 Hello and welcome to Monet Café. I'm artist Susan Jenkins. We're gonna have some fun today and if you're new here, please subscribe and hit that little bell icon to be notified of future videos. Hello and welcome to Monet Café. I'm artist Susan Jenkins and I'm excited to bring you this lesson on painting flowers. Now this is a lesson that's going to hopefully simplify some things and allow you to paint many different varieties of flowers with just a few tips and techniques to demystify what could possibly be a complicated subject. So we're gonna go over the structure and the composition of flowers and I think it should be a lot of fun. Alright, let's do it. Now we love flowers as artists. I would say most artists do. I mean they're the perfect subject matter for painting, right? Beautiful colors, awesome textures, shapes, and such a plethora of designs in nature. But it could get complicating. There are some intricacies to flowers. They're geometric patterns like I've talked about in other videos. The Fibonacci sequence and the golden ratio is just inherent to flowers. That also can help you to learn more about painting flowers to just learn more about the structure and the way nature works. But there are some simple artistic things that we can do to simplify painting all kinds of different varieties of flowers. And so one of the things we need to focus on and concentrate on is their structure. Alright, and by structure I mean the general shape of the flower, the gestural quality of the flower. Is it on a stock? Is it a big bloom? So that's really a basic principle for simplifying the subject matter is to think about the structure of the flower. Now the next thing we're going to do is to simplify that structure. Now I have a few different flower varieties that I'm going to show you some little techniques that will help you to do just this. Alright, here we go. Now this particular variety is a daisy of sorts. And the first thing we want to do is identify the structure. What is the structure? Well we know if we were looking from above directly down on the flower, the structure is typically round with a stem. Okay, that's just really basically the structure of a daisy. Now we could get very bogged down and overwhelmed in going in and saying, oh how many petals are there? How many rows of petals are there? And start to try to paint every individual petal. So that's what comes to the next step which is to simplify. So I know we've got a circular structure, but I also know that there's going to be different angles for these flowers. Some are turned different ways. So a little tip that you can do is to basically, instead of trying to draw the flower from inside out, let's draw it from its basic shape and work in. Let's say I wanted to do a daisy and I am going to focus on the center portion and then I'm going to start doing all of the leaves out and in towards the flower. Alright, so you know I've got the general shape and but it starts to look kind of amateurish, not very painterly. So here is another strategy of a way that you can simplify and not have to go in and try to be so specific with every petal. Alright, what is the structure? Again, it's like a circle and I'm going to basically, and it's turned a little bit, so I'm basically going to get the general shape of this flower. It's kind of like an oval turned to the side like that and I'm going to then work from within that shape. This is what step number two, simplifying this. Instead of going, oh, petals, negative spaces, oh my goodness. So we're just going to simplify it. So now I can just simplify by getting this general cone shape in here. I can kind of see the sizes of things and then I can gradually start working from, it's the same principle but it's just so much easier when we give it a simplified structure to work from. Alright, so now we can end up with a much more painterly result and then we could do the same thing with other flowers that are in the background. We can get their shape. Now this one's going to get in the way of that other Daisy, but the same idea. We work from the simplified structure and shape and go out from there. Alright, let's talk about this little particular flower. What would that be? I'm not sure. Let's see if it says it. It just says blue flowers. Okay. Alright, so here's one approach to this flower. I could look at all these, the little things on the flower seem to be like little, I don't know, cone shape types of things coming around. I mean I could like focus on them like this and how each one's coming out and then another one down here and then we could draw the stem. Okay or I could take and do it like, let's do this one up here. We're going to simplify this. What's the structure? Obviously the structure is not round like a Daisy. There's our general structure. Alright and now what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna actually use some pastels with this one. Now what I'm gonna do is I'm just going to suggest some of the elements in here. I probably should have put some dark down first. Let me do that. Let me get some darks in here. Instead of drawing out every petal like this, I'm going to get the general shape kind of like that. Now I'm working on news prints, so bear with me. General shape. Alright now let's get in some of these brights up here. Oh, I love these and I'm just going to suggest some of the little things that are kind of coming out from the flower. Now we did have some of that nice dark blue, but I'm going to come in here. Let's do this here. I've got some rich areas in spaces. Alright, so let's give it some some richness in here. I'm really just doing like a little value study. We've got some of the little shapes coming out. So instead of drawing the shapes, I'm going to add some light on top of this too. I'm carving and working with them. I'm going to do some more of these bluish colored flowers, but let's first talk about the third step which is to suggest. And now we could simplify and suggest even further by just even simplifying it more. Let's see this one back here, I'm speeding this up and I want to expound a little bit more on this about the concept of suggesting. Rather than focusing so much on every shape getting in or every petal, you basically, like I said, the steps to the left there. You get the structure, you simplify the structure, and then you just suggest. And now you suggest even more when it's not an object of the main interest. So if you want like the largest blue flower there, I lost layering ability. Again, I'm not even working on sanded paper here, so I'm kind of limited in what I can do. But you want to give the most detail on what your focal area is, and then you suggest even more for the areas that are not your focal point. Alright, now let's do another one. And I'm totally doing these random. Well, the sunflower is a little bit like a daisy in structure. So let's see if we can find. Alright, here's an interesting little structure with a B. Let's approach this one in the same way. First, I'll do one that's more focused on our brain thinking about every single petal. And I actually have a hard time painting this way because I try to focus on simplifying it so much. So it's even kind of hard for me. This one's even a little more loose maybe than I would have done many years ago. Alright, so now let's do one that's focused a little bit more on just the general structure. Okay, maybe a little gestural quality. Now, see how I just kind of painterly did a darker center, even though that daisy or whatever that is, dandelion is yellow primarily. We still need to get a little darker value to lay some of those lighter colors onto. It has some darker little petals underneath that I'm just suggesting back to the third step there. And then I could, if I was working on sanded paper, I could really get more layering than I'm getting here. But it's getting more of a, you see the difference? I hope you can see the difference. This one is more suggestive, maybe more free and gestural than the first one. And now I'm going to do just do a few more and get a little fun and crazy like I did with the blue flower one. And just like the last example, I'll have a few that have a bit more detail to create more of a focal point. And then the further the flowers get or they're buried deep down in the grass and you don't want them to be a focal point, they are going to be even more suggestive than your focal point flowers. And I had to throw in a little quick B. Alright, now let's look at this flower variety. And they are basically like stars. So we could do these flowers. Oh, it's like a star. Let me let me pick a spot right here to do these. We could say, oh, look at that. There's a little B down here. I'll draw my B. He's right in here. And then I'll start drawing all these flowers. Okay, there's one that is like a star right here. There's some space here. Here's another star. And you get the point, we could just keep drawing these little star shapes everywhere. Okay, well, one thing we're not doing here. In this example, we are not simplifying. If anything, we are making it more complex. And before you know it, it looks very amateurish. Alright, let's go ahead and draw a little star. Okay, I'm going to draw a little star. It's very amateurish. Alright, so how would we simplify this? Let me get myself a little border to work with because I seem to be going all over the place. In this last example, I am going to be even more suggestive. Now, as we often do in pastel painting or many other mediums as well as we get some darks down for contrast. And I just basically got in some nice purples and dark blues. Now, talk about suggesting. I am suggesting shapes and gestures, values and colors based on kind of what I see. Now, notice in this example, I am not doing individual star shapes, but just kind of suggesting them. And I know that as the painting progresses, I will get more specific about certain areas in the focal point area. And I've chosen to make the focal point. To me, it was kind of obviously kind of some of the center flowers that are a little lighter center to center left, I guess. And those will be the ones that have the most color, the most high chroma color and the most contrast and the most detail. Those are some of the strategies to create your focal point of interest. And some of you, I know, probably seen my focal point video that I did. So that's why particular flowers will have a bit more of the star shape structure. And some will just be almost not there. Now I've given a few centers to them. And once again, I'm pretty limited with what I'm able to do because of the unsanded paper. But I went back and played a little bit more, got even more suggestive with some of the flowers, added a little bit more darks to the pink and purple flowers. And even added a little bit of sky to some of these just to have fun. So I hope these principles of structure, simplify and suggest will help you with painting flowers. It also makes it so much easier. You know, we can get too stressed about having flowers be so perfect. And it's so much more freeing as an artist when we can learn that if we can get their basic structure, simplify it and suggest certain areas will not only have more fun as an artist, but we will also create a painting that is much more painterly and artistic. So keep those three points in mind. Create some painterly, fun, free flowers. Oh, and be sure to check out my Etsy shop. I've just added over 30 paintings. You can find the link in the description of this video. And please be sure to subscribe to this channel, like this video, comment. And if you'd like a little bit extra, you can become a patron on my Patreon page for only $5 a month. So get out there, paint some flowers, enjoy our beautiful world. And as always, happy painting. That will hopefully make painting flowers easier and