Sunflower by Robert A. Sloan
Sunflowers are a classic flower to draw or paint, and the style of pen and ink with watercolor is an easy way to get dramatic results even as a beginner. It's like making your own coloring book page!
Instructions
1. Use your grid ruler and pencil to mark up a standard mat size or frame size for your painting. Suggested sizes: 2 1/2" x 3 1/2" for an ACEO, 4" x 6" for an OSWOA, 5" x 7", 8" x 10" or 9" x 12" -- all of those will fit standard mat and frame sizes except the tiny ACEO, and that will fit a wallet photo frame. Leave at least 1/4" margin on all sides to go under the mat, a larger border is preferable for two reasons. One, a big margin gives plenty of space to test color mixes, two, a big margin on a flat sheet or watercolor pad reduces buckling once large wet washes get applied.
Sketch your sunflower, copying my sketch or tracing it from a printout. Draw lightly so that the pencil lines can be easily erased. If you copy by eye rather than tracing, it can be very good practice for freehand drawing from live sunflowers. Seen at an angle, the center of the sunflower is a vertical oval, the petals radiate out from it evenly in all directions.
It doesn't matter if you get exactly the same number of petals or placement of them, but it does matter to have them all pointing outward from the center and about the same length. Some overlap other petals. Draw the top petals first, then fill in behind them with the others.
If you have trouble making the petals radiate properly, mark the exact center of the flower center with a dot and spin your ruler around it, drawing petals next to the ruler before you move it. This will line them up pointing in the right directions.
Draw a smaller oval within the oval center, off center closer to one side than the other. Draw the smallest oval within that. These are guidelines to show where the active pollen carrying ring will be. Sunflowers with ripe seeds have a different center that's very geometric. Accuracy in drawing a ripe sunflower needs a compass and some careful drafting that's a bit too advanced for this article. So we'll do a spring sunflower with a ring of pollen carrying structures in its center.
Add a thick stem proportional to the flower as I've drawn it, and leaves surrounding the flower. Sunflowers have a lot of leaves up near the top branching out of the main stem.
If this image is too faint to work from, sketch your sunflower from the next step's inked image where the lines are easier to follow. Just look at the way the center of this one is laid out, since we will darken the center with some inking in the next step.
My drawing was done from a reference in "Artist's Photo Reference: Flowers".
2. Using your Sakura Pigma Micron disposable technical pen, carefully draw over all the penciled lines except the ovals within the center. Because the sunflower's big stem is fuzzy, do that line more like a dotted line, jiggling it back and forth about one pen width and lifting the pen frequently to make little jagged marks. They don't need to completely connect, they just need to describe the line and make it look fuzzy. Practice on a piece of scrap paper before doing the fuzzy line until you can get it fuzzy without making it too heavy.
Outline the leaves with jagged edges because they have jagged edges, and fork some of the veins. Don't carry the veins all the way out to the edges, just put a few and fork some of them. On two folded leaves, don't make the underside jagged where the fold is, only where they're leaf edges should it be jagged. Outline each petal with a smooth stroke, again doing the top layer first and then filling in. It's okay to move some of them if your pen slips or you want to make a change.
Where the three concentric rings in the center of the sunflower fall (the arrangement is important) outline each ring with a jiggly open line of small squiggles. Then shade in the center of the smallest oval (within the pollen ring) just on the top and to the right with more small squiggles.
Fill in the outer area smoothly with small squiggle marks, like stippling but not so controlled. Go over the darker shadow areas at the left side of the pollen ring and under it a second time with little loose squiggles to create shadows. You now have a beautiful ink drawing of a sunflower! Put your initials or signature where my monogram is.
This looks more complicated than it is. If you take your time drawing each leaf and petal it'll come out great and the complexity hides any number of tiny errors like overlapped lines.
3. Carefully erase all your pencil marks. For one thing, this will show whether you missed any lines, but it'll also remove false lines where you moved a vein leaf or a petal. Erase thoroughly with a kneaded eraser or white vinyl eraser. Art gum erasers and normal pink erasers may leave crumbs that can stick to the paper and ruin your watercoloring, also, pink and other colored erasers can stain the paper by heavy erasing. I never use a pink eraser on any artwork because of the stains.
Brush away all crumbs even if it looks as if there are none. Use your pen to make tiny register marks outside the picture area if you are going to scan this to post it online, then you can also erase the penciled outlines of your picture area and they won't show through on the final art if your scan is just a hair off one direction or the other. Just draw over the overlap area leaving a sixteenth of an inch before touching the actual image area. Then when scanning, line up your scanner's dotted line for image area using the register marks and it will scan clean.
This scan shows the register marks so you can see what I mean by register marks. If you desire, you can also outline the entire picture. Use a ruler with a raised inking edge if you're going to draw outlines around the entire drawing, so that they come out clean and smooth. This may be the best image to copy for your penciling.
4. The pen we used, a Sakura Pigma Micron disposable technical pen, has waterproof India ink. Give your drawing ten or fifteen minutes to completely dry. Even though it dries quickly, you want to know it's thoroughly dry before adding any water.
While you wait, get out your watercolor set. Pan watercolors make it easy to use pure colors right from the pan. My choice for this project is the Sakura Pocket Sketch Box, which has a special nylon brush with water in the handle. It has a light lemon yellow, a bright warm (orangy) yellow, yellow ochre, a light green, a dark green, burnt sienna (reddish brown) and a dark brown. These are the colors we're going to use for the project, so if your watercolor set has all these colors you're ready to go. Squeeze a little out into your palette if you're using tube watercolors. The pocket water-handle brush in the Sakura set is pointy enough to get into the points of the petals, so that will work.
Start with light lemon yellow and paint in all of the petals in a group. Don't go outside the edges of the petal ring, but you can go over the inked lines between petals because watercolor is transparent and the Pigma Micron ink is completely waterproof.
Paint the outer ring of the center and the little center ring with Yellow Ochre. Paint the leaves and stems Light Yellow-Green. Use a little more water when painting the flipped-up undersides of the two folded leaves, so that they're lighter, and either do those first or wait till the leaves are dry before doing them.
Let these layers of paint dry completely. The key to changing colors and shading on this project is glazing. Glazing is applying more than one layer of transparent watercolor over another, so we start with the lightest colors and then detail with darker colors.
You can paint in the pollen ring with bright warm yellow (the darker yellow, orangy yellow) as well on this layer. We might be finished if you like this look, but the next step will add rich detailing and shading to make the flower look even more realistic.
5. Shade the leaves irregularly with the darker green, occasionally doing strokes to follow the veins. Leave some lighter areas for highlights. Thin the darker, bluer green and go over the pale underside of the leaves to make them look a little greener, but still pale. Shadow especially around the edges of petals, to create more contrast.
Shade the thick stem with a line of dark green down the left -- sunflowers turn to face the sun, so the direction the flower's not facing is the shadow side automatically.
Using Burnt Sienna, the reddish brown, shade the center. Fill the innermost circle with a layer of Burnt Sienna over the Yellow Ochre, pushing the bead of paint till it clumps up in the curving shadow area, tilt the art a little to let that dry but don't leave such a big bead of paint that it drips out. Speckle just a little Burnt Sienna over the bright golden pollen ring, to the bottom and the left side especially. Run a ring of Burnt Sienna around the edge of the entire center but leave some Yellow Ochre highlights at the top.
Let this shadowing dry completely before finishing by shading the petals and doing the deepest dark browns.
6. Using very dark brown or black mixed with reddish brown (my set didn't have the very dark brown, but it has black, so I mixed black with reddish brown) accent the very darkest parts of the shading. Don't use the dark brown too strong, just get a medium value dot when you test it on the borders. Let that dry completely, the next layer of shading is going to touch it and we need to avoid unpredictable wet into wet effects.
Using the fine point of your brush, take golden yellow (orangy, the darker yellow) and shadow the petals. Paint a fine line up the center of the front petals, or up the shadow side if they are top and bottom, not quite all the way to the top. Paint a little flick into the bottoms of secondary petals and randomly shadow some of the second and third row petals darker.
Let it dry completely and add details, sprinkle a few more Burnt Sienna dots into the pollen ring center if they blurred (mine did) and let that dry too. It's finished!
You can use this technique with any flower or subject that's too complicated to paint directly in watercolor. Drawing first and inking the lines of the drawing makes it a lot easier to get realistic detail, especially if you are better at drawing than painting. Shading with clear outlines to follow can be looser and less precise, and still look gorgeous.
