Learning to Draw Florals (Part 1)

Don’t let their delicacy fool you.

Those dainty beauties hold some dangerous curves under their hoods! Floral doodles are definitely not for the faint of heart and I envy anyone that has a knack for drawing them.

I could always create credible florals using a mess of lines. I tend to try to conjure their form from my imagination out of the page.

That’s not bad for some uses. But, learning how to draw specific flowers, simply, with simple, contour lines to describe form is a wonderful skill to have. Yet, it has always been a challenge for me.

But I am making some progress…

I purposed to learn a total of ten for an upcoming event.

For the past few months, I have been learning from YouTube University, Etsy downloads, and books I have on hand.

So far, I can safely say, I can reliably recall maybe eight flowers. But, I’ve been plugging away here and there with mini-projects to see what could be done with these beyond this event. Have a look…

That last photo of some heat foil doodles is a little difficult to see. But, these only scratch the surface of the versatility of florals. Still, just between the engraving, foiling and the use of florals on paper products, I can already see why florals are a beloved discipline. 🥰

Check out this peony series I learned with the help of a tutorial by YouTuber, Shayda Campbell.

As you can see, I followed along using my iPad rather than natural media. But, I think I got it!

Now, most artists who begin drawing florals don’t stop at just learning various flowers. Once you’ve gotten used to drawing a few buds, it’s time to turn your attention to floral arrangement…

The floral arrangements I’m most attracted to are like many traditional art works…They normally involve hierarchy. Artists who use hierarchy or some form of emphasis act as composers in an orchestra, purposefully bringing certain parts of a piece to a higher resolution and leaving other parts a little looser than others to draw your eye to specific areas of their composition. Sometimes, it’s even used as a way to draw your eye around the piece in a certain circuit. The logic behind this kind of work is based on the fact that our natural eyes are only able to take in so much. This is why our periphery vision kind of falls away as we focus on what our eye rests on. A traditional drawing takes advantage of that to lead your eye into and around a piece…in the most capable hands, it is to introduce information to your eye in the order the artist wants you to discover it. During times like the Renaissance, many painters used this kind of emphasis to highlight the main action going on in their historical paintings.

Bonus: This approach is opposite of artists who lean toward photo-realism where many times the intent is to give every piece of the composition the same level of attention, detail, and interest…However, the most conceptual of these artists are not “just trying to mimic a photograph”. The underlying idea is to almost overwhelm or bombard the senses of the viewer-it is a sort of nod to our fast-paced, real-world experience these days where our culture asks more of us than we can humanly pay attention to.

Ahem, I think my Urkel is showing…Let’s put Teacher Stacey away for a bit, shall we? 😂

As for the approach I’m attempting to learn, there’s usually one to three or more larger flowers to anchor the piece with some minor characters flanking their sides to support them. As a beginner with floral line drawing, as long as my larger flowers are sound, the smaller flowers and supports can be a lot looser and you could actually wing them a bit..

Check out how I used the complex peony I learned from Shayda’s tutorial to make the arrangement for the lead piece of this post.

Not bad for a newb, right? 👍🏾

I may be a late bloomer, but I’m finally beginning to get the hang of this!

While it would be nice to stop there, if the arrangement is not stopping at paper, learning how to use floral arrangements to adorn, complement, or frame a label you’ve introduced on glass or some other rigid, three-dimensional surface is yet another skill to tackle. I’ll share some examples from the work of some of my favorite artists and how I practice this next time.

Stay tuned!