How to Draw Roses

I started out drawing roses with pen & ink on paper with no sketches, no rough drafts (scroll down towards the bottom of this page for an example). I know I can do it, so I don't feel like it's cheating to trace a rose from a photograph using Photoshop CS2 and my Wacom graphic tablet.

The shading, coloring, and the quality of the line is what makes it a unique drawing instead of just a copy.

Here's how I do it:

I started with this rose photograph posted on Flickr by lincolnian. It has a Creative Commons License on it that allows for "remixing" or altering of the image as long as attribution is given.

First I made the transparency of the photo about 90%. Then I created a new layer to draw the tracing on. Using a pen & ink "brush" I created in Photoshop to mimic a fountain pen, I traced the outlines of the petals.

Using lines that change thickness adds dimension to a drawing. That's what makes it look done by hand.

After doing the outline I like to use little dots to create shading. I kept the original photo visible under the drawing to guide me in where to put the dots. Lines of dots show the shape of the petal. Just look for the faint lines or "veins" in the photo and follow them. As my art teacher said over and over again, "less is more". Just use the lines to give an idea of the shape of the petal. More dots makes a darker shadow.

You could stop right there and have a drawing that could be used for clip art and as the basis for many other works of art.

Or you can add color as I did. I used other Photoshop brushes to "paint" on transparent layers of color. Using the layers function in PS I put the dark gold color on one layer, and the bright yellow on another.

The darker shading is much the same effect as you would get with a pen and ink wash. The yellow color would be watercolor paint.

The eraser function is my best friend in Photoshop. I lay down color and then use a scatter style brush to pull some of it back out. It gives it a more natural texture.

That's the simplest way I know to draw a rose. Every mark you make with the graphic pen (or even the mouse, if you're extremely patient) is your own individual signature.

Don't worry about being exact! That's the great thing about drawing flowers. Unlike a portrait of a person, as long as you get the general shape of the petals and overall flower it will be recognizable. Flowers give you an opportunity to play around with techniques and see what happens. Most of my art is intuitive and accidental.

This is another digital rose drawing I've done using Photoshop CS2 and my Wacom graphic tablet I'm going to assume you already have some knowledge of how to use layers in Photoshop.

I started with this photo by kostas.v on Flickr.

I changed it to black and white so that I could more clearly see the values from black to grey to white.

From there I opened a new layer and outlined the rose with a bold pen photoshop "brush" as I did in the first tutorial above. (I hid the photo to show you just the drawing, but it's still there in my layers.)

I use a lot of layers when I work in Photoshop which gives me more flexibility as to what I can remove or change later on in the drawing's progress. So, opening another layer between the photo and the outline, I began to fill in some of the shading using crosshatching. The shadows were my guide.

I ended up with this:

I was trying to stay true to the actual shading on the photograph, but when I was done I decided that didn't have enough contrast. It had no visual punch. So I went back in and redrew over the the lines I had (using several new layers), going with what I thought looked good instead of what the photo dictated.

Notice how I used some of the lines of the crosshatching to show the actual shape of the petal. After I got that all drawn in I threw in some more random crosshatching to keep things interesting. It also takes the pressure off from having to be perfect.

That is the basic, clip-art-like rose drawing. From there you can do all sorts of things with it. I chose to color it in digitally again.

Using a chalk "brush" in Photoshop, I laid down some color underneath the drawing using another layer.

I continued on using different shades and values of red. I really like to use the eraser brushes in Photoshop to pull color back out again, too. Keeps things from looking too flat and more like what I call "analog art".

I could have messed around with all that for hours, but this is where I stopped.

If you had a drawing like this of your own you could print it out and use it in collages and other mixed media art. There is a great book about how to do that called Collage Unleashed by Traci Bautista that shows how to "repurpose" your artwork over and over again like this to make new pieces.

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