Month 9 Tutorial - Flowers

Sarah Burns Studio X Craftamo
Gouache Subscription Box 9

Flowers are one of those subjects that can be extremely simple or extremely complex. I will be demonstrating how I study flowers while making a fun little “collage” and this is something you can do with any flowers you love.

Part 1: Color Mixing
Supplies

Materials in Box #9:

• Paper
• 2 brushes
• ¼” Dagger
• #12 Cat’s Tongue
• 3 colors
• Opera,
• Permanent Yellow,
• Cadmium Green Pale

Part 2: How to use the Brushes 

This month we have two unique brushes. You have already seen the dagger brush, but this time I’ll show you how I like to use these for flowers/leaves. Then you can continue to experiment and make unique marks.

Part 3: Drawing the Flowers (Basics)

It’s really important to practice drawing flowers to understand the structure. This will drastically improve chances of a more realistic painting.

I like to practice finding basic shapes within the flower. Simplifying it to a sphere, then understanding how the petals overlap or which way they lean.

Part 4: The Drawing

For our flower collage, I’m using two main references (below). You can use my cover art to help guide your composition, but I also invite you to play with your own layout if you want.

Here is the line art for my painting:

Part 5: The Demo

My Result:

I know painting detailed flowers with gouache can be very challenging. Take it slow and think about it in layers. Let layers dry. Use dry-brush textures. The more paint on your brush, the harder it will be to control to get very subtle shifts of color. 

I encourage you to have a look at my pinterest board to see a huge variety of flower styles or for more inspiration: https://www.pinterest.co.uk/burnsstudio/florals/

I hope you enjoyed this! See you next month.

What’s coming in Box #10
For Box 10 we are going to paint some cliffs on the beach! This was a highly requested subject (rocks/cliffs). See you then!

Supplies included in Box 10:

• Paper
• 2 brushes
• ¾” Flat
• ⅜” Flat
• 2 Colors: 
• Cobalt Turquoise
• Lilac

Brush Care 

Never leave your brushes in water for too long. After rinsing, dry the hairs as best you can with a towel then let them dry on a flat surface. Leaving them in water for too long can cause the wood of the handle to swell, which can crack the handle coating. If that happens, the brush is still usable, just not as pretty! 

I usually clean mine with brush soap every few uses. You can find brush soap on the Craftamo website or any art store.

Community

Don’t forget to join my Discord chat server! You can share images of your sketches/painting and enjoy a sense of community. Or if you’d like to share your work with me on Instagram, use the hashtag #sarahburnstutor so I can find you.

Additional helpful resources:

Brand new to gouache? As you discover questions about gouache, I hope to answer as many as I can. For now, you can start with this blog post which goes very in-depth about what gouache is.

If you want even more instruction, I often post free tutorials on YouTube. Otherwise my Patreon is a great resource to learn even more. 

Additional suggested materials:

I use lots of different gouaches, papers, sketchbooks, and palettes for different purposes. You don’t need anything extra right now, except maybe paper as you will probably run out of that first. 

Craftamo sells extra paper (same as what is in the boxes) and it’s very affordable. 

Otherwise, I have lots of recommendations. I keep an updated list of all my favorite art supplies here.

How I use my different brushes: video

This video shows all the brush types you will receive over the course of the 12 month subscription. At the end of the video I show how to care for your brushes.