Draw a Rose From Life With This Simple Formula | SHORTS

1. Introduction: Hi, my name is Jenna Lo I'm a watercolor landscape nature artist and sketcher. In this short class, I'm going to show you how to draw a rose from life and give you a simple formula that you can use to draw almost any flower. Let's get started. 2. Draw the Outline: The first thing you're gonna need to do is draw the outline. Start with a light pencil like an HB or a 2H I'm drawing this to scale, which means that it is exactly the same size as it appears. The size of this rose is pretty much a perfect circle. That means that the height and the width are the same. I draw out a circle, and then after that I draw the center. Now I need to make sure that the center is correct because I'm going to use the center as a reference to map out all the other petals. Now what I'm doing is lightly mapping out where each petal should be, each petal that I draw, becomes a reference for the next petal. Make sure that you go in one direction so that you don't get confused about which petal your drawing. I'm not really worried about the small details, but I'm just thinking about the size and the placement. Some questions I'm asking myself as I'm mapping out these petals. Is this petal bigger or smaller? Does petal A connect to petal B, A usually being the one that I've drawn last and B being the one that I'm currently drawing. Other questions I will ask myself. Does this petal connect to the one that I've drawn or do I need to draw another one before I can connect it? Once you finish your general outline, take a look at the rose and then take a look at your drawing and make sure that everything is where it's supposed to be. But the great thing about drawing flowers is that although they have a pattern, they make some pretty unique shapes. So if you have a few mistakes, it's not really a big deal. 3. Contour Drawing the Petal's Details: Now that the general outline is done, we're going to use contour drawing to draw the petals details. Wait, what is contour drawing? Drawing exactly what your eye is seeing. So your eye tells your pencil where to go. You're gonna go back and forth between your subject and your pencil and make sure that you're drawing every single turn and twist so that you get all those little tiny details. You can use the same pencil, but I did not have any eraser, so I move to a to B pencil. At this stage we're still drawing the outline, but starting to draw all those little tiny details that make each petal so unique. The cool thing about having already mapped out where each petal is, we don't need to spend time thinking which petal am I drawing? Because we've already mapped out where the petals are placed. You can even see that I've made a mistake with the outline and I had to go over it. That's something that you are going to be doing at each stage. The more you look at an object, the more you will see the little things that you missed. 4. Fill out the petals: Moving on to stage three, this is the fun part because we're going to start filling in the details of the petals and following the form. First I need to draw out the center. And it's just a bunch of squiggly lines with dots at the end. I don't worry too much about where each line is placed. I just fill up the center. Then now I move on to the HB and start drawing out the lines rather softly to show where the petals bend and curve. Now you might be wondering, which direction should I draw these lines? Well, just follow the form. The form will tell you. At this stage, I'm looking at each petal and thinking, where are the darks and where are the lights. But I'm not really worried about drawing any shadows or anything. I'm just trying to fill in the information of where each petal is catching the light. I leave some areas out because that's where the light is. And I'm also following the outline and following the form. Now you can see each petal start to take more of a shape. For this petal. It's a little bit wider, so I start using horizontal and vertical lines to show that it's a bit broader, but still using the lines that show that the petal is curving and gravity is pulling it down. Okay, this is gonna take a little bit of time. So let's roll music. 5. Final Details: Let's add the final details as a whole. In the first three stages, I was really focused on each petal and how each petal looked. But now we need to put it all together and think of the rose as a whole. Now, I'm using the four B pencil because what I want to do is sort of tie it all together by looking at some of the larger shadows that are being created on the entire flower. And just adding in a little bit of contrast. That's why I'm using a darker pencil. Some areas in the middle where all the petals are connected to. And then also as the day went on, the sun started to change. So it started to create some of these darker, long shadows, which you'll start to see me put in now. To be honest, I felt like I went a little bit too dark with some of the shadows and it's sort of lost its light area. Perhaps next time I wouldn't use a Forbes to create the shadows. I would probably just stick to the tube and use a bit more pressure to make it a little bit darker. By doing this and putting down the final touches, you can really start to see the rows come together as a whole. Hope you enjoyed this and it was simple and easy to follow along. Thank you for joining me. If you want more classes, please go to my profile and follow my page. You will see all the classes that I've put out on watercolor and sketching.