Paint An Easy Loose Watercolor Peony.

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Looking for a fun and easy loose watercolor flower tutorial? Then you have landed on the right page!

This step by step tutorial to paint a loose watercolor peony is a great way to let loose and have some fun with watercolors.

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Painting loose watercolor flowers is a good exercise for any level painter, because the style is so versatile and any artist can put their own spin on it.

Art Supplies

Paints: Watercolor inks are absolutely gorgeous and well worth the buy. I love watercolor inks for their vibrant colors

Brushes: Having a good selection of brushes will help you get different variations in flowers.

Paper: Investing in good watercolor paper will also help you get the best results in your paintings. The heavier the paper, the better the results to absorb all the water.

Let’s take a look at how to paint a loose watercolor peony!

Tutorial: step by step

Before painting, I chose a reference picture from Pinterest to work from as this helps us to map out the flower and not just paint from imagination.

Source: Pinterest

I started off with choosing my colors and paintbrushes.

Starting off is best to keep a limited color palette, with a few variations of the same color. I added some blue and green for the foliage.

Below are the two paintbrushes I used for the painting.

Before you start painting, get your paintbrush wet with a bit of water and add a tiny bit of paint to it.

Watercolor inks are very saturated so they need to be watered down a bit before starting, as you can see below.

Step One

Start off with the centre of the flower and make small gestural petal marks with a flick of your brush.

Keep adding petals to the outside of the bud so that it grows. Try to keep the petals going the same way so it looks like it’s at an angle.

Step Two

A little below the main flower, start working on the smaller bug with smaller strokes.

Build the petals little by little but don’t over do it.

Step Three

Once the smaller flower is painted, start painting the stem with the tip of the paintbrush at a nice angle instead of going straight down.

Step Four

Paint a stem to the smaller flower and then we can start painting the leaves.

To paint the leaves, put the brush fully down onto the paper and pull outwards so that the tip of the brush makes the point of the leaf.

Add more leaves where you see fit, and paint another stem pointing the other way to paint some more foliage one

Carry on adding leaves and building it out, this is what makes the painting really come together!

Step Five

Once the leaves are painted, then you can go back and start adding more saturated paint into the centre of the flower to give it more structure and pop.

Add some more paint to the smaller flower too.

Keep going with adding some paint to the centre. Once you have got the flowers nicely painted, go a head an add a little extra to the leaves too.

I added a little bit of blue to the leaves so that it gives more dimension to the leaves.

And there you have the finished loose watercolor peony!

As you can see, it doesn’t need much skill but rather just the ability to have a go.

One of the key rules in doing loose florals is to work fast before the paint dries too quickly, but at the same time not having it too wet.

Below is the final painting once it’s fully dry. It has lots of lovely bleeds where the paints have mixed in together, it’s very unexpected how it will turn out and that’t the beauty of loose watercolor flowers.