I am in need of two Thank You cards, so I am taking my need and turning it into an opportunity to be creative and learn something new! I may have coined a new phrase today. I told my mother it seemed like a good opportunity to polish two stones with one cloth! I love animals and have never really appreciated the saying, "Kill two birds with one stone." As my family will attest with grimaces, I am someone who will break for birds, sorry to the people who have been driving behind me! This is why there should be a half to whole car length between you and the car in front of you and your eyes should be focused ahead, not day dreaming or checking texts :)

For this exercise I am following Lindsay Weirich, thefrugalcrafter on her Youtube tutorial, "How to paint wildflowers in watercolor easy tutorial." I chose this one because it is a little more controlled than some of her others and it requires both sketching and painting. My comfort zone with paint is still in the coloring stage, though I have discovered I have some talent beyond my current skill level. I am hoping this blog helps me catch my skills up to my talent and then see how far I can fly...again another great reason not to kill birds!

Okay, what took Lindsay about 8 minutes to draw, paint and explain the whole process took me close to two hours. I watched the video all the way through, then followed her step by step, pausing her video at each step and then proceeding to the next. This is one I will definitely be doing again, after all I said I needed two Thank You cards this week!

These are the paints I used per Lindsay's instructions: Hooker Green, Cadmium Yellow, Ocher Yellow, Alizarin Crimson, Rose Madder and Ultramarine Blue.

I started with a sketch, sketching the daisy and the buttercups. Lindsay showed a technique to help get the shape of flowers which I had never seen before and it helped me amazingly. In her video she shows how to use oval or elliptical shapes and then sketch the petals within the shapes. It helps you draw from perspective, creating that slightly angled look without losing the shape of the flower.

Then the painting started! 

The most difficult part of this for me was definitely the clover (the purple flowers :). Those were not sketched out but done loosely and loose is hard for me so I did practice runs on scratch paper. I think they turned out pretty decently though for a first try. Lindsay has these great white spaces but I ended up with almost no white spaces so I went back with a scrub brush to add some highlights. The leaves were also very difficult. Her press, lift and twist technique is more than my hands could do! So for me I did the technique for each leaf but went back in and shaped them through straight painting. The other thing I will be working on is the shading and highlighting of the daisy. Mine was a little to gray, I need to work on leaving more white and let my shading stay shading! I wasn't a fan of the splatters so I left those off.

I would highly recommend this video and this exercise, though be careful of helpers and observers! I had to paint out a finger smudge after asking advice from my mother the artist! I told her it was wet when she first tapped it--guess she didn't believe me because she proceeded to run her finger over it as a Head Butler would check the mantle for dust!