NEW ONLINE PAINTING TUTORIAL – ‘Paint Realistic Watercolour and Botanicals – LOTUS’ is Underway!
‘Paint Realistic Watercolour and Botanicals – LOTUS’ is set to be my next watercolour and botanical online painting tutorial, and whilst there is still much more work to be done, it IS on its way. From the messages I receive asking for more of my online painting courses, I know thats going to be some very exciting news to many of you… and it is for me too! As you can see, the Lotus is one of my all time favourite subjects as a botanical artist, and also as a teacher. I have explored them many times now and never tire of their grace, elegance, romanticism and wonder, so I am extremely thrilled to be extending this subject to you in my new online painting tutorial.
To recap, ‘Paint Realistic Watercolour and Botanicals – LOTUS’ is set to be the fourth online painting tutorial that Ive been able to offer to my students, now around 5,500 students following my online painting tutorial offerings from an incredible 111 countries! It follows my ‘STUDIO BASICS’ course then ‘CHASING AUTUMN’, a perfect introductory tutorial designed to break the ice on watercolour and botanical painting in my style, followed by the third course ‘MAGNOLIAS’ which starts to get a little more involved with each progressive tutorial. ‘LOTUS’ is an extensive painting course looking at all aspects of the Lotus plant as a subject. The course takes us another step forwards in this beautiful art form together, developing our knowledge, confidence, and practice even further.
You know that I love to not only share the work I produce with you, but to extend the back stories and development of it all with you too… its half the fun right!? Certainly for me it is. In the least, I feel like it helps us to understand more of whats involved in this work, where I am at with various projects, the inspiration behind my work and projects and how it might appeal to you in some way, and thats all really important stuff in my book. In my experience, sharing these things in turn helps others to grow too, and so we are here again today ready to share another online painting tutorial project together with the Lotus, so thank you to everyone joining me here, Instagram, Facebook and now on my YouTube Channel too. Its wonderful to have you here and I thank you all for your constant enthusiasm and positivity about my work and courses.
Starting out filming this course for you has been tough. I began working on this course well over 12 months ago now, getting out into the field, exploring, thinking about how to make this a wonderful, interesting and educational experience for you all, programming and filming. The first trouble was accidentally punching a cactus… i know right? EXTREME botanical art hahaaa, but in fact the spines managed to lodge right into the joint of my finger and it ended up being a huge problem with no easy fix. Who knew! Yep, I ended up being booked in for a general anaesthetic in the care of a specialist for a 3 hour operation to remove the spine a year of trouble later, but at the 11th hour, my body managed to start breaking the spine down in some way and we decided to ‘give it more time and see’. A great decision it was too, as all has finally settled down and become just ‘one more ridiculous injury’ stories amongst my many.
Starting out again I braved the bitter chill of winter, studying the colours and form of the a thousand spent Lotus seed capsules resting on the waterline, sooo beautiful! I return to my locations often, watching the seasons shift from dormancy to the vibrant life of the lotus ponds in full cycles, and its not hard to be inspired, far beyond the challenges! The cold of winter shifted to the blistering heat of our summer, the rain showers, inhaling occasional flies, face red, wind… hair tangled with the humidity, skin burning by the moment in the 40 plus degrees, eyes watering in the blinding brightness of it all, but we botanical artists are a tough lot, braving the great outdoors for our loves hahaa… I know I have never been shy of these challenges, but of course the smart ones let me do the hard work then learn from my painting tutorials in the comfort and relative safety of their homes 😉
So yes there were plenty of challenges. In the end I stopped thinking about the flies in my lungs, taming my straggly rained on hair, the occasional wind and rain bursts in my equipment and the sunburn of the last day of filming outdoors in 47 degrees on hot tarmac… and just got on with it for you. With all the field work done I shifted things into my studio to start building this new tutorial for you and its finally off the ground in a real way. My focus is finally able to be placed fully on this project now and I am so excited about making this course happen for you!
In fact the Lotus has so many remarkable elements to explore. It has been hard for me to cull the offerings down to less than an utterly overwhelming amount for this course, very hard! There is just so much beauty in it, such diversity, stunning composition suggestions, form, colour, complexity, textures… its absolutely endless! After great deliberation, considering not only what is beautiful but what is the best possible subject for my students to manage and learn from, I have narrowed the subject selection down to a main painting of flower and fading leaf, the exercise lessons set out in this course are based around a gorgeous flower bud and finally, the simple drawing exercise and NutShell Extension Tutorial explore the seed capsules. One course could never cover the entire lotus painting scope, but there is a great cross section of essential Lotus elements to be covered in this course thats for sure. As always, my main aim as a teacher is to not only help you paint these lotus subjects, but to help you understand how to apply the knowledge to other elements within this key subject… to ultimately paint independently.
And so production for this new course is officially underway now. I am hoping to release it by the end of July, but as I create each online painting tutorial for you around my other workload I cant promise an exact date, only that I am doing my best, im totally on it, and it will be out soon. Of course you can check for progress updates here at any time… Thanks again for following!
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It has been a busy time in my studio, but productive too. My recent focus has been to put the drawing lectures of the Lotus painting tutorial together for you, covering everything from simple field work drawing approaches from life to how to work cleanly and easily from photographic reference of the Lotus subject for you.
The final result is three beautiful, precise drawings that we take from idea to our watercolour paper ready for rendering in watercolour. These finished drawings include a Lotus Bud Exercise, our warm up exercise to prepare us well for the finished painting and the main focus for this Lotus painting tutorial. A stunning open Lotus Flower and Leaf study is the focus there, and the second drawing we will prepare in this section. The third drawing is of the beautiful Lotus Seed Capsule which we will cover in the NutShell Extension Tutorial for this painting course.
Each subject has been carefully selected for its beauty, composition, manageability and suitability for every experience level of students, and the unique learning opportunities they each bring… So you can see we will be covering an especially extensive range of the Lotus subject and all the techniques needed to create these beautiful botanical painting studies in this course!
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The next section of ‘Paint Realistic Watercolour and Botanicals – LOTUS’ tutorial is underway. These important lectures focus on creating a simple Lotus Bud as our subject, and cover a series of technique practices, many of which we covered in the Studio Basics course, all of which will be needed to move on into our main Lotus Flower and Leaf study. This section is essentially a simplified tonal study that looks at colour, working in layers, wash, glaze and dry brushing, tone, form and creating texture with timing, designed as a practice run just to break the ice, calm any nerves you may be feeling starting out. Covering the foundations thoroughly in this series of lectures will pave the way for you to move forwards with new clarity, knowledge and confidence.
‘Lotus Bud Exercises’ – Another big step closer to bringing this new Paint Realistic Watercolour and Botanicals tutorial to life for you!
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It has been an epic amount of work getting the new tutorial to this point, but I am very happy to have come to the completion of painting our Lotus Flower Petals section of the course, and to see our Lotus flower coming to life. In this painting tutorial I am focussing strongly on working simply and improving technique. With this in mind, my approaches to most parts of this course are based on working in layers of simple, single colour use for a complex outcome, understanding tone, and practicing our technique in order to help you see, understand and grasp a manageable path forwards. The Lotus petals are not only a perfect practice subject for painting, the lessons learned can be applied to so many subjects that take your fancy.
Lotus Flower Petals’ comes to a close and we move on to the gorgeous ‘Lotus Flower Centre’, the next Section of my Paint Realistic Watercolour and Botanicals online painting tutorial
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The focus now is on the Lotus Flower Centre with its beautifully intricate detailing and vibrant yellow colours, completing the flower head for this painting. We switch from washes, glazes, grab our tiny brushes and start to look at how we can handle some of the more detailed work in areas like this. With the yellow centre in we come to the end of the lotus flower head and we move on to the leaf.
Completing the glorious ‘Lotus Flower Centre’
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With the Lotus flower complete we move on to the challenge of painting the lotus leaf. This leaf brings many important lessons to us, and was carefully selected as a focus subject for this painting tutorial for several reasons. The outer leaf deals with pigment poor wash, the inner leaf with pigment rich wash, so two very different balances to understand and manage in the watercolour medium. This is a fantastic exercise for you to explore, a beautiful playground of colour and tone.
In this section of the Lotus online painting tutorial I have broken the steps or stages into seperate lectures, walking you through the process, dissecting and repeating the techniques carefully for you to follow along. By the end you should have a fairly solid concept of the approaches and practice, be able to complete the leaf successfully, learn plenty and start adapting my approach to other similar painting subjects with this new knowledge.
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With the stunning fading Lotus leaf in, we move on to the last component of our main Lotus Study and create our stems! Oh beautiful stems… Rich tone, colour, working in layers, small areas, texture and this time we play with creating some of the beautiful scarring so typical of the Lotus stems. Of course youll already be stem experts having completed the Lotus Bud Exercise set out for you in the start of this painting tutorial, but now we step it up in our main painting with two stems, one green, one brown. We look at colour families again and talk more about the ‘relationships of colour’ so important to me in my own work and teaching. Its fun with colour and a wonderful wrap up to our Lotus painting!
With the main ‘Lotus Study’ section of this new online painting tutorial complete at last, we are moving into the final stages of the course before RELEASE TIME! The NutShell Extension lecture covering the Lotus Seed Capsule Study is now underway to complete this Lotus painting course… exciting!
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The final lecture of my online botanical and watercolour painting tutorial takes a closer look at the Lotus Seed Capsule, a diverse, magical, marvellous subject to explore for any artist! The NutShell Extension Tutorial walks you through this additional lotus element to completion making not only a wonderful lesson and study in itself, but a beautiful complimentary subject for the Lotus Bud Exercise we covered at the start of the tutorial.
With the final stages captured, we come to the end of the 2nd botanical study for this course, and our 4th in a series of thorough studies of the lotus subjects elements. With an extensive guide to creating artworks of the lotus flower, the flower centre, the leaf, bud, stems and finally the seedpod, we are certainly feeling very well practiced now to take on any lotus subject of our own. This final lecture sees not just a completion to the course content, but it moves us to the last step before getting this course live for you to jump in… exciting!
The NutShell Extension Tutorial, exploring the Lotus Seed Capsule
I have just a little more work to do to make that happen but I continue to work around the clock to bring it to life so stay tuned for the release announcement, sometime in the next couple of weeks from now!
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