Easy Floral Acrylic Painting 🌸 Relaxing Sketchbook Tutorial (Beginner-Friendly)

Hello and welcome to this video. Today I'm just going to show you a process to create ranunculus flowers in acrylic. It's a really simple process and it enables you to paint them in a really impressionistic and playful way. Once I started learning this process it made it really fun and easy to paint beautiful florals. If you would like more guidance on that I do have a learn to paint impressionistic florals class so I will link that down below as well and thousands of people have been through the course and have really loved it and at the minute it's only $7 so I'll pop the link there. But yeah I hope you enjoy today's video we're just going to have a nice chilled painting sesh creating some sketchbook florals so grab your acrylics and your sketchbook and let's go. So I've just got a page in my sketchbook and the colours I've got are white, magenta, orange, yellow, turquoise, green and oh this is prussian blue and I've got a couple of brushes here. These are filbert style brushes. Let me just show you up close. So filbert shape are kind of a mixture between flat and round. You kind of get the flat edge if you press on but then you also get the round tip as well. So these are really nice for florals. I've just got a couple of sizes there. So this is not going to necessarily show you how to do a whole painting but I'm just going to show you how to put together a ranunculus because they're really fun to paint. So you just want to dampen your brush off and I'm going to start with an orange one so what I'd like you to do is take some of the orange and I want to create kind of like a mid orange with a bit of the yellow and a bit of the orange just to create, yeah it's not light, it's not dark, just kind of mid and then literally just create a circle and it doesn't have to be an exact circle of course. In fact it's probably better that it isn't. Okay and then rinse off your brush. Now what we're going to do is take some of the orange and add in a bit of the magenta or you can add red to create like a dark orange and now not pressing on just taking the tip of the filbert brush I kind of want you to have a little look at a reference photo and just block off some little areas that you can see where that dark is shining through. So at this point I don't really want you to think even that this is a flower I just want you to see in shapes and colours and block it off and you can press on with your brush to create that nice like petal shape and then you want to use it a little bit more lightly around the edges. Okay and then rinse that off. So we've kind of gone for the mid, we've done the dark and now we're going to create the light so for that we want to add some orange and some yellow, a little bit of white and this is going to be for the highlight. So we kind of want to go in between those little dark areas that we've done for the petals that are just kind of hitting the sunlight, hitting the light. In fact you might want to use a little bit of a smaller filbert brush for this. I'm just doing some tiny little highlights here. At this point you can also kind of make up some of the edges of the flower. Okay and I'm going to rinse that off. Now it's probably best to wait for this to dry at this point so that the layers don't just kind of like all blend together. But what I'm going to do at this point while we're kind of waiting for those to dry is I'm going to pop my middle bit in so for that I'm going to use a bit of the Prussian blue because it's super dark and I'm going to use some of the orange, the green and then I'm going to use that. Also I try not to go directly in the middle because it's nice to have it a little bit at the side and you just want to use your brush to kind of pop that shape in there as it's kind of peeking through the different petals. And there's also a bit of green there so I'm just going to add that there as well. So kind of for the top highlight I'm going to take the yellow. I don't know if this is just going to be a little bit too yellow on its own. I might add a bit of white to that. Make it really light in value. A tiny bit of orange. And now I want lots of paint here to give it some nice texture. And then I'm going to take that for like little highlights. So just catching the light. And this is where you can kind of bring in like a more impressionistic feel too. It's up to you how meticulous you want to be. And you can really build up your bouquet or whatever it is that you're wanting to paint with this exact process. So to go over it again we took a mid-range orange and just create a circle. Then you want to take some of the magenta and orange or red to create a darker value. And kind of use your filbert brushes to kind of create those petal shapes. And build up those layers of the flower. Then you want to rinse that off. Go for a bit of a lighter one so maybe lots of yellow in there. Just condense the photograph that you might be painting or the flowers that you're painting. Condense them into shapes. Just try not to see like a flower necessarily. Just see the shape. Then I'm going to go on to a smaller one. Then taking some of the phthalo blue, the green, orange. Just use a bit of a mixture to get a really nice dark colour. Just to create a beautiful contrast. And you can also add a little green because a lot of the time that little green stem is in there as well. Then for the really light one I'm just going to use yellow, white. You can use a bit of orange as well. Get some really nice little highlights. And you can use the same method with all different colours as well. So if you want to do a yellow, we can take yellow as kind of like the base. Create some little ones here. Then we can use kind of like the orange this time for the shadow. And then we can use a lot of the white with the yellow to create a really nice pale yellow colour. And that can be those highlights. In fact I might even use this dark red to really get in some of those shadows. And we can try it with a pink one too. So if we take some of the magenta, add some white. I'm going to add a little bit of orange as well so it's like a peachy colour. So we just want that mid. And we can draw on our circle. Then take those darker tones so it could be just the same mixture but without the white. So just magenta with a bit of that orange in it. You can kind of carve the petal shapes. So we've done the mid, we've done the darks. Then I'm going to add in a bit of orange and a bit of white. In fact probably a little bit of yellow as well. Some nice peachy tones in there. So that is kind of a basic overview of how I put these flowers together. You can keep going with this process to keep adding in little details. It's up to you. I've kept this quite impressionistic rather than very detailed and realistic. So it's up to you what style you kind of want to continue to do. I'm going to add some little flowers here just to make it a little bit okay. And just to really finish it off. So yeah, feel free to, you can copy and do the same as me. Or if you'd like to, it's totally fine if you want to kind of do your own version. I really hope that you enjoyed today's video. Sometimes it's so nice isn't it, just to get our sketchbooks out, just have a little play session with the paints. And it really removes that pressure of having to create something perfect and beautiful on a canvas. I love my sketchbook for that, especially with florals and playing with all the beautiful bright colours. And so I really hope you enjoyed that and I hope it's inspired you a bit. If you'd like to take your artwork to the next level with Impressionistic Florals, please do join us in the Impressionistic Florals class. You get three full time tutorials that you can follow along with and it's only seven dollars at the moment. I'll pop the link below and it would be wonderful to have you join us in the course. Either way, I hope you have a beautiful day and wishing you a lot of creativity. Bye!