I love geraniums, and am especially fond of the variegated leaves some types have with their circles of cream, green, and red. I think a geranium like this one is my favourite house plants which shows leaf variegation.

Ninety percent of all wild geraniums come from South Africa, and they’re hardy plants (although frost can kill them). There are loads of different types available from garden centres, and those whose leaves are striped with white and red areas are called Zonal geraniums (or Pelargoniums).  However, it’s tricky to tell geraniums and pelargoniums apart, as this blog from NZ Stuff explains.

This step by step blog follows on from my blogs on pattern.

Geranium and pelaronium sketchbook study

When I was researching why some plants have warning colouration, I found that flower petals of these Zonal geraniums paralyze the Japanese beetle Popillia japonica, a common garden pest in the US.  They do this by by mimicking insect neurotransmitters.  Thinking back to my blog on stripes, perhaps our striped leaf is a form of warning colouration?

On with the illustration.  The plant used in this step by step is Geranium “Mrs. Pollock”.

Choosing and Drawing a leaf

When you choose your plant, make sure it’s one with plenty of leaves, and with distinct markings that you can illustrate.  It might help to take the leaf off the plant so you can examine it better.

First step is to draw up the leaf in pencil.  Begin by drawing a rough suggestion of the leaf shape, and use the leaf veins as guides.

Rough outline of Pelargonium leaf

Work into the line drawing, looking for the shapes of each leaf lobe, and for the wide teeth on the leaf edge.  Plot in the lines where the red anthocyanin pigment first appears, and where the green pigment area ends.  A quick sketch so you don’t lose track of what colours go where can be helpful, and can be rubbed out later.

Look closer at the veins and draw the side veins.  You’ll be leaving these as white for a while, so feel free to give them a touch of thickness by using two pencil lines instead of one if it helps.

Detailed pencil drawing of Pelargonium leaf

Variegation: Adding greens

Now mix up a soft green. Daniel Smith Spring green, Cobalt blue, and a touch of Naples yellow works well.  Using little brush marks and looking at the leaf, start painting in the darker areas of green.  Look for patterns in the way the shadows fall.  Having a good strong light helps with this, a daylight lamp behind the left shoulder works wonders.  There are deeper greens down where the radial veins meet, and on the right hand of the central vein.  It’s a bit darker on the underside of the branching veins.  Let the paint dry.

Deep greens are added to the leaf

Make a tint of your green by diluting it with clean water.  Lay this on top of the painting, making sure to leave the veins as thin unpainted areas.  Leave paler areas in the middle of each leaf section, but try to blend the green in with the little brush marks. Ideally, it’s an easy visual transition between the pale and darker green.  Don’t worry about your pencil lines, you can rub them out later.

Main greens are completed

Variegation: Adding Cream

Mix a pale yellow. Naples yellow plus a dash of Pale cadmium yellow is the right sort of thing.  Keeping it dilute, pick out the edges of the leaf and the same shadows cast by the veins as before.  This area of leaf isn’t white, despite having no green cholorphyll.  Background pigments like carotenoids and flavonoids give that creamy colour.  Again, be sure to leave the white of the paper for your highlights.

Cream margins are added

Blend these areas of cream into the rest of the leaf margin with a tint of your yellow mix.  Once that’s dry, mix up more of your pale yellow and paint it over the entire leaf, including the veins.  Let it dry.  Using light pencil, you can draw in outside edges of the red, if you’ve not already done so.  It’s easier to see what’s going on now there’s some colour down.

Geranium leaf plus pencil guide to red areas

Variegation: Adding reds

Time for the red anthocyanin pigments.  This is a tricky colour to mix; it’s somehow crimson and bright orange-red at the same time.

We also have to be incredibly careful not to allow the addition of the red on top of the green to make a muddy mess, so go carefully.  Try mixing Alizarin crimson, Opera rose, and Cadmium orange.  Keep experimenting with your mix til it matches the reds on the leaf.

Starting on the inside edge of the red pigments, use tiny outward-pointing brush strokes.  Before these fully dry, go over them with a slightly paler, wetter red.  Be super careful not to let the red get muddy. Pull this scarlet out over the variegated pale margin, making sure it’s paler than the crimson you first applied. Let this dry and very carefully outline the vein edges in red.  Your leaf may well look a bit rubbish at this stage, but don’t panic.

Geranium leaf plus reds

Variegation: Adding shadow

Mix up a darker green, perhaps by adding purple to your existing green mix.  Pop a watery tint on this on top of the whole green area, including over the red areas.  Be careful not to mix the red and the green.  Let it dry fully.

Using a green darkened with blue or purple, pick out your darkest areas of green leaf.  The base of the leaf and right hand side of the central vein are darker, and there are tiny darker areas by the other veins.

Look for darker regions at the creamy edge.  With a delicate touch, pick these out with a mix of your pale yellow and a dash of green.  Using this to clarify the leaf edges helps pull the illustration into focus.

Once it’s dry, use a soft eraser to rub out the pencil lines.  Some watercolour papers handle this better than others, you can be quite vigorous with Fluid 100 HP and not harm the painting.

Geranium leaf with shadows added

Conclusion

Illustrating different colours on one leaf is not impossible, and feels far more frightening than it turns out to be.  Variegated leaves are beautiful, and well worth further examination.  Once you’ve given this leaf a whirl, a whole load of new subjects become available, and many are houseplants that can be painted year round.  For more on leaf variegation, check out my blog.

The post Geranium Variegated Leaf Step by Step appeared first on Lizzie Harper.

Here are a few techniques to try which should help mitigate this.

Yellow Flowers 1: Pen and ink

An easy way to bypass a lot of the struggles with darkening a yellow is to use ink.  If you draw your flower in permanent waterproof pen, then when you add colour the ink won’t bleed into the watercolour.  The ink lines “hold” the shape of the flower, and you don’t need to waste time worrying about shadows.

Daffodil delineated with pen and ink

This approach is probably more appropriate for quick sketches than for highly polished pieces, but it creates the desired effect with minimal time and very little heartache.

Primrose delineated with pen and ink

Yellow flowers 2: Pencil

In a similar vein, using pencil to add shadows can work really well.  I’ve used this not only in demonstrations, but also on finished illustrations for clients.  It’s a similar approach to the pen and ink, but has far softer results.  I find it particularly useful if you’re painting yellow composite flowers which have lots of tiny florets.  In the White mustard Sinapis alba detail below I’ve only used the pencil to outline the petals.  It keeps the yellows pale and clean.

White mustard Sinapis alba detail

Pencil can also be really useful if you’re working into accurate details where you want to suggest colour, but where colour is not the focus of the image.  In these cross sections of the Siberian stonecrop, the illustration is pencil, then a very pale colour wash covers this.

Flower details and cross section of the Siberian stonecrop Phedimus hybridus

You can go for a bolder approach with the pencil, adding shadows.  This works because the graphite is a neutral colour.  It doesn’t add any green or orange hues to the flower as you use it to show darker areas of tone.

Daffodil with shadows shown using pencil

As with all pencil drawings, the harder you press with your pencil the darker the line.  I favour HB or 2B pencils for this tonal work as you can get some darker regions without too much trouble.

Primrose with shadows shown using pencil

I like to put the pencil over the top of a completed watercolour.  However, it works equally well to put a yellow watercolour wash on top of the pencil, which in effect is what I do with areas of my sketchbook illustrations.

Canadian Goldenrod Solidago canadensis

Here’s a close up of some individual flowers of the Wild parsnip Pastinaca sativa sylvestris.  you can see clearly that almost all the tonality is provided by the graphite.  And, in fact, there was no need to provide any mroe pencil than the outline,  The tiny flowers allowed this minimal approach to still convey something of the tonality of the plant.

Wild parsnip Pastinaca sativa sylvestris

Yellow flowers 3: Neutral tint

Ass hinted at before, the best way to avoid making your yellow flowers go the wrong colour is to use a neutral colour for the shadows.  In general, you can mix these using colours opposite one another on the colour wheel.  For example, try mixing a purple and a yellow, or a blue green and an orange red.  For more on mixing and using neutrals, have a look at my blog.

Primroses with shadows provided by neutral tints

You can buy pre-mixed tints too, which do the job.  I really like to take my “go-to” neutral a little to the purple side as the interaction between the yellows and the purple pleases me.  If the yellow is a little darker, I’ll tweak the mixing of the neutral tint accordingly.  In the Yellow waterlily below, I added a touch of orange to warm up the flower.

Yellow waterlily Nuphar luteum

Yellow flowers 4: Put some green behind it!

As with my blogs and films on illustrating white flowers, one of the easiest ways to show the edges of pale white (or yellow) flowers is to put foliage behind them.

This is easy in instances where the growth habit allows (as with the primrose, above).

In the example below, I tweaked the position of the leaves and sepals to help give structure to the flowers.  Even so, it’s rather heavy and overworked, and I have made the flowers too orange by darkening them internally with too orange of a colour.

Water primrose Ludwigia grandiflora

Christina Hart-Davies has demonstrated this trick somewhat more elegantly with her posy of Beltane flowers.  The majority of the blooms are held against the large central green leaf.  You don’t notice you’ve been tricked, but that’s what’s happened.  You simply register a beautifully illustrated posy.  But it’s been carefully constructed to make sure the edges of the yellow and white flowers are delineated with minimal effort.

Christina Hart-Davies‘s Beltane posy showing how putting leaves behind flowers helps.

You can exploit this further.  Backgrounds of any sort will help keep your yellows nice and light.  If you’re illustrating elements on a landscape, then what’s going on behind the flower (or in this case butterfly) will throw the illustration forward.  And you won’t have to worry about delineating the edges.  In fact, in the detail below there are two layers of this going on.  the very pale butterfly is backed by the darker evening primrose flowers.  And they are backed by the suggestion of grass.  Again, there’s that neutral tint at play, casting a shadow from the butterfly wings onto the flowers.

Clouded Yellow butterfly Colias croceus on Evening primrose (detail of larger landscape)

In another example, I used a shingle beach to throw the illustration of a Yellow horned poppy into sharp relief.  This was for Jersey stamps (for more on this project check out my blog).  Note that I put a purple-blue tint over the pebbles.  Again, a cheeky way to throw the yellow petals into sharp relief.

Yellow horned Poppy Glaucium flavum (copyright Jersey Post 2021)

Yellow flowers 5: Use orange and greener yellows…with care!

Writing this blog, I’ve realised that I do, in fact, often darken my yellows with reds or greens.  As long as you’re really careful this can work fine.  it doesn’t necessarily swallow up the yellows.  if you keep an eye on your highlights and allow that white paper to remain clean and clear, then  these coloured shadows can work well.

Yellow rose for Jersey Post (copyright Jersey post 2014)

The rose above has shadows picked out in oranges and dark browns.  An isolated detail below shows more.  In fact, the orange has added warmth to the pale yellow petals.

Detail of the rose above

In the illustration of the Globe flower below, the darker areas have been picked out with a green-yellow rather than an orange-yellow.  Again, enough of the main petal has been left untouched to allow it to continue to register as a clean, yellow flower.

Globe flower Trollius europaeus

But if you take a good look at the close up detail, you’ll see how much green was used to provide the darks where the petals overlap.

Globe flower detail

I would also suggest that the yellows in these illustrations are passable, but not as clean as they would have been if I’d used one o the other techniques mentioned above.

Conclusion

I think it’s important to experiment with different approaches, and to find what works best for you as an individual.  For soem people the idea of layering graphite over watercolour would be abhorrent.  For others it might be a god-send.  I like my neutral tints to be a little purple, others may like them entirely neutral, or veering toward a different hue,  Pen and ink with top wash may not be for everyone, but it’s a great way to start, or to get quick sketches down.

You may also find you’re less heavy handed than me with the green-yellows and orange-yellows.  Perhaps you can use them without any loss of vibrant colour.

Or, the way you paint allows you to move foliage around every time, or maybe you always have backgrounds to your work so don’t need to pull leaves about.

Hopefully, whatever you find you do or prefer, there’ll be a couple of ideas in this blog on painting yellow flowers that might work for you.

Yellow horned poppy Glaucium flavum

The post Illustrating Yellow flowers: Five approaches appeared first on Lizzie Harper.

Preparing to paint

This week I paint a gorgeous rose (we’re unsure of the type of rose; if anyone DOES know, please let me know!).  I’m rather up against the clock as the rose looked tired on delivery.   They have a deadly habit of unfurling all their petals then shedding them before you can finish your illustration.

I’ve also blogged about painting another rose, Rosa rugosa.  This uses different colours.

I plunged the rose into a jar of water, and got my stuff prepared.  I use hot press watercolour paper, if it’s nice and heavy (300gsm+) you need not stretch it.  Fabriano Atristico 100% cotton takes graphite and watercolour equally well, and has been my firm favourite for many years.

Ready to paint

Materials

For pencils, I favour the Pentel P205 propelling pencil, 0.5mm lead, HB or H.  What I love about these pencils is that they’re comparatively cheap, easy to re-fill, and give an excellet sharp line.  To “sharpen” your pencil tip, just snap the tip of the lead off by pushing hard on the table.  Excellent.

Rubbers I’m a bit rubbish at; kneadable ones tend not to lift the sharp, hard lines I use.  Plastic-coated ones that school kids might use tend to work better, but be sure your rubber isn’t too hard or it’ll smear the line (not erase it) and tear the page.

Drawing up the flower

Indulgently, I begin by drawing a line illustration of the open rose.  The outer petals are easy enough to plot in, but getting toward the centre you’ve really got to keep the petals straight in your mind as they overlap so much.

Pencil illustration of the open rose

Next, I plot in the stem and leaves.  You have to try and keep your head steady for this, because if you change your viewpoint nothing will line up right!  I try to include the underside of a leaf, and enough foliage to show clearly how the leaves grow in threes or fives.

Drawing up the leaves

Rose with leaves plotted in

To keep the paper clean, I lean on a sheet of A4 copying paper which prevents my hand from smudging the pencil.

Drawing in the stem was difficult because I had the rose in a jar rather than in my hand, so again, keeping the viewpoint constant was critical, and a challenge.

Rose drawing completed

The leaves of the rose weren’t my priority with this illustration as there’ll be another rose illustration in the book (Rosa rugosa, see my step-by-step blog) with similarly coloured leaves.

The petals and bloom most assuredly were.

Mixing up watercolour for the base layer on the rose petals

I began by mixing up a warm, slightly orange yellow watercolour (I like Windsor & Newton).  Cadmium orange, Cadmium lemon, and a touch of Permenant rose.

Using a Series 7 No.1 paintbrush (the best sort if you want a fine tip and a good resevoir for paint) I plotted in the yellow regions of each petal using tiny strokes, following the shape of each petal, and plotting in the darker areas.

Base layer of yellowish orange goes onto the illustration

The petals of this rose are yellowish towards their base, and flushed orangey, then true pink toward their outer edges.  The central petals are devoid of the yellow regions; this variation needs to be recorded, but I also needed to be sure all the petals looked like part of a coherent whole.  This meant introducing a tiny amount of the yellow into the central area.

Adding Pink to the Rose

Next comes the pink.  This is a little easier as the darkest and richest regions lie along the outer edge of the petals.  Again, small strokes with the same brush provide gradation between the pink and the yellow zones.

The pink was a mix of cadmium orange, alizarin crimson, and Doctor Martin’s watercolour inks – moss rose.  These inks are incredibly bright (and very fugitive, be aware of this if you plan on selling work done using them, they’ll fade, especially in direct sunlight.)

Plotting in the pinks on the rose

I rather like the illustration at this stage; I know it’s far from complete, but there’s a freshness to having so much white on the page that gets lost as the colour continue to be layered on.

Darkening the Rose

Next up is getting some shape and structure into the flower; using the same mix as above but with a little more of the Alizarin crimson.  Using a very light touch, I outline the petal edges, and plot in the darkest areas of the pink (where the petal’s in shadow).

Applying a pale orange wash

Towards the centre of the flower, where the petals are pinker, I added a tiny amount of the Moss rose Doctor Martin ink to the peachy wash.  After it’d thoroughly dried, I went back in with a darker pink shade to pick out the details lost to the wash.

Rose illustration with pink central wash, and orange wash on the outer petals.

More definition is needed in the heart of the rose, where the darks are darkest and the structure is the most convoluted.  For this, I mixed Permenant magenta with a touch of Prussian blue, and kept my painting very light.  It’s a perfect chance to destroy the whole illustration by over-doing the shadows; but also an excellent chance to unite the purplish stem with the heart of the rose by echoing the colours.

Painting the leaves of the rose

Using swift brush strokes, and a green mix of Cadmium lemon and Winsor green (with a touch of yellow ochre, I always add a touch of yellow ochre to botanical greens) I rapidly plotted in the leaves.

Rose illustration with flower detail and leaves completed

I didn’t want to obsess about these, so kept the detail minimal and popped a paler green wash on top.  Darker regions were picked out with the same mix, but with extra prussian blue and Permanent mauve added.

Illustration of one rose petal

By now the flower was wilting, and the shape of every single petal had radically altered.  I somehow felt that although the sketchbook study looked “right”, I’d lost something of the bright freshness of the petals.  A quick study of one lone petal (removed from the outer edge of the rose with a scalpel) provided the extra information I felt had been missing.

Finished study of rose

Final thoughts

You can see, on the far right of this image, how hard I found it to get the pink the right shade.  It took four tries before I was satisfied that the colour was correct both for the detail, and when used in a wash.

And finally, here’s my desk at the end of the process.  As always, my water is dirty and my paintbox is a mess.  The flower’s nearly dead.  BUT the illustration is complete, the rose didn’t manage to wilt completely, and I finished just in time to rush out and get the kids from school.  Success!

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