Cotton Flower: Step by Step Watercolor Tutorial

Hey guys, this is Nia and today I will be painting cotton plants. I love painting this one. I feel like cotton plants are so cute and fluffy and I really try to capture the texture in the painting and I hope you guys enjoy this one. So let's start off by drawing it out first as usual. The cotton plant is usually made out of either four or five cotton balls and while drawing this I tried to place them in a circular shape to form a flower shape but those cotton balls act like the petals and because those cotton balls are really fluffy I tried to make the shape of the cotton ball a little bit uneven but it's mostly rounded and full. As you probably noticed because when you get to the center everything is squeezed together so I tried to make the shape of the balls a little bit smaller as it gets to the center but at the same time I'm also trying to keep each of the cotton balls really nice and plump so everything still looks fluffy. I'm going to draw different angles now and you can practice this by just drawing out circles placed in an angle. I approach this differently than how I usually draw flower petals because those are usually flat whereas this time we're painting basically a spherical shape so I start with just an oval first but that will be the top face of the flower and when I draw the circles representing the cotton balls I go over that oval mark and draw below it so it gives more volume and when I'm painting angled cotton flowers I always like to start by drawing out the cotton ball that is closest to you and building up the rest behind it so you can tell which one is behind one another and that way you can build on the 3d round shapes too. At the bottom of the flower there are a few leaves holding it together and I'm going to be painting a dried version of the cotton plant so I want this area to look quite crisp and dry. I'm going to draw the plant from a low angle now so the leaves can be a little bit clearer for you to see and to draw the flower in a lower angle when you draw the cotton balls instead of adding more of the spherical shapes on top of the one closest to you. You can just shift the cotton balls a bit lower as it gets further away from you and you can show a little bit of the bottom area and once you've established the bottom I'm going to draw out the leaves in between the cotton balls and I'm going to randomize the shapes quite a bit and also making sharp but delicate edges to depict the dryness of the leaves for the buds. Once you've established the bottom of the flower you can also connect it to a stem so the perspective of the flower becomes a little bit clearer that you're painting it or drawing it out from the bottom or a low angle. You can also draw slightly angled flowers and for this the silhouette would still be a circle mostly but the cotton balls would overlap each other slightly and the center would also have a slight shift from the middle. These subtle angles also really help in the final composition later because playing with the different subtle angles as well as more dramatic ones and combining it together will help your painting look more natural and flowy. Try to draw more of these in different angles and see if you're getting used to it or not. If it's uncomfortable for you then I would probably recommend for you to draw an outline before painting very lightly but for this one because the colors that we're going to be using are quite light and I also want to create a soft fluffy texture with my painting later I personally prefer to not draw out a pencil outline first for at least the cotton part of the flower. Let's get to the branches and how you're basically going to bunch the flowers together. Like any other plants this plant is usually made out of one main branch or sometimes the main branch can have another long branch growing at the side of it but I'm just going to stick to one branch for the time being with smaller branches sticking out from each side. When you're painting it or trying to plan out the composition though try to make sure that the branch isn't completely straight up like the first one that I drew out. Instead you can tilt it slightly in certain areas to make some parts jagged and textured so it doesn't look so rigid and to simplify the flowers just to get the composition down quickly you want to just draw it as circles to represent the flowers and also maybe a little dot if you would like to plan out where the flowers are also facing. I forgot to also go over the leaves if you would like to you can also add some leaves for additional elements and detail to the flower. I personally like including them because it brings a little bit more interest to the painting rather than just looking at the flowers itself. These leaves have three points and they're pretty simple but because I'm drawing them dry or a dried version of the flower I want the leaves to also look dry so I will draw them out a little bit wilting so they're facing a little bit down and I'm also going to make the leaves look quite thin and also crispy so the lines that I'm making or the curves that I'm making is a little bit more distinct than if I were to draw a fresh leaf which is more rounded. You can also play around with the sizes of the flower and if you would like to include some budding flowers so for that I would make the leaves covering up most of the cotton ball and instead of making the five petals or the five cotton balls or the four cotton balls within that flower I only include one for the bulb. I'm just going to quickly go over the colors and for the mixtures later I'm just going to go straight into the painting and show you how I mix the colors. So the first color that I'm going to be using is gray of gray and that's going to be the main color for the flower and then yellow ochre, rose madder, cerulean blue and also sepia to build on the rest of the hues within that flower and also for the stem and the leaves. I'm just going to show you my sketch prior to painting this and I just drew it out roughly and I quite like the second one so I'm going to stick with this one and try to use this as a rough reference. Now let's get to painting. Firstly I'm going to place the gray of gray in my palette since I'm going to mostly use this color to start off and I'm also going to take some yellow ochre and place it next to the gray of gray and I use a tiny bit of yellow ochre to take it into the gray of gray to slightly tint the gray and make it have a slight yellow hue to the gray color and I set it aside and add a lot of water into it and mix it together until it becomes very diluted and light. This is very important as we're going to use this to paint the cotton part of the flower which is basically white so I want to keep the colors that I'm using for this area very light. To paint the flowers I'm going to use the tip of my brush to paint curvy or circular brush strokes in order to get an even circular shape so the shape of the cotton ball looks really fluffy. I'm also thinking about leaving some negative space so you can still see a little bit of white from the paper. I painted as I drew the flowers before by painting the one closest to me and then building on the cotton balls behind it. At this point I keep checking on my reference image just so I know where to place all the flowers and which direction they're roughly facing and also estimating the distance of the flowers with each other. Remember that you can also alternate the amount of cotton balls you want to include in each of the flower. You can even paint a budding one if you would like to. So I'm just going to repeat this and paint the base color for the rest of the flowers and I'll yellow ochre and also some rose madder and I'm going for a light to medium consistency here where I can just place the base shapes of the stem and the branches. As you can probably tell, as I'm painting the branches I still do short strokes to avoid clean straight lines which will make the branches look stiff and unnatural and I also try to bend it slightly in different directions as it curves to connect to the flowers itself. Don't worry if the colors you've placed is too light at this point because it's always easier to build than to take away with watercolors. And once I'm done placing the branches, I'm going to start placing the dry leaves in the areas where I feel is a bit empty and like how I drew them before, I'm going to paint them facing down. I want them to look dry and wilting so I don't want any parts of the leaf to have too much of a smooth line or for it to face upwards like it's still reaching for the light. As you can see, everything looks pretty flat and pretty light at the moment. That's because we've only placed down the base colors for the shapes and this is something that I like to do because by doing this, I'm already limiting the amount of space that I'm working with and I can just add layers to add details for the things that I've already painted. I want to work on the cotton flowers now and what I like to do when I paint something white with watercolors is to include different hues to the very light gray to avoid making any flat colors. So firstly here, I'm adding a little bit of yellow ochre to the gray of gray mix that we used for the base color and this way we're adding some warmth from the yellow ochre into the white or in this case the gray cotton. I'm just placing the colors in small random spots. It's important to not go too overboard with the yellow ochre here because I'm still going to incorporate other hues into the cotton flower and if you use too much of a certain hue, in the end the flower will just end up looking flat just like the base color. When you're adding the hues, always make sure to use a very light consistency so any layer that you add on will basically be a transparent glaze on top of the base color. After that, I mixed in a little bit of cerulean blue into the gray of gray and this is to bring out a bit of the blue hue to the cotton flowers and after I mixed a tiny amount of blue, I'm going to add a lot of water so I can get a thin consistency of the blue tone to add to the flowers and I'm adding this hue where the base color isn't showing. Now that I included a couple of hues in the cotton, I want to balance out the browns and build the detail of the so I'm going to add the leaves or the buds or bulbs, I'm not really sure what it's called but basically the brown leaves where the flowers grow out of and for that I basically used the same mix as the brown for the branches before but I added a bit more sepia and also used a thicker consistency so it stands out against the cotton flowers too. On top of that, I also added small lines at the center of the flower with the same brown color in between the cotton balls as a small separation. You can also add some of the dried leaves on the side of the flower to add a little bit more browns from the dried leaves under the cotton flowers. Meanwhile, I'm still leaving out some of the base color so the light brown color still shows through and that way you have a range of values within each of the dried leaves and go ahead and apply the same technique to the stem and the branches. For the stems and branches, I tried to darken the value of the area where the branch is in front of a light part of the flower like for the cotton part but when the branch is going over a dark part of the flower like the drying buds around the side which has the same brown, I left that part of the branch with the lighter value from the previous base color so those two shapes are still separated and visible. Once I've gone over all the brown areas, I wanted to increase the contrasting value even more so I mixed more sepia into the previous brown mix to make it even darker, somewhere closer to a black even, and I just painted small areas where I find there can be a bit of shadow or a bit of a darker area for any of the brown parts. I'm going to go back to the cotton flowers again now to rebalance the color and the value and this time I'm also going to introduce another hue to the gray and this time I'm going to use a pinkish gray color and to get the color I mixed in rose madder sepia with the gray of gray and I'm going to apply this to separate the cotton balls so I'm applying this like before, still in a very translucent manner because I don't want to lose the lightness or the white of the cotton flowers. Here I have left out some of the branches so I'm going to go back to the really dark brown color, the one that is very close to a black, and I'm going to apply this to some of the leaves and also the branches, still applying it the same way as I did before. So that's basically it, there aren't that many steps to this painting, it's just a lot of going back and forth to balance out the colors so everything looks consistent throughout the whole painting. The most tricky thing about this is probably applying a very translucent paint for the flowers so the white doesn't look overly muddy but I find that this is also a good exercise where you can extend the range of values in your painting just from using water to paint ratio. Anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed this one and learned something new and I'll see you at the next one. Bye!