Easy Watercolour Wild Flowers

I saw some pretty framed watercolour prints in a shop (I think the artist's name was Catharine Stephenson - really lovely work). Anyway, I couldn't afford them so I wondered if I could make something similar myself...

 

 

They were quite easy to do...here are some of the pictures at different stages:

Layer 1: Wet the whole sheet of watercolour paper and paint a very wet background wash of two or three light colours (I used yellow, bright green, pale blue). Leave to dry completely:

Layer 2: Sketch in the big flowers very lightly, to make a nice composition. (This is a different background - I used cotton buds on this one while it was drying to make little white dots):

Layer 3: Paint in some translucent grass/leaves/flower shapes to add a layered effect. It doesn't matter if they are a bit of a mess - they will disappear into the background. You can actually do this before or after sketching in the big flowers.

 

 

Layer 4: Now paint in some mid-strength small flowers and then your main flowers, being really bold with colour, size and shape. They need to look striking so the background will fade back.

 

Finish off by masking out the flower heads and adding paint spatter in all the colours used. Tiny dots of white Posca pen also work well.

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