Painting Eucalyptus Flowers in Watercolour

If you have ever looked at Eucalyptus flowers and thought they are too difficult to paint, then this is the tutorial for you. In this short course you will learn to observe Eucalyptus flowers, looking at the light and shade, in order to then draw a tonal study. After completing a careful, detailed drawing you will move on to paint the flowers from two slightly different angles., and then paint them in detail. I will talk you through every step, showing that they are not that difficult if you just go one step at a time.

This is bonus content, which will be useful for students who have completed the tutorial "Introduction to Botanical Art - Eucalyptus leaves". However it isn't absolutely necessary to have completed that tutorial. This tutorial is fairly casual, I'm just talking as I'm painting and there is minimal editing.

It's important to observe our subject closely and a great way of doing that is to sketch it. Here we will look at light and shade and the detail in the flowers, creating a tonal sketch to refer back to when we start painting.

Here we will refer to our tonal sketch, and lightly draw in a flower to begin painting. We will do a light 'undercoat' of colour to begin with.

Here we try to work out which colour mixes are going to get us that beautiful vibrant pinky red, and do some colour swatches on the page.

We will start to build up some colour on the flowers, painting in the stamens, using a bit more pigment and less water than the previous layer.

Moving on to the second flower, again we will build up colour by carefully painting in the stamens - still with some more detail to be added later.

Here we carefully start to work on the hypanthium (botanical term which I've just learnt!). These are beautifully rounded and we use a small brush and tiny strokes to build up the tone in order to achieve this form.

It's the little details at the end that can really make your painting stand out. We will add some shadows to the stamens, finish off the stigma, and add a few more details here and there. By the end you will be able to add these beautiful flowers to a Eucalyptus leaf painting - just make sure you are using the correct species (you don't want the wrong flowers with the wrong leaves) - a little bit of research can help you in this regard.