In this tutorial you’ll gain some tips to draw realistic hyacinth or any of a lot of complicated flowers with a lot of florets together. 

What is an inflorescence?

If you’re someone who’s wanted to learn how to draw a cluster-type of flower, then you’ve wanted to draw something much fancier than a cluster: it’s called an inflorescence! What kinds of flowers have an inflorescence in addition to hyacinth? Just a few:

• lily of the valley
• astilbe
• yarrow
• milkweed

And many more. The tips in today’s hyacinth video might help you in drawing these others, too!

Tutorial: How to draw realistic hyacinth inflorescence in alcohol markers

Watch the video below and scroll to the end to leave comments or questions — or click HERE to watch it on YouTube and leave comments over there. I read both dutifully!

Study a flower from real life

As you draw one floret at a time, you’ll want to look more carefully than you can in a photo; a 2d picture can flatten shapes so you can’t see where one flower starts and another ends. With a real flower   you can pay attention to negative spaces, which is what will create that dimension!

Color shifts

Begin with small color variances – shift hues little by little and see how that goes. You may stumble on just the right combo and if so  – write it down! I knew I had good blue violets but needed to push them more red; the pinks weren’t cutting it. Rather than having THAT many colors to carry out throughout the picture, I proceeded on the whole flower til I was ready to make a big shift in hue and value all at once. 

Harmonizing color

Carrying the same/similar colors throughout a drawing helps it all to come together; on something like a flower with distinct colors for a blossom and its greens, we can be tempted to keep them apart. But see if you can incorporate a floral color into a shadow on the stem, and maybe some of your dark green into flower shadows. Value can sometimes be a challenge – run a few tests on scrap to see how dark or light to go with those colors.

Here are the ones used for this drawing:

What’s your favorite flower?

I might make more flower videos and printables in the next month, let me know if you have ideas about which kind? (Note that I have a whole bunch of them on the Printables page already!)

Supplies

1. Hyacinth printable 
2. Copic Markers 
3. Copic Hex Chart 
4. Neenah Cardstock, Solar White 250pk  (Note I was working on Neenah but 11×17 that I bought at a local paper store. Very $$$)

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