 Hi there, it's Sandy with another brush-o video. I had so many requests for this one on Instagram and Periscope, I thought I would. Do one over here on YouTube on how to watercolor a garden using brush-o powders. And I'm going to show you my setup first, and lots of people say it's very messy, but I found I could contain it to a reasonable space, so I'll show you my supplies and my setup. I always try to do my watercolor powders on good paper. If you use the lower grade student papers, you're not going to get as much movement, so I like the arches, the Fabriano, lots of the mid to higher range papers are going to give you better results. Then, of course, my silver brushes. I have a whole selection out here, I wasn't sure what I was going to do at the start of this video, but I have two, four, six, eight. If you're going to get four brushes, if you're only going to get one, probably a four if you're a paper crafter would do you the most good. I work on a 12 by 12 surface with the brush-o. This is called a craft assistant. It's metal and it cleans up really nicely. It also gives me a good visual contrast with my white paper and the black background so I can make sure that I'm getting a good punch on my image. I always have baby wipes handy, because that's what you've got to do when you're doing anything with watercolor powders, I've got my water, and then I didn't use them here as well, but you can use sprayers of all kinds and they're each going to give you different effects. So try them out with the powders that you have and try them out at different distances away from the paper and stuff and see what effects you can get. This is my collection of brush-o. I have all the colors because I have full set syndrome. And there's a video showing you how I did the toppers with the little tacks in the top and everything in the little color guide and I'll link you to that at the end of this video. And I always have paper towels. Got to have plenty of paper towels around and some tape so I can tape my work down. This is the green frog tape. You can also use the yellow. They seem to work the same. And I cut my paper in quarters, which gives me room to tape on the sides. I don't cut it straight down to card front size because then I can just slice that little bit off at the end and still have room to tape everything down. So I'm starting by painting just an asterisk kind of a shape with my brush and just plain clean water. And then I'm going to take some gamboge and just drop it in the middle. You see how it already moved out to the edges of the flower shape that I'm doing. And then I'm taking the brush and just moving color around and even going from the outside to the inside so I can get real fussy edges. You could also go the opposite direction and get fatter petals. Lots of different things you can do with simple strokes of the brush to spread the color around. You can also do some of this with regular watercolors as well. You don't have to use brush or to do it or any of the watercolor powders. But I do find that I get these more fun results with the granular powders. The powders are made up of multiple colors. Whereas when you've got a paint, like either using tubes or pans or something, you end up with one color. And it's hard to get this variance. And here I can get a variance. This flower is more orange because I put more powder in it. And a lot of the colors will split out into different colors as you go. You'll find that as you draw each one of these. Now I wanted to do some kind of a tall spray of flowers. I'm not sure what flower this would be. A lot of people have, as I've done this on Periscope, people have guessed it to be different kinds of flowers. So I'll let you make of it what you will. But I basically put a stem down the center and then little leaves pointing out to the sides. And now I'm just moving the paint around and adding a little bit extra around the edges with my brush. Each time I've been painting the water, I've been painting it with a number six and then to add the detail and move the color around, I'm doing that with a number four. So I'm just switching between those two brushes. Later I'll go to a four and a six as I get to tinier flowers. So gauge it by the size of the flowers that you're going to be using. I'm going to do two more of these purple ones. And I'm putting the water down. And I'm speeding up the second set of each one of these because I'll do a couple of each flower since I'll have them at full speed for the first one. You can fully see how that looks. But look how beautifully the color just moves around in that puddle of water. If you let it dry too long, if you wait too long and you don't get quick about it, then you'll end up with a lot of that water not moving. But you want to make sure you keep it fairly wet. I'm doing two flowers at a time, but you may find that you have better success if you just do one flower at a time. And if you're going to do flowers next to each other, then you may want to heat set it or let it air dry before putting more color on so that you don't end up getting powder sticking to the wrong places. It'll only stick in the spots where there's water. So you'll be able to just blow with your breath or with a heat gun and remove the rest of the powder that may tap out other places on the image that you don't necessarily want it. So now I'm doing roses. And for the roses, I just made sort of swirly circles and left a couple of spots that would be highlights. And just moving the color around so you get sort of a round-ish kind of a shape. And this looks like a heavy pink, it's rose red. But as soon as I dab it off, you can see these will turn into little more of pink roses. And then at the end, I'll just keep adding more color to them until I bring them back to a red. So doing a lot of layering with these colors. And so here I've taken the color off. I could take a clean brush and just move the color just a real quick swish to make those highlights into pink highlights rather than all white highlights. And then since I have some pink left on my brush, I just started adding a few extra little, just little lines around the outside edge to make them looser types of flowers. So now we're gonna move on to making a couple other roses. And I'll speed the bottom one up here and doing the same process. But the top ones are going to be buds. Buds are basically a drop shape. So just paint a shape where it gets fatter at the bottom and skinnier at the top. And you've got a bud. We'll put a little greens around it later that will show how much of a bud it really is. So now I'm doing the same kind of flower that I did that the original one, the yellow and the orange flowers. And I'm making little teeny tiny ones. This is where I'm switching to the four for putting the water on. And the two I will use to spread out the color. And I did too many at once. I should have done fewer. So I did have little struggles with how many I put in here. But I wanted a whole bunch of little flowers in here. So just spreading the color out the same way as I did with the other one. So you can work on one shape and then adapt it and do something different with it and see what kind of different flower you can make it. I wasn't looking at any major reference for this. I just wanted flowers of different colors and shapes. And then as I went, I just kept blotting it off. Now be careful when you're blotting because you wanna keep moving the paper towel. If you take the paper towel and you just keep blotting, you're gonna replace the color you've just picked up and put it in a different place on your painting or you don't want it. So you'll just constantly be turning that paper towel and being careful of the clean area down. Now some of my blue powder stuck to the red flowers. This is why my red flowers went back eventually to red because they picked up, they weren't completely dry and they picked up some of that blue. Again, it was working too fast and wasn't allowing things to dry, but that's okay because I added this deeper color mixing a little bit more red with some of the blue and adding a little more detail to it and it looks fine. So if any of that blue had gotten all over those yellow or orange flowers, that would have been much more difficult to recover but it was fine for the red flowers. So if you've got anything light, make sure that you get it good and dry before you add anything else to it because you don't want any overspray of anything ending up on your painting. And this would be beautiful to do as a painting. I'm gonna do it as a car and add a sentiment to it but you can actually do it as a fine art piece as well. So next I'm adding some green. Now this olive green color does some interesting things that some of the other greens don't. It splits out into some interesting colors and some of them are great colors and some of them are like, huh? But you can see in this bottom section right here, the area that I'm painting right now after I blot it off is more of a blue green color. And I thought, well, I wanted to soften that out along the bottom. So I just started spreading the color and I just picked up a little bit more where it's more highly pigmented right in that little section. And as I got down to this bottom here, it went into a yellow green. Now I don't know if that's because I picked up a little bit of the red on my brush. That's possible. But you'll find all kinds of interesting things with a bunch of different colors. There's all sorts of stuff that you'll discover as you start doing painting like this because these are made up of, as I said, different colored crystals or pieces of pigment or whatever's in these little bottles and you want to take advantage of all of those. I mean, look at the beautiful richness of color that you can get and softening things out to the outside edge. Blotting stuff off tends to leave different colors behind and look at the beautiful on that right hand side. There's that really sharp edge around the rose. I wanted another sharp edge. So I added more powder while it was still damp and then more water and just started spreading it around. That brush was just gonna continue to move into the area where all of the damp moisture is in the paper. So I'm just gonna paint some water out and then just when it starts to touch the brush out, the brush will start to move out into that area and then I can create a soft wash out to the outside. Got that blue blending in. It's just giving it a really soft, loose watercolor look. Now, as I said, you can do some of this with regular watercolors as well. So if you've got other pan watercolors or tubes, you can drop color into different sections like this and make similar flowers. But the brush out seems to move in a different way than some other watercolors. So you may get a different look, but you can certainly try it with whatever watercolors you have. One of the reasons that I love making videos here on YouTube is that a lot of the ideas that I share with you, I love to see how you use them with different mediums and how you expand the stuff that you already have because nobody needs to go out and buy everything. Like I said, you could get just a couple colors of brush-o and you could make an absolutely beautiful painting out of it without having to have a lot of them. You don't have to have full set syndrome like me in order to make something beautiful. So I'm just filling in a few more areas with some of the green and moving that color around, just pushing it into some of the areas. So I have some spots that have real hard edges, some that have less hard edges, and I'm not worried about some of those areas that are white. If you look in that bottom section right now, that is gorgeous watercolor. It does not need to have all that white filled in. And now I'm using some of the extra pigment that's in that really dark section so that I can get just a tiny bit of green and do a light wash at the top rather than having to figure out where to shake out some more powder. I'm just picking it up from elsewhere in the painting because I can re-wet it and pull up just a slight, slight bit of color. So now I'm on to the super detail. I heat set it in between here so everything would be relatively dry and then just started painting. Then I'm painting by putting the powder onto the work surface and then dropping some water in it. And I'm just gonna put little stems on my little love. Rose buds. And so it's just like little tiny leaves at the base of them. And then I wanted them to sort of fade into a very washy, soft bunch of, I don't know, flowers, greenery, whatever you'd call it up here at the top. So I'm just gonna add more water and a massive color down here so that I can make it a really soft thing that these little roses are just popping up out of. And you can take very hard lines, add water around them and let them sort of melt into that background. So it just looks like there's leaping out of this very soft watercolor wash. So I'll do the same thing down here. Add some hard lines with some of the paint that I'm actually using. I can pull up more paint. I can add in, I can tap in more. Even at this point, I don't even have to put it on the work surface. I can tap it onto the painting itself. And here I decided I really like the richness of the contrast in some of those darker areas. So I just added more. Totally fine to keep working into it until you're happy with the results. And I love contrast. For me, contrast is what makes it. It's one of the reasons I like working on a black surface. One of my videos, you'll notice I have black in the background because that reminds me that I need it to be really strong enough against black so that it really stands out. That's what catches people's eye. And now I wanted to add a little bit more to a different area. So I mixed up a little bit of orange on my palette. And I'm gonna do the same thing here as I did when I made the larger flower. Just put some paint in the center and then make those same little petals coming out from the middle. And I'm gonna dab that color off. So I'm just gonna get, basically, a really soft glaze of this orange over top of it. I'm gonna let it sit there for a minute. If I dab it off right now, it'll be really light orange and I want it a little less bright, a little less light. I want it to have a little more intensity so I'm gonna let it dry just a little bit first while I paint it the other one. So dab it off and you can see I've got a second layer to it and after that dries, I'll add some more in the center so that I have a really strong middle to each one of those flowers. It's just a way to add a little extra detail to some of those flowers. And again, I had a little extra of that orange color still in my brush. Why not use it to add to those roses? So just keep just adding tiny, tiny bits of color to them here and there. And then finally, we have the purple flowers that I felt needed a little bit more love and attention. So I mixed up a second purple because there are two purples in the Brush-O collection. One is called Violet and the other is called Purple. The purple is the first one I put down. The violet is this one. The violet is a little more of a blue-purple and I'm just adding a little bit of it toward the center and just kind of scribbling around little leaves. Not really being super scientific about it and I am gonna blot it off. So it's just gonna be a layer of a slight glaze of a different color just to add a little bit more detail into them. While I had purple paint on my brush, I added little centers to the orange flowers which just makes them have a little more accent in the painting and I added a simple sentiment to this and just put it on a card base. The sentiment is from Our Daily Bread Designs from my favorite places to get my scripture stamps and there's links to them as well as all the products used in this video in the description down below as well as on the blog. If you'd like to subscribe, you can do that. You can click on any of these videos to watch more. The one on the right shows you how I made the little toppers for my brush and bottles if you're interested in seeing that and I will see you guys another time. Thank you so much to my patrons for sponsoring this video. You guys are awesome. I love you guys and I'll see you all in another video coming up very soon. Take care and have a great day. Go out and make something beautiful. Bye-bye now.