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When you’re in the world of commercial rustic and vintage design, in my opinion, learning to work in watercolour is a must, plus or bonus. The commercial world abounds in rustic and vintage art in this medium, so it makes sense to learn to produce what is in demand. For me, there is also the fact that I personally do find these aesthetics very beautiful in watercolour. I would love to improve my botanicals in watercolour and above all….learn to illustrate vintage things in watercolour.
The thing though is I don’t like the time-consuming process of digitizing watercolour on paper that I find very stressful. As a result, these days I tend to stay away from analogue art and work mostly digitally in Procreate or Affinity Designer.
So, recently I bought myself this watercolour pack from Drifter Studio:
I did so after discovering his beautiful Youtube channel where he demonstrates how to use the brushes to create a variety of illustrative art in Procreate. Drifter Studio belongs to Calvin and Calvin has a good number of watercolour illustration tutorials on his channel.
So, this week I got started learning to work with these brushes to produce watercolour florals with this video:
I am not finished with the learning but so far, I have managed the below.
At this stage, I am only focusing on creating florals and composition. I’m not yet learning to draw different flowers. I’m solely focusing on drawing florals, including from imagination if I feel I need to. Whether that’s flat bouquets, bouquets in vases, wreaths or other simple floral compositions.
I am not yet in a position where I can re-use all my floral elements separately to create different compositions for Zazzle for instance because I haven’t learnt yet how to extract the textured elements from the watercolour paper sheet that comes with those watercolour brushes. I do have my eye on a class that seems suitable to teach this though, so I will tell you more about this once I cross over that bridge. If you wonder why I would want to learn this, the answer is it makes it possible to sell the various design elements as clipart on digital marketplaces and create different compositions on Zazzle.
1. Red Gingham Rustic Watercolour Flowers Christmas
Below is the collection this floral art belongs to:
2. Floral Bouquet in Green Vase
This started out like the above, i.e flat with a view from above, but then my intuition became hooked on the idea of turning it into a proper bouquet. I am not experienced at all drawing this sort of thing, so I did enjoy the process a great deal. I spent a long time debating whether I should go for a bright blue vase, an earthy one, a dark vintage background to simulate a fake still live background and I eventually settled on this lovely green. I think I enjoy both working with these watercolour brushes and the creative process of putting a floral composition together. I am experienced in neither, so it’s a great learning opportunity for me.
Below is the collection this art belongs to:
3. Pretty Feminine Floral Bouquet
This third one was more in the spirits of the video though I made all foliage and flowers different and I love what I did. But I can see that I need to improve the distribution of water across my florals as they remain too uniform. This said, I did adjust the brightness at times to add variety to the petals. I guess I also need to continue explore brushes.
Something I love with this creative project is that, just with one seemingly simple tutorial, I continue to learn new things every single day and that’s fab. I get to explore different colours each time.
Here’s the collection this new floral bouquet belongs to:
And that’s a wrap up for my first 3 entries for my 30 Watercolour Florals art challenge!
Tomorrow I will start my drawing series with 100 Rustic Kitchen Drawings and 30 Rustic Plaid Patterns.
Alex
