Watercolor Flower Bouquet

Class Preview

Paint a vibrant floral still life with essential skills that will transfer to every watercolor work you create!

Introduction

Meet your instructor, Mary Murphy, and learn more about watercolor and some of the techniques covered in your class.

Watercolor Techniques

Watercolors interact in a variety of ways, depending on how you apply them. Murphy demonstrates how to practice the wet-in-wet, drybrush and blossoms techniques and become familiar with the watercolor medium.

Value: Scaling Lights & Darks

Learn how to scale the lights and darks in your work as you paint a monochromatic value study.

Color

Murphy takes you on a tour around the color wheel and shows how neutral, adjacent and complementary colors will work together in your painting.

Composition

Plan your painting by identifying the masses and shapes in your composition. Murphy helps broaden your awareness of how those masses fall within the painting, adding focus and movement, and drawing the viewer in.

Preparing to Paint

Murphy explains how to transfer a drawing to your watercolor paper and lay down a preliminary wash of color to define shadows and light.

Developing Your Painting

Your bouquet will begin to take shape as you build up layers of color with a wet-in-wet technique that creates the illusion of depth. Learn how to fix small mistakes and add background color.

Finishing Techniques

When is a painting truly finished? Murphy shares some strategies for looking at your work, fine-tuning it and modifying or fixing the parts you’re not satisfied with.