Table of Contents
How To Paint a Simple Watercolour Rose for Beginners
A delicate yet simple watercolour rose tutorial perfect for beginners and adding that special spring touch to artwork, cards, and gifts!
Materials
-Round tip watercolour brushes
-Water container for holding the water. Mason jars, yogurt containers, or mugs work perfectly. Just don’t accidentally drink the art water! Not that I know from experience…
-Watercolour paper or wet media paper
Instructions
- Start off by dipping your brush in water and wiping the excess off the edge of the container your water is in.
2. Now swirl your brush into the colour you would like your rose to be making sure there is a good amount of paint but not so much that it is dripping wet. Balance is key when using watercolour!
3. Start off by making two small curved shapes beside each other. This will be the inside of the rose. They do not have to be perfect! In fact, the more imperfect the more natural they look.
4. After you have made the two curves for the middle, we will make two more curves around the ones we have down already making them a bit more elongated.
5. You can tell by now that we are just painting a series of curves around each other to build up the shape of a rose. Now that we have the two curves we did from step 4. we will now add 3-5 more curves to finish off the shape of the rose. There really isn’t a right or wrong way to do this just place the curves where you feel needs more shape and volume. You are the artist!
6. Leaves: To finish off the beautiful rose we have just painted we just have to add leaves. To make the leaves pick up some green paint on your brush. Keep the lines thinner for the leaves as they will be smaller than the petals. A good tip when doing this is to not put as much pressure on the brush when painting thinner lines. Use the tip of your brush for this. Then paint a small elongated curve just like what we have been doing for the petals. After that make another elongated curve on the opposite side joining the two end points together to create the leaf shape and fill it in with colour if you wish. Add as many leaves as you’d like.
Ta-da! You are now done! Now that you’ve learned how to paint a watercolour rose you can experiment with different colours, shapes, sizes, or even add calligraphy.
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An Easy Watercolor Tutorial For Beginners
In this tutorial, we will be going through a few simple steps that break down the rose watercolor painting into digestible steps for you to follow. This watercolor rose tutorial is aimed at showing you a unique way of painting a rose that is much freer and looser.
When learning how to paint watercolor roses, we want to allow the water to do most of the work. This means that we want to use the full potential of what the water can allow. Creating various marks in our rose watercolor painting will help us to enhance our watercolor skills. Flowers often come out beautifully when approached with a loose hand as this achieves a more painterly quality in an image.
Necessary Materials
We want to have the correct materials for our painting as it will have the best outcome for a rose watercolor painting. As we learn how to paint watercolor roses we want to make sure that we have the right paper, having the right paper makes all the difference so preferably try to get paper that is about 300Gsm. We do want to make sure that we have the right tools such as watercolor brushes, the correct paper, and lastly the correct watercolor paint. A good suggestion is pan paints as they are quite easy to control in their containers. Here are a few items that you can purchase online:
Preparation
Once we have all the right materials we want to make sure we have a nice even surface to place our paper on. Painting is a very calming and relaxing process however, often we can find ourselves being interrupted by our environments. Try to place yourself somewhere where you might not be interrupted. Another good idea is to maybe listen to some music whilst you do this tutorial because the most important part of this tutorial is about being relaxed and having fun.
Step-by-Step Instructions on How to Paint Roses
In this rose tutorial, we will go through the various steps of how to paint a watercolor rose. The process is quite simple, however, there does need to be some focus in the process. When learning how to paint watercolor roses we want to start by simply painting the rose shape with a very loose approach which we then add some finer details onto once it has dried. Then we will paint the leaves and the stem to contextualize the rose in greater detail. That is it!
A simple rose tutorial that requires a little bit of focus, with that said let us get started on how to paint a rose with watercolor.
Step 1: Painting the First Layer of the Rose
We begin this rose tutorial by painting the general shape of the rose with water. What is meant by this is that we want to take a clean brush with water and begin to paint the general shape of the rose. Let us add some strokes with our watered brush to indicate the shape and scale that we would like our rose to be.
Once we have applied water onto the page that indicates the shape of the rose we can now begin to add color into the watered area of the page. This is where we begin to form the rose with color, let us use red. The rose shape is not specific, it is quite abstract. try to loosely make strokes of the brush to start loosely defining the rose with a light wash of red paint.
As you make these strokes, think about how the rose petals are seen as larger near their outer layers and thinner near the inner layers. This is because the inner layers are more closely placed together and the outer layers display more of their surface area. Make some larger marks near the bottom portion of the rose to indicate the outer area and smaller marks near the top to indicate the inner area.
A rose is very abstract, so there is no specific description of how to paint the head of the flower. However, we do so by understanding the general shape of a rose which we then make more loose and gestural marks that indicate that shape. For instance, largely painted areas for defining larger surface area of the petals and smaller lines for indicating the inside of the rose or petals that are faintly seen behind the rose.
Step 2: Painting the Second Layer of the Rose Tutorial
Whilst the first layer of the rose is still wet we will then proceed to paint details in the petals to indicate texture and definition. Again, once we have the general shape of the rose our painting action should be loose and gestural. This means we do not want to try and paint a rose perfectly but rather the abstract quality of loosely painting will slowly describe a rose.
Adding darker tones in the rose is done by darkening your red with hints of black paint. We want the paint to be slightly darkened. We then proceed to add strokes in various directions that indicate a shadow-like quality in the rose.
Keep these strokes moving in a circular fashion that indicates the rose has a center.
The strokes should not have circular or curved lines rather work with more jagged-like qualities. This is because it provides a more abstract quality to the painting for one, and secondly, it indicates a more familiar quality of rose petals in our rose watercolor painting.
The last effect we want to add to the rose whilst it is still wet is moments of highlights. With a dry and clean brush, proceed to make marks as if you were painting strokes to indicate petals, however, the dry brush will lift some paint leaving moments of light tonality. This gives the rose more texture and definition.
Step 3: Painting the Third Layer of the Rose
Here is where we become a little more playful with our mark-making. What we want to do is add different tonal qualities to the rose. A good suggestion is to make a more bright or pure red mix of paint which you will then proceed to apply near the top of the rose.
Try to add these strokes and lines in a spiraling motion around the center of the rose. These marks should indicate the structure of the rose. These marks can be simple strokes of lines with red paint that suggest movements of the petals in different directions.
Another good suggestion is to slightly darken your red again with a little bit of black paint. We can then take this paint and begin to add some shadowy qualities to the body of the rose. We can apply these marks in random strokes that indicate the general circular structure of the rose.
Play around with making lighter marks near the top of the rose and darker marks near the base or bottom portion of the rose. This helps to add texture and depth to the rose, allowing for it to have more body as opposed to seeming flat with a singular color.
Step 4: Adding the Leaves to Your Rose Watercolor Painting
We can now begin to paint the leaves of the rose. We do this by making a mix of green, brown and black, However, make sure the mix is predominantly green. We can then proceed to paint spearheaded shapes with pointed tips on either side.
Painting these spearheaded shapes indicates the quality of the leaves that roses have. However, a nice feature to add to the roses is to give the edges of the leaves jagged ridges. This makes the leaves seem more authentic to the quality of the rose. We do this by painting little green lines on the edges of our leaves with a thin brush.
These jagged edges can be painted with the same color green the leaf is painted in. Alternatively, you can pull the paint out of the leaf with little strokes of the brush using a small thin brush.
Lastly, whilst your paint on the leaves is still wet you can take a dry brush and make a line or stroke with your brush through the center of the leaf. This gives a nice quality to the leaf and indicates its center ridge. You can’t paint these leaves anywhere around the rose which we will connect to each other by painting branches and a stem.
Step 5: How to Paint a Rose Branches and Stem
Lastly, we will paint the branches and stem of the flower. We begin by painting a little triangular leaf feature near the bottom of the rose to indicate the area where the stem sprouts from. We can do this by painting two little upside-down green triangles near the base of the rose.
Once that is done, we can paint a thin green stem vertically down the page from the bottom of the rose. Roses often have very thin stems, so try to not paint them too thick. From there we simply connect our stem to our leaves by painting little branches and that is the last step.
Tips for Your Watercolor Rose Tutorial
Learning how to paint watercolor roses is a great introduction to the watercolor medium as it describes various watercolor processes in a single painting. If you are new to watercolor painting, here are a few of our top tips and tricks to help you paint roses easily.
- Painting a rose is about understanding the general shape of the petals. So take some time analyzing a source image if need be for better reference of the shape.
- Always have two jars of water, one for the first rinse and another for a second rinse to completely clean the brush before a new application of paint.
- Play around with darkening a single color by using browns and blacks in your mix of paint. By doing so we can achieve darker tones for moments of shadow.
- Allow yourself to not get hung up on perfect details, roses are abstract which means we can get away with various marks that still resemble the quality of a rose.
- Painting a rose is a layering process so try to work from light to dark.
We can see that at the beginning of the rose watercolor painting we need to work slightly fast so that we can add details to the wet paint before it dries. In this rose tutorial, we also learned how to add details onto the dried paint as well as some lifting techniques which help to add highlights to rose watercolor painting. Learning how to paint watercolor roses is a great painting exercise for someone who is a beginner with watercolor as this rose tutorial breaks it down in a few simple steps.
Rainbow Roses Craft
Am I the only one who gets a little carried away with planning even the simplest of events?
Last year, my daughter and I hosted a small Queen of Heart’s Valentine’s Party – just a couple of friends, just a couple of hours in the afternoon.. so you’d think that I would just plan a couple of activities and leave it at that, right?
Nope, I prepped four different activities to ensure that the girls were happy and entertained for the whole visit – and that was in addition to planning a screening of the Walt Disney version of Alice in Wonderland. We made fizzy roses (a take on our fizzy hearts experiment), I bought a giant game of checkers, set up a game of croquet in the playroom (similar to this one), and bought a bunch of white fabric roses for the kids to paint.
We never got around to painting them at the party so the roses just got put back into our Valentine’s Day bin and were completely forgotten about until this year when we opened the bin back up.
My little Frida Kahlo saw the roses and immediately remembered that we had intended to paint them at the party – only this time, we weren’t simply going to paint them red.
Oh no no no – just like she did with our Rainbow Tree craft, this crafter decided that we were going to paint the roses r a i n b o w .
This was such a low-key craft to make – we used a combination of regular watercolor paint and glitter watercolor paints for an unexpected touch of sparkle. My daughter initially did three roses in one sitting and then we just added more roses in slowly – when she had a few minutes extra in the morning, she’d paint a rose and add it to the growing bouquet.
This would make such a sweet gift (Mother’s Day, Valentine’s Day, Teacher Appreciation, etc) and you could have multiple kids work on it – it might be interesting to see the effects and color schemes each child chooses.
If you’re looking for Valentine’s Day or Mother’s Day crafts for kids, check out:
