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Flower Anatomy: Botanical Watercolor Class (Video)

ByKarina Rovira

Explore flower botany while learning watercolor techniques. We will paint the cross section of a wild rose and get to know the different parts of the flower. Follow along with artist Mira O’Brien as she guides you step by step how to paint a flower in a botanical style. 

Go deeper into the process during the Summer Botanical Watercolor Workshop or join our Botanical Watercolor Essentials Course

REFERENCE IMAGES

We will combine two views of a lily flower cross section. When we are relying on specimens from nature, we don’t always get everything we are looking for in one flower. Luckily we can combine images in our drawing. We will talk through it during the class.

This lily has a beautiful symmetrical shape and the anthers didn’t fall off, hurray! But… the pistol is malformed so we will need to add that from a photo of another flower. See below.
We are going to need to add the pistol from this image to the flower form above. Sometimes in nature things just don’t work out perfectly. The above flower has the shape I wanted but the pistol was malformed. So we combine them in our drawing!
Here you is the drawing with the two images combined, for your reference.

Materials: 

  • Watercolors: Any basic set of watercolors will suffice for this class. I will be using pigments such as lemon yellow, yellow “pure”, quinacridone purple, cobalt blue, and more… but I will also suggest alternative combinations if you don’t have the exact same pigments as me. 
  • Small and/ or medium sized round watercolor brush. 
  • Watercolor paper (300g)
  • HB pencil
  • Water cup, paper towel

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