How to draw sunflowers.

Sunflowers: A special kind of flower.

With their cheerful colors and iconic shape, sunflowers are a wonderful bloom to practice your drawing with. Whether you sketch a lone stalk or a field full of color, these flowers are not only beautiful, they’re also fun to draw. There’s more to sunflowers than meets the eye.

“Sunflowers have a mathematical equation in the way that their seeds are spread out. They’re actually pretty easy to draw because they’re a simple combination of just a couple shapes,” says artist and illustrator Kevin Jay Stanton. The dark part of a sunflower’s face is a Fermat’s spiral, where the seeds spiral elegantly into the middle point. While this may sound complicated, it gives you a guide for how to draw the center of a sunflower.

“Sunflowers are also phototropic, which means they follow the movement of the sun across the sky,” explains Stanton. When the flowers are young, the face of the blooms tracks the sun from dawn to dusk. When they’re older, the flowers typically face east, to catch the morning sun. With this in mind, think about your light source before you start a drawing. Since the flower can move and rotate, that gives you plenty of angles and perspectives to practice drawing.

Start at the center.

“The first thing I do is draw a circle in the middle. Don’t be too concerned about how messy the circle is at the beginning,” says Nugent. After you’ve drawn the main center of the sunflower, add a smaller circle within it. This will help you show the angle your sunflower is pointing.

“To me, a sunflower always starts with the center disk, and from there it’s just a matter of adding petals,” adds Stanton. Before you draw the petals, draw a larger circle around the main center of the flower. This will act as a guide for your petals to fit inside.

With digital tools like Adobe Fresco, you can create a more stylized drawing if you just draw several of the petals and then copy, paste, and rotate them around the rest of the flower. This will make all the petals uniform, and give you a cleaner look. If you go this route, use your eraser to clean up the edges of each petal.

Add a second layer of petals.

Once you’ve gone all around the center of the flower with the first layer, add in another. Rotate your petals so the second layer is offset from the first. With digital tools, you can use a shortcut to speed up this step. Make a copy of your first layer of petals, and then enlarge and rotate it. Go back in to erase and clean up the layers to make sure everything is blended. Now, all your petals are in place.

Draw the stem and leaves.

Sketch in a stem for your flower, and make sure it’s not too skinny. The stalk is sturdy and thick, since it supports the weight of the flower. Sunflower stems are also rather rough and hairy, so add textured crosshatching to suggest volume and communicate light and shadow.

When the stem is in place, add in a leaf or two. Remember, the leaves are broad and pointed at the end. Check out some reference photos to understand how foreshortening will affect the shape, and add in a few thin lines and crosshatches to show the veins and lines of the leaves.

Layer in color.

With the linework done, it’s time to get colorful. With digital watercolors, “go in with a soft yellow wash around the perimeter of the flower, and work with your lighter colors first,” says Nugent. After your base color is in, you can go back and do some more work with shades and highlights. Layer in darker colors of yellow to add volume and shadow to the petals, and use browns and blacks to the center in short strokes to create more texture.