 Hello there, it's Sandy Allnock and I visited the tulip fields last week and I thought I would indulge myself in a little bit of tulip fun, so I'm going to make three wreaths in three different mediums. So let's get started. Before I get started, I want to let you know that there is a new class that just launched today. It's Realistic Flowers in Colored Pencil. It's very much like the realistic flowers in Copic Marker that came out about a month ago, but this one's in colored pencil and it's different flowers. And you can either take the class in which you will get all of the images that you can just print out to color the flowers, or if you don't want to take the class, you can just go buy the images separately if you have one of these that you really love and you really need. So I will leave that to your discretion what you want to get. So now let's get going on the projects. The first one I'm going to do is in Copic Marker and it's going to be the simplest out of all of them, but any one of these wreaths you could actually do in each of the mediums. So please don't just tune out your brain just because it's done in watercolor, etc. You can use these ideas and make your own wreaths and you can also change up to different flowers. So I took a roll of tape, it's about a half a roll of masking tape, and made a circle inside and outside. That's going to help me to get the width of my wreath to be about equal. And in this one, I wanted equidistant tulips. So I made some marks across them. I made one pair of marks that was horizontal to each other that was straight across. And then I divided the other half each half into two sections so that I can have six of the tulips. And I started out with pink for my first color. I'm going to use a light pink and then I'm going to match it with a darker pink. And these are only two numbers apart. They're very close to each other. And it's going to mean that the blending is not going to be garish, that sort of thing. We're going to have real soft pastel colors because this is an RV21 and an RV13. So the one and three are pretty close to each other. And what I've done is just a few strokes to define a couple of petals. And then at the top, adding a little bit of a zigzag or a triangle or just some kind of small shape that indicates the opening side of the tulip. And that's all it takes to make it feel like a tulip. Now you can give them specific petals. You can make them the pointy petals because there's some petals on some tulips that have really pointy ones. Some are more rounded. You can go all different kinds of directions with this. But now I've got them running around the wreath in kind of an equal distance from each other. In the center of the two circles that I drew, I'm going to hand draw a circle going all the way around in a light green. And this is the G40. And I get rid of those lines now because Copic Marker will trap pencil. And then I'm going to add my leaves in the same light green first. It's a lot easier and less intimidating to work with lighter colors rather than, oh my gosh, a dark color. So start with a lighter one and get your leaves kind of sketched in the way that you want them. And I'm laying the marker down, pressing it so I get a wider stroke and then lifting it up so I get a point on the end. And I'm making each one come out of the next tulip in the row behind it. And that's going to give me an overall look of the leaves just kind of going around in the same direction that the two flowers are. Some of them are going to kind of be taller than the flower or as tall as the flower, some will be shorter. Then I'm going to switch to a darker marker and this is a G40 with a G43. Again, close colors so they're not going to be really strong against each other. There's just enough contrast that you can color half of the leaf with the darker color. And then I'm going to add in randomly any places where I feel like I need a little fill in and you can wait till the end, get these leaves done and then fill them in at the very end and see where else you might want a little something to balance it out and to add a little bit more detail. Try to leave some empty spaces. Don't make everything super small and super tight because that's just going to make it look fussy. If you can keep your strokes as simple as possible and try to make these leaves if you can in one stroke, even if it's a wiggly stroke, because some of the tulips have wiggly leaves on them. They're kind of curly and that is all there is to that. Very soft colors, very pastel-y and that one's all done for whatever kind of project you want to use it on. One idea is going to be in colored pencil and I'll be using some polychromos for this. I'm going to do the same thing, same tape roll, all three of these use the same tape roll for the idea and inside that double circle I'm going to put some tulips and I'm going to put them in sort of a random order. I don't want them all to be exactly the same distance this time so I didn't measure anything out and once I get a number of them around the entire thing I'm going to overlap some other tulips. These are going to be much closer together. The whole thing is going to be more dense and layering them over top of each other is just going to look like there's some depth added to it. Then I decided to also add some tiny ones, almost those little buds that are mostly green around the outside. There's a little pink color showing, a little red color, a little whatever the color is. You can add some of those. You can kind of go any direction you want with something like this and then I'm going to erase with a soft kneaded eraser some of the lines but you want to decide which one is going to be in front of which one as you go. You don't have to decide while you're doing the pencil lines, the graphite pencil lines, but you'll decide as you do the flowers so I'm going to do this section of flowers over here and then I'll speed through the rest. But I'm going to add my red color to the base and notice I'm not like getting real persnickety about making it really perfect because I'm going to add layers to it. That's one of the things I love about color pencils. You can just keep adding layers. This paper, by the way, is one that new color pencil artists might find particularly interesting. I saw another artist using it and I bought a pad of it. It's a Daylor Rowney pad. It's the heavy weight. I got the lighter weight first and it wasn't nearly as good but I like the heavier weight. So I will put a link to that in the supply list in case you want to try that one out. It gives you a little smoother look than the Stonehenge which I normally use. So for the details that I'm adding to this, I'm drawing in basically the outline of one of the front petals and then adding just a few lines here and there around the flower itself. I'm not really trying to make everything perfect. I'm not trying to make every center petal in the front look like it's exactly perfect because sometimes the flowers can be tilted one way or the other. You can see some of the lines just kind of disappeared even. I wanted a darker color but there's no really good dark reds in most of these pencil sets that I have. So I used a dark green that I'm going to be using elsewhere and added a few more dark details and a little bit of pink highlight. Then I started drawing in leaves in between and you can add some shading onto your leaves and some veins in the light portions if you want to add just a little bit of detail. And I'm trying to keep an eye on where all of the stems would be. So I make sure I draw the stems as I go around so that it feels like they're all part of something. But you can see when I've added all these layers of color, all of that color, the red on the tulip just smoothed itself right out, which was awesome. I'm going to speed color through the rest of this because it's basically the same thing. I'm adding more leaves in between each of the flowers and adding some depth to them, making some of them look like they're twisted, like they're turning by just putting the shading on the underside portion and allowing highlights to show up on the top portion. But it really doesn't matter all that much. You could actually get away with doing a lot less of the shading and still make this beautiful. As long as your leaf shapes look like tulip leaf shapes. So make some of them a little bit curly, some of them more elegant with nice points on the end. And you can look at pictures of tulips to see what different leaves look like. And if you're going to choose to make a different type of tulip, then figure out how to make one tulip, how to draw the shape of that and replicate it all the way around and try to make the leaves that go with that tulip. Because some are curlier and wigglier than others are. And most of them, though, are still a very nice bright green for the leaves. And when I looked out over the fields of all of the tulips at this Gadget Valley tulip festival, I pretty much saw the same green everywhere. It was just all those pops of tulip color that were so amazingly beautiful. So there is wreath number two. And of course, that could be done in Copics or other brands of markers or pencils or anything you would like to create a wreath like that. This next one is going to be watercolor. And it's going to be a little on the looser side in terms of rendering all of those flowers. You could do one of the other wreaths in watercolor. If you're careful with trying to get all your color layers to work. But I found that this was a little more forgiving to just let it get rough. So I'm using rough arches watercolor paper. And what I've done is put a blob of water into the inner wreath that opens space between those two circles of the tape roll, mixed up a couple colors. And then I'm going to drop a color on one end of the tulip petals that I've painted and rinse my brush, drop another color on the top end. And that way I can get two color tulips because lots of them have one color at the base, another color at the tip and that sort of thing. And they can be that way, they can be vice versa. All different kinds of craziness can happen with tulips. Let me tell you, there are infinite seeming varieties. And I'm going to go around the whole thing and I'm going to make the same kind of things. Dropping in one color on one side of the tulip blob of water and then another color on the other end. And these I'm going to make a little bit equidistant. So if you're trying to make a wreath that looks like it's been planned out, then see if there's one element or another that you can make consistently spaced away from each other. And even if the rest of it is all crazy, it doesn't really matter because you've at least got something that the eye can follow and think that you're doing something that makes sense as opposed to making it totally random. But I'm keeping all of that within the boundaries of those two pencil lines. I'm going to let some of the smaller tulip buds that are going to go all the way around in between. I'm going to let a few of those tip outside of that pencil edge. With watercolor, if you paint it really thin and even after you've painted this first color, the very light pale wash, you could actually still erase some of that color. Just make sure your paint is really, really, really dry. If it's not, then you will smush paint all over the place, but I'll be able to erase those pencil lines and then I've got the shape of the wreath and the width of the wreath kind of down because I've filled it with all these petals. I'm going to mix two greens, green gold with phthalo blue turquoise. Those two colors and any of the phthalo blues will mix a nice kind of grassy green sort of color. And that's the color that I want to make these. So I've mixed one that's a little wetter of a mix and it's lighter in color. And the other one is a little bit darker. So I've got a middle tone and a light tone. It's always easier, as I talked about before, to do something in a light color and then add dark to it because it freaks you out just a little bit less. So I'm going to put all of my leaves in this very light color first and then drop in just a little bit of the darker color at the base. And I'm going to try to leave some white spaces. That's going to help to give it a little bit of air so it doesn't feel like it's all solid. But as I start adding darker colors, it's going to start defining each of my tulip shapes. So even if the tulip shapes dried to look sort of like a weird leaf, we're going to add more detail to it. But it was all dry before I started on this green portion. So if you start doing the greens, make sure you don't have all that yellow and pink paint to mix the greens with because they will run together and make brown for you. So I'm going to run through and just add all of the leaves and just a tinge of that medium type of green color. Now in some of these areas, I've lost the plot on leaving some whites, but that's okay because now I'm going to add some darks. And when you add darks in watercolor or in anything, the darks are going to help to make everything else look lighter by comparison. So I'm going to mix up some sap green this time with phthalo blue and whatever is left over in the palette to make a darker color. And I'm going to dry off a lot of the moisture from my brush so I have as thick a color on the brush as I can because I want to use a dry brush technique to just paint half of the leaves and just try to make a really simple mark. It's like in the one that I did with the Copic markers and I said just the simpler you can make your stroke, the better and just make that stroke and don't fuss with it. I'm fussing with it. I'm just telling you what you should do as opposed to what I'm doing. Do as I say, not as I do, but the crisper you can make them and the simpler, the better the whole thing's going to come out. We are, as I said, going to add more to the flowers. So even though they look like logs in the midst of all the greens, don't stress out over it because we can add more detail on top at the very end. I'm using a number four stable brush, by the way. And yes, I know I've always said that you should use big brushes for things. Here I'm using a small brush because I'm making a rather small wreath. If you were making a large wreath, you would want to add that color with a really big brush because you need something that's appropriate to the size of what you are painting. I will put the link in the doobly-doo to the colors that I'm using here. The yellows were Hansa and New Gamboge. The pinks were, let's see, I think it was Quinacridone Rose and a little bit of, oh goodness, come on, Brain, kick in. Elizabeth Crims, that's what it was. And then we have green gold with phthalo blue turquoise and some sap green. So now I've mixed the pinks and the orange kind of color in a thicker mixture. And the thicker mixture is going to allow me to add some of those same kind of strokes that I did in the other tulips to give some definition to these and make them look like they have a little bit of petals and just try to make a couple of quick strokes and not fuss over them and get into every minute detail on them because that's just gonna be too much in a small wreath like this. Now, before you start something else, you can actually draw out all of your tulips in exactly the location you want them. I find this to be more forgiving because I can change the shape and the size as I go. If one of the tulips ended up being really fat and weird, I can cover part of that up with some of that darker green paint. And now I'm mixing up a really dark color because I wanna put a really dark red at the base. Well, I don't have a dark red in my palette, so I use some of the Alizarin Crimson and I mix it with the sap green, which makes a nice deep dark red color. So I can use the colors that are already in the palette for the painting and create the kind of color that I want. But look at those nice little sharp pops at the base of the tulips. Those really nice dark places add a lot of depth to the entire picture itself. So there is the third wreath. And you could do any one of these styles in different mediums, just experiment with your technique to make that work out. And that is it for my video. If you're interested in that class or in the new downloadable stamps, then by all means check that out in the doobly-do. I'll put links down there for you. And I will see you again on Friday with something special for Earth Day. All right, have a great week. Bye-bye.