Hello and welcome to another Friday tutorial, this time you will learn how to draw a flower and more specifically a beautiful rose. Admittedly it’s not easy to draw a flower, particularly a rose due to its shape and number of petals.  There are many ways to approach drawing a rose, in this tutorial, I will suggest one possible solution to draw and subsequently colour a rose.
If you follow closely you should be able to get a good result as well.  I have used a reference image for this tutorial however I have drawn the rose freehand using a drawing software called SketchBook Pro but you can achieve a similar result using any drawing software or even by drawing freehand using pencil and paper.
Let’s get on with it, shall we?
Let’s learn how to draw a flower
As I have used a reference image to draw this flower, the idea behind this technique is to draw using the profile or contour if you want of the flower as a guide. So ignore the apparent complexity of their reference image (Whichever image you decided to use or if you are using my drawing as a reference) and just try to follow closely the contour of the flower and the leaves underneath.
This is probably the most important step, so take your time and try to come up with a contour that closely resembles the flower you are drawing. In the subsequent steps, we will fill in the details.
Once you are done drawing the contour of the flower, it’s time to start adding the stuff that’s inside the contour. The key idea of this technique to draw flowers and in particular a rose is to imagine that the flower is composed of several layers, some more external and some more internal.
The idea is to add each layer at a time starting with the outermost one. In this step, I have added the first external petal that runs diagonally from left to right.
Continuing with the same idea, in this step you simply have to draw the line of the petal that is immediately inside the one you drew before. This time it runs from the upper right to the left and stops approximately in the middle.
As you can see I am proceeding step by step, analysing the reference image and adding at each step the next line of petals inside the flower. In this particular step, I added what looks like a smaller cup of the flower inside the main body of the flower.
I think you get the idea at this point. Just be mindful of the reference image and keep adding the inner layers one by one and your rose will just start building itself almost magically.
In this last step, I have gone through the entire process and finished drawing the inner layers of the rose. I have also refined a bit the shape of the flower at its base and the shapes of the leaves around the base. I think it already looks damn fine!
Before colouring I cleaned up the whole drawing, erased all the non-essential lines, retouched the shape of the flower a little more and prepared the drawing for the upcoming colouring steps. As you can see from the tutorial, your rose should now look nice and clean.
Obviously, there are infinite ways you can go on and colour your beautiful rose however the method that I am going to encourage you to try I find is relatively simple and offers a great final effect.
It consists of filling up first the flat colours then shadows and finally highlights. So the first step is just to fill in the base colours.
Once you are done colouring and you are happy with the result it is time, to use this procedure to add the shadows.
I used just a dark tone for the shadows nothing fancy, if you are using a pencil you can use maybe a 2B or a 4B for the purpose. Just be gentle and build up the shadows in the corners and crevices of the petals always paying attention to the reference image.
I have shown you where I started for my drawing but you can start wherever you want really.
Do you see what I meant by saying that this approach is relatively easy? Just by filling in the shadows you are adding a wonderful depth to the petals and really emphasising the structure of the flower.
This is how it should look after a little bit of filling in the shadows, not too shabby at all! However to really finish this off in a beautiful way we need to add some highlights. Which we’ll do in the next step.
For the highlights use a light red or even white! The secret is to be discrete and not overdo it. Just add the colour on the rims of the petals where the light might hit and catch easily.
And there you have it! An absolutely stunning rose rendered to perfection (almost!) and ready to be shown!
I really hope you enjoyed this tutorial and I can’t wait to see what you do with it. What are your thoughts? Did you find it difficult or easy? How did your rose come up in the end? You can leave a message in the comment section below and if you want to see more tutorials like this one, like me on Facebook, share this tutorial with your friends.
Till next Friday!
