone of green to just spread out in different places of the leaves and as for the veins, I added a thicker consistency of that and I start painting some negative shapes of the veins. I'm not doing this too detailed yet, I'm just doing it roughly because we can always layer on a bit later when the paint is dry. For the next one, I'm going to paint another leaf but this time behind the previous one and I'm going to show you guys how to separate those shapes. So first, I use the same green as the base color but as you can see the colors of the area looks a bit too similar so while the paint is still wet, I add the darker green to separate the shape behind the first leaf so it looks like there's a little bit of shadow being casted on the leaf that we're painting and I use the rest of the dark color to draw out some of the veins. I also felt like the space near the flower looked a little bit too hollow so I added a hidden leaf behind it and I'm just going to use the same method. Next up, I'm going to add supporting elements of filler flowers but I'm going to paint the main one first because I want to make this one quite large. For this, I use the same color mixture for the flower but this time I'm painting it on a dry surface. I'm going to paint the frills using the tip of my brush pointing outwards and this creates sort of a frilly uneven texture along the edges and I'm doing that to also block out the frilly curved line. Then I clean my brush and use it to pull the paint into the cone shape at the bottom of the flower and while that part was still wet, I also took some green from before and painted the bottom so it has a nice fluid transition from the flower to the stem. Using the same method, I'm also going to paint smaller ones but this time because it's not as developed, I'm only going to paint them as a frilly oval shape instead of the fanning out shape. I first paint the top using the same blue and I clean my brush and pull the rest with water and while the surface is still wet, I continued on with the green so the color creates a nice transition to the stem and I'm going to make three smaller buds to add to the composition. Then I'm going to add some leaves again and I just used the base color and then left out the detail for now and just used the dark green color for the midrib of the leaf connecting to the stem but if you want to add detail straight away, you can also do that by following the same method as I used for the leaves before. So that's the filler flowers and I'm just going to do a few more of these whilst varying the size and I'm just painting them according to how I feel would nicely frame the whole composition together just to enhance the like to add additional elements of curly vines. I find that they give such a nice character to the painting and when I paint this, I also try to vary the colors to add more interest like I did with the stem but don't go too overboard with painting them. They should still act as decorative elements to enhance the focal point. Once I have the main composition down, I started adding a bit more details on top of the previous layer of the leaves so I just used this time to add some of the veins but if I feel like any of the color stands out a bit too much against the base color, I'm just going to blend it using clean water to make sure that the lines are quite subtle. Sometimes I also like to fill in some of the leaf color so the veins become more of a negative shape from the base color and I find that this gives more depth to the painting and the shape of the leaf. That's basically it for the painting so if you're happy you can stop there but as my paint was drying I felt like it looked a little bit too flat because the colors dried out too light for my liking so I wanted to increase the contrast and the intensity of the colors so I'm going to do some final adjustments again and add a darker blue to create the edges so the focal point becomes more interesting to look at. For the blue I just added more of the ultramarine deep with little compost blue and no white so it enhances the lighter tones from the base color. For this you can either paint on a thick consistency of paint and then use the pulling method to blend the paint together with the base color but sometimes the paint dries a bit too fast if you use this method so another way of doing this is you can use the wet on wet approach again as we did for the base color so to do that just add a little bit of water to the surface. Be light with your brush because you don't want to take off whatever color you already have on the base and then just add the blue along the edges like we did for the previous layer and let the paint flow or help it with your brush. So I'm just going to speed up the rest of this because the video is getting a little bit too long and basically I just use the same method to paint the other flower and once I'm happy with the intensity of the flowers I also bump up the intensity or the contrast of the leaves to match the rest of the flowers. So that's basically it. Here is the finished painting. This one is quite a detailed and long one so I didn't do exercises in the demo and went straight to painting but of course you may watch the final painting first and separate the painting methods to use as exercise before creating the final painting of the flowers. Anyway if you're still here thank you so much for watching till the end. I hope you guys enjoyed this one and learned something new and I'll see you at the next one. Bye!