Beginner watercolor spring wildflowers painting tutorial » How to paint florals for spring ideas

Hello everybody and welcome back to another watercolor tutorial. Today we are painting sort of a spring vibe tutorial, or painting rather, it's just going to be a little grassy patch. So it's going to be on the more abstract side and probably quite a bit quicker than a lot of my tutorials. Although typically when I say that about a tutorial it ends up being significantly longer than I thought. We will see though. So I'm going to start out in landscape position. It doesn't really matter since we're painting a circle. Actually it does matter because we're going to have grass that's extending beyond the circle we paint. So actually it's probably best in portrait position. And if you want to sketch yourself a circle first with a pencil you're more than welcome to do that, but I'm going to freehand it. It doesn't have to be a perfect circle. In fact the more like abstract it looks the better, the more natural it will look. So yeah, just paint a circle with the top half being blue, like a very washed out blue, and the bottom being nice and green. And then sort of blend the two together. I want it to be a tad bit darker because I know once it dries it's going to be quite light and I want a little more green and less yellow in this. I am going to add a bit of like brownish gray to the bottom part. There's going to be a little dirt patch if you will down here. And then if you would like and you want to chance it because I don't have very good control over my splatters but I do want to splatter just a little bit of blue or green. Oh see I didn't want it to go all the way there. I wanted it to stay. I'm going to see if I can take that off still. Yeah that's good. Then a little bit of maybe brown or black just over yonder. Oh I wish I didn't do that because that's going to cauliflower now. Something like that. That's going to cauliflower but I'm not actually as concerned because we are going to be painting over it so we're okay. Now what I kind of forgot to think of and it's already starting to dry so it's probably going to cauliflower but I'm going to take the risk anyway and that is putting darker green on this right half because I'm going to be painting grass and I want a nice background for that grass because if I didn't have like a dark color already I'd have to paint a lot more, many more layers of grass in order to achieve the same darkness. So that's probably going to cauliflower but once again I'm trying to not fret about that because we could technically fix it with painting over it with grass. So I need to let this completely dry and then we can do the details. Okay so that should be dry. I'm just trying to think how to go about this next step. I'm going to need a good bit of green. Please let me know if this new location of my palette to painting works for you guys. I know I've had a lot of feedback and requests of people asking to move my palette to the right side. It's not possible to do that because my tripod is in the way. It's on this side and I can't remember there was a reason why I can't move it to the left side but I've adjusted it in a way where the leg of the tripod is now sitting on my palette so it gives me a little bit more leverage. Let me know if it makes a difference or if it's still inadequate for you. But I looked back on this one tutorial where every single comment was, hey you I can't see anything you're painting because of the angle and I watched it. I'm like okay yeah I see what y'all are saying so let me know if this is better. So yeah now we're just painting the grassy strands and we're going to have quite a few that are completely overlapping and you want to do them thinly if possible. As thin as you can it'll make it look a lot more realistic and whatnot. So I'm going to have a bunch of grass but I'm going to have random types of foliage as well. So many things happening in life right now. Very exciting things and I am hesitant to say some of them just because of in the past when I've been more more open with things that happened in my life. People, some viewers have not been particularly kind with my struggles so I'm really hesitant to really share more intimate details of my life. But if you are a Patreon member, a patron, I don't know what you would call it, then I probably already would have said what is going on on there because I like to assume that people that are willing to financially invest in me and my painting are probably more likely to um there's less trolly behavior if that's the word. Like a lot of people they they come and they view a video and that's like the first video of mine they saw so there's no relationship there and obviously people are welcome to have the opinions that they have um but there's always multiple ways of expressing those opinions. We can and some of them are just like why even say that? I'm just trying to think of this is going to probably be the second last painting that I paint for the next five months or so um and you guys aren't gonna know like by the time this tutorial is released I probably which will be in March I will probably already have been painting for a few weeks and getting back into it um but it is in in my time right now it's uh the first week of November or maybe the second week of November and um yeah soon I will be stopping painting for just a little bit but like I said you won't notice because I have pre-painted like five months ahead of time and I am so happy that I did because that would be very stressful to try to manage the life changes we're about to go through and try and paint content so I went we went to a Christmas market today um at a fairly local greenhouse and I had never been to this Christmas market before um we were just looking for something to do and when we got there there were cars parked so far down the road it was it was a zoo it was kind of crazy um and it was like there were vendors that didn't didn't really interest me the things that they sold um like it wasn't the best vendor Christmas market I have been to um there weren't a lot of but what they did have because it's a greenhouse it was mostly winter foliage and like fake winter garlands and plants and just really gorgeous decor for outdoors indoors and I I was very tempted to make some purchases but I was like I don't need any of this stuff and especially the price tags uh I came with them I was like stay strong Julia you don't need this stuff um but they were it was very good quality like typically fake stuff uh you you find at dollar stores and even I've ordered stuff online that was supposed to be real looking if you remember my fall chrysanthemum story um I have ordered things before that turned out to be not great but these actually all looked really real and felt like they were actually worth the prices that that greenhouse was charging for them so anyways you can see that I'm just adding a bunch of grassy strands going back and forth you can you know add as many as you like um I'm switching up the colors I'm adding a brighter green now and I'm trying to kind of blend and this is what I was saying before when I added that extra like dark green there it's still dry to be fairly light but um if you don't have a background color sorry to sort of guide you then you're gonna have a lot more work ahead of you because you have to somehow fill in all of this space and make it look natural I'm taking a little bit of blue navy blue and just adding that in there as well I'm purposely going beyond my painted circle to give this painting a little bit more to look at so if it looks like it's not green it's because it's not blue in there as well and we'll probably spray some blue on top here to add some variation what's another exciting non-personal thing going on we're selling our one of our cars and getting a new one in its place um hoping that that works out with the timing because things are yeah we're just really cutting things close here um yeah it's just nice to have a bit of slow slowness after an absolutely non-stop um late summer early autumn with all of the preserving and all the tasks and things that we usually have to do and things we're preparing for and uh it's it's been nice to have a bit of a break in that regard now that we're done all of that and tomorrow we're supposed to get a good amount of snow like our first I don't want to call it a major snowfall because I don't know if I would consider 10-15 centimeters a major snowfall but we're getting a good bit of snow and um it's nice that we'll be cozy inside there's no work to be done outside that's affected by snow and it'll just be it'll be nice to take our toddler tobogganing and making snowmen for the first time in her like cognizant existence last year she was a little over a year old during the winter so um she wasn't really fully grasping what was going on we're just going with the flow okay I'm taking this purple color and I'm just adding a little bit of color to this so I I'm adding it to the ends of these to some of the things I painted um if you don't like purple you can choose another color or you don't have to add color at all but I do think it does add to the painting to add a little pop of color here and there and if you don't want to do it this way you could just splatter some on that would probably work really nicely too and I might end up doing that myself um I'm thinking that I'm gonna take white acrylic paint and add some daisies to this as well but the first thing I want to do is just blow dry this so that I can add some lime green and lighter details to it okay so that is no that is not fully dry but I'm gonna take the risk anyway well of course my tripod is right on top of the lime green that I need so instead I am taking a different lime green that I have and I'm gonna try that and I would like to add some thin hmm it's not really visible okay I'm gonna have to move this apologies apologies but I needed to get to this neon green I have which might not be that great either but let's try this out yeah I like this so I'm using this neon green that I have as part of my palette if you don't have neon green that's quite all right just use a lime green or even um white acrylic paint will work I might do that too because it's just for a little extra pop of highlights or color um but yeah I'm gonna take some white acrylic paint here whoa that is way too much how did this happen and uh I'm gonna do daisies and I'm going to also splash some color on so I'm not very good at daisies I don't know why it never ends up looking super nice for me anyway you can add as many of those as you would like but what I'm definitely going to do is a bit of that splatter although first sorry I know I'm kind of jumping here back and forth I'm gonna try and do some grassy streaks with the white just add variation I don't know I like that too much so I'm not going to continue with that so I'm taking a smaller brush here I'm picking up this white and we're going to do a bit of splatter so I am not sure why sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn't like I don't know oops oh that's unfortunate yeah I don't know sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't for me I don't know what the heck it depends on obviously it depends on something but I haven't been able to figure out what that is yet so if you have the splatter down then by all means but I have to add it manually here okay I'm going to take some yellow or orange and add that to the center of the daisies the other thing I would like to do and I'm not going to do splatter anymore because we've already tried that is take some yellow and just add little dots all around as well these could be flowers, fireflies, whatever you want I'm just adding some color I do want to add a bit more of that purple that I used because I want a bit more color and fill in some of these bare spots where it makes sense with the flowers that looks quite nice if I do say so myself I'm usually quite critical of myself and I do not like what I paint a lot of the time but I'm I'm happy with this I'm okay with this just adding another one there to balance it out okay ah sorry one more thing is just a little bit more foliage over here because there's a lot of grass and not a lot of volume so balancing it out a tiny bit that may have been a little too thick and dark so okay I'm gonna leave it at that I'm quite happy with this little spring motif is that even the right word not sure but thank you very much for watching please don't forget to hit like and subscribe and check out my patreon if you want to support me in that way and I will see you guys in the next one