Botanical Borders: Creating beautiful border and frame designs in fineliner pen.

1. Introduction: If you love drawing simple designs, then I'm sure you'll love this course. The focus is on doodling simple leaves, flowers, and stems to incorporate into botanical borders and frames. Drawing these designs allows you to relax and unwind while creating lovely art with practical uses. Hi, I'm Michelle. I'm a multimedia artist who loves watercolor, fine line illustration, textiles and stitching. I also like to relax while doodling botanical designs. Teaching here on Skillshare is also one of my pleasures as I get to share my art experience with interested students. I created this class with beginners in mind. But anyone interested in botanical doodling is welcome. No experience is needed. All you need to get started is a pen or pencil and some paper. During the class, I'll show you how to draw botanicals in a relaxed and easy style so that you can enjoy the process. Starting with simple pen strokes, we'll move on to practicing shapes. I'll show you how you can draw endless variations by changing shape, size, stem arrangement. And some of the design elements. We'll practice doodling, leaves, flowers, and some stem arrangements together. Then we'll work through how to build botanical elements into border and frame designs. You can use your designs in simple projects like greeting cards, gift tags, bookmarks, book plates, and page dividers. I know you'll want to continue exploring this fun activity, and so I have included a bonus video. In this video, I'll show you how easy it is to incorporate color. Into your botanical designs. I've also included a downloadable PDF with designs from the class for you to keep. So find your pen and paper, get comfortable, and let's jump into botanical doodles. 2. Supplies: Supplies for this class are pretty basic. You can get by with just one fine liner pen and some paper. You can just use an ordinary black gel pen or you can use a fine liner felt tip. So this is just a uniball gel pen. I use a range of micron pigma pens because the ink is fast drying and there's less chance of smearing it. And I use them in a range from 005, 01, 03, 05 and a 08. That gives you a good range of nib widths. If you are purchasing for the first time, I would suggest if you like a heavier line, to go somewhere around about 03 or a 05. The 03 or 05 will give you a medium weight line, and the 01 is for those of you who like a finer line. I add to my kit a signo uniball white gel pen for putting in white details over the top of anything that I may have colored in. Sometimes I like to put in white highlights. Another good one for that is the jelly roll gold pen. It shows up beautifully against the black ink. I keep with me a pencil and an eraser. A ruler is a good thing to have in your kit if you want to create straight lines for a border. I also keep in my kit either a pair of scissors or a craft knife. And I have a small craft mat. Some of the boarders I like to do, I create just inside the edge of the paper a little and then I go back and cut off the excess paper. Some extra supplies you might be interested in if you would like to introduce some color to your work. Colored pencils. They work quite well. Doing detailing on borders. Watercolor, which I sometimes use, I use either a water reservoir brush or a fine detailing brush. You can do the same thing with brush pens. If you're a person who likes bright colors, you can use them straight from the pen. I prefer a more pastel look. My preferred method for using brush pens is to lay a bit of color down onto a palette, and then I use either the water reservoir brush or the fine detailer brush to pick up color, and I introduce it in that way. If I'm going to do a whole border in color, I'll either use the colored pencils, or I might use these fine liner pens which are just from department stores. I just pick them up sometimes in a packet or sometimes singly. Alternatively, and these are new to me, I've just discovered them, and I love them. There's two kinds of pen in here. There are these click art pens, which are made by Zebra or zebra, if that's how you say it. They're a Japanese pen, and they have a click end, no caps, which is fantastic because I lose caps all the time. They have a bullet felt tip. They are quite lovely to draw with. You can get some nice colors in them. They come in pastels and they come in brights. Also, I have discovered recently these mid liner pens. They're made in Japan also. And they're often used by people who do journaling. If you're interested in these, look for the double ended. This end is a nice bullet felt tip, and the other end is a chisel tip. Two ways, you can use a chisel tip. You can use it as the chisel for coloring in large areas, or you can turn it on the pointed end, and you can get nice, lovely, fine lines. 3. Project: Project for class is really simple. All you need to do is upload photos of your practice sheets or a botanical border or frame that you've created based on what you've learned in class. If you go to the Project tab underneath the video and click on that, you'll find a button to click for uploading your photos and just follow the prompts. It only takes a couple of minutes. I really look forward to seeing your designs. 4. Tips: Tip number one, don't worry about realism. Start simple, looking at simple shapes that you might see in nature. Put aside the worry about trying to make things look real. Doodle leaves and flowers don't need to be real. You can work towards that as you develop your confidence and your drawing abilities. Tip number two, perfectionism is the enemy of creativity. Please don't focus on trying to create everything perfect. It's one of the reasons why I like to work on loose sheets of paper or I have a doodling book, which is not meant to house masterpieces. It's just a place where I can try things out. Tip number three, practice often. Why do we practice often? Because practice improves muscle memory. Muscle memory is eye hand coordination, and familiarity with shapes that you're drawing. So as you practice more often, you get better and quicker at drawing those shapes because you've developed that muscle memory, and that, in turn, leads to an improvement in your drawing over time. Tip number four. Make use of small windows of time to sneak in a little bit of drawing whenever you can. Carry a small sketchbook and a pen with you in your purse. So when you're out and about, fill in time when you're sitting at appointments or watching school sports, or sitting on a bus, fill that time with some drawing practice. Tip number five, doodle while watching television. I keep a notebook and a couple of pens beside my chair. And when I'm sitting with my family, watching television of an evening, I also doodle at the same time. 5. Shape & Design: Let's talk a little bit about varying shapes to come up with new leaves and petals. If I was to start with a leaf like this, I could change that by squashing it down, making it fatter and shorter. I could change it by making it very long. You can make them thinner. You can make them smaller. So you begin to see that with one shape. You have a whole lot of variations as many as you can think up. And then, of course, there's the elements you decide to put inside. So you might leave the leaf open like that with no design in it. You might add in a single vein. You might add in a vein that has branches going off the center. And the number of branches that you put off the central vein will also change the look. You might add in some shading at the base, you could also add in shading at the tip. You could just put straight lines through your leaf. You could put curved lines in and change the look of it again. So each time you approach your design with one shape, you have a multitude of variations. You could choose to create a solid color in your leaf. You take one petal shape, and you can change it the same by making it larger, medium, smaller. Thinner, fatter, adding different decorative lines to the petal, putting shading in, not putting shading in. So it's just a matter of thinking about the shapes you've got and how you can use them to your advantage. So I recommend you have a little practice with the sizes of your shapes, making them fatter, thinner, smaller, larger, and the decorative elements that you put inside of them. See how many different ones you can come up with. This is a pen stroke you'll find extremely useful when you're doing your botanical doodling It's just a simple flick of the pen, and you can do it to draw in veins, and you get a thicker line where you start and it becomes finer where you lift the tip of the pen off the paper. I particularly like the flick stroke for darkening the bases of leaves. And I like to use a finer pen for doing this because you get a nicer, finer result. I'm using a 01 pen, which is the one I use the most when I'm drawing botanicals. And I recommend you practice doing this stroke until you feel comfortable with it. We're just going to have a look at some shapes that you might use for petals, circular shapes, teardrop shapes with a point, open shapes that you might join onto a center. You might add half a teardrop shape onto the side of another very open flat shapes. Flat at the bottom shapes like that. They can even look like a leaf shape and you can even add a line in them like a leaf shape. You can have heart shapes and join them together to create a flower and you just continue around in the circle. You can have shapes that are done completely in one line that you start at one point and join back up to. You can even use triangles and join them together. Circle shapes with lines through. You might use more of an oval shape. You can even suggest petals with spirals by joining them into a flower shape. And then by adding in circles on sticks, you end up with a flower. Create petals by just adding in some dashes. You can create dandelion shapes by doing lines like that and little balls or little V shape lines and you just join them into a circle shape, similar to the heart shape, add multiple ruffles. You can join circles together to suggest a little flower shape you can use this kind of shape horizontally. So there are some shapes that you could use to create stylized flowers. 6. Leaves Part 1: Let's practice some leaves. I've created a grid of five by six squares to give us 30 little practice areas. We'll end up with 30 different kinds of leaves. So beginning with a central stem, I'm going to build this leaf out with little shapes that are kind of like part of an oval. It's just missing the end off. And you just stack them one on top of the other until you end up with the size of leaf that you like. You can make them fatter as you go along. So that as you get towards the base of your leaf, they're slightly larger. You can also do this one by angling them slightly different and you'll end up with a slightly different look. And we can do leaf shapes like this, and they can stay open with no decoration, or you can add in the decoration of your choice. This one just has a couple of plain veins in it. You can change the shape of that slightly and give it a little bit more of a curve top. And put in a curved vein. And again, this will look different depending on how you decorate it. So you could just put in some vertical lines. If you want, you can leave it open. You can add veins, something like this. This one will be a wiggly shape. I've seen shapes like this on trees, but I don't remember which trees I've seen them on. These can be purely out of your imagination, too. They don't have to resemble anything in particular. This one I thought I would put little branching veins in to just make it look slightly different. This one is a bit like the leaf of a liquid amber tree. So I'm not starting with a stem this time. I'm just going to make the shape. There's so many different ways of doing these. These are your leaves, and you can have them however you want them to look. No rules. Whatever makes you happy. This one's going to be saw toothed, I think is the right description. As you've seen, sometimes I start with a stem, and sometimes I just draw a leaf shape and then put the stems where I'd like them to be. This one could have some horizontal bands in it. If I was to put vertical lines in this one, the lines going down, it might have the effect of making the leaf look even longer than it is. When you put horizontal banding in, it tends to make things look shorter. We could do rounded shapes, and let's make a stem out of this one. You can do half a leaf with lines and half without. You can do very wiggly shapes. Sometimes I just put lines on one half of a leaf for something different. We could have a ginko leaf. And of course, the classic ginko leaf has lots of lines in it. And you can actually put a little shading in at the bottom, too. There are ferns. This would be a frond of a fern. All of those tiny little leaves down the side, similar maybe to, like, a fish bone fern. With these, you can bring your little leaf parts out further as you go, so it gets bigger towards the base. Some of them come out a little bit bigger for a little while, and then they tend to go back in as you get down to the bottom of the stem. Some of them start bigger at the top and get smaller at the bottom. We can do a maiden hair type fern, which is done with little heart shapes. So again, this would be a frond of the fern, and they can have longer stems as you come down to create that triangular shape to the leaf, I always like to add some little ones in between the branch parts. I feel like it adds a bit more fullness to them. You can color these in to make them darker and give you some contrast in any of the floral arrangements that you draw. We can do something in a fern style that's a bit larger. We could have teardrop shapes, and instead of putting little veins in them, we'll just leave them open and join them on the stem. This would be a frond of a fern. But this also reads like a branch of some type of shrubby tree as well. Put a colored dot at the base of the leaves, and it completely changes the look. There are long sort of narrow leaves like this. A lavender plant has foliage, something like this. If you were doing lavender, then you would put in your flower head up here or we can just add a long leaves at the top. 7. Leaves Part 2: You can do a very stylized leaf. Let's make it curve. an open heart, and then we can curl it back around, put in a vein, and then decorate it. A rounder base with a pointier top leaf, and there might be a bunch of these together. And you can just put in a couple of wispy lines at the base. Could do the monsterior shaped leaf. Put in some of those classic hole shapes that they end up with. You can make shapes that are a bit like an elongated diamond. You can use it this way on a leaf, or you can switch it around, decorate with lines or you can add in shapes. You can just put in the classic veins, but group them in two to make a pattern. You can make curved shaped leaves. I'll show you that again. So I just kind of start like that and draw this edge, and then I come back and draw that bit, and then you go underneath and draw that bit. So you end up with this. I wouldn't put a central vein up here, but I might just put lines like that, and then under here, I would do that just to indicate where it's twisting on itself. You can have tiny little just colored in leaves. Like that. You can do the same thing by adding them more open, and you can actually stagger them on a stem to give you a bit of a different look. We can do a group where we have leaves like that. There's a stem coming off it, and then each one of these would have a vein. And then just put small arrowhead type marks, which suggest veins as well. you can do a maple leaf shape, which I'm not that familiar with because they're not something that grows here much. But I think they look something like this. I know they have wiggly outer edges. It might look something like that with a vein in it down the center. And then decorate these however you like. If you notice, some of these are angled slightly differently. I like to do that because it gives it a slightly more realistic look, even though these are fairly stylized. Something like this, you can vary by each one of those tiny leaves that join together to make this little stem of leaves could be a bit wiggly like that, and you could do the whole lot like that. Can do stretched oval shapes. Curving your veins in there can make them look a little different as well. Do another leaf shape there. And you could put straight with circles on the end. These tend to remind me the shape of a feather. So you could put the veins very close together. So there's three different looks for the same shaped leaf. You can also do leaves that are variegated. With variegated leaves, you can get patterns that run through leaves. You'd have two options here. You could color in the negative space and leave the center white or this is a bit of a thin pen to do this, but you can color in the center that will add quite a bit of contrast in a botanical border. You can play with shapes by stacking them to give you a different type of look to a cluster of leaves on a branch. By adding just a little bit of shading at the base of the leaves, you get a little bit more of a contrasting interest in your stem or your little group of leaves. There are just some ideas of how to put together different leaf shapes and different decorations. 8. Flowers Part 1: We're going to draw some simplistic flowers and leaves. I've ruled up my blank page with six boxes across times five boxes down, which gives a grid of 30 boxes. So we'll end up with 30 different types of botanical elements. I usually use a 0.1 micron pen. I like to put in a stem and then add to that stem. This is going to be a really simple element. I'm just going to use small circles, and I'll put one on the end of each of those stems, add in other little stems, and add the little circles to them. How much is enough? Enough is when you feel like the piece is full enough or it looks finished. Now, just looking at that, I could add some more down here, and that gives that stem a little bit more of a balanced look. I nearly always start with a stem. I'm just going to add some simple leaf shapes along the stem. This time, I decided to be a little bit different and overlap the stem. I'm just going to go up and put a dot on the end or a circle. I'm just going to branch out either side until I feel like there's enough to create a flower head. With any of these designs, you can use them open like this, or you can actually fill in the centers. This time, I'm just going to put some leaves on it, working from the top down. One of the things you can do with this is vary the size of the leaves so they can become slightly larger as you progress down the stem. You can vary the size of the leaves small to larger to small, or you can have larger at the bottom and smaller at the top. The other thing you can do is space them out a little more. And sometimes I like to just put a couple of little lines in the base of each leaf where it joins the stem. It adds a little contrast darkness in the center of the stem area. This one, I think I might just do a simple daisy shape, and I'm going to color the center in. You can leave the leaves blank or you can add lines to them. If I do the same thing again with my center and my petals, I can go around again and add some more petals. To this one, rounded leaves. I'll just do a straight stem again, and I'll go back to little circles or dots. But this time, I'm going to go straight down the branch. This one will be more like some berries, and I'm going to color them in. Now, these ones are fairly spread out, but you can actually put them closer together. I'm going to do that on one side, just to demonstrate the difference between the look you get from closer together and further apart. This one, I think I might do three flowers on make an upside down tear drop and add another one in, and I'll do the same on the others so all my flowers are similar. Put some stamens sticking out. Varying the number of stamens will vary the look. These kind of leaves this time and in some angled lines across the leaves. I'm going to do a petal with some scalloped edges. I might just do a little coloring in the center of this one. This one should have a little bud off to the side. Make this look a little bit like a cup. I do like to use stripes down my leaves as well. This one will be a multi stem. Little heart shapes are always fun. Put one on the end of each stem, and then you can build on that by adding them down the stem. You can do these open or you can color them in. They look really good either way. I'm going to add petal shapes to this one and continue around it. I'm just going to color that bit in in the center where it meets the stem, some little branchy leaves. This one will be more like a scalloped triangular shape. Once you've done these a few times, you end up with a few favorite shapes that you come back to. I'm just going to put a few little lines at the base of each petal. A cup shaped flower, put the stem in. And with stems, you can go straight or crooked, as you've seen me do here. Put some lines in there. I might use these little triangular shape as some leaves, but I'll just make them a little bit bigger. Might have a multi stem here. These are all going to be slightly different. Some have four scallops, some have three. I might just do is colour these in for a different look. What I might do is leave two coloured in and two open. Need some little leaves on this and might do these half leaf shapes. They go particularly well with these stylized type of flowers. To do those, I just do a straight line and then do a curved one. This one, I'm going to put a circular shape. And then from the top draw lines in there, I'm curving these a little. On the top, make like a little crown shape. A little circle up there for the center. So just a simple four petal flower. Do that. Like a little heart shape. Bud shape there and a little bud shape here. And then coming off here, put a little leaf. Now I'm going to do a daisy. Circle in the center, go around and divide up the area with the petals. It's very difficult to keep them all a similar size unless you use a pencil to draw a circle to keep them in putting lines from the center vein to the outside on one side of the leaf only. I'm just going to show you a different way to do this. Put your center in, make some lines. Those lines can be encompassed by a petal. And then you can fill in any gaps like I'm doing here. You can just add wispy lines from the center. I like sometimes to put some dots in the center. This one, I think I might put spiky leaves. And a line in the middle. Let's make a stem and put some little side branches on it, add in some leaves. I like to add these little circle shapes in. They could be oranges, they could be flowers. Go back and decorate the leaves. You could do them in many different ways. 9. Flowers Part 2: This next one is a very loose, squiggly line, botanical. I do like drawing this one because it's easy to do. It's just a circle in the center with squiggly lines coming out. You can leave it at that, or you can add in shorter squiggly lines to fill in the gaps in between to give a fuller look. I like the idea of pointy leaves. Let's do a simple rose shape. You just make a spiral, put a petal either side to meet in the center. A couple of sepals on it, then put rose leaves. They do have a sawtooth edge or you can leave your leaves smooth. Roses usually have a bigger leaf at the top and the smaller ones underneath. Let's do a dangling down flower, like a trumpet shape or even a fuchsia shape. That might look something like this ruffles around. Three stamens. It could have little sepals and it might be hanging down off a stem. Another flower can be done with heart shapes like that, and you just keep building them out around and around, building your flower out. This is more like a ruffled carnation flower. And you can keep going and making it bigger if you like. I'm going to make a roundy bit here because carnations have that fat little bit at the bottom where the stem comes in. They have long narrow leaves on their stems that are separated out. I'm going to do scallops, again, a couple of stamens for each one. We'll add these little circles to look a little bit like buds. So rounded leaves. You can make these a little more interesting by adding a little shape or you can just leave them plain. The teardrop shape, a curved one off the side, and put another one.This has a very tulipy shape, so we're going to put tulipy leaves on this one. And to add some interest, a couple of lines down the center. This one is going to be a cup shaped flower. I'm going to add some zigzag shapes up here. I'm going to color in some dots. This one's going to have quite a few stamens. This bears no resemblance to anything in reality, but they can be fun to add into your work. I think a smaller leaf up here. The small circle, a smaller one underneath, three petals. Put one rounded shape in the middle. And on the side, bring one around a slightly curved stem. It reminds me a bit of an art deco style. My stem in. Put a circle in there, a five petal to start with. A, I'm wondering what would happen if I put points of leaves in here. Adding a little line. These kind of leaves and a couple of lines in them. Let's shade a couple in so we can see how that might look. This one's a fun one using circles, too. Tear drop shapes out to the side, on the top circle shape. And for leaves, I'm going to do them like that. Another variation on teardrop shaped petals. And again, variations on a circle. We'll do a long stem, little stem there with a circle on it, half circle in there. I can change them a little bit by putting in stamens. Here's our flowers all finished. You'll find a copy of this sheet in the PDF download I've made available for you under the resources tab. 10. Border Bases: I'm going to have a look at some simple lines that can be used to create borders. I'm going to turn my paper sideways. Now, you can use a ruler if you like. I prefer to free hand, add branching stems to come off. And on these, you would add your leaves, flowers, berries, seed pods, whatever botanical elements you're going to use. For example, you could add little leaves. In here, you could put in some extra little stems with berries, and you would just build on these lines as your base. Another version could be a curl, and you might add in a second curl where they overlap, you would add elements as well. This one has little leaves and build on your stem, whatever types of foliage you might like. I might put some little flowers in there. Another one is to do an undulating line, and then you can simply add in your branches, one on the convex side, one on the concave side. Or you can do like I have, fill it in with more. You can have them further space apart. And again, you would add in little elements on here. You can build on straight lines without branches by adding in leaves. You could go back and put daisy shapes in here. So you can build more simple border designs. Or you can step them up to be far more complex. Another one is to add in like this, and you would just keep going all the way to the end. And on here, you could add in leaf elements, flowers, whatever you fancy. Then there is just the plain undulation like this. And instead of having heavier stems, you could just put in your little leaf shapes. I call this a string of pearls. So you can do this. And you could turn those into little flowers like that. You can add in a simple leaf. Then you could miss one maybe and add in another one here, a daisy shape, putting in your leaves wherever you feel like they're needed, miss one, add another one, or you can turn these into little group of leaves. Lots of ways to do it. This could be curlies onto which you can add elements. So I could put little tiny leaves on these. So you start by building out your vine shape and then adding in your elements where you feel like they might be needed. You could just put in some larger leaves. Another one is to do, like, a looping, squiggling vine shape onto which you can add little leaf elements, cluster of berries, could be flowers. But you get the idea that some simple lines will get you started. 11. Borders Part 1: Now I'm going to show you some easy borders. The easiest of all is to work off a straight line. So we'll start with that. This is just going to be all leaves. I'll go along and add in some little stems where I think they might sit in nature. To begin with, if you just go down the stem and add in some lines, it gives you a place to come back and build on. You can start at the top or you can start at the bottom. There's no rules to this. These little leaf shapes are very effective, easy and fun to do. By varying the leaves, direction and size, you can give your border a bit more of a natural look. Some leaves can be smaller, some can be larger. So can go across the midline. Once you get the base down, go back and have a look and see what else you might like to do. I could go back in, and I could create the veins all the way to the ends of the leaves, like I have in some of them, or I can just leave it as it is, which creates a little more interest when you look at it. They don't have to be uniform. That's what I'm trying to tell you. The line I ruled initially is a bit thin for me, so I'm actually going to go back down it, but I'm not going to go directly on the line. I'm just going to wiggle it a little. It gives it a bit more of a natural look. This one will be a curly design. You may not meander as much as I did, but I like things to be a little quirky. I'm going to put these little berries in, I think, and add some simple leaves into this one. Continue up the stem, creating either leaves or berries, varying the size of the leaves and the direction of them. I've accidentally made a little line there, I will just put a little leaf at the end. You have to be a little inventive if you make a mistake. So I'm changing over to the 08 pen, which has a nice thick nib and will make it quicker. Less wear on my narrower nib pen. I feel like there should be one here and perhaps one little leaf there. Now, when you get to the end, you look back and see if there's anything else you would like to add. Next, we're going to use curved lines. I am just going to make individual sprigs that will look like they've joined up. I might do leaves that look a little bit like ivy and small berries. I like using berries because they add a bit of contrast. If I decide later that it needs highlighting, I would come back along with my white gel pen and just put dots in the middle of the berries. Now, you can see by filling in a little and by touching the previous stem. It now becomes more like one single stem. I could have left them separate like this so that they just look like interlocking sprigs, or you can join them up and make it look more like one continuous branch. You can do these designs exactly the same on each arch. I prefer to just wing it, and I do them as I go. I just try and join them with some element, like I just did there with a berry. If you bring out your elements a little bit, it becomes difficult to see where they merge together. To finish this off, bring in a leaf at the base, and add another one to the side like this, making an end to it. This one is a very easy one to do, and it is just these little rounded leaf shapes. You can keep them straight or you can tilt them a little upwards. You can tilt them downwards. And basically, what you're doing is just stacking them. You can make some slightly larger than others, and some can be smaller. You could actually start large down here and get smaller up the top. You can leave some gaps. You could change the angle, angle some so that they cross over other leaves, which will give them a more natural look. 12. Border Part 2: This is another one based on a straight line. I'm just going to put in some lines along here, and I'm going to put in some smaller ones. I'm going to do a longer, narrower leaf. It doesn't matter whether you start at the top or at the bottom with these. Just going to add in a couple of smaller leaves here. And I'm going to add some little flowers. These are just those little flowers you probably learnt to draw when you were in school. Just simple rounded petal edges with a filled in center. I find it easier if I draw the center in first and then run around it with the petals. I'm not even counting how many petals I'm putting on these. I'm just going for it. It's about the look, not so much the perfection. I can go back in now and add some others in just so that it's not so uniform, but I could have also left it neatly spaced out like that. I can add in little bud shapes, add in some sideways facing flowers. This is another easy one and a little bit like pine needles. Space out some lines either side. You can come back in and fill in in between if you want it thicker. I've gone a little crooked here, so I can just add in some more branches. This is quite a rustic country style looking border. If I wanted a more even edge on this, I could have ruled in with pencil some guidelines on either side. This one's another one based on a straight line. I'm going to go along and put these flower centers in. I'm going to try and space them reasonably evenly. If you wanted to have a perfectly spaced design, you'd go along and mark measurements so that they were all the same. And this is a daisy design. The easiest way for me to do a daisy is to go from the center and put the cross arms in and then fill in the spaces. So I'll go along and do the daisy part, and then I'll come back and put in some elements in between. The other trick with this is to try and keep them all a similar size. Not as easy as it sounds. You could use a circle as a guide. I do have a little ruler somewhere that has templates in it for different size circles, and I could have used that Okay. Now, what I want to do is put in a curvy line in between each one and then put these little lines to the end. And then I'm going to go the opposite direction this way. This is a cute little element to add in between. This one is a wiggly line. Very simple. Little rounded leaves, spaced out a little on the stem all the way down nice and easy beginner friendly, like little squashed oval shapes. Now I'm just going to go back and add in some little roundy things. I'll put them opposite each other and put little tips on them like that. Just place them wherever you feel it might look right. Just angle them slightly different. Point the little tips in different directions. You could vary that by creating open berry things and coloring in the leaves to give a different look. You could leave out the little berry things and just have the leaves on their own. You could add little flowers. Now, this one's just going to be a series of curves going one way and the other. My pen is getting very raggedy, but I will keep going with it. This one is a variation of this where you just put in these little Chevron or V shapes, little sticks either side. This is what I call a broken design, so it has gaps in it. With these type of designs, you can put something in between or either side of the convex and concave. It's just completely up to you. If you put them closer together, you'll get a different look. These ones are spaced out a little bit, or I could actually extend and bring them closer together like this. And you can see you get quite a different look. 13. Borders Part 3: I'm going to create some curl shapes. I'll do one going one way and do one the other way. Now, onto these, I will add a branch up there add these flower shapes with scalloped ends. I'll put one on the end here, too, I think. And it needs something else. I'm thinking I will add in leaf shape there, and I feel I should put a little dot on the end of that. What I think I'll do is mirror this That's a fairly simple border design as well. You could add to that. Instead of having them mirror each other, you could curl them one into the other. This is really simple. These are just leaves one after the other. All in a row, trying to keep them a similar size and a similar shape. And the fun comes with decorating them. I think it might be fun if I add extra lines on this side. So it has two different looks to it. Another simple one is to put two leaves together on a little branch, one larger than the other, and curve them opposite directions, another simple effective border, and you could actually add in, like, the odd flower, even just some berry dots, whatever you felt like. This one is another line design, but it's a broken one. I'm just going to put some branches off each one. I'm going to add onto these little branches. I'm just going to put these tiny little leaves. So that's another very simple design into which you could add little flowers where you could add them onto the ends of the stems, or you can simply leave it like that. You could create the leaves slightly bigger so that they have an open negative space in the center. I'm going to start with circle shapes and make these into daisy shaped flowers. Either side of them, I'm going to create this shape onto the tip. I'm going to put part of a daisy flower. I think we should have some dots in the center of the flower. These have lines through them like this. This is a more imaginative rather than a realistic design. If you darken the centers a little. It will help the daisy stand out a bit. 14. Frame Part 1: I'm going to show you how to draw a simple border frame. I've outlined on my page in pencil a rectangular frame. You can choose to fill in the space on the outside of where you've drawn your frame. You can use it as a guide and fill in around the inside of it, or you can use the line around it as the midline to follow with your design. I'm going to use this guideline as the midline for my design. I'm going to do a mixed floral border, little pieces of foliage and florals that are sitting next to each other rather than all joined together. When I do these, I usually start with an element in the center, and then I do one in each corner. I'm going to start in the center, and I'm going to put a stylized rose motif in there. I'm not measuring exactly. Sort of near enough is good enough for me. And this is a very stylized rose. I'm just going to fill it in until I feel like it's big enough. I'm using my 01 pen. It's the one I like to start with. I don't like to go too dark too quickly. And now I'm going to put in a couple of leaves. And another one on this side. So that's my central motif, and then I want to put something either side here. I'll put a stem like that. What I want to do is fairly simple style of flower, and I can think of one that is really easy. It is just a series of dashes to make a cup shape. Very simple to do. And then when I get to the top, I bring them into a bit more like a cone shape. And then I go back and just add in if there's any gaps I'm not happy with to make it look a little more full. And then around the sides, I'm going to put sort of a saw tooth shape as a leaf. Like that. Up the sides. I'll put in a couple of buds. One across there and one further down. These will be smaller and not fully open. The same little dashes, heading for that cone shape. Put the little dots at the top of it as simple as that. And I'm going to do the same here. These ones I won't put the leaves on because I want to keep them smaller. I like to mirror what I do with these sometimes, so that's what I'm going to do with this one. I can't guarantee it will be a perfect mirror image, but we'll give it a go. Usually, when they're not perfect mirror images, it's almost impossible to do that. You end up with the design so similar that nobody will notice if it's not a perfect match. Just put them in randomly. Try not to get them into very symmetrical lines, and then the saw toothed edge come back along the inside edge of it. I could make this a little bit more of a cone. And then these little ones here. I'm going to put petals almost a heart shape. I'm just going to put a couple of lines in where each dip is and put an extra line just around the center. I'm going to do the same over here. I might add something going that way. I can put these wispy shaped with little dots on the end. They're cute. It's a little bit like a eucalyptus blossom. I might put a foliage branch there and a foliage branch there. Let's do heart shapes, but bring the line right through the center. Now, I'm working my way towards the center, and I need some more fillers in here. So what I'm thinking is I might put another rose in here. And I'll put a leaf this way. This time I'll make the leaves slightly different. So rather than having the serrated edge, they just have the plain edge, and I'm going to do the same over here. And now, I've got a little gap here and a little gap here, and I need to decide whether I want to put anything in here or here. So the first thing I'm going to do is fill in in between here and then I can see how it looks and what I might like to do. I'm thinking maybe a daisy flower. I'll do my usual and put four arms on to begin with. Then fill in the gaps. And I think I might like a dark center in this, so I'm going to color that in, and then I'll do the same over here. There's a little space in here, which I think I might put something in something tiny, something like that. And I think I'll color those in. It's almost like a little clover leaf. I could put one up here. So although I'm mirroring, there is scope to change it slightly. It doesn't have to perfectly mirror each side as long as it's similar enough. Now, there's a little gap here, one here, one here. Just a couple of tiny flowers similar to this one. That just fills those holes up. I feel like I need something here. So what I might do is put in another one of these. I quite like the way that looks. That fills that in fairly well. And I've got a nice bit of contrast happening there with a few dark elements. Now, the trick is to repeat that across the other end. I don't do the side bits yet because they may be a little bit different to what I've put here and here. 15. Frame Part 2: This is where it does get a bit tricky. I use a ruler, find the edge and measure it 6.5 centimetres to the center. Make a little mark there. Put the central rose in first. And I'm just going to continue on now. 16. Frame Part 3: For the next part of the frame, the side pieces, I'm going to measure to the center and then decide what element I want to put in the center. And then I'll do the same as I've done here and here, and I'll just fill them in either side. Make a mark about where the center is. And that'll give me a guide. To work from. Now that I've filled it all in, I just go along and have a look and see if I'm happy or if there's any little spaces I want to fill in. I look at it from all directions and also holding it up a little so I can see it just to see if there's anything that needs filling in. Maybe an extra little leaf here and there. At this stage, I'm not worried about making a mirrored image. I just go in and fill up any little gaps. And I'm going to leave that there. 17. Bonus Coloured Borders: Introducing color can be fun when you're drawing botanicals. I use a mixture of supplies for this. It can be done purely with fine liners. Or if your like me, sometimes I like to draw with colored pencils. And sometimes I just like to use a little bit of watercolor a dab here and there on a black and white design. In front of me, I've got a couple of sheets with examples of colored botanicals. This one here is all done with fine liner pens, and this one. This one I've introduced a little jelly roll and some colored pencil and some fine liner. This and this one's purely colored pencil. Frames can be fun to do by ruling a few lines into a shape on the page. I did this just as an example sheet for myself. I keep it in my inspiration folder. This one is border designs done with mostly fine liner. These two are done with colored pencil. I'm just going to show you a design done in fine liner color. I've ruled a line. And I have a selection of pens here. I thought I would go with a blue, green color scheme. I'm going to start with a darker color, and I'm just going to put in some curved lines. I'm going to go one way and then the other. The hardest part is trying to keep your shapes uniform. I've made that one a little bit higher, but it won't matter. To begin with, I'm just going to put in some leaves, and I'm just trying to balance out the design either side. Here I'm going to interlock. This one, I'm going to put solid leaves on. I'm aiming for a little contrast between this type of branch and this one. Now, what I'm going to do is just add those curved lines in down here, so I know where I'm going with this design. You can try and make them exactly the same, if you like. I sort of look at it, but I don't worry too much. When you're finished, it's all going to look quite cohesive, whether you're exactly the same, or it differs a little. I want to see what these leaves look like if I color them in with a contrasting color. I do like to use different colors in my colored work. I mean, blue leaves. You don't really see those every day, do you? But I like to push the envelope a little bit. I like to see things a little bit quirky, a little bit different. I would like something a little delicate in here. I'll put a little branch of berries in, so I could add the berry branch where I have only got one fern branch. I would like something here. I'm just going to put a little curved line in there and put in something a little more delicate. I think I will add one of those here as well. Let's see what these look like. Colour it in with this lighter blue. Sometimes, when you're using these markers, the ink will bleed from one into the other, so it may turn far more blue than what I was expecting. It's all part of the fun. I might put in some really wispy element up here. I'm going to add in a couple of these little stems. I might like some little flowers. One over here. And maybe one in here. Because I have a bit of that green color there, I feel like I need to add some in down here as well. I've got to the end of one section there, and I'm just going to keep building on that now so you can see how it turns out in the end. I hope you've enjoyed this bonus video and that you'll consider playing with some color in your botanical line art. It can be a fun alternative to just doing black and white designs. 18. My Journal : I wanted to show you my journal that I keep on the couch beside me of an evening when I'm sitting watching television with my family. I like to doodle, and I keep this journal. It's not full of masterpieces. It is very scrappy, but this is my place for working out designs and testing out different ideas that I have. I've been working in this journal for a couple of months now. These are larger elements. I was testing out some fern type leaves and some little branches. A little frame design, playing with color. I got some new pens and I was testing them out. Some funky leaf designs. Not everything you try comes out the way you would imagine. Sometimes there's failures. I don't like this and I don't like this. But that's what this journal is for. To test out things and see how they work. A border design. Some flower practice. I don't like this. And I'm not so keen on this. But it's all about exploring. This is a Dutch door. So I drew a border, and then I cut the edge. These designs are often used in bullet journals. Then you would just turn the page and write in here, I have put in some colored paper so that the design shows up. Another design for a larger border that would work as a Dutch door. And again, another one. This was my Dutch door phase. Some little borders. This one is a more modern style of border, very whimsical and nothing like anything in reality. This one I was playing with some swirly shapes, and then I put in the cup shapes. Because I'd been working on cups here. I liked that swirly shape with the leaves, so it's appeared again, and I tested out some color on the leaves. Now, I did make a point of saying, Look out for strike through. That's what's happened here. So it's a good idea to test your pens in your play journal first before you work on anything that's important to you. I was just testing out a split border to see how it might work in a bullet journal. Some more easy borders, some more funky leaves. I wanted to try out some banana leaves, and then I wanted to see what I could put with them. Some strawberries, mushrooms, more mushrooms and more mushrooms, split borders. These are just some frames. I sat down one night and drew shapes on the page and then turned them into frames. I had a lot of fun doing that. With frames, you can write something in them if you want to, or you can just leave them plain as a decoration. Just testing out a wreath design, and then I put my initial in there. I was testing out a gold marker pen. More leaf designs. Page on building flowers. I was just jotting down. The steps involved in putting together some flowers. This circle one is a good one for flowers that grow in a ball shape. I drew this after looking at my snowball tree when it was in bloom. And, of course, if you do this, the circles are done in pencil, same as here where you are filling a cup shape or a circle shape. Then you can erase them afterwards. Some more leaf practice. Some wreath shapes. This page, I was just sitting down watching Telly and squiggling on it, and I just filled the whole page with little bits of ideas. And I must have been tired because I put the wrong year. It is currently 2025. Some twisted or curled leaf practice. I made a mistake up here and had to use the white posca pen. It twisted the wrong way. So I had to fix it. This is a really good exercise to build your skills with twisted leaves. So I sat down and tried to think of all the different ways I've seen leaves twist and then attempted to draw them. This one was just a really simple idea I had. The idea came from seeing a cherry blossom photo. But instead of putting blossoms, I just put little dots. It could be used as a full border around a whole page, just down one side, down one side across the top or flip it and do it to the bottom. And that brings us up to the last page here that I have done in this book. And this was where I had been doodling on loose bits of paper, so I cut out all the little things that I liked and stuck them in my book. I hope looking through my journal has been helpful for you. As I said at the start, it's not filled with masterpieces. It is purely a place for me to play and test out ideas. 19. Final Thoughts: I wanted to say a big heartfelt thank you to you for participating in the class. I hope you had fun doodling botanical borders and frames and that you feel inspired to go on and create more borders and frames. Please don't forget to upload your project photos. I so look forward to seeing everybody's lovely designs, and I know that we all draw inspiration from each other. If you enjoyed the class, please go ahead and leave me a review. I love to hear your feedback, and it's also helpful for other students. If you would like to doodle more frames and borders, I'm releasing a second class soon. It's Botanical Borders Part two. In the second class, I'll be teaching more complex designs. Or if you're looking for something to do in the meantime and you like patterns, why not check out my fine liner pattern library class? You'll find the link on my Skillshare homepage. If you like my teaching style and are interested in taking other classes, please follow me on Skillshare for updates on new classes. If you upload your art to Instagram, please tag me @brunybear Once again, thank you so much for taking this class, and I look forward to seeing you in the classroom soon.