 Hello there, it's Sandy Allnock and it's Sunflower Week in my world. I'm going to teach you how to draw this sunflower. It's not as hard as you think, so don't click away, but you could also fast forward to the section on free downloadables. There's lots of printables that you can just color, if you would like, that are all sunflowers and realistic flowers is a new class that's just launching. So at the very end of the video, you'll see a preview of that. You can use the timestamps or the chapter navigations here on YouTube to get to those. I happen to love sunflowers because they're yellow and yellow makes me happy. So we're going to learn how to draw a sunflower today. And I looked up some information on a particular sunflower. It's the common sunflower, and there are lots of different varieties even within that one. But I found one website that had some measurements and they said that the pedals are two inches and the centers can be up to four inches. So I figured out the math. Divide your circle in half and then divide each half in half and then make a second circle. You can do that with a compass or you can do that by just freehanding it. Totally easy to do because it doesn't have to be perfect, but then draw a plus sign across it. So verticals and horizontals and then angles. This configuration that I've sketched out here is actually 16 petals. And your average sunflower can be anywhere from 15 petals to 50 petals. So in drawing out these 16 petals with just a really generic kind of standard shape, I've got at least half of my flower going and I can just put petals in between each one of these 16. So I'm just erasing the lines that I don't need in my sketch, lightening it all up and then we're going to talk about petals themselves because that's really what makes a flower realistic. Lots of different flowers have different shapes to them and you can draw a sunflower with a just plain oval. Make it really simple or you can make it a little more elegant. Add in some petals that have a fatter middle to them. Add in some that have more of a point at the top and it doesn't have to be centered in perfect. Then this one is one of my favorites is making one that looks like it's twisted like the end of it is curling around in one way or another. And I do that by making an S and then crossing it with another curve and then refining where they crisscross because you see that the S goes around the curve crosses it. And then if you get that weird shape there that looks like an X just smooth that out and then it starts to look like it's curling around. There's other petals where you end up with a darker area in the center because it's a cup shape. It's cupping up toward you and you can indicate that by leaving highlights on both sides with the darker shadow in the middle. And then there's some where you end up with almost a heart shape at the end, two bumps at the top of it because on the other side is where that curl is the curl I drew in the top one, but you just don't see it so it'll end up looking like it's got two bumps. And then there's other petals that curl toward you so much that they get short and they'll get small because of the angle of them. And so you can make little ones and add in that same curl and you get some really interesting shapes that work really well for sunflowers. So I'm going to combine all of these in my sunflower. I've got my really light outlines to start with of the first 16 petals and then I'm just going to randomly go back and forth between all the petals that I already talked about. There's going to be some that are just going to be regular plain straight forward petals, some that'll have a twist to them around the edge, some that'll be the short ones and combining them in different ways is what's going to give your flower lots of realism and make each petal unique because they're not in general going to all be identical. This is made by Mother Nature. She just kind of lets things grow the way they grow and you're not going to end up with in most cases a very perfect flower with absolutely everything being the same size, the same shape, the same distance from each other. I'm adding now petals in between the other petals that I've already drawn. So those are the second layer, the ones that go behind. And I can just keep going all the way around the entire circle with them. Don't stress out about having proportions exactly perfect on everything either because there are so many sunflower breeds that have smaller centers, bigger petals, smaller petals, further apart petals, fewer petals, more petals. How do I know this? Because I did research every time I do one of these themed weeks. I do some research to see what else I can learn about the topic. And I learned a ton about sunflowers, which I'll be sharing on social media all week long, one of which is something that I've known for a long time anyway, which was that sunflowers turn their heads to follow the sun. So they start out facing east at the beginning of the day. And then by the end of the day, they're facing west. I would do that too if I was sitting outside with nothing to do. However, that's only young sunflowers. I did not really think about flowers aging, but young sunflowers do that. Older sunflowers do not because their stems or trunks get thick and they start to get stiff. Well, I can kind of resonate with that. And then they can't turn their heads anymore. So they face east. OK, so what's the big deal with that? Well, bees happen to like plants that face east. They'll pollinate better when they're facing east. So it's all a good thing, even if they're old, crotchety flowers at that point, but they get pollinated better. So there you go. That's one little bit of trivia for you today. For the texture on the leaves, you can just make lines across them. And the first petal I didn't do any dimension on. Watch what happens with this second one. I'll use heavier pressure at the base of the petal. And lighter pressure as they move up to the top and it starts giving it dimension. So I can go back in and add a little bit more pressure on that first one. And they start to look like they're curling into the flower in toward that disk in the middle. So that's going to give each one of the petals some dimension. And they're all going to be different because not every petal is going to be curved the same direction. So on some of them, adding shadows on the outside, that dark edge is on the outside. The ones that are peeking out between two petals are going to have more shadow between them because one is casting a shadow on the other. And I'm just doing each one of them differently because every petal is unique. We talked about their shape being unique. Their shading is also going to be unique from one petal to another. And there are some sunflowers that have very regular petals and their shading might be more regular. But this particular one is just all over the place, which I love because it gives you a lot of freedom. You can't mess it up this way because every petal is unique. So you can just say, yeah, that's the way the petal grew and tough luck if it's crooked or doesn't look quite perfect. So next up is going to be drawing the center of the flower, which is called the disk. Different sunflowers have different configurations, but some of them have a center that recedes, which is what we're going to do. And then they have these spirals of seeds that are in that disk. And what I did was start by just making lines going outward. But what you can really do is make them curves. And when you make them curves, they're going to feel more like a spiral the way that the inside of a sunflower actually looks. There's some sunflowers that are going to have different areas breaking them up. So some of them will have a line like this around it where you'll have a dark area and then other areas that are light, different parts recessed and all that sort of thing. We're going to ignore that. And we're going to go along the curved lines that I sketched in and basically scribbling with good heavy pressure, a zigzaggy line. So I'm just going back and forth and making scallops that touch each other so that what this is going to do is create shapes that go along this spiral curve that make it look like there's a thousand little seeds in there. And what that actually is is flowers. There can be like up to a thousand, I think I read on one website, a thousand flowerettes, they're called ray florets, little bitty flowers. And each one has the male and female bits to turn into a seed. That's where we get our sunflower seeds from. So you want lots of these so that we can have lots of sunflower seed snacks. But this is a really easy way to draw them. Then when you get to the very center, which is going to get darker, this is going to be a cup shape that recedes into the flower and just put a mid tone in there and then put a dark toward the top section, because that's going to create a shadow from the sun casting on it and make it look rounded. It's like a really easy trick to do to do that. There's some of the sunflowers that are going to have a fully rounded center. You're not going to see that receded area. So adjust as needed if you're doing a different breed of sunflower. Then to give the outside dimension, that outside part, we want to make it look rounded so that it's like an upside down bowl. We're going to just use very light pressure around the edges to darken up those areas, just in a circle around the outside so that right around the middle part, right around that center, you end up with a lighter area in the front, and so that ends up looking like those pop up to the top. Wasn't that easy? That was so easy. I hope you'll try it because it was really fun. So now let's get to all those free printables. I know some of you are going to prefer to just color someone else's drawing, and that is perfectly okay too. You can join the sunflower craze along with everybody, and all of these are going to be listed in the links down below. I've written the names of each one of them on here so you can figure out which one exactly that you want, or you can just go download the whole lot of them, go to all the websites, make sure you send the owner of the website a thank you for offering a free digital image. I don't know how long all of these will last, so get them now in case they decide not to have them free forever, but they're doing this for Ukraine. This is their national flower, so lots of people are doing that. Now this one is going to remain free forever. This one is mine. I do this sunflower, and you can download that for free on my website, link in the do we do, but there's also a class that goes with it. So my Copic people, if you would like to learn to color flowers with your Copic markers, this is a level two class. So my expectation is that you've taken Copic Jumpstart or have the equivalent experience of it. And if you have conversion charts for other brands of markers, you can certainly take the class with those. The five different flowers are also available as printables. So you can buy the other four, the sunflower is free, but all the other four are available if you want to buy just one of those. And you can also, if you buy them and then change your mind and decide you want to take the class after all, just email me and I'll refund you the price that you paid for the digital images so that you're not paying for them twice because they're included in the class itself. The lessons in this class are in real time. I'm not talking the whole time because it's like way too much talking, but you will get to see every stroke of the marker in this class since it's a level two. And I expect some people might want to just see how you get through every little bit of these flowers. It's springtime and it's National Craft Month at the time this is being launched. So I figured we could all use some happy right now. So let's just do some flowers and have a good time. So links to class are in the doobly-do as well. Check all that out. All the freebies, go draw your own sunflower. Join me on social media for lots more sunflowers and I'll see you on Friday with a rather epic sunflower project with Copics that you are not going to want to miss because it's really cool. I'll see you guys later.