Watercolor. Tulips in watercolor in stages

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

Flowers always cheer up, give smiles and positive emotions. Due to their variety of colors, they look great as elements of landscape and interior design. However, it is far from always possible to use fresh flowers, such as tulips, to decorate a room. In this case, they can always be depicted on paper, for example, using watercolor. Tulips can be drawn in this case with a simple pencil and brushes. How to do it step by step?

Which is better to draw: from life or improvise?

Before proceeding to the main stage of painting with paints, decide for yourself whether it will be a drawing from life or you would prefer to come up with your own flower arrangement. Accordingly, in the first case, you need to purchase or pick a bouquet of tulips in advance, put them in a vase and create an interesting drapery. For this purpose, you can use a beautiful piece of fabric, a neckerchief, a towel, etc., set the vase in a suitable place and start sketching.

If you plan to draw tulips in watercolor arbitrarily, for clarity, you can find their image on postcards and photographs. In thatIn this case, you will only need to place a sample picture close to you and start sketching it on a piece of paper.

What tools do I need to draw?

Ready to create an artistic masterpiece? Then for drawing you will need the following tools:

• blank landscape sheet (you can also use professional watercolor paper);
• drawing board or any hard surface (table, book, folder);
• well-sharpened pencil and eraser;
• brushes (ideally round brushes 2, 3 and 5).

After you have all this at your fingertips, you can start painting tulips in watercolor. How to do it?

Step 1: make a pencil sketch

Take a sheet of paper and attach it to a piece of wood or place it on any hard surface. Next, take a simple pencil and eraser. The next step is to create a pencil sketch. To do this, barely pressing on the pencil, select the upper and lower plane of the sheet, the middle.

Suppose you will paint tulips in watercolor. In this case, the flowers will be in a beautiful vase. So, first choose a place on the sheet where it will be located. Measure the approximate place for the vessel and flowers. Next, draw a large oval in place of the vase, draw several curved lines from it (these will be tulip stems), draw circles (or ovals) on each of them and draw two lines for the leaves.

Step 2: Shaping the Pencil Sketch

Beforedraw tulips in watercolor, let's give them more understandable shapes. To do this, we will work on each element of the picture separately. Let's start with the vase. At the first stage, we divide our empty oval in half vertically and horizontally. Then outline the top and bottom.

At the next stage, draw three horizontal ovals with a pencil: on top, in the middle of the vase and near its bottom. In this case, you should pay attention to the dimensions of your vase: whether it has a thin or thick and wide neck, expands or narrows downwards. We take as a basis a standard vase with a narrow neck. How to draw tulips in watercolor, we will tell further.

Draw two lines from the base of the upper oval (one on each side). We connect them together, forming a kind of acute angle. Inside it, draw another small flat oval. At the same time, do not forget that all unnecessary lines will be erased, so you do not need to press too hard and direct. The same applies to the sharp corner and ovals, which will be eliminated when you form the neck of our future vase.

Tulips in watercolor step by step: draw the middle and bottom of the vase

The next step is to draw the middle and bottom of the vase. To do this, we return to our oval in the neck area and from it we draw two gracefully curved lines to another oval located in the middle of the vase, and from it downwards the vessel.

In this case, we should get something similar to a heart, but without a notch in the middle and a too narrowed sharp corner from below. Now it remains only to draw the contours of the vase and erase the extra auxiliary lines with an eraser.

Step 3: draw tulips with a pencil

After the full-fledged sketch of the vase is ready, you can start drawing the tulips themselves. Suppose you plan to draw 5-7 flowers. In this case, they do not have to be of the same type. You can draw, for example, several opened and a couple of closed buds. If you make such a variety in your picture, you will get very realistic tulips. The watercolor will only emphasize their shape and color.

So, if this is a bud, then our oval is slightly narrowed down and pulled up with a pencil. On both sides, draw stripes along the entire bud and erase the extra lines. If your flower is open, then each petal will need to be worked on individually.

Attention! When creating drawings of tulips in watercolor, pay attention to the varieties of flowers depicted. For example, some species have six petals, and they are arranged in two layers. Others have five and all have only one layer.

Start drawing petals from the axis of symmetry located in the middle of each of them. Draw a similar axis in our oval, “pull out” it (as in the case of the aforementioned bud) and remove the excess. From the top of the oval, draw a small line (approximately 1-1.5 cm long) up.

Mentally divide the resulting drawing in its horizontal plane in half, put on both sides at a barely noticeable point, first place a pencil in one of them and draw an arcuate strip tothe end of the elongated strip coming from the top of the first oval, then repeat the same on the other side. You should get a small oval within a large oval. Then we draw incomplete petals, which are hidden behind the two main ones. One flower is ready. Draw the rest in the same way. Next, we just have to draw the stems and leaves and get the watercolor. Don't forget to circle the tulips. This will help in the future when coloring.

And remember, your flowers shouldn't be too big as they will look unnatural.

Step 4: draw the stems and leaves of tulips

The next step is to draw the stems. To do this, draw clear lines, starting from the base of the neck of the vase and ending with the bottom of the tulips. Draw additional lines from the stems. These will be the leaves. In the middle of each of them draw a vertical strip. Point everything with a pencil. And finally, let's move on to painting the resulting sketch.

Step 5: coloring the drawing with paints

To do this, take paints, brushes and draw water into a jar, cup or any other container. Then you need to determine the lightest places in the picture and the darkest. You should start painting the picture with light colors. They need to be painted over with light green (buds and petals) and light pink (leaves). Look at the picture. Pay attention to those places where there will be dark areas (shadows).

Most often the shadow falls on the inside of the tulip petals. It is on them that pink and green color should be applied.two coats of paint. Next, the shadow areas need to be gradually darkened. To do this, first apply a bright red color to the inner parts of the petals, and then a darker burgundy. Yellow tulips first paint in yellow, and then draw red streaks. The leaves and the stem are drawn in the same way: where the shadow from the petals and neighboring flowers should fall on them, make it darker.

After the flowers, paint the vase, not forgetting its lighter and darker areas, and also make a suitable background. This is how tulips are painted in watercolor. Drawing them step by step is much easier and much more convenient. Now you know how to do it.