 Hello there, it's Sandy Olnok and welcome to a very long deep dive video. I'm going to be doing both stamped watercolor and regular watercolor and yes, you can fast forward to the portion you want to see. Let's get going. If you've been around here very long, you might know that in 2022, I've been using my Friday crazy video to inspire my Monday deep dive. So Friday I'm going to be testing dioxazines and playing with those to paint those flowers. So I thought the deep dive would be fun to do on watercolor flowers. Part one is stamped watercolor flowers that's coming up right away and part two is painted watercolor flowers. So if you don't want to use stamps and you just want to dive into seeing six different flowers in watercolor, jump to 12 minutes and you can go see that section of the video because this is really long. So for stamped watercolor, let's dive into that first. I'm going to do an overview in case you have not heard of stamped watercolor art impressions is a company that makes these stamps. I have cases and cases of these because I'm a little obsessed with them or a lot of fun to play with. They make these stamps that are sized so that the flowers can all be used together and they have trees and scenes and chairs and pots and all kinds of things. And you can stick these onto blocks like an acrylic block of some kind. I sell a little teeny tiny set, little teeny tiny squares and they work really well for these very small stamps. I use watercolor markers with them while you have to use watercolor markers with them. Any brand is fine but I like Tombow for a number of reasons which maybe I'll get to in this video. We'll see. You need a brush to paint with. I tend to like a regular brush, a silver black velvet. This is going to be a number six today rather than an aqua brush and some stamps. You can get just one set of stamps that has just a couple of the flowers in it but in this particular case today I'm going to use just one stamp and I'm going to show you how many things you can get out of one stamp. This one looks kind of like maybe the end of a pine branch or something and I got out that little piece of greenery from the bouquet that's sitting on my desk because it reminded me of that but that's the shape of it and I'm going to turn this into six different types of flowers and talk about how to do that. So I'm going to start with stamped lavender because it has little frondy things on the end of lavender. I used to have a lavender bush in my backyard and I loved it and I had some guys come over and do some yard work and they were just cleaning everything out at one point and they said, well, you know, can we get rid of anything that's weeds? Yes, please get rid of all the weeds. That's what I'm paying you for and they got rid of my lavender bush because they considered it a weed and I was so sad but, you know, stuff happens, right? So anyway, what I have done with this is used a light purple first and just done a series of tapping motions to create a long strand that turns into a piece of lavender and I wet my brush and wiped it off so that I don't have a ton of water in it. This is why I think you should use a regular brush rather than an aqua brush. An aqua brush keeps pouring water out onto your paper. If you use a regular brush, you can control how much water is on it and then just move the ink around. It's really easy to do. It doesn't take a whole lot of effort or energy to make it look like watercolor. Really nice, simple type of watercolor look. You can use the pens to actually draw on the paper as well. You can draw in stems and leaves and stuff or, of course, they have lots of stamps that do those things too. But I am trying to use just that one stamp and showing you how you can use other things to embellish upon it to make different kinds of flowers and groupings of flowers. So I am using the brush once again to move the green that I had drawn all this in and you can even use the pigment that's on the brush like I'm doing here to make very light leaves. Markers are a little harder to get control with and if you stay for the regular watercolor version you'll get to see some of the advantages of regular watercolor versus using markers in this way. So a still bee is similar to making the lavender but instead of making just one line I'm making a curved line so I just turned my hand as I was tapping the stamp. You can also just stamp with part of the stamp. You can just stamp with the heel of it if you only need a little mark. You can do all different kinds of things, turn the stamp upside down and left to right in all different directions and see what kinds of lines it can make. That's where I started just playing around with this one to see what I could make this one little stamp do. After I did the water portion of this I went in with a marker and just drew into the flowers themselves so I could add the depth and detail of a second layer of color. Once again I added some green at the bottom where I can then use the brush to move the color around. So there we go with the a still bee. Now carnations, some of them have curved leaves but some of them have kind of spiky leaves so I thought I'd make the spiky kind. And what I've done here is turned the stamp and just keep stamping it, it gets lighter the more times you stamp it, the first stamping will be the darkest but it still retains some pigment so you can get that transition of color and I'm just wetting the color as it moves around the flower. So I'm getting a difference in the amount of pinks and the depth of the pinks that's on the paper. So however much pigment gets stamped is determinative of what your flower is going to look like. Now there's this thing at the base of, and I'm no botanist, I'm just going to tell you that right now, at the base of a lot of flowers called I think a calyx or a calyx, I don't know how you say that, but it contains the girl parts for reproduction of the flower. I tried to do research, sometimes I actually Google things to find stuff out but for drawing those in I just drew them in fatter and added some dark green at the top edge of it so that it would look like there's a shadow cast from the flower onto the calyx or the calyx and I'm adding different colors into the flower itself, even that purplish color in the shadow areas. So I can get a little difference in color on the flower. Next up, stamped this all related in some ways visually at least to the carnation. So I am stamping the pink first and then a purple at the base of it and I'm stamping with just kind of the heel of the stamp and then stamping green underneath of it because these also have a calyx or a calyx and theirs is green on thistles. So I'm going to use two different greens and that sort of thing to add the depth to it and once all of the ink is down then I can start to add leaves and then watercolor. Now with these stamped watercolors you can sit down one day and do a whole bunch of different pictures with the stamping portion and then come back the next day and do all the watercolor portion. The watercolor markers should stay reactivatable for quite some time so you can come back and work on that later on. You can't really do very easily with watercolor. So now I'm going to work on wisteria and this one I'm just going to warn you is a bit of a wreck. It didn't come out exactly as I hoped it would but I thought the example and the idea of it is something that will still be helpful. So I've stamped basically the still be upside down. So they're pointing down instead of pointing up so think about doing things upside down when you're trying to transform your stamps and make them into another flower and I wanted the flowers to be light and the area in between to be dark so that the flowers show up which means I have to put dark color in between. I'm doing negative coloring. It's a little hard to do with stamps because these stamps are not controllable in terms of trying to create specific shapes. If you stay tuned for the watercolor version of the wisteria it looks a little bit better but if you're doing this kind of a thing on a picture with say an arch and there's flowers hanging down from the top of the arch it's totally going to look like wisteria even though this looks like a blob when it's just by itself on a square of paper. So don't judge me too harshly for my attempt here at making wisteria but a lot of different types of things can be done this way. You could do stamped grapes hanging down from an arbor that sort of thing in whatever kind of pictures you're making. I'm just adding darker colors trying to get some depth in between them so that those lighter purples pop forward. If you squint it looks a little bit like wisteria maybe. So the last one of the six is stamped morning glory because I know you might be wondering how do you make white flowers when you're doing this kind of thing. Well you have to not paint the white and paint all the other colors. So what I'm doing is taking one green and stamping it in different sections leaving whites open and just trying to get some color on here and I was going to stamp the lighter green as well but I got really tired of stamping. This is much more time consuming to do than just using the marker this way since I'm not really trying to retain the shapes of the stamp itself. So I just went in with the marker and drew it in and now I'm using water to draw out all that color in between each one of those circular kinds of shapes and morning glories are not perfectly round so making them perfectly round might look goofy. And just blending the color and letting all the rest of that look like leaves that are behind the morning glories because the white flowers need to pop forward and everything is more viewable when there's contrast. So if you want to show off something that's light then put something dark next to it and it will start to look light. So here I'm adding in under a couple of the flowers not every single one of them but adding a little bit of darker color underneath of them so it looks like there's a small shadow maybe cast onto the leaves behind the flowers and then the last step is just adding in a little bit of some centers for these and I added it directly with the marker and then just used a brush to make a stroke to soften out those centers a little bit so they wouldn't look like dots necessarily and there you go again if this was hanging on a fence it would look a lot more like morning glories. So let's start with the watercolor flowers without stamps and I'm using my palette from 2019. This one has more floral colors than my current palette because normally I don't paint a lot of flowers so I get this palette out when I'm going to paint flowers because I do sometimes and I'll put a link to that video that talks all about those colors and everything and how I put together a palette so that you can go see that if you need to. Now let's start with a still being I'm going to do the same flowers that I did previously and see if I can match the stamped version by doing them in straight watercolor. So I've used some anthraquinoid scarlet and I'm just painting basically a wiggly it almost looks like a tree you could also paint a tree like this just make it green. I wanted a light pink instead of just this dark red so instead of worrying about trying to you know mix up a color that was going to be light I just used a baby wipe to dab up that color and then since that surface is still a little bit damp I can paint back into it and a lot of that watercolor will start to blend in with what's already there. If you want to add a darker color in watercolor they just mix it with something else you can mix a darker red using a Payne's gray to darken it you can add the complementary color to it which would be a green in the case of red or you can buy a color. Now this is a perline maroon I only recommend buying a color when it's something you use all the time and you're tired of mixing. So I would recommend attempting to mix it first and see if you can get a good color that you like and if it's easy to mix then don't go waste your money on buying a gajillion different colors. Use the colors that you've got and then if you're really annoyed with it then go ahead and buy a dark in whatever you're looking for because you're tired of mixing it. I tend to have a lot of greens in my palette because I get tired of mixing greens so I have a couple of them that I really like and then I'll use straight up by themselves but in this palette I included some of the perlines so I have a perline maroon and a perline green because I'm working with crafting in this particular case and I don't feel like mixing up my darks all the time. So with the watercolors as opposed to the stamped watercolors using markers I can get more natural colors. I'm getting a richer red for the astilbe that's closer to what an astilbe actually looks like and the color of the leaves is adjustable. It's not adjustable with markers. One of the left is marker and you can see it's more of candy apple types of colors but with watercolor I can control what that looks like. I can mix my green exactly the way I want it to look. Now watercolor lavender this is a very similar type of shape to astilbe except it's tall and skinny it doesn't have a bowed out in the middle shape like a triangle type of shape. So I've just done the same thing I've kind of scribbled in the color in the shape that it should be and then lifted so I could get that really light purple and then add in the dark in between. I'm not making a single scribble I'm making kind of lines that go across and then joining a few of them so that they look related to each other and that gives me the texture of the lavender branches or the lavender flowers and then I mixed up a color. I put some blue into my green so that I could get something that's more of a blue green type of color and the stem on lavender you can actually see some of the green going up into the flowers so I'm just painting right into them. And with watercolor you can also get more control over how light and dark all your colors are you can mix more water in them to make them lighter. You can paint with basically a dirty brush. Sometimes I do that I have water that has kind of turned green after I've painted a bunch of things or it's turned purple if I've been using a lot of purple and I can actually paint with that to get a soft shadow color so on the left is the stamped one on the right it's the watercolor one. Now we're on to Carnations. I wanted to use something that was going to be more of a baby pink so I pulled out another palette that happens to have some opera pink in it because my pink in this palette is a quinacridone rose and it's not this kind of a pink but what I've done is put some color onto the paper rinsed my brush so it's nice and clean and then dried the brush off so I can just pull color from the blob and make the edges so you can make spiky types of flowers or spiky types of objects by simply using a dry brush to pull color out of a puddle and I'll do the same thing with all these other flowers. This is opera pink and opera pink is not in this palette even though it's a really pretty color because it is fugitive. Fugitive means it's going to disappear and if you're just making a card or you're sending a postcard to somebody and sketching out some flowers or something then it's not really all that important because nobody's gonna save that card or postcard for 100 years or 10 years or however long it takes for the color to disappear but if they set it on their shelf and it had pink flowers on it at some point it will have no flowers on it. If you mix opera pink with a blue to make a purple then your flowers would eventually become blue they would lose the pinkness because that's what fugitive means so that is why it's not in my main palettes but for this exercise that that would be nice to use that really bright color. There are these things underneath of flowers that I believe are called a calyx or a calyx they hold the girl parts of the flower and in this particular case you can see that the green is kind of dipping into the pink flowers it's making a brown because these two colors are opposite each other on the color wheel and that's what happens when these kinds of colors mix together but I'm gonna leave it I don't really mind that there's a brown color it looks like a shadow but if you wanted to avoid that you can just dry the pink color completely before painting some next to it because that's just what happens when wet watercolor touches wet watercolor. Next up is thistle. Thistle is similar we're gonna use a similar technique for painting this basically using a dry brush to create all of those fronds or whatever they are the little fuzzy parts of the thistle and I've lifted color with my brush I had dried the brush and then pulled it out and then painted back in so I could get two pinks and then after I dried it completely so that the pink won't move I added a blob of purple underneath of it so that I could then have purple that's surrounding all of that pink. It works like this when the color you're adding the purple color is darker than the pink if you're going the opposite direction say there's dark purple in the center and light pink on the outside this technique does not work because you need a color that's gonna cover what's underneath of it. So these also have the calyx or calyx and I've painted that and all the stems and everything on them and I'm using the same technique for all the other flowers. Dry all that pink before you start adding the blobs of purple and then use that nice dry brush to spread out all of those lovely petals I guess they're petals I don't know what they're called I should have looked that up too shouldn't I I'm doing a deep dive I should do it justice and really do my research. So on the left is the stamp version on the right is the watercolor version. Next up is wisteria and I did have better success with this with watercolor than I did with stamped watercolor but it's still not great and the reason is because a square these are two inch squares that I'm painting on is not really going to look like wisteria when it's this small and there's no context for it but if you're painting in archway or something like that or a column that has wisteria climbing on it it will look like wisteria so the idea here is to get a really pale wisteria flower or clump of wisteria flowers which are basically a still be shaped but they're upside down so they're hanging the opposite direction and putting darker colors in between all of those sections of flowers because this is negative painting the positive flowers which are the light purple are going to look like they're in front when there's some dark color behind them so the dark color behind is giving definition giving shape to the flowers that are in the foreground so that's where putting all this dark color comes in to help to create those shapes in the foreground I'm mixing purples and greens in here because the pictures that I was looking at to try to figure out what the wisteria looked like it was just a mush of color in behind it and then you got this beautiful light purple in the foreground so it didn't matter if there was a little mush happening with the purple and the green because the purple and green I have too many colors in them they make brown eventually but to add detail into each of the groups of flowers all I had to do is pull that wet color in using the same technique of a dry brush to tuck in a few lines and create some interest within each one of those flowers and if like I said if this were on an archway it would totally look like wisteria even if it looks a little blob-ish from from this as I'm doing my voiceover and looking at this I'm like you know that looked better the moment that I painted it and I was all proud of that now I'm like that may not look so great but the watercolor one came out better than the stamped one because the stamped one it's really hard to stamp in that shape all right the last one for today is watercolor morning glory a morning glory come in different colors but I'm gonna be doing white morning glory just to give you an idea of how you can approach flowers that are white and morning glory are almost round so they're a little easier than other types of flowers to to show you how to do some white flowers so I'm starting with clean water or dirty water I guess you could say it might as a little bit on the greenish side from all the painting that I was doing and I made circles with the water and then just dropped the green color into that and I had mixed two different greens one had a little more greenish-blueish in it other had more yellowish in it so I could get multiple colors in behind those morning glories and when I get to the end of the morning glory section I'm turning all that into leaves by just doing some little scrubly lines to indicate leaves not trying to draw every leaf I'm just trying to give the impression of leaves same with all these flowers you're trying to give the impression of flowers not necessarily paint in every single petal what I did was lift the color off so that the color that's there right now that very light color will serve as my lightest areas in between I started adding darker colors and tracing around the flowers this is the point at which you can start making your flowers maybe smaller if they're not the right size and be aware when you're painting something like morning glories if there's something it's in context with if it's hanging on a fence then make sure that the flowers don't look like they're 18 inches wide basically flowers need to be scaled to their surroundings and in this particular case just like with the wisteria it's hard to make them look quite right when you're just doing a square with a few flowers on it but if you're painting it in context make sure those flowers are appropriately scaled for the scene that you're doing and if it takes you know going outside and you know measuring your fence post and see how wide that is to make sure that you get that approximately right you just don't want your flowers to look like they are really ginormous so here I'm adding in a couple of darker greens and using water to move the color around so that I don't have blobby edges you know blobby lines around some of the flowers necessarily and I'm also using a damp brush to soften just a few of the flowers so they look like they're in shadow that's not necessarily something you'd have to do but I just found it to be fun and then I added a few pops just for kicks of some cobalt blue into the green because I wanted something with a little more life to it and then added yellow centers to them and once you put the centers on them they feel a little bit more like flowers but again put them on a fence and they will be stunning and you can see the difference between the stamped version and the painted version so these are really fun and an interesting challenge to try to see if I could mimic them from the stamped version into the regular watercolor version and don't forget on Friday I will be back because not only am I going to have those beautiful purple flowers I'm also going to have a new class to announce which is going to be watercolor flowers so stay tuned for that it's going to be a lot of fun and I will see you on Friday so you have an excellent week I'll see you on social with lots more on watercolor flowers all week long bye bye guys