 Hi there, I'm Sandy Olnok and today I thought I'd bring you along while I practice some floral watercoloring. Daniel Smith came out with these half pan pallets a while back and they have six colors in each one and they have different collections. Today I'm going to be talking about the floral collection. These pallets are nothing to write home about but the colors are pretty fun and they're a great way to get a few half pans of Daniel Smith colors without having to do huge investment. And I did little swatch sheets for myself for each one of the little sets and the folks at Daniel Smith saw them and said would you show us how you made that flower one? So I am doing that. I'm posting stills over on their blog and a video here so if you're interested in seeing more stills of this then you can hop over to the link in the description. For each one of these I started off by swatching the colors out which is what we do as artists but I don't find them to be particularly helpful other than just reminding myself of what the colors were that I used in the painting. So if you're doing this in a sketchbook it's a great way to just test out different color combinations put a little swatch of them in the corner so you know what colors you used and then try to stick to just those colors and see what you can make out of them. I've been taking a lot of watercolor classes and the more classes I take the more my palette is limited for each painting that I make I'm not trying to use all my colors in every painting anymore and it's bringing more harmony to my work so I recommend that you do try to limit yourself when possible. So limiting myself to these six colors to create a bunch of flowers is a challenge. The pink rose I just dropped water down first and then added very light quin rose pigment to it. I wanted to make a warmer red so I added heavier pigment lots and lots of pigment and less water and dropped in quin gold into it. You could also test it and see what happens if you drop some cadmium yellow into it and what kind of red would that make if you were mixing them. For all of these little paintings I'm making sure I let everything bleed into each other I'm joining while everything's wet each of the different flowers to each other because that's going to help me know what's going to mix well what's going to flow into each other naturally which colors might I want to use for particular effects and here I'm making some of these little flowers by painting affirmatively with the the phthalo blue but then I'll paint a whole nother group of flowers right next to them with just water and let the color flow into them so I can test and see what's going to happen when the color is much lighter with more water and a lot less pigment to them and the flowers that I'm painting are not any particular type of flower I was just doing general flower shapes as if this were a whole garden so don't hold me to trying to create anything in particular I dropped a little extra color into each of these little flowers and then tilted the board and let it roll around a little bit little bit of Queen Rose in there and then made some pink blobs just to make some other kinds of flowers and see what would happen it's fun to just play with brush strokes and help yourself to loosen up by working in a sketchbook or on a practice piece like this I find if I get out a full sheet and I've got it stretched and I'm ready to roll I feel so much pressure that I tighten up as an artist and it's a lot easier to create something looser if I tell myself it's just practice I'm just playing and that often will loosen me up for when I actually do go to the big piece of paper that I want to do a finished painting on dropping in some cadmium yellow medium and letting it just run into those yellow flowers it definitely takes over the Queen rose much more than the Queen gold did on that other flower it just kind of ran right into them and it dries really interestingly so that was a fun learning to do from this one again dropping in more of the green I'm letting the cascade green mix in with the yellow at the top portion and it was the green appetite down at the bottom so I get to experiment and see what kinds of yellow greens am I going to make out of each one of these color combinations and I'm just going to finish off by joining some of these other portions of different flowers and then letting a few stems show in some of the open places I'm not filling in every hole because the thing that I love about watercolor is the open spaces that are created you get soft edges and hard edges and open areas and full areas and I love the mix of all of them for the second pass on everything it's all completely dry and I'm doing the second pass with the detail work and this is a technique for roses that I believe it was Jean Haynes that taught taught me this many years ago which is just painting part of the rose so I'm painting the center and then I'll just go down to kind of one side of it as opposed to painting all the way around the entire rose the mind will fill in the other half of it and this allows me to just play around with one portion of the rose and I'm using enough water that I don't have hard edges everywhere don't make just concentric circles around and around and around unless you know that's the style of painting you're looking for if you wanted to feel natural then drop different amounts of color in drop some heavier thicker pigment into wet areas but don't do too much drawing with with your brush don't allow too many lines to take over add enough water that those blend softly into the flower or else you'll end up with something that just looks like it's it's got drawing all over the top of it but I love these roses in that that it's just a portion of the rose you don't have to paint a whole lot of it my little rose on the right hand side didn't come out all that great it'll dry a little better than it looks right now but did not make me happy there and then these little flowers I was picturing something that had those little bell shaped flowers where they they're deep at the top so that the shadow would be on the inside and then they would feather out toward the bottom and and the color would trail off didn't work out as well as I liked but I thought hey wait a minute let me just get out a spray bottle and just spritz it and soften everything and let it dry and that made me much happier because I ended up with a more natural look rather than all of those intentionally painted little little spots for the red flowers I did some negative painting to create shapes utilizing the blooms that I got and a lot of times you can use the blooms to your benefit instead of always trying to not do them in the first place because there's a lot you can do to eliminate creating them but when they do happen look for ways that you can create a flower out of them look for lost and found edges where you can create just a little extra stroke somewhere that makes one flower look like it's in front of another one these little guys look like they needed centers but then it felt like now I just made polka dots on everything so I used my brush with just some water on it to pull those out a little bit and make a little more of star shaped centers for them you could also spray them at that point and soften some of that out just a little bit but it's on dry paper so it's a little hard to to hope that they will just do that on their own for the yellow flowers I didn't even know what kind of yellow flowers these were so I just did a little bit of quinacridone gold to add almost centers to something that's just barely there and just create a little bit of detail without getting too particular with it and then went back in dropped a little bit more color now into those little bell shaped flowers and they had dried a little bit so I was able to do that and then a couple of those leaf sections I added just some negative painting around the shape of a leaf to create an open leaf next to a shadow behind it once I had done this floral one I really had to go and do all of the other sets as well so I went through each one of them this is the earth set I figured an earth earth tone set could do cities it could do rocks it could do a dog could do all different kinds of things with a set like that the sketch or set I did some line work and doodling and then just filled in the colors this is unlike the artwork that this set was designed for but so be it the blues I had a lot of fun painting water and birds and there were there's a lot of great colors in here that you can use for water type of landscapes the inspiration set was never intended to actually be used together particularly much so I was trying to think of purple things and I thought of purple vegetables and the last of the sets is the ultimate mixing set which is already got all 15 colors filled in for you one more thing before I go I have a watercolor jumpstart class over on my teaching site and in that one you will make a watercolor sketchbook and you'll work on things like color theory and technique and water management and all kinds of fun things in a sketchbook form and it's a great way to learn a little bit more about watercolor thanks so much for joining me for this video click the like button if you liked it and subscribe if you haven't already and I will see you again in another video now go out and paint something beautiful