Beautiful Roses in Minutes | Expressive Acrylic Painting for Beginners

If you have always struggled with painting flowers, then this video is for you. I'm gonna show you my personal technique in how I paint flowers expressively and loosely, but also keeping the form. And you're gonna have a beautiful painting, and by the end of this video, you'll be confident in painting flowers. So I chose a rose because that overwhelms a lot of people. They look at all the petals and think it's gonna be really difficult, and I wanted to show you that it's simple and you can do it. So I just have a little canvas here using acrylic paint, and I'm getting a nice kind of medium mid-tone ground here to cover the white canvas. And while it's still wet, I'm going to take this paper towel and subtract kind of the outline of the petals. I think with roses, with flowers that have a lot of petals, it's good to get the edges kind of in, and then you work from the center out. So I'm just using this paper towel as a nice subtraction tool and just kind of mapping out the edges, letting some of the petals go off the edge of the canvas. And I'm just looking at the big highlights here, going petal by petal. And it does not have to be perfect. I always like to start very loose and messy so you don't have to get overwhelmed with adding all those details right away. You just want it to be expressive. So this is a good way to kind of stay loose, and it's fun to use your finger as a tool to get a more detailed, like for this smaller petal, I'm just using the edge of my fingernail in the paper towel. Okay. Demetra, what are some of the things that beginners get wrong when they're trying to paint florals? Well, I see people put the same brush strokes everywhere and treat all the petals the same, or they'll oversimplify it, and then it looks cartoony and doesn't really feel much like a flower. So I treat every petal as, like just looking at the source here, each one is different, and you want to capture that shape in your piece. So I'm going in with this filbert brush, and I'm just kind of adding in some of the shadows in here. And I'm starting at the center now. So I'm just looking only at the shadows, ignoring anywhere where there's highlights. And this is loose, so I'm not blending or trying to get super exact, not using a tiny brush. I'm using this probably size, I think this is size 10 or 12 filbert. So with a rose, everything kind of spirals outwards and all the petals overlap each other. So if you start this way by getting the shadows in, then it's really going to help you. Once you get a few petals right in the right place, the rest of it is so much easier. So now I'm just looking at this right here. And this is such a good practice just to do one flower, just to get the hang of it. You can paint along with me right now, or you can watch this and paint later, but I would recommend just giving it a try. And you don't need that many colors to do this. Why is it that you are painting the flower rather than sketching it first? Or is there a reason why you didn't sketch it first? Well, sometimes I do sketch my paintings first, but I'm trying to keep it feeling loose and expressive to show you that I'm just, I guess I'm trying to keep it more simplified. And you could sketch with paint a little bit. I mean, I'm kind of doing that here, like using the dark colors to kind of pop out those lighter petals. Even if it does look more like a sketch, I'm using this big brush to do it. I think the key is to stay loose and not get too tight, too quick, because there's always time to add details. The point right now is to get all the darks and mid-tones in and to kind of find the form of each petal. So now that I have a pretty good underpainting, it's very loose and messy, but it has some form. It's starting to look like a rose. This is a good place to start adding a little bit more colors to it. So I'm just gonna get a few different colors out. And those two colors I was using were transparent, transparent red oxide and vivid or opus pink. And now I'm just gonna add some red, yellow, and then some complementary colors as well, because I'll show you in a little bit adding some compliments into a very dominant ink rose, like shifting the colors a little bit towards green or blue will really add a lot to it and make it look a lot better. So I'm just gonna go back to that same brush because I love using filberts for flowers. I think they capture the flower petals so well. And there's so many big round areas that this would just create the perfect brushstroke. So keep that in mind when you're choosing your brush and choosing your flower. Sometimes, you know, a square brush works better, but usually filberts are like my go-to. What's your, let's say like mental checklist as you work through this first stage of the painting? Like what are you looking for at this stage before moving on? I want this to have depth. I want the rose to, all these folds to kind of sink back and then those highlights to pop forward. And so to achieve that, you have to start with the darks. And a lot of beginners skip this step and they go straight for the highlights, wanna just paint it all in because it's very gratifying and adding those highlights is, you know, fun. And that's what you might think is the right thing to do. But you wanna make sure that you have the darks in there and it creates the perfect base for the highlights later. So you're gonna see me start by adding in some darker colors and sometimes I will mix just a touch of blue into it to make it a little bit darker. I'm also just sticking to a very small, limited palette today to keep it simple. And are you aiming for total realism or are you trying to be a bit more expressive with this process? Well, I'm definitely trying to keep it more expressive, but that doesn't mean you don't have to follow any sort of rules and not have the form in there. I think it's very important to add your brush strokes according to the form that you see with each petal. So they're not just random. Okay, and I just realized I have a petal missing here and that is what was throwing me off right there, this white one. So speaking of having a petal missing, how do you keep from getting overwhelmed when you have so much detail and so much within the flower? So like I kind of said in the beginning of this, I think with roses, I started out kind of mapping the edges like where I wanted the flower to be, but then when I zoomed in on the details and kind of getting that spiral right, I start from the center and then go outward. So starting with these little pockets of the shadow there, and once you get one area accurate and right, then you can kind of calibrate the rest of your painting according to that. So I noticed I had everything in this area right, except I was purely missing this petal right here and acrylic is so forgiving, you don't have to worry about that too much. So you can just keep layering and painting until you get it how you want it. Feel a bit more expressive, you can exaggerate the colors that you see and in the dark here, this is probably the darkest part of the flower here and here and I'm taking mental note of that. So you wanna look for the brightest spots and the darkest spots to make sure you have enough contrast and I am exaggerating the color and in the shadow just adding a little bit of green, so the compliment to red and that's going to give the flower a little bit more pop to it. And then something I do a lot when I have big floral paintings that I'm working on, I will work on the background colors to kind of sculpt out the edges or petals of a flower, so that helps as well. This is a much smaller piece, so you can kind of see a little bit how I'm doing that, but the main focus is painting the flower petals itself, but that is a good technique, especially when you're painting a more abstract floral piece, kind of work on the background to pull out your subject matter more. What do flowers mean to you personally? Like why do you keep coming back to them in your art? You paint them a lot. Yeah, good question. Well, I have always loved flowers since being a little girl. I just, I used to love to pick them all the time everywhere I went, and I just love that a flower always brings happiness. It's a way we cheer people up. I think it's just like they're full of emotion in my opinion, and they create a lot of emotion when they're painted, so I use them in my art to create like this very soft, I don't know, more emotional aspect to it. Okay, so now I've switched to a smaller brush as you've probably noticed, and I'm just quickly adding in a little bit more darks, and I'll start with adding some opaques. So mixing white into the transparent paint. With roses, I've noticed, you know, painting them so many times, also peonies, any flower that has a lot of petals, a lot of layers, it's always kind of darker in the center, and then it gets lighter as it moves outward, so you wanna create a soft gradient on each petal. So you start with the darks, and then you gradually shift your color with a little bit of white to get lighter and brighter. And for now, I'm just ignoring the highlights, so I'm gonna add those at the end so you'll see that dramatic change where it really comes together. But you have to have patience and trust the process to just not add the highlights right away. Let us know in the comments why you think florals resonate so deeply with people across cultures. It feels like it's one of those subject matters that everyone kind of resonates with, and it's, you know, frankly, they sell very quickly in our gallery too. Yeah, it's true. Let's say it's a very sellable subject matter when done right. I guess who doesn't wanna live with flowers that are immortalized? Is there like a specific brush technique or way that you hold the brush or move the brush that's kind of specific to painting florals, you'd say? Yeah, that's a good question. It's gonna be different for each brush that I use. For the filbert brush, it's, I mean, most of the time, you'll see me just place a brushstroke and leave it. I don't like to blend or kind of scumble with acrylic, and especially painting florals. I think it works best, and they have a very effortless feeling if you just practice kind of like one sweeping brushstroke. So let me show that really quick. And I'm looking at these petals, and for some reason now, they look a little bit more blue to me. So with the filbert here, I'm just kind of letting it be a little more thick on the edge, and then kind of softly letting off the pressure so that it creates that dry brush effect and picks up the texture of the canvas. Okay, that was jumping ahead a little bit to the highlights. You just can't help yourself sometimes, huh? Well, I was trying to demonstrate what you were asking. Well, that's good. Thank you. It's so important to understand how to use your brush. Like a lot of people don't think about training brushwork and treating your art as a practice sometimes in terms of maneuvering the brush and having that artistic dexterity. That's something that Dimitra has developed over years of painting. It's easy to kind of discount how long she's been a professional artist because she's still so young, but it's been over 10 years now. Yeah. What's a difference that artists should be aware of in painting florals with acrylics versus oils? Well, the main difference is acrylic paint dries darker, and it's a lot more flat looking. So when you add a highlight, you might think it's gonna dry just as you painted it and it will dry darker. So it can be a little bit frustrating when it's just not as you thought it would be. So I always, even if I do an acrylic painting, I will usually add oil on top to finish it. It's interesting how you enlarged the flower on the actual canvas itself. Is there a reason that you did that or it just kind of started to be a little bit bigger so you leaned into it? I think that's what happened. And that's okay. As long as everything's in proportion to each other, it'll work out. One technique for applying a brushstroke more expressively is don't mix the colors too much. So you can just kind of grab different colors and then when you apply it, it will have like a nice little kind of ombre brushstroke where the colors aren't all mixed. So you have them mixing optically on your canvas instead. So you can always go back in and add some darker colors or value that you're missing. I decided to add some purple into the pink here to give it a little bit more contrast. Those last highlights happen quickly and it will totally change the piece. I am just adding this small filbert brush for details and just trying to get the center very accurate. For anyone watching this who loves this like floral painting technique and they wanna have a incredibly step-by-step instruction of how to create an acrylic floral painting, we have a whole class that Demetra did. It's one of our most popular paintings or classes, I should say. Students absolutely love it. You get full three-hour masterclass with lifetime access and we have a quick sale guide, a brushwork. It's a super beautiful PDF brushwork technique guide too. Like honestly, that alone is worth it. We also have a color mixing guide with that class too. And at the end of the class, if you want feedback on your acrylic floral painting that you create, you can even get a complimentary coaching session with that class. It's super amazing. Oh, and there's three copyright free sources or references with it too. So it's definitely worth it. Demetra is such an incredible instructor and it's a very fun class. You can create a beautiful acrylic floral, both watching it and painting it yourself in less than five hours. So that's a great thing to do this today. Or if you want to do that this weekend, you can buy it now and take that project this weekend or watch some of it today, do all of it on the weekend. It's just a lot of fun. So I highly recommend that one. Yes, that is a super fun class. I had a lot of fun creating that piece and I really take you step-by-step on creating a full floral painting with multiple flowers and definitely a much larger composition and how to also blend more abstract with the realism. So we talk a lot about style things and how to paint expressively, but also get over the fear of painting flowers and have like a really good end result. So it's such a great class and so many people have enjoyed it and have amazing paintings after. Now I'm going in with a small brush. I never really use pure white for the highlights. I am mixing my whites with other colors and I'm noticing for some reason, I'm really working on textured brushstrokes. It's so much texture on this piece, but it's a lot of fun. The edges of the rose petals have the brightest highlights. So I am trying to be very strategic about where I put those bright highlights, knowing that they're gonna pop forward. I'm just loving how this is turning out. It's such a short amount of time. I can't believe you started with a blank canvas less than 30 minutes ago. So following the edge here of this petal, I think this is how you can achieve really nice, realistic looking petals that still feel loose. And I'm just not oversimplifying it. I'm really looking at those shapes and trying to get every point in and treating each petal differently. The petals that you want to really jump out and be more refined, you can spend more time with the details. Like right here would be a good area and then you can let your outer petals be a little bit more loose and abstract and maybe a little bit thinner. So I'm kind of focusing my thick textured paint in this area where I'm leaving the brush strokes. And acrylic is nice because you can just keep layering and it will look better and better with each layer. So as long as you're not blending too much, I will say that changes. Like I'll change my mind if you're blending everything, then it can get worse and you can overwork it. But if you're leaving your brush strokes and being expressive when you lay down the brush strokes, it will look better and better. So sometimes a good trick as I'm finishing this with the highlights, I will add a tiny bit of a complimentary color into it. So this is a really light minty green and I chose green because there's a lot of reds and pink in here. So adding a little bit of green is going to really pop next to those other warm colors. And I'm just doing that here or here and there. So I'm just adding little pops of other colors in there to just make it more interesting looking and I'm having fun with it, but I know we're getting close to the end. Again, if you really want to learn more about painting flowers and would love a full step-by-step class, definitely check out the acrylic florals. Deidre, how do you know when a floral is finished? I think when you just, you can step back from your piece and nothing about it bothers you when it works far away in the room and also up close. I think it has to work in both scenarios and you need some areas of very detailed refinement and then other areas that are more loose and you basically are looking at your edges to make sure you have enough variation everywhere. So right now I'm taking a transparent color and just kind of, again, glazing a little bit behind some petals to pop some of those highlights forward a little bit. So when your paint's dry, you can always go back to that glazing layer and add those shadows in a little bit more. And as this dried, it got darker, so it needs more highlights. Well, I think this is a good stopping point. You know, this piece has all the contrast. It has some more abstract loose areas and then some more refined areas. And I think this gives you a really good idea on how to work with maybe something that feels complicated like a rose or a peony or a really layered flower with a lot of petals and break it down to make it easier. And I hope you give this a try and let us know in the comments how you like this video and if it really helped you with your flowers. And I will see you soon.