3 EASY beginner friendly watercolor flower doodles

Hi guys, this is Nia and today I will be sharing with you three easy flower doodles that is beginner-friendly using repetitive basic shapes. For the doodles, I'm just going to paint with very basic colors but you're also free to adjust any other colors you prefer or whatever color is available on your palette. Anyway, let's just start by drawing out the elements for the first flower. This one is super simple, I'm just looking to create basic leaf shapes that I can bunch together to create a flower. You can make three or more petals to form a flower and I think it would also be great to add thinner ones on the side to give the illusion that they have different positions or rotations. I also like to play with the angles so everything looks nice and organic. To finish off the flowers, I added stems and some leaves and also flower buds for fillers. For the leaves, I just created the basic leaf shape which is the same as the flower petals. I also added a longer one to add a bit of variety. And for the flower buds, I just created a smaller version of the petals but not as opened. You can vary the size of this including making very small ones that is barely forming. And that's basically it for all of the elements, so let's get to painting. So for the flowers, I'm just going to start with the colors yellow and vermilion. I want the main petals to be mostly yellow and for the bottom, I'm going to add the vermilion so there's a bit of gradation towards the bottom. Since the yellow on this pencil set is very bright, I want to actually add a touch of vermilion to warm up the yellow a bit. But if the tone of your yellow is already warm or you have something like permanent yellow deep, then you don't have to mix it with the vermilion. To paint the petals, I'm going to create basic leaf shapes and you can just paint it as you draw them before or you can also try to paint them using single strokes if you would like to treat this as an exercise. However, it's not really necessary especially if you're new. You can use as many strokes as you need to to adjust the angles or to fix the tips. While the paint is still wet, I'm going to add a thick consistency of the vermilion at the bottom of the flower petals. It's important that it's still wet for the vermilion to travel slightly through the yellow but make sure that it's not puddling wet or else the paint might travel too far and too fast. It does take some trial and error to see how it travels. You can always take off any excess paint with either a dry brush or tissue and start again so don't be intimidated by this. Specifically for this painting, I want the yellow to actually be medium to thick consistency because yellow is already such a light color to begin with. I think for some of the flowers that I painted here, you can already see that the colors are turning a bit too light as it dries off and when this happens, you can also do a glaze or an extra coat of the yellow again to intensify the color so you can actually start to paint using a thicker consistency at the beginning to avoid having to glaze at the end if you want the yellow to be very vibrant. As you can tell here, I started the composition with the larger flowers and scattering them on the page. Then once I feel like there's quite an even distribution, I'm going to add smaller flowers which are more closed up for the flower buds and place them in between the ones that I've painted before. However, you can always go back to painting the larger flowers at any stage whenever you feel the need to balance out the composition. After I have a decent amount of the flowers scattered on the area, I feel like I can start adding the greens. I like to start with the stems and also the smaller flower buds which I'm going to paint with the green color only. For the green color, I mixed in Viridian to the previous yellow and I also added a touch of Vermilion to mute the green so it's not as saturated as the color of the flowers. To paint the stems, I just think of a triangular shape which becomes smaller towards the bottom as it attaches to the stem. The way I paint this is by creating small strokes so it doesn't look like a rigid triangular shape, but the unevenness of the shape will keep it looking natural. As for the smaller flower buds, I like to also approach this the same way by painting smaller strokes, but this time I want the bottom to be slightly more rounded with an uneven top where you can see some of the individual strokes that you've made. Here I'm just going to show you a close-up of my brush pressure and strokes so hopefully it's a bit easier to see. I'm just going to continue on and attach the stems to all of the flowers and I'm also going to add those tiny flower buds in places which are a bit too empty in my opinion. I'm just scattering them quite evenly, but of course you can also play with a bit of negative space for your composition if you would like to. Once I've attached all the flowers to a stem, I then add the final elements which are the leaves. For the leaves, I choose to paint two types, a normal leaf shape which is the same as the flower petals and a slightly longer one. Like usual, you can actually do this in any amount of strokes that you would like to, but for the longer ones, I actually enjoy just painting them with one long stroke. For all of the leaves though, I also like to finish off by moving the excess paint or I intentionally add a puddle of paint near the stem which will create a really nice gradation between the leaves and the stem. You can do this with your brush by directing the excess paint in the area that you want it to gather. After I have a good amount of the leaves down, I'm going to add the longer ones and to paint this, the key is to have your brush pointed at the opposite direction of the leaf that you want to paint and I want to make sure that the tip is nice and sharp and I'm going to just rotate my brush until I have that fine point and as I slowly apply pressure to the brush, it will spread creating a thicker line and when you feel like the leaf is long enough, then I just take off the pressure until the brush comes to a tip again which will be the other side of the leaf. I'm also going to treat this like the previous leaf where I gather the excess paint at the bottom tip and I also play around with the size of the leaves and that's basically it for the first flower. Moving on to the second flower now, instead of the leaf shaped petals, I'm going to create rounded petals as individual teardrop shapes and I'm going to create groups of four petals for each individual flower. For this, I'm going to paint them as clusters where a bunch of them are placed together in groups so there will be a bit of overlapping and for the leaves here, I'm also going to paint two types. One which is a long leaf shape which is like the first flower and for the second leaf shape, I'm going to create tiny teardrop shapes with one leaf at the top and a few leaves running on both sides of the stem. So for this one, I'm going to create pink flowers. So for the main color, I'm going to mix in naples yellow and red purple together to create a soft pastel pink. I'm just going to paint them like how I drew them out before with the individual petals and I want to create a little bit of distance at the center so I can use a thick consistency of the red purple to paint the center and I'm going to use that to connect the petals together. The teardrop shapes doesn't have to be perfect so if some of the tips of the petals are a bit off, I think it'll be fine since we're going to be painting a cluster of them. So if there are any imperfections, it'll just blend with the rest of the flowers and I also find that making the flowers imperfect is what makes the painting look more organic. As a tip, I would recommend to paint with really soft pinks because the contrast will be more visible to the flowers and if you find that maybe you have too much paint or the darker pink is spreading across too much on the petals, remember that you can either take it off with tissue or with a clean dry brush. So I'm starting to create a cluster of flowers at roughly the center of the page and this time I'm going to overlap the flowers and when I do this, I try to leave a space in between the flowers so the paint doesn't run. However, if that does happen, it's still okay. You can always separate the shapes by waiting for it to dry and repainting one of the flowers to darken and separate the petals. I also fill in some spaces if they're quite large of a space in between the flowers and I just basically fill it in with a bit of color to represent some petals behind the flowers. This should be able to add some density to the clusters, however, I also like to add a few odd ones around the sides as well to loosen the composition slightly. Remember that you don't have to follow the exact composition. If you're new to watercolors, it might be good to just practice each individual element then put it together yourself so there are no restrictions of where each flower should be composed. There's still a bit of space left at the top so I'm going to add one more cluster then I'm going to move on to painting the stems and the leaves. If sometimes when you are overlaying the flowers and if the space doesn't allow you to paint four petals, it's also okay to only paint three. As long as it follows the similar rotation of the petals, it'll still look fine. In fact, if you mix it up a bit, it'll look natural since some flowers doesn't always have the exact same amount of petals. Once I'm done, I start to mix the green color and for this I just use some viridian and yellow green to mix with the pink that I already have on my palette, but the green turned out to be a bit too vibrant so I mute it down with a bit of yellow and also red purple so the color isn't overly saturated. You can mute colors down by adding the opposite color, so as an example, red is the opposite of green, so in order to mute down the green, I added some red purple. However, you can also mute green with either orange or purple because those two colors also have red pigments and you can always adjust the ratio of colors to get the tone that you're looking for. With the green, I painted the stems on the flower which are mostly visible. You don't have to attach a stem to every single flower that you paint at the back or else it might turn to be a bit too overcrowded. While painting the stems, I also added the long leaves, especially if the bottom of the flowers look overly empty because I don't want the stems of this particular flower to look too long for the painting, but again, it's up to your own taste. If you don't want to add too many leaves at the bottom, you can also add more flowers to cover up the longer stems. Once I feel like there's a decent amount of leaves, I then start to add the second type of leaf and I really like this one because I think it just adds so much dynamic to the composition. You can paint this single strokes by putting more pressure as you paint and taking it off really quickly to create a small leaf shape or you can also paint it as how you've drawn them out before by filling in the inside. You can try both and see which one you find more comfortable. If it's a bit difficult to paint the stems using the same brush, you can always switch to a smaller one as well, but I think it's always good practice to be able to play with the brush pressure and create different weights for the strokes. So all there's left to do is just to fill in the rest of the spaces using any of the elements and that's it for this painting. Moving on to the last flower, I'm going to draw it out again. For this one, I'm going to basically draw the same type of flower petals as the previous one, but instead I'm going to only bunch them in mainly threes. Again, not every petal has to look the same and if the angle of the petals are a bit closed up, you can also turn this into a bunch of fours or fives as well. In the middle, I'm also drawing out lines to connect all the petals together and again this will create the delicate element of the flower. Then I'm going to finish off with the stem and the leaves. And for the leaves, I'm just going to draw tiny ones. The tips can either be sharp or rounded like the petals. I'm going to keep the color simple for this flower. For the main color, I'm going to use a light consistency of sky blue and again like the pink flower, I think that the lighter the blue you can create, the more delicate and interesting the painting will look because of the contrasting colors between the sky blue and the dark prussian blue that I'm going to use to connect the petals. I'm just going to show you a close-up of how I paint the flowers. So for the petals, I'm going to paint using the light sky blue and for the rounded petals, again you don't have to think of painting this using special brush strokes. You can also draw the outline out with your brush then fill in the middle if you would like to. And again for this one, I also want to paint them with a slight distance so I have a bit of space to add the lines with a thick consistency prussian blue. You don't have to limit yourself to only painting the same number of strokes as the petals, but I think if you can add several delicate lines in the middle with the prussian blue without it puddling too much, it'll give more dynamic to the flower shape so it doesn't look too overly simple, even though I think that this is probably the easiest one out of the three flowers. If you find that the petals that you're painting are puddling up a bit too much, you can either use the same trick as before by taking the excess paint off or you can also paint a couple or a few flowers at a time until the petals are at the right dampness where the thick paint won't travel too far. So like the previous two, I'm just going to scatter all of the flowers around the page and play around with the variation of angles, size and petals. If you find that the petals that you're painting are puddling up a bit too much, you can either use the same trick as before by taking the excess paint off or you can also paint a couple or a few flowers at a time until the petals are at the right dampness where the thick paint won't travel too far. For the stems, I want to use a bluish green color so I just add radiant and yellow green with some prussian blue and use a medium to thick consistency. So even though the stems are very delicate, the colors are dark and visible enough to see. I want the leaves to be slightly different in tone so instead of making the leaves too blue like the stems, I added some yellow green to give a warmer tone and I'm just going to go ahead and paint the leaves using this color. As I mentioned before, for the leaves, you are free to paint just a small version of a basic leaf shape or you can also paint them as rounded leaves with the same shape as the petals. For this flower, I want the leaves to be quite small in comparison to the flower and I want to place them near the top of the stem. However, I'm also going to add more leaves if some of the stems are too long to fill in some of the space. And like the previous flowers, I also want to gather the paint on the leaves where it joins with the stem. That way, that part of the leaf will be slightly darker than the rest and since those are the only elements for this painting, that's basically it. This is the completed blue flowers. If you are going to paint along to these flower doodles and your neat watercolors, I think I would suggest for you to probably paint the third one first since it's probably the easier one even though the level of all three flowers are very similar. But I think that it might just be easier to paint something with less elements to worry about if you're a true beginner. Anyway, I hope you guys enjoy these three doodles. If you give this a go, don't forget to tag me on Instagram so I can see how it went. And like usual, my tools and social media links will be in the description box if you're interested. Thank you so much for watching till the end and I'll see you at the next one. Bye!