Karen Rice is a YouTube artist from London, UK, and over the last 30 years has accumulated a large following. Her tutorials on YouTube tend to be 14 to 20 minutes, and her patreon ones are longer and more complete. Patreon costs $6 a month. For $4550 you can join her group painting in Portugal. OK, I wish.
Karen is known for using a sharpened twig for branches, stems, and veins in flowers. She is also known for creating abstracts using the edge of a cut credit card. This week was focused on two ways she does florals. One is by masking out the flowers and doing a very loose and free background. The other is a wet into wet technique for flower petals.
Below is her tutorial for poppies in a field. Basically, she used masking fluid to mask off the poppies in the foreground and stems and grasses. I don't love Miskit, so I used contact paper instead for the larger flowers. If your paper is 100% cotton, you can use masking tape/packing tape/contact paper for this.
There are two methods of applying contact paper. You can cut the shape out with scissor and then rub it onto the paper, removing any air pockets and sealing the edges. OR you can put a square over the area you want---cut it gently with a craft knife--then remove the parts you don't need.
If you want to dry with a dryer, use a low setting only. Heat will adhere the masking fluid or tape to your paper, and make your life miserable.
After any masking is dry (contact paper doesn't require drying time), you wet the entire paper with a large brush and brush in quinacridone gold over the surface. While wet, apply some dark muted green and scrape in some grasses and stems with a sharpened twig. SPATTER red over the page. Choose a few spatters to enlarge and turn into background poppies. Let it all dry.
Remove the masking. Paint a light wash of warm red with a little orange in it over the poppies and score some petal veins and crinkles with your twig or bottom of paint brush. Leave some whites. Paint in stems and any more grasses you may need. With dark purple or blue, paint some black on the bottom of the poppies, and moisten that area with water to soften the dark into the petals and onto the stem. For buds, I like to use a green with some purple dropped in.
For stems I made a line of green on the right side of the stem. While it was still wet, I dropped dark blue every two inches or so. (I personally don't like to paint more than 3" of one color without breaking it up). Then I ran some clear water over the left side of the stem, and allowed the paint to soften and move to the other side, only lighter.
Here is the link to this YouTube:
The other flower we tried today is cosmos. What I hope you take away from this was using wet into wet techniques. Cosmos can be any color, so you can use anything you like.
In Karen Rice's tutorial she used just one color of pink for the flower petals. I prefer using two similar colors (lemon yellow/gold yellow; cool pink/coral; cerulean blue/cobalt; etc.) to give it variety, but that is up to you. She is just trying to keep it simple and not introduce too much at one time for beginners. If you do use more than one color, be sure each petal has those same colors in it.
I demonstrated the two main ideas here. One is called "flooding" the paper. You take "creamy" thickness of paint and apply it to the tips (or to the center) or dry paper, then "flood" the area with clean water. In flooding, you start where there is no paint and push water toward the painted area before it has a chance to dry.
The second way to do it is to wet the petals with clean water, then drop in the color. I always drop it in where the darkest part will be and let it move toward the lighter parts. In either of these ways, you can "draw" veins in by using your twig or end of paint brush...start where the paint is darkest and draw it down the petals to create a vein. ALWAYS do veins toward the CENTER when doing flowers.
(She will explain what she means by "creamy," but it mostly means thicker than thin and transparent, but not like straight out of the tube. The paint will not drip off the tip of the brush, but releases nicely on the paper.)
In this picture I allowed some petals to bleed into their neighbors, and others to look more separate. I also dropped in a different but similar paint color to add variety. I added the yellow center while the top petals were wet so the yellow would bleed into them, but left it dry on the bottom, leaving a fleck of white.
In the picture above, you also see some lighter areas that have been "lifted" while the petals was wet. To do wet lifting, wipe the moisture from a clean brush, and let it soak up the color while wet. If the petal has dried, "lifting" involves wetting a clean brush with water, and gently rubbing over the area. Then pat it with a paper towel or tissue.
Keep looking at the final photo of the cosmos. You will see some petals with "lost edges." We talked about lost edges when we did the goldfish. It prevents your picture from looking outlined, and can give the effect of distance. The first flower on the left has two petals with lost edges, one on the top and one on the bottom. It is achieved by gently loosening the paint at the edges so they are not hard and defined, but fade into the background a bit.
Here is Karen's YouTube on cosmos. You can get her reference from the YouTube, but it is from pexel.com.
FOR DIRECTIONS FOR APPLYING CONTACT PAPER AND MISKIT SEE THIS:
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