Acrylic Tutorial – Rose Flower

A rose in itself denotes beauty, love, passion and joy. Its serenity surpasses the feeble mind of the young child to the chaotic mind of an adult. It’s impossible to ignore its beauty and an artist adores the rose. The rose is more or less like an artist: Vibrant, beautiful and pure.

Drawing the rose is like a fundamental that no one tries to skip. An artist paints out what he feels and brings out his deepest thoughts through his art. Nothing should prevent you from taking the paintbrush and making the world your canvas.

So let us dive into a small and quick tutorial on how to draw acrylic roses. You can give this a try even if you are a beginner level or an intermediate level or a professional level artist. We are using acrylics here (you can choose normal or artists edition according to your choice). Get your palettes ready because we are going to create magic!

Step 1: Rough Outline

Firstly make a rough outline of the roses on a canvas or an acrylic sheet. Use light and rough strokes to draw out the roses. You do not have to make them dark as we are going to paint heavily on them and the outline will not be seen.

Step 2: Transfer the acrylics to the palette

Pour out red and black acrylics onto your palette. We need only a little bit of black as we are using it mainly for the inner parts to show the shadows. So we need more of red and less of black.

Step 3: Start from the inner part

Dilute the black acrylic paint a bit on the palette and start painting the inner corner of the rose. Remember, we are going to start from the inner part and we will paint our way to the outer part.

Step 4: Red acrylic

After painting the inner corner of the first petal, dip another brush into the red acrylic and paint the outer part of the petal. You can use water for diluting but do not overuse it as it will reduce the consistency of the paint. The thicker the paint is, the more realistic the rose will look.

Step 5: Blend

While applying the red shade, be sure that you blend it nicely with the black acrylic paint. The key is that while looking at each petal, the inner corner should be darker and the outer part should be lighter in the sense that it should be reddish.

Step 6: Petal to petal

After painting one petal, move on to the next petal. We are painting petal wise, so move onto the next petal only after finishing each one. Continue this process and finish out the whole flower.

Step 7: Final touches

Here are some progress shots to the final look.

So here is the final look of our acrylic rose.

1. In case you are using a canvas, apply a gesso and prime the canvas so that you can work on a smooth surface.
2. In case you are using an acrylic sheet, trying using one of good quality preferably of 300 GSM or more.
3. Note that acrylic sheet is different from water color paper, it is specially designed for using acrylics so that the thick paint will not make the paper damp or warp. So make sure you pick the right medium.
4. Start painting the rose from the innermost corner and work your way to its outer parts.
5. Do not dilute the paint too much with water. Reduced consistency can affect the finishing of your artwork.
6. Use a favorable medium (matte or gloss) if you want to increase the quantity of the acrylic without decreasing its color or consistency.
7. Add layers of red if you want to highlight a particular portion.
8. Always varnish your painting with liquid or spray varnish to protect it from damage and to secure it for the long run.

Hope you all enjoyed painting this with me!