How to paint easy watercolor clematis flowers

I painted some fun little watercolor flowers the other day. I made them with a super easy wet-on-wet watercolor technique that I’ll explain as well as show you in a video. You don’t need to be great at watercolor or drawing to try this!

Step 1: Sketch out your flowers

Start by drawing some flowers on watercolor paper.

(Tip: You can use normal paper, but it will be more likely to warp than watercolor paper.)

I chose to draw clematis flowers, based on one of my plants in the garden. For the flowers, I drew circles where the centers would be and surrounded the circles with five lemon shaped petals. Since clematis grow on vines, I then drew a stem toward the largest flower and added several other stems branching off this main stem heading toward the smaller flowers. A few curlicues for vine tendrils finished the drawing.

Your flowers don’t have to look like mine though! You could draw any shape of flower petals coming off a circle, and this technique will make your flowers look cute and a little fancy.

My sketch was too dark, so I lightened it with a kneaded eraser. When I was done, I could just see the lines – I didn’t have to squint to see them, but I couldn’t see them from across the room either. This is important because if the lines are too dark, they’ll show through the watercolor and you will see them in the finished artwork.

Step 2: Paint the flowers

I painted both the flowers and the leaves with the same technique.

1. Paint a base coat, using plenty of water in your paint to make sure your color is light. You also want to keep plenty of paint on your brush to make sure the paper is still moist for the next two steps.
2. Mix a darker version of the base color by adding more pigment to your first paint. Load this on your brush, then touch the tip of the brush to the paper. The darker paint will flow off the brush onto your painting and blend in all by itself (as long as the base layer is still wet).
3. Repeat step 2 with a second color. I chose to add a blue-purple to my purple flowers and a blue-green to my leaves.

I painted very light purple base coat on my flowers. I actually painted them all and then found out they had dried, so I went back over them with water in my brush to re-wet them so the technique would work.

Then I added a darker purple to the flowers.

I also added a blue-purple that made a pretty mix with the purple.

One word of warning – it’s a good idea to use colors that are next to each other on the color wheel. Complimentary color mixes get muddy looking.

Here are some colors that work together well:

• Pink with purple
• Pink (or red) with red-orange or coral pink
• Yellow and orange
• Purple and blue (I started with purple and added blue, but you can also start with blue and add a little purple for a mostly blue flower.)
• Green with yellow-green
• Green with blue-green

Step 3: Paint the leaves

I used the same technique to paint the leaves.

Starting with the leaves on the top of the design, I painted in a green basecoat.

Then I added a darker green and a blue-green to the light green. I love how that created color variations that make the leaves look fancier.

(Note: Sorry my hair is in the way of the picture… again! This is my first time creating a video and blog post, so I’m learning some things along the way. Next time, I’ll plan to pull my hair back!)

After the first leafy section was done, I worked on the other leaves.

Then I used some golden-brown paint to paint in the centers of the flowers.

The petals need to be totally dry before you do this. If yellow and purple mix, they tend to make muddy looking colors.

That’s it! As I mention in the video, I learned along the way that you do want to work in manageable sections or plan to re-wet your painting between steps 1 and 2 because this technique will only work when you are adding wet paint onto wet paper. That’s why this type of technique is called wet-on-wet watercolor. By the way, wet-on-wet has many variations and is one of the fundamental techniques you need to know to learn watercolor. I’m certainly not a master, but I will say that it feels amazing to watch the darker colors blend into the base coat and look so fancy, just because I’m letting the watercolor do its thing!

Thanks for reading!

Blessings,