Introduction

Hello! I’m LILYRESH 🍥⭐🐟 This is my first tutorial, and I’m very excited to show you how I draw flowers in chalk pastel style digitally!

The flower that in this piece is called “kalachuchi” (aka white plumeria), a flower that blooms in summer at my home that fills me with warmth and nostalgia everytime I see it.

🌼 prep and warm up

When starting on a piece, I like to get a feel and vibe with the idea that I want first. Since this is a style from traditional art of pastels (hard, soft, or chalk pastels), I prepared the digital canvas to feel more ‘traditional’.

I used a canvas texture from the image materials called “Canvas 02”. Feel free to choose any texture that you like! This is simpy what spoke to me at the time.

🌼 sketch and line art

To make the artwork look more organic as the traditional look, I kept the sketch and line art a bit rough and soft. I continued to work from sketch to line art on one layer, letting small rough slips contribute to the wider whole composition of the piece.

I did the sketch using this brush asset.

Later on, I kept this sketch visible throughout as I painted. Usually, when you work traditional art, you only really have your canvas as the only layer to your work. I wanted to keep that idea in the art so I showed it a bit.

🌼 start painting!

In this part, I will show you how I draw and painted in pastel style along with the techniques and brushes that I used.

This is my primary coloring brush. I really like the texture and the pressure control I have on this brush as it possess that soft look when you draw lightly on paper. This brush set has ten settings for pressure and control so you just choose what you feel is right for the detail you want to work on.

One thing to always consider when coloring is that pressure and control is the key! I also chose complimenting colors for the color palette so it will look good.

Next, I locked the layer of the sketch and changed its color to something softer that looks like the pencil texture. Again, I painted the details softly and took note of the values for the shadows as a more cool tone.

In this part, I chose a different color for the canvas. Feel free to experiment on the colors. Ultimately I chose what color will compliment the flower more.

Our flower is almost finish! I changed the later setting of the canvas texture layer to Multiply to make the colors pop more. You can also change the color of this texture using the layer effect setting.

For a more stylized effect, I added a few simple hatching techniques to give it more texture. You can see it on the flower’s petals. This simple technique can give more flavor to your piece as it gives it a glowy soft effect on the flower.

This is another brush I use if I want to add a hard rough effect. You can see here on this detail how I use it to add more “pastel-like” texture to the piece.

I also wanted to give the piece more dimension, so I started painting on the background it as well to make the upper part more brighter and the lower darker.

You can achieve this effect by painting over the background layer and using different brushes that I linked above. Make sure to choose colors that will complement each other. Feel free to adjust the colors using the adjustment layer as you please!

🌼 finishing touches (+optional!)

Personally, I like to make my digital art that looks ‘traditional’ a more vintage look. To make that happen, I simply duplicate the canvas texture layer and put it on top of the other layers. This will result on a more textured and dated look.

🌼 final words

Ta-da! ⭐ Here is the final work. Thank you so much for reading! I hope you like it. Feel free to drop your thoughts or comments below! 💞🍥