(upbeat music)
- Hey everyone, it's Amanda, welcome back to my channel.
Today I'm coming at you guys with another doodle tutorial.
You guys seemed to really like the last couple
of ones that I did, so I thought I would sit down
and show you guys how to draw sunflowers.
As some of you guys may already know,
my bullet journal theme this month was sunflowers
and I had so much fun drawing them,
they make me so happy, so I thought
I would pass on the knowledge to you guys.
Even though July is pretty much almost done
and this video might be a little late,
I thought you guys still might want to know
how I personally doodle sunflowers whether it's for
future reference or just for fun, you guys can doodle
along with me while you watch this video.
So hopefully you guys find this helpful,
but without further ado, let's get doodling.
All right so as usual we're gonna start off
by talking about the basics which is
the petal shapes of sunflowers.
So for my personal method of drawing sunflowers,
again as usual, this is just how I personally draw them.
There's probably a million different ways
and there's no right or wrong way to draw obviously.
But for me personally, there are like four or five
different main petal shapes that I like to do,
one that is more teardrop shaped, one that is skewed
to the left or the right, one with a rounded top
and then kind of a mix of the both,
so it is skewed to the right or left plus a rounded top.
And then you can always play around with the shapes
like make them taller and skinnier and whatnot.
The center of a sunflower is kind of its distinguishing
feature and very iconic, that's how you can kind of tell
that it's a sunflower and not just a yellow flower.
So there's a couple different ways that I like
to fill in the center because typically it is a lot darker.
The method that I used in my July bullet journal
is kind of like filling it in with a bunch of loopty loops.
If you guys don't know, I'm actually very impatient
with my doodles, I don't like to spend a lot of time
with them, especially when I bullet journal.
I kind of just want to do it quick and fun and easy
and not really painstakingly hunched over
and getting every single detail right.
So for me just kind of doing that loopty loop
shape all around until I fill the center
works perfectly fine, but if you do want to be more
detailed with it, you can draw those individual circles.
It's totally up to you.
Another way you can fill in the center is almost
like a cross hatched diamond waffle pattern.
You can also use a lot of dots and illustrative strokes
as you can see here, I kind of focus them
on the outer edge and bring them in towards the center.
This kind of gives it more of
an illustrative realistic feel.
And then finally just leave it completely empty
and then color it all in with a darker color.
Moving on to the actual sunflower,
let's put all of those elements together.
So, I actually like to start off with a pencil
which is really rare for me, usually I just
kind of wing it with a fine liner,
but I find that this really helps.
So I'll draw a center circle which will be
the center of the flower, and then I'll draw
another outer ring around that center circle.
The diameter of the larger circle
is triple the center smaller circle.
I find that the outer ring helps guide me
so that I know that all of my petals
are around the same size.
So I'll start off with the center of my circle,
outline it with my fine liner, fill it in however I want to
and then I'll start drawing random petals.
Now this step is pretty important.
I like to start off by scattering random petals
around the circle, I don't go in order one by one
all the way around clockwise or something.
I start off by scattering like five or six
different petals all the way around
that way I can make sure that the angle of the petals
are actually sprouting outwards in kind of in a starburst
pattern, and then also this makes sure
that you get a lot of randomness with the layering
of the petals because if you kind of just start
from the top and then go all the way around,
you'll kind of just start layering them backwards
and it'll look too put together if that makes sense.
Once I have my main petals down,
that's when I go back in and start
putting petals behind the main petals,
in front of the main petals, filling them in
using all of the various different petal shapes,
switching back and forth between the rounded ones,
the pointy ones, just however my little heart desires.
And then once you fill all of the petals in
that's when I start to color everything in.
So for my July bullet journal cover, I actually use
multiple different yellows, and I thought this helped
give the sunflower that golden look.
So I start off with a paler yellow,
then I go in with a more normal yellow
and then I'll go in with a golden almost orange color.
By the way I'm gonna be linking all of the markers
and colors that I'm using in the description box
below in case you're curious.
But once I have the flat yellow colors down,
that's when I'll go in with my darker yellow ochre color.
It's almost like a golden dark brown,
but still more on the lighter yellow side.
I don't even know how to describe colors.
But I'll use this to stroke from the center
of the flower kind of midway into the petal
and I really flick my wrist so that it fades off
into the end and that just gives it
a little bit more depth, it looks like
the flower petals are bending inwards
and it kind of brings everything together.
So that's the actual flower portion,
and then of course I always like to add in a stem.
I like to draw the stems curved because
in my head sunflowers always are facing towards the sun
or they're always like very photogenic
and facing towards the camera of any picture.
And then I'll throw in some leaves as well.
The leaves tend to be a bit loose and droopy almost.
But I don't really focus on the leaves a lot.
In terms of my actual July bullet journal cover,
when you're adding multiple sunflowers
that's when doing the pencil guidelines really helps
because I'll always start marking off the circles
so that I can picture where the sunflowers will go
and where the leaves will overlap and all of that.
You can actually see that I'm also drawing
sunflowers that are from a side angle,
and in order to do that I kind of squish
the guidelines into an oval, so there is a smaller oval
and then again a larger oval around it
and then I'll fill in the petals the same way
except some of the petals are gonna be shorter
because you have to fit in within those guidelines.
I hope this makes sense.
In order to give it that perspective of a sideways flower
I'll also skew some of the petals so that
they are wider and it kind of makes it look
like the perspective is coming at you.
It's really hard to describe.
Hopefully you can kind of see what I'm doing in the picture.
It's just trial and error and playing around
with the different petal shapes.
By the way, I accidentally used the wrong green
for this illustration and it ended up looking too dark
and very bad so ignore that and picture
the green that was used in the previous flower.
So that's how I've been drawing my sunflowers this month.
But I wanted to show you guys a couple different options
and different styles that you can draw sunflowers in
just because there's so many different ways
and just wanted to give you guys some ideas.
So if you want a very clean, bold look,
I would try making all the petals
one shape and very even and uniform.
As you can see I'm just sticking with
the pointed shape all the way around.
Another thing I experimented with was playing around
with drawing lines in the center of the flower.
So, kind of following the shape of the flower
and it looks pretty cool, almost again, very stylized.
The next sunflower style I did
was more illustrative and realistic.
Same type of deal, all of the sunflowers I start off
with the guidelines and the center and then the petals,
but with this one I'm not really focused on making sure
that the petals are all uniform.
So I'm playing around with the petal shapes,
I'm adding extra strokes onto the petals
so that it looks like the petals are curling upwards,
I'm adding little strokes as well
and it's more of a sketchy sketchbook, like a sketchbook
type of feel and it looks really realistic.
Later you'll see that I fill it in with watercolor.
And I'm not focused on fully filling in the petals,
it's more just to get the essence of the sunflower.
And I really like the way that this looks.
This one I did a larger center and then smaller petals.
And this gives is almost more child like feel.
I feel like it looks like something you would see
in a nursery room or a Kindergarten book,
but it's still pretty cute.
Then finally I did one where I didn't even use
any of the fine liners, it was just all watercolor.
This was also really, really fun because I started off
with the yellow petals kind of in a starburst pattern
and then I went in with the brown
and since the yellow was still a little wet,
the brown kind of bled into a natural starburst pattern.
So it looked like petals, like the natural lines
of a petal, which I thought was really cool.
All right guys, so that's it for this video.
I hope you enjoyed.
You guys should all be pros at drawing sunflowers by now.
I've already been seeing a lot of you guys
doodle sunflowers, but I can't wait to see more.
If you enjoyed this video and want to see more from me
you can go over to my Instagram @amandarachdoodles.
I do a lot of doodles obviously, but we also
do live streams over there, some videos,
it's a fun time so go check that out.
But, other than that, I think I'm gonna sign off now,
so keep doodling and I'll talk to you in my next video.
Bye everyone.
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