Hiya everybody!

 

This will be my entry for the Clip Studio Paint Monthly tips for the Flower theme!

I'll write the written version here, and there is also a video version above, this should be really beginner-friendly and if you have any questions please feel free to ask me ! =) ♥

 

I'll be covering how to shade a flower for your everyday illustration needs and for backgrounds and foregrounds =)

 

Drawing First Step - The Stem

For this tutorial, we will go with a Lilly!

A flower is structured by two main parts, the stem, and the petals.

We first draw the stem using a cylinder and a sphere on top.

 

The cylinder and sphere will determine where your flower is facing.

For example, a curved line can make droopy flowers, and a slanted one can indicate wind in the scene.

 

Drawing Second Step - Geometry

we draw a geometrical shape to determine the perspective of our petals. This will depend heavily on the flower we decided to draw. in our case a Lily!

 

Keep in mind each flower is made from different geometrical shapes, for example, a daffodil will be made out of two 3d shapes.

Drawing Step three - The Petals

each petal is similar to a small piece of soft square paper.

Some have unique curves and shapes for example Daffodils are triangular, while tulip petals are oval, and Petunia’s are tapered squares!

 

It is essential to pay attention to where the base of the petals is connecting to the stem, marked by a blue dot, to help you ground the petal in perspective.

In separate layers, draw in squares connecting to the sphere for each petal to get the perspective right .

Keep in mind it might be easier to draw the petals on top after coloring the squares and the geometric shape you drew using the CSP Color layer function that can be found right here.

and then draw the petals on top of them in another layer.

Do remember not to be too rigid following the guideline perspective squares we drew earlier, as some petals might be too oddly shaped to fit perfectly to a square.

 

After completing this step, we can also add a few small garnishments such as leaves and stigma,

afterwards, you can turn off the squares you drew for perspective and delete the parts of the stem you cant see and you have successfully drawn a flower!

Optional Step, Lineart

An Optional step that might help you paint the flower you drew earlier more easily is to merge all the layers and delete the hidden ones

and then use the layer color function we used earlier on the whole flower

and go over it slowly to make sharper lines.

Painting Step One - Filling

For Step one we will fill our drawing in a layer underneath the flower's lineart

Tip: don’t be scared to use the color tip tool for choosing the colors using pictures of flowers!

An easy way to fill our flower will be to use the Fill Tool, or mark the Lineart layer is a Reference layer

And use the fill tool or a brush to color under the lines in a layer below, while making sure it pays attention to reference layers

Painting Step Two - Shading

Make a new layer then clip it using this icon to your filled color layer that you have just made in the last step!

And now you can start shading using a soft brush like this

pay attention to the minute shade changes in the flower and worry about the texture later, for example,

some flowers, such as Petunias, have a soft gradient from pink to white

and red tulips are often gradient yellow at the edge of the petal.

A great tip to shade correctly is to move your color wheel a bit to the left and then move the color picker down from the original color you started with

you can do the opposite for adding some light!

 

Don't forget to shade the stem as well!

Painting Step Three - Texturing

With a hard brush like this and the occasional soft brush like before,

Make a new layer above the color layer and clip it to the layer below as we did before.

You can now start drawing in the texture of the petals, in the new layers we just made. This might require some trial and error so take your time during this phase.

 

 

Something that might help you is using the Pen pressure option under your brush tool properties

And Thats it! you colored your flower!

Painting Optional Step

If you already have an established scene you are going to use a flower in like mine, you can color the lineart or sketch lines to better fit your flower and scene

then make a merged down copy of the flower you just drew

 

It will allow us to better match to the lighting of the scene, and go over it with an overlay layer that is clipped to the merged layers

 

It will allow us to better match to the lighting of the scene,

Drawing Colors for Backgrounds

Under this section, I'll go over how to draw and add flowers for backgrounds!

This section will use some of the same techniques that are used in the previous section so it's highly recommended to see it prior to this part.

A lot of the time we blur the flowers in the background to create the illusion of depth and we mostly look at them from above, so one easy way to draw flowers for a background is to forgo the stem and just draw the shapes of the petals connecting to different spheres.

 

We also won't need to draw dozens of flowers to fill a background as we are going to draw a few rough variations using the same method we did before, by drawing a sphere and connecting petals to it, but foregoing the stem.

 

We will start by simply roughing out the circle without the stem(Cylinder) and then drawing rough petals around it.

Turn them blue using the same color method we did with our earlier flower

Go over them with sharper lines in a separate layer above the blue sketch.

and then erase the sketch below those black sharper lines as we did earlier.

And of course, now we can color fill our drawing using the aforementioned reference layer method.

Lightly shade the flowers, no need to overboard with texturing precisely, as they won't be part of our artwork's vocal point.

Now we can start selecting using the lasso selection tool and then we are going to copy-paste different flowers we drew, pull them together.

To make more similar-looking flowers that are just skewed copy-pasted flowers for the illusion of more flowers with less work, using the Transform tool(Hotkey Ctrl+T) will be helpful to skew the flowers.

Afterward, we will bring the flowers over to our illustration, and do what we just did with individual flowers just with the whole flowers,

copy-pasting the whole layer and transforming it in multiple locations.

And then we will merge all of those copy-paste flowers to a single layer, and transform it to fit the perspective of our scene, in this case, by stretching the bottom two points in the free transform bounding box by pressing Ctrl + T by default and then pressing control as we stretch the points.

Copy the layer of flowers layer we made put it below the flowers then paint it a dark color by locking its transparency

 

To indicate the cast shadow the flowers would make on the ground

Move the shadow layer you made down a bit and blur them a bit as objects with a distance from the ground have their shadow blurred a bit using the gaussian blur effect that can be found under the filter tab.

Then copy the background flower layer, blurring the copied flowers a bit

and then start erasing the parts closer to the camera with a soft brush.

And of-course an overlay layer on top to fix the lighting

Extra - Flower Basket

I have also made the flowers in the basket the exact same way we did our Background flower, no stem, only petals, roughed

Color functioned as we did earlier to make them blue,

Draw sharper lines in a layer on top

Clear the blue lines,

And as earlier fill in the colors

Texture them a bit and then overlay to fit the light scheme in the scene =)

I hope you found this tutorial helpful and if you drew anything using it! feel free to let me know as I'd love to see it =) ♥