How to paint a Banksia in watercolors

Banksias…mostly seen on Australian land, these belong to the Protea family. A cone-like flower with beautiful and slender swaying leaves attracted me to paint it. The flower is so attractive that I even made a pattern design.

So let’s dive into how I painted a simplified the flower, painted and shared the entire process as well as made a pattern design of these Banksias.

The Sketch

A banksia is a complex flower. While searching and observing photos on various platforms, I observed a few things and simplified the flower. I made a diamond-shaped pattern on the cone and decided to paint by showing the light and shadow on the cone, giving it depth.

Also note that this outline is available as a free coloring page digital download on my website, in the freebies section.

Choosing colors…

Since I wasn’t going to paint it in a hyper-realistic way and also wanted to use it to create a pattern, I chose complimentary colors and kept a limited color palette.

Red and green but instead of using cadmium red or a deep red, I chose Indian red which is a muddy red and, has a granular texture. For the leaves, terre verte which is like a pastel green.

Painting process…

I used the wet-on-wet technique for the entire process. So starting with the cone first, I applied clean water and then a very dilute Indian red. During this time, I lifted some color from the portion that was supposed to be the lightest area on the cone. Then, I applied more color to the bottom part of the cone as this was the darkest part. Since the paper was still wet during this time, pushing the color was easy and avoided hard lines as well.

As that part was still drying, I started working on the little filaments seen at the base of the cone. I painted them individually, creating variations in the color. For this, I used a 00-numbered brush.

Once that was done, I started with a cone. Here, all the diamond shapes are painted individually and variations are created by the color intensity. Each diamond shape is painted along the borders, leaving the middle portion as it is. As I mentioned before, I wanted to create light and dark areas on the cone, each diamond shape’s color value also changes accordingly.

While painting each shape, I made sure that the boundaries remained as they were by avoiding color spreading from one shape to another. This entire process was like a meditation for me as I was patiently painting each of them. Every time, after painting a certain portion, I took a look at an entire cone so that the original plan of maintaining the tonal value of the color is materialized.

For painting the leaves, my initial plan was to use only one color; Terre Verte. But then I realized that it was giving a very flat look to the painting. The cone had tonal variations, so the flat look of the leaves was not justified. So I used two more colors here, sap green and perylene green. Both these colors are highly pigmented as compared to the Terre Verte.

Hence, using the wet-on-wet method, I started painting the leaves. I painted the whole leaf with one color and then highlighted its mid-rib.

Lastly, the stem, where I used Sepia. Now Sepia again is a color that spreads very easily and creates a nice gradient. So like Indian red, I was able to create a gradient on the stem as well.

The detailed video is available on YouTube.

After painting a Banksia…

Creating a pattern was in my mind from the beginning and so I painted another Banksia flower using the same color palette and techniques. Watercolor paintings can be digitized by scanning them to high resolution and removing the white background in Photoshop. I followed this process and created two motifs.

After that, I created a sketch of one of them and by combining both, that is, the watercolor motifs and sketch, I created a pattern. This pattern and its colorways are available in my Spoonflower, Raspberry Creek Fabrics, and Cloth Cuts shop.

So this was the entire journey of the watercolor Banksia flower. If you have watched the video and downloaded the coloring page from my website, I would love to see how you painted the flower. The artwork can be shared with me or you can tag me on Instagram: @sneha_coloursoft