General Overview

Today i will show you how the same exact subject can convey 2 different stories with just the addition of the language of flowers, 2 quick ways to add flowers,and sharing some tips on making sure your flower doesn't look disconnected from your subject.

 

The key to making sure your flowers look seamless with your environment is by using consistent light and colors. It is key to make sure that your flowers and the rest of the illustration/subject all exist in the same space.

Plan your Light and Color

To start, i like to start with a thumbnail for each of the lighting scenarios i want. It’ll be way easier for me to keep a consistent light if i know what i would like to make beforehand. 

I have a top down light and a side light source for the demo.

An easy general light rule i often follow is a warmer tone light and a colder tone shadow. You will need to apply this to your whole illustration to make sure everything is cohesive.

Alright, let’s get into how to draw the flowers themselves. Sometimes drawing a huge amount of flowers like a massive bouquet or a flower field might be intimidating, but don’t worry,

There are ways you can get that glorious flora without straining your wrists

I. How to Add Easy Flowers : Asset Brush Method

Setting up your Asset Brushes

The way i like to color in these is by setting the brush’s lineart color to the lineart color of the rest of my illustration, and the fill to be white or a light beige.

 

Therefore I can set this layer to multiply and color underneath the multiply layer to my liking, having the lineart intact.

If you can’t change the colors and the brush colors are black and white, you can use blend mode overlay to color the black lineart.

Make a new layer, set to overlay, and fill it with the color of your choice. Clip the overlay layer to your layer with the asset layer.

 

Once you’re satisfied, you can set the asset layer to multiply, make a new layer undernearth and color as you please.

How to edit asset brush with set/unchangable colors

While if you want to use a brush with set colors, you can adjust it using the tonal correction settings. You can find it in Edit -> Tonal Correction

 

play around with the options and settings as seen fit. in this example, my subject is very desaturated while the flower brush is quite vibrant. To tone down my colors, i did :

 

- lower the saturation and luminosity (Tonal Correction->Hue/Saturation/Luminosity)

- shifted the colors to be more neutral with color balance (Tonal Correction-> Color balance)

-clipped a layer with grey fill on blending mode “color” to the flower layer to unify the colors of the leaves and flowers

 

i suggest playing around with the tonal correction settings, and trying out different blending modes (i reccomend blending mode multiply, overlay, and color for these type of color correcting process)

Sometimes using asset brushes can easily look disconnected from the main drawing, as it’s most likely drawn not in your art style, but adjusting the colors will help with this a lot. The light will improve this even more.

Adding Light and Shadows

An easy way to quickly establish a lighting source is to use a multiply layer (with the fill color of your choice - blueish grey is a common universal choice) for the shadows, clip the layer to your subject, then selecting the parts you’d like to be in light with the lasso tool, and deleting it.

To push the light even further, i like to use both blend mode soft light for the non direct light (like bounce light and softer light fall off) and glow dodge for harsher light like edge lighting on the parts without the multiply layer.

 

Don’t forget to keep in mind your light source and keep it consistent! Reference and 3d models would be a great reference for this, but with practice and consistent observation, you’ll be able to more or less guesstimate the light. 

 

If your light source is coming from the left, all items in the space should be lit from the left direction as well.

II. How to Add Easy Flowers : Impressionistic Method

General explanation and Examples

The second way to get a dense flower bush fast is to not draw all your details. Sounds counterintuitive, i know, but we will be using an impressionistic approach, which focuses on giving the illusion of detail without having to draw every single element, because you are focusing on how light and color forms the overall environment.

Here is an example in one of my older artworks!

i will show a more detailed breakdown in the demo/example part of the tutorial. you can click the directory if you’d like to skip ahead to that.

Maximize your Foreground & Background

The last tip to improve your background even more is to maximize your foreground and backgrounds! I like to either blur the foreground elements, or blur the furthest elements away from the camera to give a sense of distant detail. 

 

elements that are close to the “camera/viewfinder” will look larger, and darker. to add the blur effect, just select the layer with the elements you’d like to blur

-> Filter -> blur -> gaussian blur.

This is great to push a sense of depth to your illustration.

you can also do the same for background elements, especially if your main subject of the illustration is something on the midground/foreground. This will give that depth effect without taking too much attention from your main subject.

 

I will explain in more detail in section Let’s Draw : Impressionistic Method

Let's Draw : Asset Brush Method

For this demo am picking some common flower language examples for the demo : white lilies and red roses.

I’m choosing 2 different direction to show you how versatile flowers can be that it can change the overall direction of the illustration despite having the same subject.

 

According to multiple sources, white lilies are associated with purity, virtue, rebirth and sympathy. 

While red roses are often symbolized with passion, love, and desire. But the thorns in roses also present a dual symbolism : Challenges, sacrifice, and sometimes danger.

I am using this lily brush (linked below) using the method i explained before. Feel free to jump back to section Setting up your Asset Brushes if you feel lost!

Adding your Light and Shadow

Once you have colored your flowers, create a new multiply layer.

 

Using the fill lasso tool, i am selecting parts where the shadows would hit from a top down light scenario like what i have planned out during the light planning section.

 

I picked a desaturated grey-green as my shadow for the leaf and stems, and a desaturated grey blue for the flowers, choosing cold colors because I want my light to look more warm.

For the harsher light, i create a new layer with the glow dodge blending mode, and still using the lasso tool, I picked a warm desaturated yellow for my strongest highlight.

You can adjust the opacity to your liking, but because the illustration is pretty muted overall, I opted for a lower opacity. I believe the glow dodge layer here is on about 30% opacity.

 

Using the same light source reference, I applied the same method to the character, from carving out the shadows and adding light. This is what will make your flowers and your character look like they exist in the same space.

Final Touches : Dreamy Glow and Soft Airbrush

To avoid the background flowers competing for attention, i will use the airbrush tool on a normal layer above the flowers to add a soft mist of the background color (in this case, cream) to separate our character from her background slightly.

As a final touch, I also duplicated the entire flower layer (after merging all of your shadows and light into the base color and lineart layer)

 

set the layer to “lighten” blending mode and add Filter -> gaussian blur to the layer.

 

This will give your drawing a slight light bloom effect, that softens the colors and line to further put emphasis of detail on the center of the illustration and add a dreamy effect.

 

 

Let's Draw : Impressionistic Method

Let’s try the other way to speed draw some flowers a demo here.

 

Here i am drawing the main flower held by the character using a reference photo i took. Since this is the main focus of the illustration, this flower should be the most detailed, so i drew every petal, the thorns and the stem.

 

But.. what about the background flowers that is supposed to be a dense rose bush with a LOT of leaves and a LOT of flowers?

Looking at another reference photo, you can see that the overall color percentage is dominated by the leaf color, with stems and leaf overlapping each other. some of the flowers are tucked in between the leaves, with a couple ones nearing the top of the bush.

So first i lay the color of the roses (i picked a desaturated red hue) over the area, before layering on top the darkest leaf color.

 

Then either using the lasso fill tool, a brush with low blending options, or any brush on a new layer, i start to carve out some leaf over this dark base, some lighter color leaf, stems, and finally flowers.

 

Work your way lighter and lighter as you layer these elements, mimicking how shadows cover deeper parts of a bush, like seen in the reference! Light will fall mostly on the top leaves that are exposed, so your top leaves will be lighter than the ones deep inside the bush.

 

For the roses i mimic the shape of the flowers, and for the leaves, rose leaves are quite round, and they grow in groups from one single stem,  so I repeated that pattern all over, alongside some stylized thorny stems. Check your reference and see how other artists stylizes certain types of flowers.

 

This is super fast and only took me about 10 minutes to do!

Next, as we did with the first illustration, we need to match the light on our character to the background, and it’ll blend everything together.

 

The steps i took both on the roses and the character is exactly the same as in our previous Let’s Draw section : Adding your Light and Shadow. Feel free to jump there if you need a refresher of the detailed steps!

 

but the basic breakdown is : multiply layer -> delete parts of multiply layer -> add soft light layer -> add glod dodge layer

Final Touches : Blurred Foreground

For this illustration’s final detail , i added some floating rose petals (linked below) both around the character and far into the foreground.

 

I add larger petals that are closed to the viewfinder that i applied the gaussian blur for the foreground.

 

These foreground is darker, since foreground elements so close to the viewfinder that they blur, tends to be darker. This will give the sense of depth and the varied value will add clarity to your illustration.

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You did it! You added Flowers to your Background!

i hope this small tip and demo helps you to add a little bit of background elements when you might be stuck on what to do with your illustration’s background! It’s simple, quick, and adds so much nuance and flair to your final illustration.

 

Thank you for reading! <3