How to Draw an Open Rose

Drawing an open rose is an excellent way to represent the glorious beauty of nature. You'll definitely want to draw your rose in full color. You can work with colored pencils or pastels and from a photograph or from nature. This can be a challenging project because you must gauge the colors in the rose petals, stamens and surrounding foliage. You must also determine levels of light and dark to show the dimensionality of the rose.

Things You'll Need

• Quality drawing paper
• An open rose or photograph of an open rose
• Colored pencils or pastels

Instructions

1. 

   Block out the outer edges of the rose petals, stamens and major areas of light and dark. Use a graphite pencil so that you can easily erase mistakes. If you're working from a photograph, you can trace this part using an art projector or light box. This will increase the accuracy and speed of your drawing.

2. 

   Begin to block out the darkest areas of your drawing. Do not draw them as dark as they appear just yet; put them in lightly with a relatively dark color that contains the color of the rose. For example, if your open rose is red, use Tuscan red or purple for the shadows.

3. 

   Go over the darkest areas of your open rose drawing with a color with a medium tone. In the case of the red rose, a color such as magenta or crimson lake works well. Avoid using orangy reds such as vermilion when drawing red roses. For other color roses, match the color as closely as possible to what you see in your subject. Then begin to draw in the darkest areas of the middle tones of the rose.

4. 

   Start to darken the darkest areas of the drawing. Mixing colors is an excellent method for representing the shadows on your open rose. Try mixing in colors such as brown and violet to see how they work in the overall drawing. If you're uncertain how your chosen colors will look together, try drawing them together on a piece of scrap paper first.

5. 

   Shade in the main part of the rose petals. Begin with a very light cross hatching to get a light color. Avoid any areas that are in bright highlight. Work carefully because colored pencil is hard to erase, and pastels cannot be erased. Begin to very slowly, very gradually darken the areas that seem slightly darker. Continually look at your subject and back at your drawing to see how they compare.

6. 

   Draw in any stamens and other fine details in your picture of an open rose, such as dew drops. Carefully darken any areas that appear too light, and erase any areas that seem too dark. Finish by filling in any areas of highlight if necessary. You may wish to go over the highlights of a red rose with a very pale pink in some instances.

Tips & Warnings

• Draw shading with decreasing pressure to represent areas of gradual shading.