Ten flower painting ideas, ordered from the least demanding to the most, and most of them need no brush at all. Flowers are the easiest subject in painting to get a good result from, for one simple reason: nobody can check your petals against the original. A tulip that leans is still a tulip.
Ten ways to paint them, roughly from the least demanding to the most. Most need no brush at all.
1. Cotton Bud Dots
Dip the end of a cotton bud in paint and press it onto the paper. Each press makes one soft round dot, and a cluster of dots reads as hydrangea, blossom or lilac without any drawing at all.
Use two or three close shades of the same color and a fresh bud for each. Vary the pressure: a light press gives a small pale dot, a firm one a wider dot with a defined edge. Add stems with a fine brush at the end.
2. Fork Tulips
Load the back of a fork with paint and press it onto the surface. The tines leave three or four short parallel strokes that read as a tulip head immediately.
Angle the fork slightly on each press so the flowers do not all face the same way. One quick green stroke under each and you have a row of tulips in about four minutes.
3. Bottle-End Roses
The base of a plastic drinks bottle is moulded into five lobes. Dip it in paint and press: it prints a five-petal flower shape in one go.
Two coats of slightly different pinks, offset a few degrees from each other, give the layered look of a rose. This is the fastest way to fill a whole sheet with flowers.
4. Bok Choy Roses
Cut a head of bok choy straight across near the base, about two inches up. The cut face shows the leaf stems packed in a spiral, which is very close to the structure of a rose.
Pat the cut face dry, brush paint onto it rather than dipping it, and press firmly. Red or deep pink for a rose, cream for a peony. The vegetable is still perfectly usable afterwards.
5. Celery Chrysanthemums
The same idea with the base of a celery bunch. Its cut face prints a tight ring of small crescents, which reads as a chrysanthemum or a dahlia.
Yellow, bronze or deep red suit it. Print the flower heads first, let them dry, then add stems and leaves behind them.
6. Fingerprint Bouquet
Press a fingertip into paint and onto the paper. Each print is a petal; five or six in a ring make a flower.
This is the one to do with children, and it is worth doing once as an adult too — it breaks the habit of treating the paper as precious. Draw a vase underneath in one line and fill it with prints.
7. Painted Rocks
A smooth flat stone takes acrylic well and needs no preparation beyond a wash and a dry. Paint one flower per rock, keep it simple, and let the shape of the stone decide the composition.
Outdoor acrylic or a coat of varnish will let them live in a garden. If you are painting with children, this is the version they will remember.
8. Lavender With a Fine Brush
Lavender is a stem with a dense head of tiny flowers, which sounds hard and is not. Paint the stem first in one confident upward stroke of green.
Then load a fine brush with violet and touch it against the top third of the stem, alternating sides, denser at the base of the head and sparser at the tip. Add a few paler dabs while the violet is wet. The whole flower is about thirty small touches.
9. One-Stroke Petals With a Flat Brush
The first proper brush technique here. Load a flat brush with two colors at once — one corner in white, the other in your petal color — and lay a single curved stroke from the outside of the petal in toward the center.
Each stroke comes out shaded, light at one edge and saturated at the other, because the brush is carrying both colors. Five or six strokes in a ring make a daisy or a rose. It takes a few attempts to get the loading right and then it is very fast.
10. Palette-Knife Poppies
The most satisfying, and the only one that needs thick paint. Load a small palette knife with red straight from the tube and lay it down in a short curved sweep, lifting at the end.
Do not go back over it. The ridge left by the knife is what makes the petal look like a petal. Two or three sweeps per flower, a dark blob at the center, and stop.
Which to Start With
If you have never painted anything, do the cotton buds. If you have half an hour and want something worth framing, do the palette-knife poppies. If there are children involved, fingerprints and rocks.
Two things apply to all ten. Work on something heavier than printer paper — card or watercolor paper at minimum, or acrylic will buckle it. And put the flowers in before the background rather than trying to paint around them afterwards.
If You Want a Finished Floral Piece
The techniques above are for practice and play. If what you actually want is a floral painting to hang, a numbered kit gets you there without the drawing.
Our florals include Rita's Pansies, Sweet Petunias, Morning Glory and Cosmos From the Garden, several of them by Judy Buswell, and the full catalog is here. Sweet Petunias is one our own reviewers rate as demanding, so it is not the one to start on.
If the flowers you want to paint are from your own garden, photograph them and Custom Paint by Numbers will turn the photograph into a numbered canvas. Finished work is in the customer gallery.
More technique: painting still life in acrylics covers composition and light, which is what separates a flower study from a bunch of flowers on a page.
