Flowers in Milk Bottles

Hey, hey, hey, how's everybody doing today? My name is Christie Hawkins and I am the owner of The Social Easel. A lot of people always ask me this question, is like, where do I come up with ideas? How do you just keep getting inspiration? And it's hard because we don't want to just copy what's already out there, right? We want to make our own pieces. And I'm not speaking to those of you painting what I'm painting and learning to paint with me. I mean, when you're making your own original piece of art, you don't want to just copy. Um, you get— that's great to learn from, but you also want to make your own pieces. Um, so people ask me where I get inspiration from. Obviously tons of Pinterest images, right? So I'm sure we all have like a little board where we keep painting ideas. But you don't want to keep just one idea and then look at that and then make something from that. What a lot of us do as artists is, let's say we have a theme like cactuses, then we get probably, you know, 20 different pictures of cactuses, some photos, some paintings, and it's just a combination of everything. And out of that, we create our own composition. So, um, I wanted to show you But this is just an old Family Circle magazine cover. But I love flowers, again, and I have saved this. I don't even know how long I've had it. It's been in my drawer with all my art supplies for all these years because I knew at some point I was gonna paint it. I just didn't know when. So today's the day. I took inspiration from this to create this. So if you're comparing these, can you see how they are relative to each other without being identical? So I took the hyacinth and made it bigger. I took this big pink flower and put it right here. I used the yellow ones kind of in my background. So this was my inspiration piece for this, along with some ideas that I found on Pinterest. So I'm going to show you guys how to take something like this and turn it into your own painting. Another thing that I love, um, and that I get inspired by— I don't know if you guys are calendar people or not, but I love calendars and I love the ideas. Here's one. I think I had some people asking for a waterfall. Sorry, you're getting the glare off of that, but I love getting inspiration from different calendar scenes like these tulips. What else do we have here? This is just really pretty with the tree and the flowers. So you can take ideas like this and turn them into paintings. So today I am going to put you guys— I'm gonna pull you guys a little bit closer over here so you can better see see what I'm doing, and I'm gonna put this up. I think I'm actually gonna tape it on the front of this other painting so you guys can kind of see my inspiration and then kind of like what I'm doing in reference to that. So I kind of pulled some colors already to kind of prep for painting this today. So it kind of has like a mint green background there, and so I just grabbed— this one looks pretty similar, it's called Spearmint by Craft Smart. And then I've got Dragon Fruit and Cadmium Yellow from DecoArt, and then I've just got orange and red. These are two of my favorites, Caribbean and Apple Tart. Those are some of my go-to colors. So we are just gonna jump into it here, and again, I am not trying to make this identical. I'm using it as inspiration. So give yourself some freedom when you are doing stuff like this. And before you even get started, I want you to tell yourself it's not supposed to look exactly like the photo. It's not a photo, it's a painting. So it should have its own character. It should have its own personality. This does not need to be photorealistic. That's not what we're going for. Or it's at least not what I'm going for, I should say. I just want to kind of give the idea of what we have going on here. So I'm not trying to be super specific with my flowers. I'm going to have fun. I'm going to make the flowers the way that I like to make them, which is nice and abstract, and just embrace the process of trying something new. If you do not have one of these, I would highly recommend getting one. This is a mixed media pad, and it is kind of like a sketchbook for painting, and it takes less pressure— or it takes more pressure off of you because you're not so worried. You're not painting on canvas. It doesn't feel as final. It allows you to just play and experiment and not feel like— just because you paint something doesn't mean you have to show anybody. If you don't like it and you're not happy with it, who cares? Just move on. Take it as a learning lesson. We can't learn without making mistakes, okay? You have to try in order to succeed, and you're not gonna know that you can do something until you try it. So it's the same with painting, and every time you paint, you're going to learn something new. Every painting that I do with my tribe members or in the boot camp course, I pick those paintings specifically because I want to teach you something different in each one. Every time you paint with me, you're learning something new, and you're learning something that you can apply to your next painting that you didn't know before you took that class. Does that make sense? So, um, that's, that's kind of how this works. You learn a little at a time. You're not supposed to start and just know everything immediately. This is a journey. It's a process. As an artist, I'm still learning. 2 years ago, I hadn't even played with the palette knife, and now that's what I use in a majority of my paintings. So you continually evolve and grow as an artist and as you learn more techniques. So I've just got a basic background here, quick base. The other thing with mixed media pads is it dries pretty fast, so you don't have to wait a long time before you move on to something else. So I've got a couple jars here. Okay, so again, I'm not gonna duplicate this exactly. I don't think I want that many jars on there. But I'm gonna get a little of my white and just a little bit of my Caribbean and just maybe do a couple. And again, I'm not worried about this being perfect, just kind of getting a general idea of what these look like and just having fun, just trying to create, recreate a photo. So I'm just adding a little kind of ellipse in here, kind of act as water, a little heavier at the base. But I like kind of like that sketchy look, so I don't like perfect all like nice and neat lines. It's not the way that I paint, so I kind of paint a little messier than that, and that's kind of what you see here with the jar. So maybe let's just add one more over here, and we'll just make this 3, maybe add a shorter shorter style here. So you see what I mean by quick and kind of sketchy? So I move around quickly and I'm not too worried about having perfect lines because again, I kind of like that abstract style that this gives. And we're going to come back and we'll be adding some white brush strokes over top, but for now we're just going to leave it like that for our base. So I'm getting my green. All right, this one we're gonna have these kind of crisscross in here, and I am gonna come back and I'll pull that glass jar back over top again. These are gonna be my poppies. They're gonna be a little bit thicker. They have a more substantial stem on them. Let's kink that one a little more sideways. And I don't want them to end all at the same spot. I may pull— this one needs to come a little bit higher. That one may fall over. A little bit. All right, let's do this one. I'm gonna do a tulip, also a little bit thicker stem. And I have not done just a tulip painting before, and it's kind of surprising because they're one of my favorite flowers. So are poppies. So I've done poppies before, and I love them. Okay, all right, so I'm trying to decide what flowers I want to do because I'm not gonna do all of them. So I'm thinking I'm gonna do the tulip, and the yellow and the poppies, and I think those are going to be the main flowers. I left a stem off for my poppy. It kind of overlaps here, so you can't really see that too much. Now you could do this with a palette knife, or you can stick with brush. I am going to stick with brushes for today. Because it's a little bit faster and easier for me to show you guys. By the way, if you want a really pretty hot pink, I love this color. It's Dragon Fruit by DecoArt. It's a really, really pretty pink. And for my poppies, I am just using just regular red paint, nothing special, and regular orange paint, nothing special. I saw some poppies on the way to picking Sophia up from school the other day, and I really just wanted to stop and take some pictures and maybe pick a few. I need some poppies in my backyard. All right, we're going to start with our yellow ones here, and again, I'm not going to do all of them, but this first one is kind of sideways, so it's kind of funny looking right now. Almost looks like an egg shape. But it's opening up to the side and the base is coming right here. But what I want to show you today is how loose and free you can be with paint and not try to be specific and make really technical brushstrokes, and it still turns out to be an awesome painting. So I hope that makes sense. Sense to you. This one, we're gonna overlap that just a little. I'm gonna overlap my edge here, and they don't look like much to begin with. So right now what I'm doing is kind of just getting placeholders on there. I know where I want my flowers, but I don't have any detail in them yet. And again, you guys see how fast I'm doing this? It's so fun almost to like force yourself to paint fast because you learn things in the process while you're doing that, and you learn how to get out of your comfort zone. If we're slow, we like overthink things way too much. It's so much more fun to just speed paint sometimes. Play yourself some fast music and paint to the tempo. and it's just a ton of fun. And realize you don't have to overwork an area. Little brushstrokes here and there are sometimes all you need. So I'm gonna give this one a little bit of a center here. I don't want it too dark. This one's opening up and the light's kind of hitting from this way, so I'm just going in and getting some of my highlights on there. So just quick little brushstrokes. Okay, so for the poppies, I am getting red and orange on here at the same time. And I'm going to start with this one's kind of opening up, so kind of just like a smiley face shape. That's got more of the red in it, and I'm going to grab some orange. And again, just super messy. This one's kind of opening up this way, and poppies don't have like huge separate petals. It's not like what you think of when you think of like 5 petals together. This one has some yellow in the center. We're just gonna put that there. Oh, I got some green on there. I don't want green. Where's Piper? Uh, on the couch. So you guys kind of see how that works, and then I'll pull— once this dries a little, I can pull this red over top of that yellow a little bit. So that it opens up a little bit more and kind of pulls that into the front. Does it make sense what I'm doing and kind of taking some basic principles and design elements from this and turning it into a painting, kind of an inspiration piece? I hope that's translating for you. We're gonna come on and do this tulip over here, and it kind of has, like, to start with, like, a basic U-shape. And I'm gonna have one petal is like that on the side. This one's real short. This one barely is gonna peek over the back there. I'm gonna grab a little red to mix with my pink. It doesn't matter what it looks like, just enjoy the process. Enjoy the fact that you're getting to create something new. It does not have to be perfect. I hate that word when it comes to art. Who's to say whether your piece of art is perfect or not. That is up to the person looking at it, and we all see something different. And some people, for instance, may hate my style of painting and they don't like it at all, or they may say it's amateur or whatever. That's fine. They can go on and they can like somebody else's painting. So If you happen to have a negative person in your life that would actually say something like that to you, then just forget about them and move on. And again, the other thing I love about our community, it's just an awesome place to share and a safe place to share so that you can get honest feedback. If you are struggling with something and you want advice, they will gladly give it to you, but it is in no way a group where we are negative whatsoever. No negativity allowed. Switching brushes. And now I'm just kind of tweaking and deciding what I want to keep in here. And I like to add fun little accent marks to my paintings too that may not necessarily be in the painting, so, or in the photo. So right now I just added that little touch of red in there. It's gonna mix with my blue and kind of make like a purplish color over here on the side. But see how that's just giving me the shadowing on the side there. And actually, without thinking about it, I should have done it on the opposite side. The light is coming from this way because that's where it's hitting the flowers, and my shadow's on the wrong side. We'll switch it. We'll do it this way, and I'll cover that back up. There you go. See, no mistakes, happy little accidents. You guys get to see me change it up, but I really like that little bit of purple that that's adding in there. And then I can come back on that side where I put the shadow and just pull some white back over top of that again. Then maybe throw some of these— got little petals down here on the table. And I could let this dry and just keep going and adding layers. You'll see once it starts drying, some of that color kind of soaks into your canvas. I love these poppies, all these warm colors— yellow, red, orange. So I'm just coming back and just kind of layering, layering that in. Here we go. Let's kind of— that really was like almost the perfect color of paint. It does look like a garden, doesn't it? I have flowers everywhere here. Eventually I am going, and it may be more of this style, I'm going to paint this entire wall in my studio, and it's gonna have flowers all over the wall. Cory was really excited about that, but I told him he didn't have to come in here and look at it. No one can see that unless they come into my studio. So if you don't like it, don't come and look. All right, so here is the photo or magazine cover, and there is my painting. So just fun and quick. My goal is to teach you to not let fear, to not let stress stop you from creating. Just create, just have fun. If you don't like it, turn the page and start again. It's okay, and it's okay to mess up, and it's okay to make mistakes, but it is so healing and and freeing and just mood boosting to paint. It doesn't have to be a long drawn-out thing. Give yourself 20 minutes, give yourself 10 minutes, 10 minutes to find one of my videos and practice a technique. You know, it doesn't take a huge chunk of time. So I hope that you guys learned something today. If you are bold enough, which I hope you are. If you are bold enough, I would love for you to find an inspiration piece— a photo in a magazine, a photo that you print off a calendar, whatever it is. Find an inspiration piece, make your own version. Don't get too caught up in it. Be loose with your brushstrokes. Have fun and post the side-by-side. So I will talk to you guys soon. Bye!