How To Paint A Flower

In this session, I'm going to show how to paint a single flower. So, I'm going to do a very quick drawing outline, only really putting in these central lines, certainly no detail but looking really carefully at the way the petals move, the way they turn on each other, on themselves, the way you see one side and the other, so really just drawing whatever you can see. I'm doing it quite large because I'm going to be using wet on wet technique which gives us nice fuzzy edges and I'll be needing quite a big area for that.

Always, when you're drawing, the rule is just draw what you see, draw the shapes that you see, not what you think you see because what you actually see is a lot more interesting than what you can imagine. Now, I'm going to do wet on wet here. That means I have to wet part of the paper that I want to put the paint into and that will spread and give me quite exciting blends of colours because there are no hard edges between pink tones and cream white tones and greens and yellows.

They're all kind of mixed in together. The paint I'm going to use is two blues, cobalt, ultramarine, a warm cadmium yellow, a little bit of lemon yellow, and certainly some of those crimson and some maroon. We're going to see lots of pink marks in there.

I'm using a flat brush, a wide flat brush, and I'm going to wet the area that I want to put the paint into. But first, I'm going to mix the paint that I would put into that area. I'll add a bit more to that, put a bit of crimson in there, and maybe a little bit of blue.

I'm doing pinks that I can see and then I'm going to drop some paint in to some wet areas, okay. If I wet an area in the middle of this, I'm only wetting the area where I want the paint to go to so wherever I stop the wetness, on the edge of the line there, it will not go any further than that and if I drop the paint in, you can see how it's already spreading into the rest of the leaf. I can come back to adjust the petal and I can come back a bit more to that and we've got some other colours in there.

I'm actually going to put some green in the middle as well, so if I wet this area here, I'm just going to drop some green in there and just let it expand and spread into the other colours I got going there. Wet another area and put some pink tones in there as well. So, a bit more water now to get the green off my brush.

Just a little bit more crimson this time, I think, and I drop crimson into the area I just wetted. I can see how it spreads into the area that I've wet, so I take that paint there and spread it with my brush a little bit. Just a little bit more red on there if I wet another area and work my way around, a little bit more crimson in here, and I drop it a little more loosely.

You'll see streaks down in the middle of that petal which I want to pick up on. If I want to use a bit more pigment in some places, I just get a very much stronger area and in some places, it is that strong. Now, you can already see I've got green on the top of this petal here.

Just notice that so if I take my crimson off, then I go into a bit of green there, get my cobalt again, and some lemon yellow, probably more yellow than cobalt, drop some in there because I want a mix of green a little bit and see that spreading to the pinks. Some green to start with in the middle of this petal here, I put a green onto the top, just a faint green, it's not a very strong green. So, I'm getting all kinds of naturalistic colours and again I'm going to put a little bit of red through the middle of that area I just wet earlier on and let that merge in together and give me a little blended area.

I think I need a little bit darker on that edge. Wet through here, put some green, I've got a very strong green running down the middle of that, so we let that merge in with a little bit more cadmium yellow in there so I'm getting quite a loose effect. Now, I'm going to try some wet on dry now, so I'm not going to wet any more area