How to Draw Iris Flowers

Series Summary

Drawing and sketching refers to two-dimensional pieces of art made by marking on a surface with a variety of mediums. Drawing tools can include graphite pencils, pen and ink, colored pencils, charcoals and chalk and pastels. It is the most foundational skill an artist possesses. The practice of drawing and sketching as an art form became widely popular in 15th-century Europe when paper became generally available. The famous journal of Renaissance master Leonardo da Vinci contains hundreds of sketches, brainstorms and observations that inspire draftsmen today. Almost every form of imaginable art involves some level of drawing or sketching. In this free video series on drawing, an experienced art supply store employee demonstrates a few drawing tips. Find out how to draw various types of flowers, and get information about drawing the human face and body. Understand how to use reference images to create a drawing, and even find out how to create bubble and graffiti letters. Start drawing in a variety of mediums with this helpful art guide.

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Laura Pace, I'm here at Asel Art Supply, and today I'm going to give you a lesson on how to draw an iris flower. Something interesting I found out about the iris is the fleur de lis that we see on the symbol of The City of Saint Louis, The City of New Orleans is really an iris flower. The Medici use that as a symbol for their family, and when Marie de Medici went to France and married a French king it became the symbol of French royalty. It's really a good depiction of an iris flower, because iris flowers have three upright buds, three upright petals rather and three fall petals that hang down. I took apart an iris flower and this is what the different petals look like. The petals themselves are very fragile and crapey, they're thin as a piece of tissue paper and they kind of drape like a piece of fabric, particularly the falls, they have a strong central vein that somewhat defines their shape, it helps to hold the upper petals upright, and the particular species of iris I drew is a bearded iris. It's called that because it has a little fuzzy beard that fits over the falls of the flowers and contain pollens. When this flower is all put back together the upright petal form a little chamber and the falls fall down below those upright petals and the fuzzy beard fits right on top of the petals. These bottom fall shaped petals really have kind of bell shaped to them, they're wider at the bottom than they are at the top, and they have kind of a ruffly edge. Now to give realism to your drawings of flowers you what to draw not just the flower itself, but also the stem, the leaves and the opening buds of the flowers, so I drew those in here. The iris has a very strong fleshy upright stem, and typically you're going to see the bud cover below the blooming flower, it looks like a brown piece of tissue paper that's kind of crumbled but attached to the stem there. The iris has big sword shape leaves that stick up almost as tall as the flower. And here is a picture of what an iris bud looks like before it opens up. It almost looks like an umbrella that's folded up, it's very pointed on the end and it has some green leaf coverings on either side. This is what an iris plant looks like when it's growing up out of the ground. It grows up out of a stem called a rhizome, which looks something like a piece of ginger root if you've ever seen one, kind of a gnarly wooded root with rootlets growing out of it, and the leaves grow up like a big fan directly out of that root. So that's my lesson on how to draw an iris. Go get yourself one from a florist shop or get some photographs and practice drawing."