Watercolor: Florals & Botanicals

Beginning with the Basics

with Joan Hansen

IMAGINE WALKING down a garden path and gazing at a mass of brilliant color and sunlight glistening on beautiful flowers in bloom. As the fragrance fills the air, you wonder how you can make this moment last forever. By painting a floral image in watercolor! once you’ve learned to see the basic shapes of a flower, you’ll be able to draw and paint any flower you like.

Focusing on Shapes

Every flower, leaf, and stem can be broken down into a few basic shapes: circles, rectangles, squares, and triangles. To draw any flower’s shape, I simply draw the petals’ outlines within those basic shapes, as I did with the circular daisy shown below. And I keep in mind that all the petals always radiate from the center. ...