Mandala Flower Tutorial

Nature is an endless source of inspiration and for me especially flowers. I love their shapes and their colors.

You'll probably know by now I love mandalas. For a while I've been drawing these Mandala-Flowers which are inspired in real flowers.

In this tutorial I'll show you how I do it.

 For this tutorial I used:

Stillman and Birn Alpha Series Sketchbook

Staedtler Pigment Liners  0.05, 0.2 and 0.5

A photo I took of a flower.

You can use any paper or pen/pencil you have. 

As for the photo, is better if you use your own photo or a photo which you have permission to use. Most of the photos you find on internet have Copyrights and are NOT for FREE use, so make sure what type of Copyright it has before you use it.

This is a photo I took at a friend's farm some years ago. It's the flower of one of my favorite tropical fruits called LULO in Colombia, its scientific name is Solanum quitoense

First, look at you flower carefully. I like to use actinomorphic flowers, which means that it's radially symmetrical, like this one, you can divide it in equal segments meeting at the center.
This one has five segments.

I start with a big dot which will be the center of my flower using the 0.5 Pigment Liner.

Then I add the five heart yellow shapes using the 0.2 Pigment Liner.

Now I draw the five light purple petals, each starting and finishing in the middle of each heart shape.

Next I put the five dark purple sepals between the petals.

Now that I have  my mandala flower with its main elements I add the details inside the main shapes. I like to add some other details not in the actual flower,  they complement my drawing.
I like to use the very fine 0.05 Pigment Liner for this, to have a little bit of contrast with the heavier previous lines made with the 0.2 Pigment Liner. The little dots within the heart shapes are done with the 0.5 Pigment Liner.

You can make one or many, arrange them in a mandala like the first photo and previous tutorial or make a little composition page like the second photo.
You can leave them as black and white drawing or color them in with you favorite media.
You can add as many details as you want.

I hope you like this tutorial and have lots of fun drawing your own Mandala Flowers and flowers.

Find more tutorials here.