Today we’re painting a simple floral bouquet or spray, ideal for beginners and improvers. You can adapt the colors to suit any season, but this one is late summer roses and some imaginary flowers as it’s always good to let the imagination run free.

I picked out four colors from my set of Kuretake, and made a simple floral design in pink, lilac and cream.

I used a sheet of Etchr watercolor paper for this painting, but any 140lb cold pressed watercolor paper would be fine. I happen to like the Etchr paper for florals.

Two new-to-me papers I’ve recently found on Amazon for the first time are called Wanderings and Sax. The Wanderings is handmade, Indian style, so bound to be irregular and ethnic, and the Sax is 90lb cold press at a very good price. Both would make good supports for this painting.

You could easily use this design for a greetings card. Paint it half-size and you’re good to go.

One approach is to use a lightweight paper for your painting and then glue it to a ready made card with envelope from Strathmore for example. This way you can risk less as if the painting goes wrong you haven’t wasted a card.

Alternatively you could use ready made cards made from watercolor paper, or simply cut a piece the right size and use that.

I really like this mixed media paper for the whimsical paintings I am doing at the moment and it is fine for light florals too. It’s very forgiving to watercolor and is a good surface for penwork. There are other mixed media papers too, and the Canson one is good.

Sets of Paints

Here are a few choices for watercolor that I paints which recommend.

The big 48 pan Kuretake set is great for studio use, and the smaller plastic tin comes with a waterbrush and a pen and is perfect for travel, or for the smaller kitchen table studio. And I’ve just discovered another Japanese manufacturer of similar paints, Mozart, which looks to be very good too.

The brushes I used were a medium round, size 9, and a larger one, size 13 or so, for the background and larger parts of the painting. Depending on the size you design your painting, you might need a bigger or smaller brush.

Here are a few good options for brushes:

How to Paint Beautiful Florals Every Time!

Let’s go shopping!

Here are six more good choices for paper when you paint your picture.

And here are some more options for paints.