Hi friends, Adrienne from @studio80design here to share a fun tutorial on how to draw and illustration poppies in your Archer and Olive Watercolor Notebook! I love drawing flowers and today I’ll be adding some color to my illustrations!

Materials you’ll need:

• Archer and Olive A5 Watercolor Notebook
• Tombow MoONO Graph Mechanical Pencil
• Tombow Fudenosuke Hard Tip Brush Pen
• Tombow Dual Brush Pens in colors 856, 905, and N15
• Tombow Medium Water Brush

Step 1

The first step is to use your MONO Graph Mechanical Pencil to draw small circles on your Archer and Olive Watercolor Notebook page. Make them a 1.5-2in apart from each other. These will be the center of our poppies!

Step 2

Next, use a Tombow Fudenosuke Hard Tip Brush Pen to draw the petals of each of the poppy flowers all around your page. Make the edges of the petals bumpy and wavy so we can add texture later! I love using this brush pen for illustration because it has a brush tip so you can get beautiful line variation depending on how hard you push on your pen! It’s also waterproof so you can add color right on top and it won’t bleed!

Step 3

After you’ve got all your petals drawn, use the same brush pen to draw the center of each of the poppies. I drew small circles in the center of each flower with more condensed circles in the very center to make it darker. Then draw lines coming from the very center outward with tiny stamens on each one. 

Step 4

Now it’s time to draw in those detail lines on the petals! I drew several lines across the entire petals and then added smaller lines to each of the bumps and notches we drew at the tip of the petals. Doing this will help make the petals looks more alive and life-like! Draw these lines from the center going out as well!

Step 5

Time to add color! I wanted to make my poppies a bright red-orange color so I used Tombow Dual Brush Pens in the colors 856 and 905. Quickly draw in the colors onto the petals,  varying both colors. Don’t worry about completely coloring them in, leave a little white space!

Step 6

Use the a Tombow Medium Water Brush filled with water to add water to each of the petals and blend together! The water-based ink from the Dual Brush Pens will turn to watercolor and blend together beautifully! I also chose to leave a few white spots in some of the petals to act as highlights!

Step 7

Add some ink from a black Dual Brush Pen to the very center of each of the poppies. Then blend it out with the Water Brush! And that’s it!

I love how this poppy illustration page turned out—it is so bright and colorful! For more inspiration like this make sure to follow me @studio80design!