 Hi there, I'm Sandy Olnok, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube, and today I'm part of an Avery Elle liquid watercolors blog hop, and I'm going to share also watercolor flower series, which I've been doing for a couple years, with the hand-drawn flower stamp set from Avery Elle, and I wanted to take advantage of the soft colors that are available in this Avery Elle palette of colors. If you haven't seen them yet, they come in these little bottles. They're the kind of bottles that reinkers normally come in for ink bottles, or ink stink pads. Gosh, I can't even talk. And so that is the consistency. You just squeeze a little bit out, and you can paint with it. Now you can use a palette. You can use something as simple as an 89 cent tile from the hardware store. Just go pick one up. If you have something white, it's helpful so that you can see the color brightly through that. Through that, if you use a colored plate or something, then you'll see whatever colors underneath of it, and just use some water and you can paint away. I put mine into a little plastic palette, and I'm going to save this and be able to use it. I've got it marked with Avery Elle, so I know what brand it is. You could actually write the names of the colors around each one of them as well, which I chose not to do because I thought it would be messy on screen. And I also made a swatch chart for myself with solid color and then some watered out colors so I could have an idea of what that looks like. You can pick up that chart over on my blog. I have a nice clean, tidy one with not my scribbled handwritten text, but you can go grab that one if you want to see what those colors look like. For my project, I took some watercolor paper. This is Arches Cold Press Watercolor Paper, and I've stamped them in Avery Elle's Daisy Ink, and I'm going to start painting around the flowers first because I wanted to make it feel like these flowers were just popping out of a beautiful spray of color, and I started by painting really watered-down color in here. Notice that I'm just grabbing from my water jug off the camera and then dipping straight into the watercolors. I'm not mixing anything. I'm going to let the colors mix on the paper and just scribbling some color as I go, just a little bit here and there. And I'm focusing on trying to create these as white flowers. You can do them in a lot of different ways, but I wanted white flowers that were really soft, and I thought I'll spray them a little bit, too, to soften up a little bit of that ink because even though it's pigment ink, if it's not really dry, you can actually move it a little bit. And I wanted to have that be a little bit softer as well. So these look like they're just super fresh, soft kinds of flowers. Notice the color is really light, and that's partially probably because of my video lighting, but it's also very, very light on here. I'm going to build up my color slowly, little by little, and I'm painting the negative space around the flowers and just throwing in some color. Here I decided I'm going to throw some of the, I think that's lemongrass color into the leaves themselves and let that bleed out. I'm just letting it bleed wherever it wants on the paper and then throw a little bit of color in the centers of each of the flowers. And to spread that color out, I'm using clean water from my brush to just kind of pull that color out and let it trail along these little little rivers that I'm making of water because that color is going to keep moving while it's wet. And that's going to help them to kind of move out that way. You can create shadows around some of the petals that way by just painting some water in the spots that you want it. I had a little stronger color on the inside and I'm just watching things carefully to see where I want to add some punches of color, where I want it to be soft because with watercolor, when you have contrast between soft edges and hard edges and strong color and soft color, that's where watercolor really sings. So I'm just kind of keeping an eye on where all those places are on my painting and trying to make some decisions as I go about how much color to put in and how much color to remove that sort of thing. So I wanted some color underneath where I'm going to put the stems because I'm going to draw my own stems in here since there is a stem that comes with the set, but it's got a curlicue thing on the end and I wanted to make sure that these were stems that look like they belong to the flowers. So I'm going to paint them in myself and you too can paint in your own stems. I promise you. So I'm going to throw a little bit of pink in here and let a little bit of that bleed into some of these leaves just slightly. No big deal. If things start mushing into each other, that's what's going to make it look like beautiful soft watercolor when some of those things bleed and that sort of thing. We're going to be able to clean up some of those edges and add some definition as we go. But in this first layer, this really soft layer, just let him let him kind of merge together. And this is all dry. Now I air dried it because I prefer that for what I'm doing with my watercolors and then I'm looking for where my stems going to be. Where is that flower stem going to go with what's the curve going to look like and then where's this curve going to go. It's going to go the opposite direction. You can kind of pay attention when you're doing your stamping which direction those are going to go. Now those are a little bit harsh compared to everything else that's on here. So I thought before they dry, I'm going to just go over them with a clean damp brush and soften them a little bit. I just don't want them to be super harsh. And you can make them really wet and let them totally disappear or let just parts of them disappear and leave parts of them with sharp edges really up to you. Letting them be different and not the same all the way along the entire petal is really going to help to make them look just soft and watercolory and make you look like a fabulous artist that you knew what you were doing. Even if you don't know what you're doing, don't tell anybody this is a terrible painting. I did a terrible job on this. Just let them enjoy it and love it because people are going to see it and they're going to think it's great. Even if you're like, oh my goodness, that one spot it bled, you know, it doesn't matter. So I'm going to add a few other little strands just to keep that delicacy going. Just a little tiny bit here and there. Not a ton, but let the even let some of that green color be softer than it is in other areas. That sort of thing. So it's helpful to kind of have that difference between the shades of the green. I'm going to go in and clean up a few of the areas around some of the flowers. I'm not painting, notice an edge. I'm not painting a line around the flower itself. You don't want to outline things, but you can add darker shading around certain sections and allow that to be color that looks like it's sitting behind that flower that the flower is popping out from it. And if you get too much color on there, you can always dab it off. You can add more water. You can use a brush that's damp, but not super wet and just scrub over it a little bit like this and spread that color out a little bit more, because I didn't want it to look like there was a pink cloud at the bottom, a blue cloud at the top. And then I'll add a little bit more pink here and spread that out as well, because I didn't want it to be a harsh spot of pink. I just wanted it to be a little soft touch of pink in there and then increase that that contrast right there where there's two petals meet and just create some of these negative shapes around the flowers themselves. Once you're satisfied with how the outside is progressing, then you can move to the inside and start to paint those those very deep centers and start to reaffirm those because you can see how light watercolor dries. Once the color is painted, it generally doesn't stay as strong as it started out as no matter what kind of watercolors you're using. That is just kind of traditionally the way it goes. So I'm going to add some color toward the center and then right around the edges of it to create that lacy look, just let my brush dance along there. And while I'm mentioning the brush, I'm using a silver brush. This is a number eight that I'm using for the flowers and you can also use a 12 for something like the backgrounds, the eight and the 12 are the ones I use the most. But even though I'm painting tiny detail here, I'm using a fairly large brush compared to what some folks use. Some folks like to do a two or a four. And what I find is the smaller the brush, the more I get lost in details that I don't need to get lost in. And here it allows me to just make some wider brush strokes that are just going to define those petals. So look at how I'm putting just a wash of that light memosa color on a couple of the petals to darken them and a little bit of color toward the center of the flower to let it carry out from that, the deeper center and not really fuss. If I had a number two brush, I would be painting every single vein in every one of those petals. And it would not only take forever, but it would look fussy and I want it to look fresh and loose and washy. And that's what I'm doing here. Now, some of these petals, I might even be changing some of the shapes of them or something, but I'm letting the watercolor define that. If it looks like the watercolor is trying to create a petal there, I'm just letting it go. So I wanted to reaffirm a little bit more on my greens and grab a little tiny bit more color because now that I have that punch of the orange color in the center of the flowers, the painting can handle a little more color elsewhere, just slightly stronger. So I've taken my panel and I've popped it onto some cardstock that is kind of of a coordinating color so that I have just that little lift up of the panel. And I stamped the thinking of you in Mermaid Ink from Avery L. Isn't that pretty? I hope you'll try something like this with flower stamps that you have and these Avery L watercolors. They're lots of fun to play with, super soft, beautiful colors. And I will see you guys again next time. There's more videos on the screen if you want to see a comparison to some other liquid watercolors. You can check that out as well. Thank you much. Bye bye.