This real-time film shows me illustrating a few petals and part of the middle of a Zinnia flower for the New England Society of …
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hi my name is lizzy harper and i’m a botanical illustrator and today i’m going to make a film for you of me painting a flower i haven’t decided which one yet i’m gonna have to decide now um but it will be in real time and this is for the new england society of botanical artists i’m looking forward to it hope you are too right so i’ve chosen a zinnia and here it is drawn up in pencil um i was wondering whether or not to show you the drawing process but then 45 minutes it’s not a very long stretch of time so i thought let’s not let’s just crack on with the painting so this in here is um you can see it’s very pink it’s got pink here it’s a member of the daisy family so these are all individual flowers we call them petals but each is an individual flower and obviously each of these you can see is an individual flower and these little yellow bits here coming out these are the um they’re the stamens of each of the petals and they’re in the family of the daisy family the asteraceae family and they’re called composite flowers anyway you don’t need a lesson in botany you’re here for the painting um so i’m going to pop this back here so in the hope that it won’t die on us it’s always as you lot know the worry that your plant is going to die on you so now i’m mixing up a color to start on the petals with so this is um what’s it called it’s opera rose isn’t it but i always call it slightly wrong no notice operators it’s windsor newton not perot’s and it’s quite close but i think there’s you know tiny bit more blue in there to get a closer match and as you see i mix up my colors quite um quite thick so that i always say they’re kind of a consistency of blood which is an unpleasant thing to say but there we go generally i use winter newton and i use pans and i use tubes right and i always use my trusty winsor newton series 7 brush it’s a number one that’s almost all i ever use that color looks pretty close to me you can always check the color by actually painting it onto the flower which i know is just out of view but um let me show you so you can always check the petal by holding your you know painting directly on the flower i find that quite useful or by painting a tiny swab on a corner and um and then checking right let’s stop procrastinating shall we so i don’t know um how adept the members of the new england botanical artists society are i would imagine there are many of you well don’t rotate you wretched flower i would imagine there are many of you who are professional and probably many who are just as able if not significantly more able than me so if i tell you stuff that you already know or if i speak down to you um please do feel ready to to pick me up on it when we have a q a session on zoom later so the way i paint is i tend to put down my darkest darks first now i know this is very unusual in botanical illustration and generally what people like to do it looks quite a lot pale in the middle it’d be nice if i could have the flower in here as well but i just don’t know if that’s feasible um so what i tend to do is i put the darks down first rather than building up a series of washes and i like to do this because it gives me some kind of a some kind of a guide or a map as to where my lights and darks are i mean with botanical illustrations with all art so much of it is down to where your lights and darks are if you crack that then you’re okay you know because you’re gonna have depth to your illustration so yeah so this this is a mix of um the mix of cobalt blue and opera rose now opera rose i love especially for botanical illustration but you’ve got to be super careful because it is very fugitive which means it fades in light so if you let’s say you painted your zinnia and were delighted with the result which hopefully you would be and then you thought oh well i’m going to frame it and give it to somebody as a gift you might this is rotated it’s really annoying um you might find that if you put it in a frame that the light would fade the color so you need to be careful about that i look the way the color chips off isn’t that fascinating um right so what i’m doing is i’m building into my darks and with with flowers in general with petals if you um i find if you pull the color out the darkest color out towards the edges then you end up giving some kind of form to each flower so i in 45 minutes which is how long this video is going to be i’m not going to have time to paint the whole flower for you but i’ll just try and do i think i’ll do a few petals and then i’ll also try and do the um an area of the middle as well so that you’re not left it’s just a blank staring central area so i’m working from my studio in hay on y which is a little town just across the border from england in wales and then we have a famous literary festival which of course with covert has been cancelled this year but it’s very very lovely place to live and these flowers this in here come from a friend of mine whose job she runs an amazing b b up the top of a hill called a majestic bus and she also on the side grows fields of these gorgeous flowers which she sells to local you know not to local individuals but also to restaurants and stuff so i had a lovely time yesterday up at hers just wandering around with a pair of secateurs and thinking what flowers might we want to do for the new england botanical artists society okay so this leaf this petal here is curled back on itself and what’s interesting about the petals here is um they’re pale underneath that they’re not they’re not um bright pink underneath as well they’re much paler it’s always worth before you before you crack your paints out having a proper proper look at your plant i mean the thing is when you’re drawing something you’re gonna have a proper look at it anyway um because you’re drawing it so in order to draw it accurately you need to observe it i mean i always have my little hand lens out and all that kind of stuff so and always draw what you see rather than what you believe to be there that’s a big trick something like that and that’s that one curving behind there i do want to make sure i’m going to move this up a little bit so you can see here we go let’s do this petal then as well so this one is very much behind the other one so it’s a little darker so zinnia i did my research before i started painting then you come in various forms this one i believe to be probably a single flowered one you can get double flowered ones there are rows and rows of petals and you can’t even see the center of the flower and then you get single flower ones like this one where you’ve only got sort of one really one row of petals and then you can see the center of the flower really clearly and then you have something called intermediate flowered actually maybe this one’s intermediate flower because it does seem to have two rows of petals oh i’ve rotated that wretched flower again so um so perhaps that’s more accurate they were named after an eminent german botanist called johann zinn who lived from 1727 to 1759 and they’re native to south west united states and down into south america um mexico is supposedly a place where you’ll find them growing in the wild and most are the same form as this so they’re erect flowers with a single flowering head held at the end of a stem terminal inflorescence if you will okay so there we go so as you can see i’m just building up the dark edges and then i’m gonna come and do a these are much darker okay um come and do a an over wash in between petals i like to um i like to leave a little white line it ends up being covered up by the um by the paint but you can it sets it sets them it sets the detail of each petal apart so you end up not getting a messy blur there we go i guess you do this one as well maybe we’ll just do those ones i’ve got a little clock out in front of me to make sure that i don’t lose track of time because often when you’re painting and i’m sure you not know this you totally especially if you get into what you’re doing you totally lose track of time you just sort of end up the hours go by and then you look at the clock and you’re like oh my gosh where did the last three and a half hours ago that’s so weird okay so this color is lovely actually this bright indulgent pink a lot of things i’m a professional botanical illustrator which really just means that people pay me to paint flowers there’s nothing possible um but um but a lot of the stuff i i’m asked to do most of it is native british plants it’s a bit of a shadow here as well um and oh okay all right we have beautiful ones of course we do we have the poppy and you know apple blossom and all that kind of stuff but we do have a lot of very small things like ladies bed straws and little kind of little things with tiny white flowers so for me the worst of course are the cow parsleys um like queen anne’s lace you know big on bellafoot i’m sure i don’t know if you have them in the states i should know i lived in dc for many years um but they’re a nightmare because they’re all leaf and then these tiny little flowering heads anyway but yeah so being able to paint a big kind of florid decorative flower like this it’s a real tree okay so what is going on there that’s a mess so yeah so with with materials the paper that i’m working on i’ll actually i might i might do a little bit at the end on this but the paper i’m working on again this one’s behind that’s a weird liner what that’s doing um the paper i’m working on is fluid 100 which is made by global arts and which is american actually both my papers are american from american companies right now so they they operate at the states and i think you can you can get um their hot press paper watercolor paper from most art stockists i think so is there a range of art student shops art shops called dick blick i think you can get the paper there so in its hot press which means it’s incredibly smooth for painting and drawing on um and that means it takes the paint really really nicely and you don’t get any bleeding or anything like that okay so these are these petals and if i go i’m just going to put a little bit further around here again it’s really important when you’re drawing and painting really important to um look at your subject matter all the time i read somewhere that when you’re drawing and illustrating you want to look at the um the thing you’re drawing 80 percent of the time and if you do that then you’re so busy looking at it that you kind of learn it by by viewing it so working around the petals and anchoring out at the outside edge okay so i am hoping that you get zinnias growing in new england i’m pretty sure you must do right because i wanted to choose a plant that you lot in new england would be able to get your hands on so the theory is with this that because my um because i live in a very rural area my internet connection is dodgy the theory is that if i do this video which vicky will share with you and then we’ll have a zoom q at a later date because otherwise what would be happening is that i would be very anxious that the zoom would be falling out because sometimes the screen just goes black so it doesn’t matter how well you paint if the technology lets you down then you’re in trouble okay it’s raining really hard here actually it’s beautiful that noise is my small daughter who just came in to steal a stapler so quite difficult to paint and at the same time gesticulate no no go away i’m filming still she’s used to it bless her okay so i’m going to let that dry and i’m rinsing my brush and so the next step um is to make a more dilute version of the same pink so here’s the pink i’ve been using so i’m literally just diluting i mean you don’t know this but in order to make a color paler in watercolor avoid using white to avoid mixing it with white because that will make it heavy and muddy you make a tint of it by just diluting it um and i might actually at this point i might read and add a tiny touch of red as well because looking at the flower there’s a little bit so this is a tiny touch of alizarin crimson from oh just off the from just off the screen great okay but that slightly mudded it so i’m going to put more of my original color back in a bit more water when you mix colors don’t worry about how long it takes sometimes takes ages sometimes it takes longer longer to um mix your color than it does to than it does to actually paint the subject matter okay all right so that looks fun and can you see how much wetter that is than the first color i mixed so what i’m going to do now is again looking closely at the plant put the next layer down so here is it dark enough to hold weight yes it is so this is going to make it look slightly less uh stark the distinction between the pale petals the pale areas of the petal and the areas that we’ve done the edging on which were darker so if i was a traditional botanical illustrator i believe i would have taken all these petals i’d have had an initial uh an initial pale wash and then i’d be building into the darks building into the darks now i’ve always said i work from dark to light but in fact somebody who watches the videos on my youtube channel lizzie harper illustrator she’s pointed out iris gross she’s pointed out that actually i’m lying i start with the mid tones because what i do is i come back and cover what i’ve painted with these sort of paler edgings and then i will have one last pass or couple more oh that’s a bit messy a couple bit of um a couple last last things while i pick out the the darkest darks but um but illustrators who who don’t put their darks in like that but who work the whole thing from pale to dark to darker i’m incredibly impressed by them because they keep all this information in their head where their lights and darks are i mean of course we’re all looking all the time but i i find it so easy to feel like almost at this point in time i’ve got a road map of where my lights and my darks are um if you want to have a look at any more of any more of my work do feel free i’ve got a website www.lizzyharper.co.uk and i do a lot of step-by-step blogs and things like that there and on my facebook page for lizzie harper illustration i’ve got a newsletter you can sign up to and there’s the youtube channel which has got a lot of them videos of me talking through what i’m doing is illustrating different subjects sometimes with accompanying blogs sometimes without which may or may not be of interest to you okay so so now it’s really wet now this is crucial because this is always really tricky you’re like oh yeah doing my flower i want to get on with it oh yeah oh yeah let’s get on with it but if you don’t let your paint dry you will regret it so make sure that you let your paint dry i’m now looking at the color remember i was saying that there’s the color underneath can you see yeah you probably can so it’s extraordinary actually color of the underneath of these petals is almost green well that’s tiresome isn’t it so i think what i’m going to do is yeah a little bit of yellow ochre i think so i’m taking a taking a corner of that very light mix here and i’m mixing it in with yellow ochre to bring out the yellows and then i’m going to add a tiny touch of cobble green which basically makes a really nasty dark flesh color which strange as it may sound i believe is the color of the underside of these petals so i’m going to apply that now very lightly and the thing is when things repeat themselves through paintings they make more sense just splodged so in this case that’s not going to make any sense um because it’s the only bit that has the tail end now this is good i didn’t plan on this but this is me making mistake and trying to fix it so this is quite a bad mistake to be calling this review so what do you do weep into your milk and cry no you don’t you just keep working at it so if you just scrub away with your paintbrush and then with a clean bit of tissue go and blot as hard as you can don’t scrub around with the tissue or you’ll compromise the paper there you go now that’s got rid of most of it and then you just do a patch patch up job where you messed up now what i would probably do if this was going to be a finished illustration is when i was done i might get a tiny bit of um winsor and newton designers white gouache and very lightly cover up over that i’m not going to do that now because we’re concentrating on the petals these ones dry yeah those ones are nearly dry okay so now i’m conscious at the time so now i’m going to work into the darks so they’re very as they’re very bright but they’re very dark so i’m going to thicken up this this mix here that we’ve been using and and a little more cobbled blue well that’s not good is it that’s way way too bright too blue too purple loads more pink the pink is a less strong color than the blue that’s a bit more like it but i’m actually going to add a tiny bit of purple as well to just add a little bit of depth that feels better to me that feels quite a lot better to me for the darks maybe even a little more you just have to keep going until it’s almost like the color when you’re color matching it’s almost like the color feels right i put tiny bit brown in there as well if i can remember where my brownie and you’ll know your right wants a color the color will feel okay so these are for the dark bit okay so this petal now is nice and dry so we can without doing what i did before which is putting my hand on the wet pain let’s pick up the darks overlaying paint i’m blending it in this with a lighter brush i’m also i don’t know if any of you do this but i am i lick my brush to get a point and it’s very naughty but i do it and i can’t stop now but um i did i was worried that i would die of cadmium poisoning which because i know cadmium yellow which i use a lot of is one of the colors it’s meant to be quite dangerous that turned out i spoke to a chemist friend of mine it turns out that actually we’re going to be okay unless i eat about five blocks of five pounds of cadmium yellow a week it’s unlikely that i will suffer from cadmium poisoning so there’s one less thing to worry about okay so can you see trying to get a little bit of a little bit of depth in here into these petals with filming it’s quite difficult because normally i rotate the page quite a lot as i draw but i don’t want to do that because then you can’t you won’t be able to see what i’m doing okay it’s not bad um the petal behind that’s nice and dark the whole thing can be taken much dark in fact i’ll take that darker again that’s gonna have the whole can’t work in that one yet because it’s still wet curses curses tie some of it and this one here is also dark so again being careful not to lean on what i’ve done okay and this one is also in the shadow this is now going a little bit too blue looking at my colors so i’ll do some top color washes in a minute i think what i’m now going to do having done that i think i’m now going to pause the film and wait for these ones to dry so then i can come back to you and show you what happens next so i’ll see you in a minute or two okay back again that’s dried more or less i have the chance on to my email so let’s work into the darks and these petals this isn’t on can you see this kind of tide mark so if you work too wet with your top layer if you’re not careful then you get this kind of edge effect where it dries which if with people who work looser than me it can be very very effective and beautiful but for me i find it really annoying so hopefully if we just paint on top of it as if it’s not there and don’t panic too much you’ll be fine this is the darker darks and then we’re gonna put a nice bright pink top wash which will help us hide the um white lines that we still have what’s happening here the art of seeing shadows is also very tricky i mean quite often if i’m teaching people would be like what do you mean draw the shadows where are the shadows on leaves is especially difficult so you have to actually use your knowledge of the plant and a bit of logic as well as um as well as just eyes thinking well of course it’s going to be a bit more shadowy here because there’s a ridge of a petal so it’s going to be casting a shadow over there and we know that our light source is coming from here it’s actually i’ve got a daylight got a daylight bulb so it’s kind of coming from that direction so you just have to think logically anything where are the shadows likely to be and then look for them there if they’re not there don’t put them in but often you’ll find if you sort of find it find and stick with a consistent light source with the shadows that will help you okay this is not this annoying one it’s a little tide mark that’s still pouring with rainier i do like it the plants need it’s been very dry in england this summer in wales up till now so we do need it but it’s um it’s absolutely tipping it down it changes light changes the light and makes it flatter which is no bad thing i suppose but i like it when it’s sunny because there’s more more hoverfly and b action outside my studio window my studio is in my garden i’m lucky to have a system where i can work from home okay oh this is annoying this isn’t going so well hopefully still suffice to show you how i work so there we picked out our darks now don’t know if you’ve heard of these is a they’re called um dr martin’s hydrous watercolor inks and i use them because they are incredibly bright you don’t want to use them straight on your artwork um they are too too too much but they’re very pretty so here we go so there’s just a drop of this pink you see how ridiculous that color is so bright so what i’m going to do is i’m going to mix that i’m going to get rid of this and then you just pure opera pink coupled with a bit of that the the dr martins and that color is called quinacro quinacridone magenta there we go so i’m gonna put some of that there mix it in with our opera pink it’s a really in your face color isn’t it nice and dilute and that’s gonna go once it’s dry it’s going to go over all those petals that we’ve worked on and hopefully the plan is at least that it will unify them i’m just going to pause for a minute and let that little bit that’s still wet dry and then i think we’ll probably will have time to have just a little look at doing some yellows and stuff in amongst here okay so what i’ve decided to do while those petals are drying is to do some work here on the center so these little ones they’re like they’re like little daisies they’re five petals pretty easy to see and it’s a nice okay you can’t see that can you there we go it’s a nice golden gold so this one is i think cadmium orange light gosh i should know the color of my name of my colors thing is i don’t know if you’re like me so you set up your paint box and you learn what colors are in it but you always forget well you sort of half forget what name they are and then when you have to replace them you panic a bit well maybe it is just me it doesn’t sound like a professional at work does it right so these i know are something like cadmium yellow light there we go so that’s about right to match the um the little star-like flowers on the edge so literally these are pretty straightforward all we’re going to do let’s pull this down a tiny bit so you can see literally pick them out with the edge of the brush and then once they’re dry we’ll put a yellow wash over the top and that will give them the definition that they need i’ve got more water on my fingers again i don’t know what i’m doing today it’s no good at all literally just outlining it so people sometimes will wonder about the um the fact that there’s pencil you know oh my gosh what do you do the pencil well with some smooth papers such as this fluid 100 we’re very fortunate in that you can rub the pencil out afterwards who knew so the drawing which is where the real hard work is you do that in pencil and then you don’t have to get rid of it you can just leave it and rub it out later i mean it doesn’t always work perfectly but it works well enough for me and in some cases you know you actually don’t mind the pencil being there so if you’re painting a white flower for example you can leave the pencil line which is where you’ve drawn the edge of the petals and things you can leave that to stand as the actual edge of the petal you don’t need to um you don’t need to go back and work into it and it adds a lightness and a clarity that is um very useful certainly for things like the cow pastures i was talking about earlier it’s really nice just to be like you know what i’m just not even going to get very much paint anywhere near that i might put a little bit of yellowish wash over the white froths of flowers anything which has a lot of white frothy flowers i might put a bit of wash over them but actually you know what what we’re actually gonna do is just leave the pencil to to hold that shape okay so now i’m gonna make something slightly brighter yellow slightly paler yellow again i’m not diluting it this time this is just a different yellow which is straight from the box it’s a cadmium yellow light without any darker shades mixed in gosh according to my watch i’m going to be finishing with 10 minutes that’s not going to give you much to go on do apologize okay so there you go [Music] so see they’ve almost got enough definition there i mean i’m working them a bit more the center of the flower is crazy there’s a lot going on there um there’s a lot of kind of dark orangey red so i’m going to mix up a little bit of cadmium orange dark with my yellow ah so when you’re filming your camera’s in the way where your head should be can be annoying okay so this is just putting some of the texture in which comes from all of these things which are pointing inward i think with this film i’m not going to be strict about the 45 minutes i think i think once i’ve proved once i’ve shown different ways of approaching different corners of the flower i’ll call it a day but i don’t want to leave you hanging without any kind of conclusion to my techniques this is just the way all these parts of this linear point in they’re actually a little they don’t wrap their individual yeah they’re individual brat but i’m gonna draw each one partly because it would take too long but also partly because it would confuse the issue you need to you can you know while it’s very important to look all the time you also if you find a pattern that looks good when repeated and which suggests the botanical reality that you’re looking at and you would be a fool not to reduce it to that pattern okay so it’s a bit darker on the edges hopefully you can see yeah you can see this edge this orange goes on a little bit outside here now i used to have i’ve got rubbish eyesight but i used to be very good at seeing things just with my contact lenses in really clearly in the last couple of years age has caught up with me now i need to wear glasses and even though the glasses help still swear i can’t see as clearly as i used to it’s very irritating if i’m doing something really detailed like moth i’ll take my contact lenses out i’m very very short-sighted and um work incredibly close with my lenses out or sometimes one lens out and leave one lens in so one lens is busy mixing the colors and doing all that middle distance stuff and the other the other eye is um just on the on the close in close in detail so now i’m just again this is this isn’t any tint here i’m just a slightly orange thing moving it in to the tip of each of these points so that we have some feeling for what’s going on as we move towards the center of the flower i just you know what’s going to happen this always happens so if i do a demo you end up thinking maybe i’d like to do more on that and you end up instead of doing paid work spending the rest of the day finishing the demo i’m not going to be able to do that right now because i’ve got some pretty full-on deadlines but it’s tempting definitely that’s a technique for that bit um we’ve got this white bit here and it ain’t white so that’s going to be helped by our top wash of pink which we’re going to be able to do in a second actually um but what i do want to do is i want to put centers into these flowers that these little yellow flowers star-shaped flowers that we’ve been doing so that i’m using a i don’t even know what color that is it’s a dark red mixing was orange is quite brownish and just a tiny spot at the center of each flower and if there’s an area of darkness and a bit shadow again this is all just giving a bit of shape in a bit of depth to what you’re doing okay now here’s that top wash i was talking about i’m now using a tiny bit of it to pick my way around these remember we’re talking about these um yellow filaments which are part of these flowers these these petals here when i’m done with this i’m going to show you what i mean by pulling the flower apart because it’s worth knowing but i don’t want sort of i don’t want a really sort of odd white juxtaposition between where these pink petals end and where the heart of the flower lies so i’m kind of trying to pull that together now in the least possible clunky way it’s a bit muddy and rushing a bit okay so now what i’m going to do is turn it around again turn the page around again make sure that you can see what i’m doing yeah we’re still center screen that’s good so now do you remember that very pale top bright pink wash we’re talking about this one i’m gonna put that over the whole lot make or break moment again always follow the line of growth so hopefully so i wouldn’t be going i wouldn’t be going horizontally across this you have to follow the way that the veins go it really helps that does maybe this top wash is going to get rid of that hideous tide line on that petal as well this is the nice thing about fluid paper the fluid 100 that i use is when you paint on it it doesn’t lift up too badly the detail below there are some papers which when you do a second pass in watercolor all the detail that you put your heart and soul into just gets lifted up and washed off and what’s nice about fluid is it doesn’t seem to do that too much okay and i’m even gonna let that pink wash go on top of the underside there so you see that’s really quite wet now okay it’s a bit of a dog’s dinner too okay i’m gonna let this dry and then we’re gonna pick out our darkest darks and see where we’re at okay back in the room so now this has dried so can you see it just sort of looks a bit pinker but what you need to do to make it really pop i hate that word actually but what you need to do is to pick out your darkest darks so really now now it’s time to throw caution to the wind so i’m really i’m going to put some really i mean so i’m mixing up something it’s really quite a dark purple here and i will use it very carefully do not be concerned and again quite quite thick you don’t want it to flop about everywhere you need to know exactly where it’s going to go so again twisting it so you’ve got a nice sharp point on your brush and again looking at your subject which is rotated all over the shop oh dear me so disobedient and literally just pick out your darkest darkest darks it’s a bit difficult because the light at this angle shining off the wet paint so i hope i’m not gonna destroy this really delicate use of the darks here you don’t want to overdo it but at the center you want that that pop that extra that extra bit of shadow that really makes a difference between uh between a piece of work that looks nice and a piece of work that really sort of has some drama to it maybe or maybe i’m getting above myself and at this point doing these dogs although i am still looking at the flower i’m also thinking quite carefully about what will look best on the painting so it’s it’s a balance now rather than just being rather than just being about copying the exact details of the flower we’re also trying just to make it look good don’t overdo this is always uh always the risk you don’t want to overdo things and there’s yes it really does cause quite a shadow here so in fact she says i don’t want to overdo it and then she really cracks open open the purple but that really is much um darker than at least that’s behind that petal that’s fine oh if i was to talk about the this plant the zinnia molotov is molotov mix or zinnia elegans i would have to say that the leaves are amplexical which means they cling onto the stem and that they are opposite one another um and they’re quite kind of floppy quite big and floppy but we’re not we’re not doing these today it’s a whole different ballpark okay right and then this bottom can you see how this one here doesn’t look as nice as the other ones because it hasn’t got that final bit of detailing so again this really is picking out your darkest darks i want to leave this pale bit on the edge here because that’s where the petal curves up slightly and so hopefully this bit of film will have given you some idea of it’s actually really dark up there right where the can you mix it in with a bit pink sorry as well so totally different than i just looking at it this bit up here has really got some darkness going on is that still on the yet still of course it has darkness i mean any only an idiot would think it didn’t was i’m not thinking because of course these little flower here these yellow flowers are casting shadow because they stand proud of the rest of the center of the flower there’s always logic to lights and dogs it’s always worth thinking through this bit here which i hadn’t painted in but i’ve forgotten about actually is a sort of stunted half petal it’s not it’s not really grown fully into a petal but i’m gonna i’m gonna bring it into the sun now because it needs to be included i haven’t done that i don’t want that much dark on this one because it’s above the others and it’s sort of catching the light more but it needs to be pulled into a crisper format i’m going to knock that one a little bit there back a tiny bit with a little bit of pink wash got to be careful not to overwork that’s something i learnt over time to try and avoid you can keep going back and keep going back but you need to know and to say enough enough is enough not gonna do anymore this is just literally a bit of that tiny top wash just softening the edges of the darkest darks yeah well that’ll do i swear oh and in the middle i’m gonna have a another top wash this one’s a kind of orangey it’s quite hard to know what that color is you can’t see the flower can you because the angle i’ve got going but okay okay so that’s just going to swallow up any errant bits of white that are left over oh i said about that didn’t i said about the um doing that last petal let’s do that last stage is ladies and gentlemen last stages last orders at the bar okay so if i was actually working on the whole of this um i would be rotating it the whole time so that while different bits of it see what that does it’s very dark so that while different bits of it were drying i’d be working into different you know other corners of it so that you wouldn’t be using any time but i’m just working on this one corner which is why we’ve been having to do all these all the all the pauses between things trying if you’re planning on doing the whole thing you can just rotate the page and get onto doing a different bit bit more this is just a bright a bright pink and i just want to make that one out there and stand back but not lose any vibrancy there we go oh what did i do that for stupid to smooth it out this is definitely behind the other one now this is a cobbled blue that i’m mixing in with the purple for a slightly paler slightly um what’s nice when you’re painting is you can use what you’ve already mixed so here we go there’s a slightly paler purple i’m making a tint of it and that’s just for a couple of bits of gentler overlap which go on here and show the delineation between where the petals are i’m not sure that’s a good idea actually maybe i messed that up right okay so there we are that’s basically this little demo finish there’s one more thing to do which is the stigma and the answers of those internal flowers so let’s get them nice and gold and again with this bit the um the paint is very very thick so i know exactly what i’m doing with it so it doesn’t blur about sure you can tell those two different things two different structures now i’m fiddling you can tell i’m fiddling can’t you i don’t need to spend ages fiddling away and wasting your time but there you are so let’s have a look so this is a this is a flower and this is the corner of the illustration so i’m going to zoom out a bit now if i can oh technology right do you know what and do you remember i’ll be careful not to ruin things now do you know what i was saying about this flower so i’m going to put this aside for just for a sec so when i was saying that these are all different flowers so each of these little yellow ones if you have a look each of these is a little flower i don’t know if you can focus on that can you see with little petal five petals and a long that’s one flower but the here these big external petals come on you never feel bad about tearing a plant apart because you’re learning from it these are as well they’re called ray florets these ones are these long they’re called straps these are um with these long legule straps and you see this little yellow bit is that clear i’m hoping it’s clear in the film i don’t know these are the yellow bits just here so those are the anthers so this is an individual flower so it’s worth remembering that any time you’re doing anything in the daisy family there’s that going on i never feel never feel worried about when i’m tearing plants apart when you’re trying to draw them because you need to to understand them so yeah so in conclusion there we go i mean it’s only a corner but hopefully it gives you some kind of idea of the techniques that i employ when i’m painting flowers i’m going to do a tiny bit at the end on materials but um thank you so much for watching so the last thing i wanted to do was talk to you about materials so this is my paint box and these are full pans and half pans almost all winter newton actually and when they run out which they do quite often um they’re the brown i topped them up from tubes there’s some discussion about that a lot of artists will say you shouldn’t mix tube paint with pan paint i’m sure they have their reasons for me it’s never really been a problem at all so that’s how i do it to keep on top of things um and obviously i wash my paints sometimes but not enough the yellows are always green i’m a bit a bit slapped that uh if i need an extra sort of jolt of color i will use these which i mentioned earlier dr p h martin’s hydrous fine art watercolors this one’s gamboge which is great for yellows and i use them i drop them in with watercolors mix them in and they’re also worth remembering especially the pinks they are um fade resistant so they’re very useful if i make mistakes i use winsor newton designers gouache permanent white which is very useful i also very rarely use white in my illustrations but sometimes i do sometimes i use um dr martin’s white sometimes i use this there are some colors i find it very difficult to mix without white such as forget me not blue and primrose yellow there we’re drawing up pencils i use an 0.5 lead 8.5 millimeter lead pencil p205 these are mechanical pencils let’s get rid of that so when you you make the ledge longer like like that and then if you want to sharpen them you can just do that and you’ve got a nice sharp point without having to resort to a pencil sharpener rubbers this is really good this one try 24 factors just soft very cheap a couple of quid a couple of dollars i guess paint brushes they have to be top of the range series seven windsor and newton and number one they’re pure sable and they hold their tips and they also hold quite a lot of color all at once in the in the well um you can’t fault them they cost an absolute fortune it’s really irritating but they are the one thing that i would find it really difficult to do without hand lenses if you’re doing botanic illustration you really need to get your eye in so this is a i think this is either a 10 or 20 times a hand lens and if you’re actually drawing something up close you can just keep drawing while this is on your hand um and likewise you probably if you’re doing a lot botanical illustration with specimens you want just like a little point that’s just a needle on a stick so you can get in amongst things and scratch about and a scalpel so you can do cross sections to see what’s going on and the last thing i wanted to talk about was paper so i’m using two papers right now this one is stonehenge aqua hot press it’s got a lovely silky surface i’ve been using that a lot and that’s by legion paper and also another hot press which i was using for this one which is fluid 100 and so there you go so that’s the surface of that one really smooth and right now for my botanical stuff that is what i like most of all um so there we go that’s that’s my equipment done and dusted i hope that helps okay i just quickly wanted to say something about color matching um you might have noticed that the plant that i was drawing is a much darker color than the sketch i did and in fact you can kind of get away with it somehow the eye compensates so even though if you actually did match the colors you’d be like oh my gosh this is so much pale as the other one in order to get the detail across you can get away with doing a much paler version of the same plant the other thing you can do is you can keep working into it by adding layer on layer on layer and building up a sort of velvety depth to the color which in them the 45 minute format we had we weren’t able to do um i’ll just show you what i mean i’m going to take a photo just to the flower right up against the sketch and i’ll put that right after this so you see the pink of this looks incredibly much paler than the pink of the actual zinnia flower but if this was to be a complete illustration it would still register as the same kind of dark pink as this flower is in real life and i suppose that’s where artistic decisions come into play perhaps so yeah you can you can play about without yourself or you can keep going until the color is exactly the same by layering more and more and more on top of that but if you do do that be sure you don’t lose your highlight and also be sure that you don’t um you don’t overwork it so there we have it that was a quick demo of the way i go about um do watercolors of petals and the flowers if you’re interested in seeing more of my work do check out www.lizzyharper.co.uk with lots and lots of examples of the work i’ve done over the years and also there’s a section called originals for sale where there are loads and loads of my original illustrations that you can buy at quite modest prices um likewise if anybody be interested in buying this original there’s a just an easier way to interpret what i’ve been doing getting your hands on the actual painting and seeing what the paint does on the paper drop me drop me an email info at lizzyharper.co.uk but in the meantime thank you so much for your patience um i hope it was of interest to you let me know if you’d like me to come back and do some more sorry that i couldn’t use zoom because of my broadband width but um i’m planning on doing a q a with you that’s vicki’s idea which i think is a great one um and i really enjoyed it so good luck with your painting and your illustrating and thank you for your time bye you
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