Here’s THE SOLUTION to a watercolor problem (you didn’t know you had till now!)

hi everyone Diane here welcome to my studio hope everyone's well and ready for an interesting and uh hopefully enjoyable video today I'm going to be looking at something a little bit different we're going to be looking at color mainly as well as uh plants and um trying something which is actually very low pressure and when I started to do this I thought to myself yes you know I could really enjoy this this is something that takes away all the pressure from painting and aren't you intrigued to wonder to know why why I would think that well um it goes like this okay um a few months ago maybe a year ago I heard about the color Cube by Sarah Clark Sarah Renee Clark um and you all know about that because Denise love has been featuring it constantly on her videos for about a year now at least um so there's that and other people have talked about it too but um um to my mind that's that doesn't suit my kind of way of painting it kind of goes about it from the wrong way around for me um and then the other day though as well as that I heard about a book which I don't have a copy of but I have seen a review of it on um art Book Nook which is called color in and out of the garden and a couple of other people on here who do art have talked about it now it's not an art book per se and I'm hoping at this point that um a picture of some shots from it will come up on the screen for you to see but it's not an art book per se although there's a section at the back about painting but it's actually about color and the lady who wrote it who's called Loren Edwards Faulkner um is basically encouraging people to look more closely at color and to try to understand what it means and and to actually get inside color and create better paintings as a result as well as making yourself more relaxed and happy so I thought well this all sounds very interesting I haven't bought the book um but I would highly recommend if you want to have a look inside it as I said go and have a look on um Kay's channel on artbook Nook and she goes through it Page by Page literally from the beginning to the end so you can see exactly what's in it and if it floats your boat you might want to buy a copy of it so today what I'm going to do is I'm going to try to reproduce some of the photo that she has got in that book myself and I'm going to do that by I'm going to just um move my stuff out of the way the pet is going to have to go to the side here you can see these are the plants I'm going to use I'm going to use a hranger which has gone over and is starting to fade to some absolutely beautiful um soft autumn colors I've got a little spri of fuchsia here which which is really pretty and has some lovely colors in it and I've also got a little spri of spa which is one of our favorite plants because in the Autumn all the leaves go red like that so you can see there's lots of colors in these plants although when you look at them just quickly they look rather dull but actually aren't so I'm going to pop those just there for a minute move that out of the way and I'm going to show you how I'm going to do this now if you've looked at the book or if you've um gone to um art Book Nook to uh check out you will know that she creates things like this she has got a square which is photograph which has got nine different colors in it and then the actual I don't think that's blood um I think that's paint um she's got the actual flower on top that those colors are in and you can see here what I've done is I've looked at this Rose and I picked out all the different shades of pink and green and the sort of brownish color that are in it and that's what we've created I also did the same thing for lavender here it's got a bit squashed cuz I put something on top of it and it's kind of been pressed um but those are the colors that I found in the lavender so I've tried that out and at the end of the video you'll see me doing this one cuz I um uh I did that one first when I was just trying it all out to see if I could actually do it so what we're going to do is we're going to try to match these colors now that sounds difficult I know I that does sound hard but actually it isn't it really isn't and you see the reason why this is exciting to me apart from the fact I've now got paint on the end of my brush is because you can have tremendous fun mixing the colors to match the flower but you haven't got to worry about painting The Blessed thing you can just paint squares of color now how good is that I think that's just fantastic I got quite excited by the whole idea so I made myself some some rectangles of watercolor paper this is just um this is etal could uh clear CL Fon and it could be any 140 lb watercolor paper this is just cellulose it doesn't have to be anything fancy and then I made myself a grid like this and I'm not going to show you how to do that because it's very simple you just draw the squares using a ruler and then cut out the pieces which are like this obviously with a sharp xacto knife and then you can speed up your whole process cuz you could do a whole book of this you know using those Rings like we did before do you remember um I made these little swatches using these uh binder rings that you can buy really inexpensively well you could make a whole set of these and then you'd have your own color Cube that's what brings me back to the color Cube idea that you can create your own palettes of colors that go well together now the whole point of this the beauty of this you see is that take away that and now you've got this people have asked about how do you decide what colors to put in a bouquet if you're going to construct a bouquet of flowers and you want to paint one and you don't know what colors to put there well if you take a flower like that Rose and you extract all these colors from that then you can use these colors to do a harmonious um composition for your bouquet that you're going to do perhaps from imagination or perhaps you know just well from imagination really I suppose or you might want to look at an example of a bouquet and change the colors and you can use your your color palette that you have created for yourself you can see how excited I am by this whole concept can't you so let's get started on the paper on the painting uh well of preparing the paper actually we need a nice sharp pencil a HB would be fine sharpen that and then I'm going to sit down ow and um use my template to just very lightly very lightly just let the pencil very lightly go around the squares and that will give me the guide for putting my colors down just hold it with your fingers and I've left enough space at the bottom here so that you can write down the colors that you use to make your um mixtures from and uh you can also put other details what kind of flower it was what kind of plant when you did it anything of note that you might want to say about it so there we are we've got our nine boxes and um so then we're going to go I think we'll start let's start with the um fuchsia which I think you can see and you don't need to worry about drawing it and you don't need to worry about painting it so it looks like a fuchsia you're just looking at it for the Pure Color how liberating is that how liberating is that I just need some water and I need uh my towel my Aaron towel and I need a brush I'm going to use a draww round number eight this is could be anything just not too big not too small so now I'm going to look on my set of paints here and what I have here is the Botanical Michael Harding set um and I I'm going to start with chacone rose and I'm going to hope and I think bingo I think Bingo that is pretty much what I'm seeing there I could add a tiny smidgin of quinacridone purple to that to just darken it down a little bit and then I'm going to paint my first Square so there we are we don't have to be too fanatical about you know keeping within the lines and everything so then I need to look again and see what other colors I can see and here I know this is kind of creamy white but here we have a more of a pink so we might want to take a little bit of shell pink which is a whole bind color little bit of shell pink there as the base and then I'm going to build that up until I come to another nice pink and we'll pop that there so that's shell pink from Hine mixed with quinacridone rose from Michael Harding these colors are available in other sets as well so you know you don't have to worry about having exactly the same paints as me and then the stamans here they are also pink but they're a little bit more orangy and I'm not sure if you can really see this on the camera or not but so I'm going to pick up some quinac uh quinacridone gold and mix that with the quinacridone rose just to get a nice orangey red there and I'm going to put that here and then after that because I don't think we need bother too much with the white um we're going to go down to the leaves and we have a pretty dark green so I'm going to go to um perene green which is a little bit too blue so we'll add a bit of yellow to that that's cadmium yellow and I think that's probably okay for one of the greens anyway so we'll pop that in there okay so you can see that's okay and then if you look a little bit harder you can see there is a lighter and then there's some beige and there's a darker blodge there of I don't know what so let's go to um sap green light no actually we'll go to green gold green gold and we'll put some green gold in here because that's pretty much the lighter green and then underneath the leaves that's a much more grayish kind of green so we'll take a little bit of uh ultramarine blue and mix that with the green so we have a gray green and we can put that here and you will learn so much about color from doing this and you'll learn if you practice this using flowers or you don't have to use flowers you can use rocks you can use anything you see in your house it doesn't matter what you use and there here we've got a kind of orangey probably a bit of fungus growing on there so we'll go with um how can we mix that I think that's a bit of a pinky green so it's coming towards Brown Yeah I think that's probably something like that so we'll pop that in there and the stem don't forget the stem I am is going to be a reddish definitely we're going back to the red of the yeah that's pretty much exactly it so that's a mixture of the perene green and red and that's going to give us a nice reddish brown and then we've probably got something even darker here so we could go to a little bit more perene green and do that to give us a lovely gray for the shadowy areas so now we have a color card with nine interrelated colors on it that all go together they would make a spectacular bouquet if you used that idea for your flowers that you're going to design and it's all based around this little humble humble little fuchsia sprig so we'll put that over there and later on we'll take a photograph with that sitting on top of that but but you can see already how sweet that is going to look so pop that over there and I've got two more to do for you and we'll take another piece of card honestly I do think taking away the pressure of having to make something look like something all you're doing is drawing squares and filling those squares with color and honestly it's it's a real thrill to make something beautiful because they photograph so well zen zen no [Applause] Zen okay that's our next one and we are going to go to the spyer which is absolutely glorious look at that look at the lovely darks here really dark purpley color and these lovely reddish orangey greens and the pink beautiful pale pink in the flower so I I sort of have developed a kind of system whereby I start with the flower and I'm going to go straight for this shade here just make that a little bit paler maybe I'll add a little bit of soft white to it and yeah that's about right and we're going to pop that in for the for the tiny little flowers and then the center of these flowers is darker and so I think we're looking at something like this there we are and then what else have we got here this is a kind of little bit brownish or grayish so I think I'm going to nip over to my my ultramarine blue for the gray and mix that with this pink yeah so we'll do that okay so that's the colors in the flower you can see that there now we need to go to the leaves and the leaves have got brown veins in in them but they are quite I think they're pretty much gold green so they're pretty much like that straight out the palette and maybe with a little bit more yellow in yeah let's let's go with that so that's gold green with a little bit of cadmium yellow and then the veins are brownish red so something like that yeah pretty much something like that so that is um quinacridone Rose and um perene green really and then we've got these dark things here which look like a really dark purple so we'll pick up some really dark purple there and to make that darker um we'll add the perene green as well so that's going to give us this really striking almost black color okay and then over here we've got this beautiful Autumn Clow thing going on there so immediately I think Autumn I have to go to quinacridone um gold so we pick up some of that but it has a bit of red in it and I think it's more of the orangey red like that so we'll pop that there a little bit more red maybe a little bit of that red in it and then a bit of blue to make it yeah bit more B more of krone did I say blue what I I think I meant I don't know you'll have to look and see which one I picked up because I can't remember now and then more red so we'll add a bit more red to that for the last color which is this color here so it's very bright very very very varied autumn colors there and you wouldn't imagine that would you until you've looked at this really really closely that they are all in there like that so we'll stick that over there and then the last one that we're going to do today is um the um hranger which has been drying out nicely and this is so pretty CU it's got such lovely soft greens and things in it and still got some of its blues very very pale this one is going to be completely the opposite to this bright one here so I'll just move those well away so they don't spoil that one's dry by now okay so let's do our [Applause] good you could do this in a Sketchbook of course if you wanted to you could get a special sketchbook for all of your color combinations or just make these cards and then put them into a you put them into a card file or just put ring rings in them you could put them here if you wanted to uh okay so let's have a look at this so we've got this pale I think I'm just going to clean a bit of space here for my mixtures cuz the this one is a completely different color from the ones we've just done which are very on the red side this one is much more on the blue side so just wipe off some of this paint and turn this around to the blues and greens so what have we got here this looks like um a Cerulean blue I think so I'm just going to see if I can pick some of that up yeah I think that is Cerulean with a bit of ultramarine in it actually there's lots of colors there there's going to be more colors than we can actually fit on our nine grid of nine I think but we can make a start so that's Cerulean with a tiny Touch of um ultramarine and then we have a mauve there so Cerulean with a little bit of mauve something like this Crone purple and ceru and blue and then we've got it's quite pinkish so we can go down here to the lizin [Music] Crimson yeah alarin Crimson that's pretty much it so alarin with quinone purple and Cerulean to give us this this kind of color there and then we need some soft greens so this is shadow green from Hine and I think that's pretty close actually so I'm going to use that as it is so that's kind of this kind of green so some of them are much more yellowish though so we add some yellow um yellow gold green or green gold to the shadow green and we'll have this green and you shouldn't while you're doing this be thinking about how making this square look really nice you should be thinking about literally just coloring the squares in using the colors that you see and like I said there are more colors here than nine so I'm going to go for this one here which is um basically I would say that was like um I need to clean that a little bit this is soft white or warm White from Dan uh from Michael Harding with a little bit of um raw [Music] umber okay and a tiny bit of [Music] yellow um yeah a cool yellow so a lemon if I can find have I got a lemon yellow here anywhere I should have that will do I think there there we go that's what we needed so that's this color here and we've got some really dead ones in there so we could go for a nice Rusty Brown so back to our trusty canone gold and put that here with a bit of raw umber that'll give us a nice dead brown color and then we've got these leaves here which are you know one of the most useful colors for leaves is this perene green here which we have I'm going to mix that with with that quinacridone bit more quinacridone just to give it a bit more warmth cuz it's quite a cold blue green and then the stem color is a light green so let's go for hooker's green um mixed with a bit of warm white or soft white whatever that is called and a bit of konac rodone and that's going to give us a very soft light green for the stem so you can see that's this color here so there we are that is that one so we have created ourselves a wonderful panoply of color cards here and there's an ant wandering across there so what I need to do now is to write underneath here which colors I used what kind of flower I was um using as my inspiration uh that was this one and then we'll take and that was this one and going take some photographs and you'll see those at the end of the video after I finished showing youi painting that one as well which is a bonus so what we need here is just a little sprig of this really don't we we don't need the whole thing that and a leaf so there we are I hope you enjoyed that I did it's a tremendous um what's the word uh not exactly relief but it is very exciting to just be able to think about the colors to just mix the colors that you uh are seeing and just literally put those colors down on a piece of paper and enjoy them for the sake of the color and not worry about reproducing the flower itself that can come next once you've done this and you know what colors you're looking for you can then paint away to your heart's content um using those colors and you know that's one thing less to be concerned about and if you want to put together a bouquet that's got this in it and other things as well for example there you are you've got your harmonious set of colors that are going to go together because they're all already in that beautiful plant that you um are knowing and loving so well so enjoy the next couple of minutes where we're going to play you some music and show you me painting this one and um I'll see you again soon don't forget to give us a like And subscribe turn on notifications and watch right to the end please if you've come this far you might as well go ahead to the end so I shall see you again here soon and uh take care everyone have fun enjoy paint a lot and keep well I'll say bye for now everybody bye-bye [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] for [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music]