How to Draw a Flower
Sketchbook Adventures, Part 1
In writing about sketchbooks a few weeks back, I touched briefly on how terrifying a blank sheet of paper can be. Where do you even begin? So to help diffuse that initial sense of trepidation, I wanted to start a semi-regular series looking at prompts to kick-start your creativity. So for the first installment: how do you draw a flower?
To be honest, this isn’t really a botanical drawing activity. In reality, it’s about moving past initial ideas and unearthing the delightfully unexpected. And if there’s one thing sketchbooks do well, it’s excavating un-thought thoughts. So back to the flowers…
Set yourself a goal of drawing 50 flowers. Daunting? Possibly. Unattainable? No. Now get ready to make your first flower, which will look like this:
That’s not a flower. It’s an emoji. It’s a universally understood distilled understanding of a flower. It’s not an orchid or a cactus bloom or lupine or any one of the glorious botanical examples that populate our planet; it’s kind of a snooze fest. But that daisy is usually where everybody starts out when drawing a flower. But you aren’t everybody, right? So let’s roll up our sleeves and have another go at it…
Draw another flower.
The daisy was followed by a (yawn) tulip. The tulip was predictably followed by a rose. But then? Things started to get a little less planned. This is the point where you need to keep drawing quickly. Disabuse yourself of two notions: this has to be perfect and it has to make sense. Maybe you’ll draw a super messy scribble for the flower itself, but you’ll make precisely rendered leaves. Perhaps you want a plant that blooms kittens. If you want petals that are made of piergoies, knock yourself out (sorry, I’m hungry). Draw the first thing that springs to mind and don’t overthink. I’d also recomend sticking with just a regular graphite pencil or a single colored pencil. Color is fun, but it can trip you up when you’re in the ideation stage, trying to think through form and shape.
This is around number 25. The flower that looks like a Sawtooth quilt square? Where’d that come from? And those round leaves on the bottom right example? Definitely not on my radar when the sketching began. As a point of reference, I was probably around 15 minutes into the activity at this point. But are you done yet? Nope. Upwards and onwards!
Aaaaand here’s 50. I think. Everytime I kept counting I hit a different number (there’s a reason I ended up in art not accounting). But you get my gist: the more flowers drawn, the more unique they became. Each flower wasn’t a totally new creation. In some cases, I piggybacked on an initial concept, drawing a tulip again, but changing the petal formation. What I really love about this sketchbook prompt is how it forces you to move past the obvious towards the unexpected. It can initially be frustrating and you’ll probably feel stuck, but just keep moving your pencil. Overthinking can be incredibly damaging to creativity. There are times to pause and think deeply about idea prior to exection, definitely. But for an activity like this, you’re focused on idea generation and it’s important not to become bogged down with precision.
And don’t feel that this is an activity limited to botanical art. You could do the same activity using facial expressions, cars, houseplants, cakes, stars, robots, fish or any number of things. The key is to identify an object that comes in a myriad of forms and to think about it deeply and widely.
When I taught at Squam back in 2019, this was one of the group activities we did in the workshop I taught. It was so much fun seeing the hundreds and hundreds of flowers we collectivly drew and it’s an activity I come back to for my own personal work frequently. So sharpen your pencils and happy drawing!