Joel Hickerson, grindog.com. Today, we're going to draw a sunflower. The first thing you do, is you know you're working with a tall flower, so you want to keep your page vertical. Start with the very center of the sunflower. It's usually a circle, and then the petals. Again, I like to start drawing with a pencil, so as I create my construction lines, I know I can always come back, and erase them. Just remember to draw very lightly. Now, sunflowers is usually straight up and down, with a couple of leaves on the stem, but it's a tall flower, so make sure you don't shorten the stem anymore than you have to. A sunflower also has a texture to it, because this is where you get the sunflower seeds, that everybody likes to chew up, and spit out, so you can create yourself a little texture. I want you to have your construction elements in place. Come back, get your marker, or a darker pencil, and pick out the pieces that you want to keep, and at this time, there's nothing says you can't create your own lines, now that you have your basic diagram to follow. Come back, follow your edge. Now, you can do the petals around your sunflower, and there's a lot of petals around a sunflower. Do this until you get it like you like it. Then, if you've drawn your construction lines lightly enough, come back with your eraser, you can get rid of these lines, just keeping the lines you want, and then you can come back, and you can, after your marker lines are drawn, you can either color it, or you can come back and just shade some of the elements, to make it look a little more three dimensional, and give it a little more interest, with shadows. I usually like my shadows to go in the same direction. When I shade the bottom of the figure first, to kind of give it a little bit of white, so just kind of something to distinguish the leaves, or the petals from each other, and also give it a little light source, or like I said, more weight, and there we have our sunflower.
