Alena Moon

Do you love plants and drawing??

I've always loved drawing and sketching things but plants weren't really the things that I drew often. I would say it's easier than drawing faces, people or animal so maybe this will be a good daily quick task for you to do if you just started getting in to drawing or doing croquis. I'll be sharing how I practice drawing plants and this tutorial is more about for you to see how you improve on drawing plants as you practice more, rather than making a perfect drawing.

You will need:

1. Paper (I used A4 ivory paper)

2. A sharp pencil or a mechanical pencil

3. A ruler 

4. A craft knife

5. An rraser

6. Tape

7. A compass or a circular object

8. A plant you want to draw

Steps:

1. Cut your paper into 4~6 square pieces. 

3. Very lightly draw a general structure of the plant in the center of the circle. In my case I drew the stem of the plant in the center and built on the leaves as I went on. For drawing stem, I studied how it curves and how each leaves starts from the stem. 

5. Draw the rest of the parts lightly (be careful not to draw them too dark). In this case it's not really about whether your drawing looks the same as the real thing but it's more about learning. So don't worry about drawing exactly the same number of leaves or branches be quick and move on.

6. Start shading the darkest parts of the plant. See how I shaded the roots of the each branches first.

7. Keep working from darkest to lightest. See how leaves overlap each other but they have different opacity of darkness. Draw in the darker laves first then draw the lighther leaves next.

8. Use the eraser to clear the edges. See the drawing as a whole and add the shading where you think needs more.

9. Don't spend too much time on drawing one plant, move on after 10mins. It will train you to spot the details faster. Repeat this as many times as you want. Number your drawings and also write down the date of the day you drew the plants. It will show you how much you improved since you started and you can also compare your drawings.

10. Use a tape to stick the drawing on your wall. You can decorate one side of your wall with plants and your drawings.

What you will need 

1. A sketchbook

2. Watercolour paints

3. Paint brush

4. Scanner (if you don't have one, use a camera)

5. Photoshop

1. Draw any kind of flowers or plants, patterns on the sketchbook using watercolour paints. Try to use different colour and  different kind of shapes to give variations. I've decided to draw random plants and freesia flowers. As you can see the drawings don't have to be fancy, they can be rough and very plain. It's the combination of the drawings that matter :) 

2. Once you are done, wait until the paint fully dry. Scan your paintings and open the file in Photoshop. Use the Lasso tool to cut out each drawings.

3. Paste the drawings into a new square page and make sure to erase and cut out the edges of the drawings. I used masking tool to erase the edges.  Place the drawings nicely and try to fill up the gaps. Note you can adjust colour and brightness of each drawings here to make the whole piece to look nice. I've used hue/saturation to change colour and brightness. Once you are done pasting, merge all the layers. If you like to have a different background colour, use a paint bucket tool to paint the background layer.

4. Make a new page and paste the square page into this page. Repeat this until you fill up the whole page.

5. You can rotate, turn, enlarge the patterns however you want to create different style patterns.

TADA! These are the patterns I've created. You can use the pattern to create your own scarf, packaging or curtains, however you like! 

For instance, I used the pattern to create a concept page of home fragrance series.

I hope everyone enjoyed reading this tutorial!

Alena