30 Minute Beautiful Watercolor Flower Painting Tutorial

Make a beautiful watercolor flower painting in 30 minutes! Easy tutorial & video for beginners. Lots of tips & techniques to paint loose floral watercolors.

With all the gorgeous spring flowers blooming everywhere it’s time for another watercolor flower painting tutorial! We will be creating a colorful modern loose floral watercolor inspired by garden flowers.

If you are new to watercolor painting, check out our beginners tutorial first: this 3 ways to paint a watercolor rose tutorial teaches you in detail some essential watercolor techniques such as wet on wet, wet on dry, and how to use brushstrokes expressively.

If you are familiar with these foundation techniques, let’s start our watercolor flower painting!

Make it portable

Materials and tools to make a watercolor flower painting

( Some of the helpful resources are affiliate links. Full disclosure here. )

• paper :  I really like this Strathmore and this Canson watercolor paper.
• brushes: I like using soft watercolor brushes with a nice pointed tip like these , and this set. They are great for watercolor washes, and for finer details.
• watercolor paints:  this is a good basic set, and this is a fabulous artist grade set which I LOVE, and a palette that can be used to mix colors. This palette with lid is a great choice too.
• a jar of water for wetting and rinsing brushes

Step 1: start with the basic structure in a watercolor flower painting 

Making a loose floral watercolor painting is similar to making a movie. The structure of the story is created around a few main characters. Think of the bigger flowers as the main characters in a movie, and paint them first to set the structure for your watercolor flower painting.

Here we started with 3 large pink flowers using the wet on wet technique. You can learn more in this detailed tutorial: 3 ways to paint a watercolor rose & 3 best techniques for beginners!

Step 2: add more groups of flowers with different colors, shapes and sizes 

Next, paint some purple flowers, followed by yellow and blue flowers. Use all the gorgeous flowers in nature to give you ideas on all the colors, shapes and sizes you can create. 

For example, the yellow flowers are inspired by our state flower, the California poppy. The blue flowers are Forget-me-not. 🙂 Nature is the greatest artist!

Step 3: add stems and leaves to our loose floral watercolor

I like to have a range of greens when painting watercolor leaves and stems. When we use a mix of dark and light greens, blue greens, yellow greens, and olive greens, it can add a lot more richness to a painting.

Mission Gold watercolor paint set has some really beautiful shades of greens and blues which can be mixed together to create endless variations. 

Step 4: finishing touches to complete the watercolor flower painting.

Add some bright yellow centers to the blue and purple flowers to make them stand out more. 

Step back and look at the overall watercolor flower painting. You might feel that it needs more contrast by adding some darker touches, or it needs a few more leaves or flowers here and there to achieve a better balance.

You may also love: how to paint watercolor flowers in 15 minutes!

Additional watercolor flower painting tips

What is the best watercolor paint?

There are two general groups of watercolor paint: artist grade, and student grade paint.

Artist grade watercolor paint is more expensive because the pigments are more concentrated and colors are made more precise. When you mix them, the colors are less likely to get muddy. The colors are richer and more intense. This painting is made with Mission Gold watercolor paint.

Student grade watercolor paint is cheaper. You can still make very beautiful paintings with them. I have both, when I am doing a quick study or sketch, I often use a student paint set like this.

Is it better to paint from real flowers or photos?

It is actually a great idea to practice both! when we paint from nature, we notice unique details that we often don’t see in photos

On the other hand, a beautiful photo can offer inspirations and ideas we might not find so easily in our surroundings.

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Happy painting! See you soon!