Acrylic Painting - Step by Step : Floral Series

Hi all. It's our pleasure to make our First Blog post on the Floral Series : Acrylic Painting Step by Step Tutorial.

So lets begin !

Creativity to take a new road, so keep your Colours on!!!

This tutorial is given step by step, so any novice person can do this Floral series by yourself. We have sticked to 5 colours : Orange, Red, Yellow, Black & White. But it’s upto you to choose your combinations for the background and the flowers accordingly.

Materials Required :

1. 20 minutes of your time

2. Stretched Canvas Board

3. Acrylic Colours : Orange, Red, Yellow, Black & White

4. Nylon Brush - Size 22

5. Palette Knife

6. Sponge

7. Palette

8. Varnish

9. Water and a waste cloth

10. Newspapers

Step 1 : Setting up

To keep the area tidy, spread the Newspaper on a flat area and place the canvas on it.

Step 2 : Preparing the Background

                Take 4 acrylic colours : Orange, Red, Yellow, White and squeeze the paint on the canvas as shown in the picture below. Then use the sponge to dab the colours and mix it thoroughly. Importantly Note : No water is used for dabbing.

                Keep dabbing quickly and cover the whole canvas. If the paint is not sufficient, squeeze the same 4 colours randomly and continue dabbing.

                Usually after dabbing, you can choose which area can occupy the Top & bottom part respectively. Here,  the canvas is rotated to keep the attraction of red and white to the center, so the flowers can be more bright.

Step 3 : Loading the Brush.

                It is always important as how much paint you load on to a brush, since the strokes depends on that. For this, yellow is loaded at the tip, then orange is just touched (sometimes with a tint of red, to add the bling to the colours), so now the strokes have to be given. (Have not used water for dilution). Red should be used for highlights.

Step 4: Painting the Base of the Flowers

Note : The flowers are numbered so you can refer to which flower is being demonstrated now.

            

Initially all the Flower’s base are completed together.

                For the 1^st Flower, start as shown in the picture below : For each petal, the brush has to be loaded as shown in Step 3.

With Yellow & Orange loading & with a tint of red, start the first petal with the stroke from top and slide to the bottom; then for the second petal, start closely to the first petal and curve it down. For the third petal onto the left, start with the same procedure from top to bottom but it should be slightly away from the first petal and the curve should be a nice bend. Similarly draw the extreme right petal and complete the base of the first flower. Now give Red Highlights in the same fashion, but it should not be dominating the other 2 colours.

Now, the 2^nd flower should be planned accordingly and should be below the 1^st flower onto the right, and it is completed with the same procedure.

To the left of the 2^nd flower and to the left bottom of the 1^st flower, third flower should be completed as shown below:

4^th Flower is on the complete right side of the canvas, and you can see, where my brush is kept for the petal’s first stroke.

To make the 4^th flower comparatively big, 5 petals are painted for the base as shown in the picture below :

What about a bud in the garden ? Should’nt we plan one? Then here it goes… The 5^th flower is a bud just below the 4^th flower and it has 2 normal curved strokes as shown in the above flowers for the centre and onto to the left of it, paint a horizontal stroke, to show that the flower has started to bloom.

Always in any painting, it is necessary to have some dominating flowers either with colour strokes or with a size or both. So, here for the 6^th flower, it is gonna be big again and below the 4^th & 5^th flowers.

If you think, that the picture is complete with the flowers, don’t consider the 7^th flower which is drawn in this painting. The location alone is shown, as where to start the 7^th flower.

Step 5: Highlighting of the base petals

For all the flowers, highlight with a stroke of yellow to make it more intense wherever necessary and then with red highlights to make the painting look vibrant.

Step 6 : Second Layer of petals

For the 1^st flower, start from the left, from the mid of the first base petal, with a curved stroke at the top and bring it down with a curve as shown in the picture below. Then, from the right side, do the next petal.

Similarly do for all the flowers :

2^nd Flower :

3^rd Flower :

4^th Flower : For the 4^th flower alone, 3 second layers petals are painted as shown in the pic below:

6^th Flower :

Step 7 : Tint of Blackish maroon highlights to the edges of certain petals.

Now load the brush with Red and black mix and give a stroke on the palette and check, whether you have got the right colour mixture, then apply to areas, where you feel it is certain to have a darker shade to give a 3D effect to the Flower. Below picture shows the highlights for all the flowers.

Step 8 : Stem

Now comes the stem part to the painting! Load the brush with black paint at the tip alone. Here Flat Synthetic Brush is used, but if you are a beginner than 000 brush can be used for drawing the stem. The stem has to start typically from the base of the flower and should be brought downwards with a slight curve and irregular textures, to make it look more beautiful.

Make it a point, not to draw straight lines, as it won’t give a natural look to it, but it will be like a monotonous and a usual painting.

After this, you can wash the brush with water and dry it with a waste cloth. Since from now on, Palette Knife will be used.

Step 9 : Leaves

Here we can make darker and lighter leaves to make it look different. For the leaves, a Palette knife is preferred to a brush, to give a good texture to the painting. Palette Knife is loaded at the tip with Black Acrylic paint and the leaves are painted from bottom to the top. Don’t fill it with black completely, leave it quite abrupt, so it might be looking beautiful.

For the lighter leaves, in the same way proceed with it, but with very little paint on the  Knife.

Now the complete base part can be seen with the darker n lighter leaves.

(If you don’t have a Palette Knife, use the brush itself for painting)

Step 10 : Time for the beautiful Pollens J J J Jus’ <3 them.

Load the Palette Knife with Black Acrylics to give a random effect for base of the pollens.

After, completion, it looks like the picture below :

It is necessary to make a pollen spray for the flowers and to the surroundings, to make it look natural. Take Black Acrylic paint onto the palette and use more water to dilute it. Load the brush with watery Black Acrylic paint and practice to rub the brush onto the rough paper to check,whether u get the spray correctly. (Sometimes, the dots can become big and can spoil the painting, so practice before you make one.) Then spray it near the pollen grains black part and randomly on the sides. It will look like the pic below :

To highlight the pollen grains, keep 4-5 dots of white paints on the black part of the pollen area.

Finally sign your name and leave it for a day and then varnish it for protection. J

The closer snapshots of the paintings to show the details :

Finally, here is the Painting !!!

HOPE TO SEE YOU HAPPY WITH THIS TUTORIAL.WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR? Do u have the LIKE colour tone acrylic paints, a canvas board,a flat brush? Then START and send us the feedback !  If it has helped you and if you think it is worth it, then please do comment here and do LIKE us on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/GoldenTreesArtByVikashini and follow us on Twitter J https://twitter.com/GoldenTrees2013 ...LOVE TO SEE YOU !!! 

Cheers from GOLDEN TREES CREATIONS J J J

 (We would say it was rather easy to shoot a video to demonstrate to all, then to make clips and post it here. But in the long run, Video tutorials will be available from us :) Sorry for the picture quality, managed to take with the Handy while painting, & believe me it is tough to manage the Phone with a messy hand ;) )