 Hey everybody! So I decided to make some more of these flowers. As you all know if you've been following me on social media, I was inspired by these original batch of flowers you see on the left by J.B. Lady here on YouTube and I will link her channel and hopefully I can find the video and link it in the description below. I decided to continue forward with that idea. She punched out some leaves with a leaf punch she had and created leaves to go with her flowers that way. You'll see in the video again. I'll link it below. I have leaf punches but I thought, you know, wait, why don't I just paint some leaves? So I decided to get out a few greens and yellows from my Americana Decor Craft Paint and paint some leaf shapes with a makeup sponge, varying shades of green and I put some of the yellow in there as a highlight. This is how I did the flowers, only obviously with the flowers I did sort of blobby irregular circle shapes and in this case I'm doing sort of an almond shape. So just layering different colors on top of each other, not really being too precious about it. In a way the sloppier you are about it, actually the cuter they turn out I think, the leaves and the flowers. So just make sure you have some dark in there and a little bit of light in there. The yellow gives it a nice pop and of course we're not done yet but before you do the next step it's got to dry completely. So then as I'm doing it I'm realizing I've brought some newspaper home from Lake Tahoe. Let's make some newspaper flowers inspired not only by JB Lady but Shemi Dixon. She did her newspaper flowers a completely different way than I'm doing but the inspiration is still there. So I cut my newspaper into squares and I'm using my leftover greens to create some large green shapes in the same way that I did the leaves where I'm just not being precious about it. I'm using up all my paint, putting some lights and some darks and adding some yellow for accent. And this is how I did the other flowers and these actually end up not being flowers, they end up being sort of a background greenery leaf thing. But you'll see in the end I did them and then I decided wait a minute I want to do more of these. I like working on this newspaper. So here I have some, basically a black pen, a white gel pen and a gold Sharpie paint pen. I actually have gold and silver and I'm only using the gold. So I just scribble my shapes on top of my paint with black and then the white gel pen and then I add some gold accent dots with the Sharpie paint pen. And I do the same thing to all the leaves. Don't be precious about it. Don't worry about trying to stay on the paint, outside the paint. It's not about that. Just don't even think about it. Just have fun with it and just make sure that you have kind of a leaf shape. That's the only thing. They turned out so cute and they look so cute with the flowers. Now when I did the original batch of flowers I also used colored pencil to sort of highlight sort of a petal shape on the flowers. And I don't do that here, but you could do that. Look around and see what kind of drawing supplies that you have once the paint is dry that you could accent your leaves and flowers with and just have fun with it. So once you're done with the leaves they need to dry before you can cut them out and then you need to, then yeah, and so once they're dry, don't cut right next to the black line. Cut about an eighth of an inch away from it. That gives it the loose, sketchy feel that you really want. The loose, messy lines and the non-precise cutting give it that loose, messy look that you really want. Again, don't do the drawing part with any of your markers or paint markers until after everything's dry. Doesn't that look cute? Alright, so we're going to cut all the leaves out and this is the part that kind of is a little time consuming, but you could do a whole big batch of these and then just sit in front of the TV in the evening with a family and a pair of scissors and cut a bunch of leaves out. I have to figure out where I'm going to store them now because the last thing on the planet I needed were more embellishments. But yeah, I don't know what I'm going to do with them now or where I'm going to store them. I do have some ideas on how I'm going to use them in artwork going forward, but until I can get to that point, I've got to store them somewhere and I haven't figured out where that somewhere places yet. Right now they're just in a tray sitting on top of a little drawer thing cabinet. The leaves are actually a little easier to cut out than the flowers were. The shape is a little easier, but neither one of them were super hard. With the flowers, you'll notice I went around the edge of the petals a couple of times at the black, a couple of times at the white. Then I did the color pencil and then I did the flower centers with some, you'll see, I think I'm pretty sure I showed on camera here. I did the flower centers with some black paint and let that dry. And then I accident it with some white paint pen dots and I also put some gold paint pen on the flowers. I'm pretty sure we do. I show you how to do this similar techniques with the newspaper flowers. Okay, so we're going to get rid of all that trash and now we're going to get our newspapers out. Now you'll see I have way more pieces of newspaper than I started out with because right away I started, oh, I want to do some bright ones. So these bright ones are just layered the same way and I have two yellow ones that I initially think are kind of ugly, but you'll see what happens when they turn out cute. So I just put some like yellow paint down, then I put some green on there, very messy. So now then take a stippling brush and some black paint and stipple some black right into the center of your colorful blobby circle shape. You want it to be loose and kind of freeform. I only did the colorful ones. I didn't do the green ones. And once they're dry, I restacked them up and then I'm going to get out a white paint pen. I use a Posca, but you could use a Sharpie. I had a Posca, so I'm going to use it. And I put some white dots in the center of the flower, drew a few black circles around the edge, a few white circles around the edge and called it done. Now, oh, and then I'm sorry, I put my gold dots. You could also go in there like I did with the other flowers with a color pencil and do some, you know, accents to suggest petals. You don't have to, though. Look how cute they are without it. Either way, once you add these extra accents on the flowers, it really makes them start to pop. Now I do this on all of them. Look at this ugly yellow one and then look at what happens. That's kind of cute. Wait until you see it at the end. Now, you know, it's always the ugly ones that surprise you. So what's the lesson here? Make ugly art. It might surprise you. But I'm literally just scribbling on the paper. I am not trying to be precise. I'm not doing it slow. Yes, this video is sped up, but it's not sped up by a lot. I am just scribbling and having fun. I've got the radio turned up loud and I'm just having fun. So when I get to the green ones, the only difference is that I didn't do the black center on the green ones, but I do go ahead and do the black pen, the white gel pen and the gold dots around the edge. And yeah, there you go. And I do all of the green ones the same way. And then just like with the leaves, you want to sit and cut them out. Now, you don't want to cut them out again directly on the lines. You want to cut about an eighth of an inch, quarter of an inch away from the lines. You don't want to cut a perfect circle. You want it to be irregular and loose like you see the flowers are in the tray to my right. And then for these newspaper flowers, you can do these singly and just cut them out like I did the first batch and leave them. Or if you're going to do them the way I did this batch, then you're going to need some glue. I just use Elmer's. I didn't use anything fancy. This is newspaper after all. It's not archival. And so now cut it out. Cut all of them out. And you'll see I'm kind of wiggling the scissors around, following the suggestion of the pen lines to get my irregular blobby shape to emphasize more that irregular blobby shape. And once you get the decorations on there and you get them cut out like with the leaves, they really, really start to pop. So once I get them all cut out, I do separate them by size. So I put all of these green ones initially together, but then I separated them out. There were some small, medium and large ones. There we go. And I did the same thing with the colored ones. And then I just started layering them using the green to suggest leaves and then putting a colored flower in the center. Now when Shemi did her newspaper flowers, she dried them after they were glued and the edges like curled up and everything. And I kind of liked that. I didn't want them too crinkly, but I only glued the center so that the edges will stick up and they won't lay flat. And I like that. I want that. So I left it. Look how cute the ugly yellow one looks. The yellow one surprised me. So I basically just put glue in the middle. This is Elmer's Extreme. I just tried to make sure that the green piece was a little bit bigger than the colored piece I was putting on top of it. And if it was not quite too much bigger or kind of a little smaller, I just kind of tried to offset it a little bit. And I decided to go back to a couple of them and layer the flowers. I decided I really like the flowers layered and I had these two extra flowers I wanted to do something with. Isn't that cute? So then I decided to do that with one of the yellow ones, which was already cute. But wait until you see. So I offset the pink one and then I put the yellow one. And look at that. So cute. So there you have it, flowers. I hope that gives you some ideas of what you can do. Have some fun making flowers. Watch Shemi's video. Watch J.B.Lady's video. I'll link them both in the description below. Most importantly, have a great day. Do something nice for yourself because you deserve it and I'll talk to you later.