If you like to draw outside, or like to draw flowers from your imagination, use circles and ovals to sketch flowers quickly and easily.
To draw a four petal flower as seen from the top, lightly draw a circle, or draw around a large coin (I used a quarter), and then make crossed lines that divide the circle into four sections.
I made my drawing darker than it needs to be so you can see it better.
Draw petals around each quarter line, as I have done.
Finish by erasing the circle and crossed lines, and then add a few dots with the tip of the pencil to create stamens at the center of the flower.
To draw the same flower seen from a side angle, draw an oval and add crossed lines as done before.
When you draw petals around these quarter lines, the one that “comes at” you, will be short. That’s called ‘foreshortening.’
The petal on the opposite side is also shortened, since these two petals are on the same plane in the drawing.
The flowers you just drew are flat, and the petals of most flowers angle up. To draw this effect, you’re going to draw in three dimensions.
This time draw the oval again, but make the center mark a little off to one side. Then connect the quarter lines to it again.
After you draw the petals this time, the flower looks as though it drops downward in the center. (This may be a little hard to visualize.)
To increase the three-dimensional effect, move the center mark farther below the oval.
As you can see, when the petals are added, the center of the flower drops below the center of the oval, and the flower looks three-dimensional.
These simple (and silly) flowers were drawn using the same idea of the circle with the dropped center point.
You can clearly see how the petals of this daisy I sketched point to the center of an oval shape. You can see part of the oval leftover on the petals.
The circle with the center point is a tool to help you visualize and draw simple flowers at different angles. You could use it to draw a bouquet from your imagination or to help draw a wild flower in the field.