I’ve provided two photos of the daisy for you to draw from. One is a color version, and the other is a slightly contrasty back and white version. Some people prefer drawing grayscale from a color photo, while others prefer working from a grayscale photo. If you are a beginner, I suggest using the grayscale photo.
Here are the supplies I use:
Strathmore Drawing paper, 400 Series, Smooth Surface. This is an inexpensive paper with a medium tooth.
B, H, 2H, 4H pencils.
A kneaded eraser.
A Tombow Mono Zero (round tip) Eraser.
An Xacto knife to cut the Mono Zero Eraser into a point.
A pencil sharpener.
You can draw the beginning line drawing by eye, by graph, or by tracing from the photo. I prefer tracing because it’s quicker.
Please don’t make your line drawing as dark as mine. My line drawing is dark so you can see it better. I started to add the stamens to my line drawing but found them too small and tight to be helpful to the drawing, so I decided to draw them by eye at a later stage.
I began by lightening my line drawing by tapping it with a kneaded eraser. Your line drawing should be about the value of the shadows in the petals, or very light.
I shaded the petals with a 4H pencil and a very light touch. As I shaded, I also added small details to the petals that my line drawing had skipped. As you work, look at the photo of the daisy or my drawing. Notice that the shadows are not all hard-edged. Some of them have edges that gradate into the petal.
Using an H pencil, I shaded down the middle of the stem and used a 4H pencil on both sides. I’ll make it look “soft” or “fuzzy” later on.
I tried drawing the stamens from the center of the eye of the daisy outward, and I tried drawing them along the rim. It was easier to draw those along the rim first because I could use the petals as landmarks to help place them. I used 2H and 4H pencils to draw the stamens and a Mono Zero eraser cut into a smaller point to clean up stray lines.
The stamens in the middle of the flower had a curving pattern that I tried to capture. As you can see, my stamens aren’t perfect, and yours don’t have to be either for this drawing to work. I’ve found that if you draw sixty percent of what you see correctly, and the other forty percent within an acceptable range of reality, most drawings look realistic. (The exception is portraits.) So, there’s usually no need for perfection when you draw.
I used sharp 2H, 4H, and H pencils to add the final shading to the inner stamens. The shading included the overall body shading, darkening the shadows between the stamens, and I added a few more stamens where they were needed. This is not a perfect one-to-one representation of the photo, but I am happy enough with how it turned out.
To find the background I wanted to use, I made a series of test hatches on the same paper with different pencils. For several reasons, it’s challenging to create a large area of even hatching. The pencil tip changes as you work, your hand gets tired, and the paper may even have different textures. For these reasons, I started with a small patch of hatching with a B pencil in one corner to get a feel for the look that I wanted, and then I outlined the flower, hatched around it, and worked outward from there. To make the stem look a little “fuzzier,” I roughly hatched along the edge perpendicularly.
If you have a dark spot in the background you want to get rid of, you can pinch your kneaded eraser into a point and tap the spot with it until it lightens. If you rub it, you’ll smear the texture.
Here are some tips for creating a smooth texture: Work in small sections. Make all the hatch marks in the same direction. Keep the same pressure on the pencil. Rotate the pencil as it flattens.
Happy drawing,
Carol
If you enjoyed the daisy drawing lesson, you might enjoy How to Draw a Rose.
