[CR] The lesson of watercolor rose

Hello! Today I have prepared two lessons on watercolor roses, which will talk about two different approaches to drawing flowers. Now here is the first one, but later I'll publish second article.

It is fairly believed that drawing flowers is more a girl's business. But it just so happened that my creative activity was connected with flowers for a long time, although I painted them more with oil and in various types of painting. But what if suddenly the task arose to paint a rose with watercolor paints, and the time to draw quite a bit?

Now I will talk about the basic rules and subtleties, often overlooked by artists-teachers in various lessons and master classes, but which are very important.

As an example, I used my own picture taken in early September.

You can to paint watercolor roses in different ways. For example, to wet the sheet and make a few colored spots, and then add small brushes details until the paper is dry! Yes, you can. But unlike other flowers, roses (or peonies) have a complex structure of the flower, where the edges of patals are quite soft in edges, but closer to the center there are many small details.

As much as we would like to, but working only on wet, we will not achieve very clear boundaries on the petals, and we still have to either dry the sheet, continuing to work on dry, or very quickly to work with gradually drying paper.

Today I just suggest to make our rose quickly. So, make a sketch. There are different options to draw the outline of the flower. Someone makes only a General outline, and then draws the details with brushes, but I suggest to pay attention to the details of the flower and make a drawing as detailed as possible. This will then help to quickly cope with the task when working with paints.

Important! If your pencil sketch isn't bright enough, you run the risk to loose it when you start to overlay watercolor layers. But if you make the outline very fat, it will be enough dark after work. Try to determine for yourself the Golden mean of it, because someone draws with bright, opaque layers of paint, and others apply thin, translucent strokes of watercolor.

It seems, we can not do without wetting the sheet in our case. I work on a small format A5, although I draw a large flower. So far, everything is quite simple, we use a small brush to make the main spots that barely resemble a future rose. When the sheet is slightly (not completely) dry, you can start to draw the individual parts.

Since we have a fairly fast drawing process today, the details of the rose is not copying the original. It is important for us to get the common details and proper color distribution.

Important! Please note: all of our main fills – is mainly the light part of the flower. And only when we begin to work with small brushes on a dried sheet of paper, then draw the shadow areas.

There are several ways to overlay layers in watercolor techiques. It is possible, as in the chart, start with the darkest corners, gradually drawing all the lighter parts. Then you just need to make sure that each layer dries well.

But today we have a quick drawing lesson and I almost do not wait until each layer get dry. Therefore, I draw all at once at the same time, not much worrying that individual areas of fills can flow into each other. Once we have outlined color spots, work with a brush like a pen or pencil, highlighting the subtle elements of the rose.

And only when we have done the main work on the distribution of tone and color, you can take a very thin brush and make eyeliners in the right places. Somewhere it will be dark lines (folds and corners), and somewhere light (for example, veins on the petals). Thus, we level out the ugly places of the overflow of some color areas to others, indicating where the hard edges of the petals are needed.

And of course the background. In our case, the flower turned out to be quite saturated, so I did not spare the paint and framed the rose with the background. But do not have to do it too dark, as I came out, even if in the original it is. Sometimes it is enough to note a few colored spots and the picture will look lively and original.