Watercolor thistles and bees demo tutorial paint along

Hello my friends thank you for coming here. I hope you had a very great summer,and it is very nice we still have some flowers to enjoy out there. Of course my annuals are still blooming, however as far as wild flowers are concerned, the star at this point in time is the Thistles. I went by the little creek in the canyon area, we like to go up there on Sunday evening sometimes when the city is still hot, and they are all over the places. Well also the wild sunflowers too. I may do sunflowers next year, because I already have a very pretty one on my blog and youtube channel. So please go paint along with that one, cause next year during this time, I will probably do a sunflower instead of thistles. But isn’t it glorious at this time of the year to have the bright yellow and orange of the sunflowers again the beautiful purple thistles, with bees going around and so big butterflies. Those wild butterflies are very hardy,but I think their life won’t be long. But the bees will go for longer, until they gathered all they need, and the chrysanthemums are coming too. I am thinking and looking for inspiration for chrysanthemums for this fall, and I will see if that actually will take place. It is hard for me to actually promise anything, cause I have the temperment of an artist, I change my mind, I will what I like, and very hard to do anything that I don’t feel inspired. But here is the beautiful unfriendly thistles, but full of life and life sustaining substances in them. I hope you have fun and try it out soon. And let me know if you enjoy it.

Let’s talk about color used. For the purple part of the thistles, I used quin violet, and drop a little magenta to brighten it up, just a little. For darker value I used dioxazine purple, all from Daniel smiths. For darker base area you can use indigo or payne’s gray. Bees are lamp’s black, Cadmin yellow medium plus yellow ochre and some sepia for shadow area. Wings are payne’s gray. Green part are all the green mix I used, which is sap green, thalo green, and indigo, you can follow my tutorial along for practice and then you can decide how much of each to use.

Towards the end of this painting, I decided to tell the story of my second uncles escapes from China, so I did a voice over, I usually don’t do that, but I really didn’t like the audio that I did, very choppy. And in their segment I promised to find out about the distance. So the distance from my father’s village to the border of Hong Kong, where the plan was to escape was about 197 miles, if you take a bus will be about 4 hours non stop. But since they were poor and refugees, I assumed they must have either get on the back of the bike of someone nice, or take a bus, or ride something to take them close to the jungle. Life was very hard then, political wars are hard, I am glad and proud of them for doing what they have to do to have a free life. I hope you enjoy the stories I told in this channel, it is very good for me to tell them, and I hope you enjoy listening to them. It really makes up a big part of me and who I am. I truly am not a very weak person, because I think about my families often and the hardship they have to go through in this life, not willing to work hard is not really part of me. I also value life and relationship, and really enjoyed knowing people, people are all interesting to me, because I know everyone has a story they want to or not want to tell. And I really do not look down on people because I know life is very hard and no matter what happened to people, they are doing what they can, some people, a lot of them have very hard circumstances to get through, but I know God loves all of us and is always ready to help us. So you know you can be my friend here, and I am grateful for your support here to help me, so I can do pretty painting to share my life skills and enjoy the journey. Do drop me a note here and there so I can get to know you. And I have to include my uncle’s story, he came to Hong Kong and married a pretty woman, have two sons. His job was driving taxi, and he saved money and owe taxi. He did very well and worked hard. However the sitting lifestyle finally caught up to him and his diabetes was bad, and Hong Kong didn’t have too good healthcare to support his illness, and he died quite young too, about early 70s. Ok , that is the end of that story, and I will see you guys in the next tutorial ok. love you, Kathy