If a quick floral is what you are looking for then look no further than these flowers, made simply and without stress to create a stylish image ideal for a greetings card, bookmark and more.
The great thing about these flowers is they are totally undemanding and unthreatening. All you need to do is pick three colors you like, plus white, out of your set of paints – preferably gouache (opaque watercolor) but not necessarily, and you are set for success!
Materials
I wanted to use a hot-pressed paper (smooth surface) for this painting, as my Viviva sketchbooks are full of it, and transparent watercolor doesn’t work well on it at all. But gouache, with its chalky texture, sits on top of the hot press and looks great. Give it a try!
You can get a starter set of gouache very cheaply online. Take a look at this one here:
You can’t argue with this price point. If you want to give gouache a go, this is a good jumping off place. I can’t find small sets of Arteza like mine online at the moment, although they may be there hidden somewhere, but this Royal and Langnickel gets great reviews and I think I’ll give it a go when my Arteza runs dry!
What paper to use
I painted on a piece about 6 x 9 inches of softly hot-pressed paper. You could do these paintings on pretty much anything, even sketch paper, as the gouache technique uses very little water so hence doesn’t bother the texture, surface or flatness of your paper.
Here are a couple of suggestions for suitable paper for this piece:
I didn’t bother to tape it to my board initially although it did curl up at the edges a bit once I started painting. A bit of washi tape fixed that!
I also had on hand a white gel pen and a black waterproof liner as shown below.
My brush was a Drawell size 9 Golden Round and size 3 Maestro round – both very good synthetic brushes from Drawell in Japan. You can order them from Drawell by contacting Mr Maeyami direct. The prices are very reasonable and they ship worldwide at minimal cost.
I decided to use my little round dishes as my palettes today, to keep the color groups separate, and in one I put the blues, in another the pinks, and the white was in a third. Although mine aren’t available as they were handmade for me, you can buy something similar here:
With my medium sized round nylon brush, I painted simple circles in what I hoped would be an artistic arrangement on the paper!
And now watch the video to see how it went!
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