Recreating Vintage Florals with Loose Watercolour (Online Course) Fall 2024 w/ Crystal Tan

September 5 to October 3 (Thursdays), 6:30 PM to 9:00 PM, Eastern Time

**All sessions are live and will be recorded, students do not have to be present. All recordings will be available to students for 3 months after the final session, after 3 months the recording will be deleted.

Please check your email spam/junk folder for your Zoom invite.

Course Description

When we think of botanical art, we all think about these beautiful vintage floral paintings by some of the most wonderful artists like Pierre Joseph Redoute and Elizabeth Twinning. In the vintage botanical style, the style tends to be more realistic as it was a time before photographs and the point of the painting was to be as detailed and specific as possible to the actual real life object.

In this course, we will be using some wonderful vintage floral paintings as inspiration and references to recreate them in a Loose watercolour style. This has been an obsession of mine and I am so excited to share this process with you.

We will cover the basics from going over all our tools and supplies. Watercolour techniques, brushstrokes, colour theory and mixing as well as how to look at a vintage floral painting to create our own composition and turn into a piece of watercolour magic. We will learn to use our intuition, feeling and I will guide you through ways to just release control and let go of expectations, to allow the magic of watercolour do its thing. By the end of the course, we will be creating plenty of beautiful, satisfying paintings that is uniquely you, and proud to call your own.

Course Outline

Week 1 - Vintage Floral Inspo, Connecting to Our Supplies & Covering Basic Techniques

First I will share with you all my wonderful vintage floral inspiration, books and internet resources. We will get to know our paint by swatching, our brushes by finding out all the different marks it can make, and creating depth and values with the most important element - water. Connecting to our tools and supplies is the first step in embracing what they can do for us, and how to make them an extension of our own artistic touch.

This first week is also a crash course for all the wonderful magical techniques watercolour can achieve. I will provide exercises for us to explore, discover and experiment.

We will end with painting our first vintage rose painting.

Week 2 - Play & Floral Exploration

This week is all about studying the different flowers found in vintage floral art and their personalities, their uniqueness, and how we can embody each different flowers personas into our painting. There will be sketching, lots of painting flowers to get us really excited and confident about putting down paint to paper. We will begin painting some more vintage roses and focus on practicing leaves.

Week 3 - Dive into Composition

We will study typical vintage floral composition, discuss ways of staying true to the essence and how to veer away into something different. We will be painting more Vintage flowers like Iris, Peonies and Tulips.

Week 4 - Adding Layers and Details

This week is all about enhancing our base layer of flower painting with details. We will experiment with splatters, dreamy backgrounds, shadows and other fun highlights. We will paint a larger vintage bouquet.

Week 5 - Intuitive Painting and the Flow

We pull all the skills we learnt together, and get into The Flow and Intuition.

We will start with some abstract painting to warm up! Abstract painting watercolour is a great way to not focus so much on getting the flowers to look ‘right’ but to use your intuition to come up with a great composition using all the techniques we have learnt.

Then as a final project, we will paint a more complex vintage bouquet together.

At the end of 5 weeks, not only would you learn how to recreate vintage flowers with watercolour, I hope you will have found a wonderful new way to destress, let go, get into flow and enjoy the magic of watercolour.
 

Course Materials List

Paper:

1. Watercolour paper at least 300gsm (140lbs), and at least A4 size or bigger. Have some cheaper cellulose paper for practice and some 100% cotton one when we create our actual paintings.

2. For the final 2 weeks, it would be great to have some bigger 100% cotton paper on hand - at least 9x12 or even better 10x14 or bigger.

3. Loose sheets or pads or blocks are fine.

Brushes: Synthetic pointed rounds:

1. Medium Size 6 - 8 round

2. Large size 12 - 16 round

3. Small size 1 - 4 round (or liner brush) *optional

4. A 1/2 or 3/4 inch flat brush

My fav brand of brushes are from Princeton, their Heritage, AquaElite, Velvettouch or Snap lines are good.My fav smaller round brush for details is a size 4 or 6 round from Silver Black Velvet.Paint:Watercolour paints in any brand. Pans or tubes. Preferably professional level. But student level works fine too. Basic colours to listed below. If you don’t have the exact hue I have, just use something similar:

1. Yellow (Lemon yellow or Cadmium yellow)

2. Pink (Perm rose or/and Opera rose or Coral)

3. Red (Scarlet lake)

4. Orange (Cadmium orange or you can mix this yourself using yellow and red)

5. Purple (Mauve or Dioxizine Purple)

6. Green (Sap green, Hookers green and/or Green gold or Olive green)

7. Blue (Cobalt or French ultramarine or anything similar)

8. Dark Blue (Indigo or Prussian)

9. Brown (Burnt umber or Sepia)

10. Black (or Paynes Gray)

Other items:2 cups of clean waterA paper towel or clothSpray bottle of waterVintage Floral Images (if you like to source your own fav paintings) - My fav painters are Pierre Joseph Redoute and Elizabeth Twinning.