Important Tips For Beginners To Create Flower Art Paintings

Flowers are one of the prettiest creations of nature. They are refreshing and beautiful and seldom fail to catch viewers' eye. Artists over the centuries have captured their uniqueness through many flower art paintings and will continue doing so. Not just experienced artists, but also beginners have sometimes attempted to depict them on their canvas as well.

However, as beautiful as they appear, accurately painting them isn’t always the easiest. We have noticed the efforts artists put into creating floral artwork at our flower art competitions and would like to encourage it further. To keep up with the spirit, we are going to discuss some beginner-friendly tips to improve your painting of flowers. These tips will not only help novice artists get started, it will also help intermediary-level artists polish their art. 

Find the Right Inspiration

The first step to painting any still-life object is to find the right inspiration. You can either rummage through the internet for images or pick fresh flowers from a garden for your reference. If you want to assort a bunch, look for some variety in number and species of flowers. It adds more life to your composition and takes away from the monotony. 

Don’t Choose Too Many Colors

When you add too many colors to a composition, it sets off the balance of the painting. On the other hand, minimalist colors give it a unified look. To be able to choose the correct color scheme, some basic understanding of color theory will prove quite useful. It will help you select colors that complement each other and ignore the ones that can create a clash. The right set of colors enhances your painting and sets it in the right mood.

It also teaches you how to work with a minimal number of colors and save money on buying unnecessary shades. To make your choice easier, you can buy the three primary colors along with some white. Once you get accustomed, you can either mix them to create new colors or simply buy them.

Choose an Angle

For a flower art painting, just assorting a bunch of beautiful flowers is not enough. You will have to trim their ends, find a vase to place them, and then find the best angle to depict them. Remember, angle plays a crucial role in not just floral artwork but in any other painting to accentuate depth.

 Once you are set on an angle, you can add a lamp over your assortment to enhance the light and shadow effects. In the case of real flowers, don’t forget to click and print their pictures before they start withering. The pictures must be focused and taken from multiple angles so that you can refer to them whenever needed.

Decide the Paint You Want To Use

There are various types of paint available out there, but the trick is to find what works best for you. If you are a beginner, acrylic paint would be the best choice because it's easy to use and also affordable. Another good option is watercolors, but the playful nature of water can be tricky to master. 

Oil paints, on the other hand, can be a bit expensive to purchase and take very long to dry. However, it is easier to blend and the hues offered by oil colors are richer as compared to other paints.

Study Your Subject

To be able to improve your painting skills, it is imperative that you study your subjects well. It teaches you about its shapes, gives you a breakdown of its anatomy, and the best idea to portray it. 

The same goes for flower art paintings too. Observe the petals of the flowers you want to paint — note if they are long or short, wide or thin. Study the basic shape of those flowers so that you can depict them with more accuracy. A closer observation will also give you the capacity to identify the color families and make them on your own. This will also save you some money on buying extra colors.

Avoid Black Paint

If you observe nature closely, you will realize there is very little black in it. The darker hues are almost always the deeper tones of other colors. For example, if you see an aging red rose, its shadows are a result of red and green mixed together, and not black. These are complimentary colors that can cancel each other out upon mixing — creating a dark, black-like color.

Hence, instead of using black color in your flower art paintings, it’s best to use complementary tones to create shadow. It adds a naturally dark tone to your work instead of an absolute black thus giving it more depth. Additionally, when you mix different colors to create darker tones, the variances in the tone throughout the painting, also make it look more realistic.

Learn About Different Brushes

If you have been painting for a while, you would already know that every brush is made for a different purpose. Not just the bristles of the brush, even their girth, length, and tips are specifically designed for certain effects. 

When you are painting a larger surface, use bigger brushes. If you want to paint softer and more round edges, Filbert brushes are a good choice. If you are working on fine points, it's best to use large round brushes. Similarly, watercolors work better with hog bristle brushes, and badger or synthetic bristles are for acrylic painters. 

Do Not Paint Hard Edges

A very important point that most new floral artists forget is that there are no outlines in nature. Read it again — there are no outlines in nature!

Adding outlines or hard edges to a botanical artwork gives it an artificial appearance. Unless you are aiming for such a result, always avoid hard edges and outlines in floral paintings. To give it that realistic look, try painting your petals and leaves in a single brushstroke. You may find it challenging at first, but this is the ultimate trick to achieve that natural depiction. You can use other colors to add depth, but avoid outlining it. For starters, you can lightly mark the edges to guide you but erase them afterward.

Challenge Yourself to Create Better Flower Art Paintings

If you are serious about your artistic growth, it is imperative to keep challenging yourself. Start with small basic flowers to get accustomed to botanical art before moving to more complicated flower arrangements. Study the flower art paintings from the old masters to decode their skills and try to incorporate them into your work. Do not limit yourself to just flower arrangements in a vase, explore the genre to find the most creative floral paintings and the thought behind them. This can be a great exercise for you to improve your craft, expand your creative horizons, and master floral artistry.