Well, hi everybody and welcome back to another video. This is another in my watercolor flower series, but I want to put a caveat on this. I don't expect anyone is going to actually create this painting. This one is one that I created on my retreat recently because I had just read Anna Mason's book called the Modern Flower Painter. And it was a book that just revolutionized my thinking about watercolor. I had been beating myself up about my painting style and that I wasn't narrowing down to a particular style. I was all over the place. Sometimes I would try some washy watercolors and sometimes try to get tight with my detail and I couldn't seem to decide what I wanted to do, but I felt like if I was trying for too much detail, then I was putting my Copic control freakishness onto my watercolor and not allowing the paintings to be paintings in watercolor, trying to make them into Copic art the way that I make my Copic art sometimes into watercolor. So I had been telling myself I wasn't a real artist if I was not doing washy watercolors. Well, then I happened upon Anna's book and she does botanicals and I mean botanicals in terms of ones that are judged by the official people at the botanical society. They say whether or not she's gotten the pedal shapes right and the colors exactly right and the veins right and all that sort of thing. So she's very, very good and very, very detailed in her work. This just gave me a whole different perspective on how possible it is to do something different than what I had in my head for watercolor. Just because I love washy watercolor and looking at other people's washy crazy watercolors doesn't necessarily mean that's what I have to create when I paint. And so for you, if you like or don't like any of the styles that I show you in watercolor, make it your own. Go do what you are made to do because we each have different talents and different skills. So what I've learned from Anna in this book and this is a painting based on one of the projects in the book. Her's is way better than mine. So she spent days on hers. I'm spending hours on mine. But I'm using hotpress watercolor paper for one of the first times. This is Fabriano's hotpress 140 pound and I hadn't really used it for much because hotpress, the paint kind of sits on the surface of the paper more rather than soaking in so you do light washes one over top of the other. That fits perfectly with my Copic knowledge because in Copic marker I layer color and I'm doing the same here. I'm using turtakis watercolor paints and I'm painting straight out of the palette. I'm not mixing colors before I put it on the paper. And you can see here I turned that pink pedal into a red pedal. The detail I put in first in the pink and then I'm adding just a solid wash of the red over top of it all to turn it the color that I wanted it. And that is one of those things that is ingrained knowledge in my Copic style that I wanted to bring into watercolor and had felt that was not appropriate but all to sudden I realized that it's okay that other people are really good at it and they do the same thing. So I started adding some of that purple detail in my pedal and it was bleeding because the paper was still very wet. So while it's drying I'll treat you to seeing a little bit of that flower center and again I'm not doing the kind of detail that that she did in hers in the book but I am adding a little bit more roundness to that center section by working in the shadows. I can do a wash over the whole thing but I wanted to allow some of those those highlight spots to retain their lightness and just put the shading transitions into the shadows. So I'm starting by using a darker brown for some of them and then I'm filling in the others with a lighter brown. That's going to give it an overall roundness to the shape of that inner part of the flower. And then I'm going to add a little more detail too in the the little portion around that the portion that surrounds it. I don't know all the proper flower names but I'm going to add more detail to that but I thought I would talk a little bit more about my conversation with Anna and her about her book. I emailed her and asked her if I could use some of her terminology going forward as I teach and that sort of thing because in her book she talks about a variety of ways to to discuss mixing a certain amount of water with a certain amount of paint. So a lot of people are asking me well how much water do you have in your brush when you do that? How much water do you have on your brush versus how much paint what's the proportion? And it's not a science. Remember this is art but she has a chart in one of the pages of her book that talks about going from a watery you know primarily water with just a little bit of color type of wash to a creamy and creamy has more paint in it and it's thicker. And I will as I start working with that system more I'm going to start using that in what I'm talking about. So I'll probably have a video talking just about that coming up sometime in the future and maybe I'll do a class on it on my blog we'll see how that goes but I'm going to be experimenting with what those different levels of the amount of watercolor versus the amount of water makes something work or not work. And Anna says she got that from whenever students that terminology so she's told me that I'm able to share that with you and I will do it as I get more understanding what it is. Now here I had my camera die on me it filled up my card without telling me so I skipped over to my iPhone and started painting some of the water drops. I had taken off the green masking fluid that I had put on the water drops to keep them white while I painted and I'm just adding a little bit of paint and I'm leaving a sea shape of white around one side of the drop. I don't know if this is how you do water drops. I always just messing around so I have more studies of water drops to do in the future. I'm adding a little bit of a shadow underneath of each of the petals or each of the water drops on the pedal so that those will pop a little bit more than they are. And I'm going to call this painting done even though it's not too Anna's level by any means but I'm quite pleased with how it came out and I'm hoping that what I've learned here will give me more freedom to do my own kind of painting the way I am made to paint as opposed to trying to be someone else which is something that I I want to try not to do I want to be authentically me and I hope this helps you to be authentically you by giving you permission to do something in your own way. So never take anything that I or any other teacher says as golden if something else works for you do it. Alrighty I'll talk to you guys later take care bye bye.