With a lovely warm summer comes busy gigs where you want to impress your customers with your lovely designs in the shortest amount of time possible. In this tutorial, I want to share a couple of tips with you and show you how you can add a bit more interest to your fast floral designs without having to spend hardly any extra time on them - inspired by the gorgeous Pantone Color of the year - Ultra Violet!
Supplies
Diamond FX Black
Diamond FX White
Kryvaline high-density petal sponge
Silly Farm paint pal romantic rose angle brush 1/2"
Loew-Cornell American Painter #2 Round Brush
Step 1: stenciling the background
I really like adding stenciled textures in the background on my floral designs rather than sponging on plain colors. It is a super easy and fast way to add that little extra to your design, and it looks super impressive! For this background, I used a petal sponge which I loaded with one of my favorite arty brush cakes at the moment "Slice" from Silly Farm. I used the darker area on the inside and the lighter green on the outside of the leaf, to add a bit of depth and interest to the background
Step 2: superfast one stroke leaves
If you don`t have any stencils with tropical leaves you can always paint them yourself. You can leave them bright green without any more details and they will look super! Or you can add black outlining and some white highlights if you have time. As you may have noticed, I have painted only part of the leaf here and there. This gives the illusion that there are several layers of leaves and that they are mixed with the stenciled texture for even more depth.
Step 3: the flower
For the flower, I use a home made one stroke made up of Cameleon Poison Purple, Cameleon UV Electric Purple (if you don't have this color in your life already, you need it. It is so beautiful!) and FAB/Superstar White. As you can see, I have added a couple of flower petals in between the leaves as well, which also adds to the depth of the design.
Step 4: dots
I love dots! They are such a wonderful way to enhance the flow of a design and add interest to it! Don't limit yourself to the usual white dots - experiment and have fun with it! For the dots here I used a lilac color to fit in with the lilac color selection, but any other bright color would also work really well.
Step 5: glitter and outlining
You can leave the design as it is without any outlining and it will look great! But if I don't have a super long line I do like to add a bit of outlining to tie my design together. I've added a little bit of glitter as well, but only in a few spots around the edges so that I won't cover up the details of the design.
Hope you enjoyed this tutorial - can't wait to see your version of this!
Kristin Olsson has her background in the art and design world and has been working as a professional face painter since 2016.
She is an instructor at Olga Murasev's International Face Painting School (www.facebodyart.com), has won numerous face painting competitions and has been published in the various face and body painting magazines.
You can see more of her work on her Instagram and Facebook pages.
Take a class with Kristin Olsson at the International Face Painting School.
