How to Draw a Rose

Roses are one of the most beautiful flowers, but they're also quite difficult to draw because of all these layers of petals. However, there's a technique that can allow you to draw a rose from scratch without copying any photo reference. This is Monika Zagrobelna, and here's a video tutorial on how to draw a rose, where I'll show you this technique step by step. If you find it too fast, though, you can find a written version of this tutorial on Envato Tuts+. Check out the description for the link. Before we start, you need to prepare your tools. I'm going to draw digitally, but this technique is universal and will work perfectly with pencils as well. If you draw traditionally, you'll need a sheet of paper and a few pencils. A hard one for sketching, it can be just a normal RGB pencil, and two softer ones. Soft pencils are the most important tool in traditional drawing because they allow you to draw dark shades without making the graphite shiny from pressing the pencil too strongly. And for such professional tools, they're also quite cheap and can be found in most stationery shops. But if you can't get them at the moment, you can still follow this tutorial to draw a rose without shading. You may also need some other basic tools, like a pencil sharpener or an eraser. So let's start drawing. First, we need to draw some guidelines, so make sure to draw them lightly, barely touching the paper, to be able to erase them later. I'll draw my lines dark so that you could see them better, but yours should be much lighter. Draw an egg shape. This will be the inner bud of the rose. Don't worry if you can't make it perfectly egg-shaped. These first lines are here just for you, and nobody will see them in the end. Draw a horizontal oval on top. This is the opening of the bud. This should help you see the whole shape as something 3D. Draw a small petal inside, close to the border. Then draw a spiral inside and connect it to the lower border of the oval. These are our first tightly curved petals of the rose. Now draw a heart shape around the opening. These lines will mark the edges of the next layer of petals. Draw another, bigger heart shape around the previous one for one more layer. These petals are big enough to curve a little outwards. Draw lines on the imagined surface to mark their 3D shape. Before we go any further, accentuate the important lines of this little bud to not lose them among all these guidelines that we'll be drawing in a moment. Still, don't press too hard, because it's still too early to decide which of these lines will be the final lines. Now back to drawing the other petals. From now on, each layer will be wider, more open, going around this inner bud. So draw three curves around the bud, not too far from it, because this part is not fully open yet. Draw the lines on the surface to better see their shape. These petals can curve quite visibly, so make sure to bend your lines on top. When you connect the lines, the shape of a curved petal should appear automatically. The next step is just a modified version of the previous one. Again, draw the curves around the petals, this time slightly further. Mark their shape with some curved guidelines, this time starting lower and bending them even more, and outline the shape of the whole petal. These petals should be visibly larger than the previous ones. Time for another layer. Again, draw big curves around the petals and add the guidelines along the surface. These petals should begin much lower, and the bending part should be longer. This is because these petals are supposed to be larger and more open. It's quite easy to draw the petals bending to the sides, but it's not realistic to draw them always in this position. Time to add a petal that will bend towards us, the viewers. Because of perspective, mainly the curved part should be visible here. Finally, draw the last layer on the very bottom. This layer will be very open, almost horizontal, so the petals should be almost flat outside of the curved part. Because they're mostly covered by the other petals, you can simply guess their shape using the others as a reference. So we're done with the guidelines, but the drawing looks like a mess of lines, and can be hard to interpret by the viewer. We need to clean it up a little. Sharpen your pencil and draw over the lines that you want to keep, this time pressing harder to make them visible. If you don't plan to shade it, you can draw with thick lines, or even use ink to mark these lines, so that they will be more visible after you erase the redundant parts. However, if you want to create a fully shaded drawing, make these lines accentuated but still thin and not too pronounced. This will give you a better control over the shading later, and keep the rose from looking like an illustration from a coloring book. Remember to take your time here. These lines are final and should not be corrected. Make sure you know what you're outlining before you press your pencil to the paper. If you're not sure where some petal starts and ends, draw another one first and see if the puzzle solves itself. When you're done, you can use the eraser to make the guidelines less visible. If you're drawing digitally, keep your lines on a separate layer to simply delete the guidelines later. You can use any drawing brush. I used a brush simulating a pencil to shade the rose in a traditional way. If you just wanted to draw a rose, congratulations, you're done. But if you have some soft pencils, I'll show you how you can shade the rose to make it more realistic. First, take your normal sketching pencil. Imagine which parts of the petals are blocked from the light coming from the outside, and fill these parts with gray. You can use a lot of hatching lines or tilt your pencil to draw with the side of it. Regardless of what method you use, keep your pencil well sharpened all the time to keep the strokes consistent. If necessary, you can press a little harder to mark the areas that need even more shadow. Keep the curved parts of the petals white. Take a softer pencil now. Use it to add shadows to the areas that get even less light from the outside. This will help you add some contrast and separate the petals in the shadow. You should use this dark shade more sparingly. Draw it only where there's already the lighter shadow, and always blend these two shadows either with hatching or by tilting the pencil. This shadow should take about 50% of the area of the previous shadow. The rose petals are thin, but they're not too deep. They have some subtle edge, and if you mark it, you'll make the whole drawing more convincing. Use the same pencil as previously to darken parts of the edges. Don't draw an outline of the petals, but rather accentuate parts of it. If you don't trust your intuition, use my drawing as a reference. Of course, if you don't like this effect, you can leave it out. It's more of a stylistic choice rather than something necessary. Now take your hard pencil again. Use it to draw a subtle texture over the white parts of the petals. Don't draw any plain shadows, but rather draw lines that accentuate the curvature of the surface. You can also subtly shade the edges of the petals to give some visual justification for the outlines. In reality, lines don't exist on their own. They're always made by contrast. So if you want to make this drawing more realistic, you need to either add some shade in the petals or some shadow behind them. If you end up adding too much shadow on these bright parts of the petals, losing some contrast in the process, you can still use the eraser and draw some light with it. The drawing is basically done, but it can be improved a little more yet. If you have an even softer pencil, use it to darken the tightest crevices in the rows. This one more level of shadows will deepen the contrast if you do it properly. You should add this shadow very, very sparingly, maybe at about 10% of the whole shadow area. Keep your pencil well sharpened to blend the shadows in a subtle way. And that's all. I hope I helped you understand how to draw beautiful rows from scratch, either traditionally or digitally. If you enjoyed this tutorial, please share and subscribe. This was Monika Zagrobelna for Envato Tuts+, thanks for watching.