Everyday Watercolor Flowers: A Modern Guide to Painting Blooms, Leaves, and Stems Step by Step

by Jenna Rainey

Overview

Author of Everyday Watercolor and Instagram darling Jenna Rainey presents a beautiful step-by-step guide to painting botanicals from lilies to daffodils in a wide variety of styles.

Artist Jenna Rainey shares easy-to-follow ways to paint a wide range of botanicals, all in her fresh, modern style that appeals to the next generation of watercolor artists and creatives, from beginners to hobbyists. With gorgeously illustrated instructions for both loose and realistic watercolor depictions of more than 25 flowers, leaves, and plants, organized by form and shape, Everyday Watercolor Flowers is every nature-lover's answer to capturing that beauty on paper.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780399582219
Publisher:	Clarkson Potter/Ten Speed
Publication date:	06/11/2019
Pages:	192
Sales rank:	426,729
Product dimensions:	8.20(w) x 9.40(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Jenna Rainey is an artist, self-taught designer, and author of Everyday Watercolor and Everyday Watercolor Flowers. As a surface pattern designer, her work has been seen on products in stores like Staples, Target, Office Depot, and more. Rainey specializes in watercolor, calligraphy, and other hand-drawn designs. She shares her talent and teaches the world how to paint on her YouTube channel, at her in-person workshops, and through her books.

Read an Excerpt

Introduction


There’s nothing more breathtaking than the natural beauty of flowers. The folds and tears in a peony petal or the striking texture in a parrot tulip call for an extra-long look and gasp. Nature has done such an excellent job. A flower can show us how complementary colors work together and how something so delicate can be uniquely powerful at the same time.   

For thousands of years, painters and writers have made flowers their subjects, finding in them attributes of beauty, growth, and happiness.  I couldn’t agree more. Growing up, I was always surrounded by flowers. My mom has an incredible green thumb, and right outside my bedroom window were lilies, jasmine, poppies, chocolate cosmos, and so many varieties of roses that you couldn’t count them all if you tried I didn’t know it at the time, but this childhood experience helped me build familiarity with flowers’ shapes and structure. Observing the growth stages of flowers in my mom’s garden taught me that a flower in its earliest stages as a bud is spherical, then opens up, petals peeling back, to form a sphere, bowl, or cylinder. A five-petal flower, like a cherry blossom, can be broken down to a star, and viewing a rose from the side is like looking at a cone or bowl shape. All of this, plus a love for art, made for tons of sketching and painting flowers.   

But, for any artist, painting a flower can be intimidating. Grasping the powerful and harmonious relationship between colors while also capturing the delicacy of each petal can be a challenge. One thing that is so important for your practice is to start by interpreting each flower or subject in terms of its basic shapes. Many artists grow impatient with the process of breaking things down first, and the proportions of their subjects suffer. For example, if a rose becomes too oblong, it can look like a tulip, or if one petal in your flower is pointing off in the wrong direction just slightly, it can mess with the whole appearance of your flower. That is why, in this book, I’m here to show you an approachable and quick way of grasping a flower’s shape. We are going to be studying flowers with a variety of shapes—star, circle, bell, bowl, trumpet, and combination—all while exploring different techniques to paint in both loose and more realistic styles.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Chapter 1 Star Shape 38

Cherry Blossom 40

Anemone 46

Clematis 52

Orchid 58

Chapter 2 Circle Shape 64

Sunflower 66

Dahlia Scura 72

Ranunculus 76

Eden Rose 82

Chapter 3 Bell Shape 84

Parrot Tulip 90

English Bluebell 94

Foxglove 98

Penstemon 104

Chapter 4 Bowl Shape 110

Camellia 112

Chrysanthemum 116

Hellebore 120

Peony 126

Chapter 5 Trumpet Shape 132

Nasturtium 134

Stargazer Lily 138

Morning Glory 142

Agapanthus 148

Chapter 6 Combination 154

Sweet Pea 156

Arundina Orchid 160

Bearded Iris 164

Coneflower or Echinacea Flower 170

Afterword: Putting It All Together 177

Conclusion 180

Acknowledgments 182

About the Author 183

Index 184

Editorial Reviews

"In Everyday Watercolor Flowers, Jenna takes you on an incredible, colorful journey, guiding you step by step through the process of painting flowers. This is a fantastic book for anybody with an interest in watercolor painting, whether they be honing their botanical skills or picking up a brush for the very first time." - Johanna Basford, illustrator and author of Secrete Garden and World of Flowers

"Beautifully accessible, warm, and inspiring, Everyday Watercolor Flowers is a book you'll want to dive right into, paintbrush in hand. Jenna's color-theory thought process, combined with her unique breakdown of flowers into shapes, helps to peel back the layers of her beautiful work and invite us all in." - Nicole Miyuki Santo, artist and author of By Hand: The Art of Modern Lettering

 "I’ve been following talented watercolor artist Jenna Rainey for years, so when I found out her second book was going to be focused on florals, I knew it would be right up my alley. Jenna thoroughly breaks down the watercolor technique into easy-to-absorb sections covering tools, technique, sketching, color palettes and tones, and floral anatomy before moving into various flower specimens broken down by shape. Not only is the content informative for any artist, but the book is also chock-full of Jenna’s stunning watercolor. A feast for both the eyes and aspiring watercolor artists' hands." - Laura Hooper, owner and creative director, Laura Hooper Calligraphy  

From the Publisher