How to paint a watercolour cone flower

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I love cone flowers, also known as echinacea – I have a few plants growing in my front yard. They’re great, because they come back year after year. I also enjoy painting them and thought I’d share a watercolour cone flower painting demonstration with you. They’re simple and satisfying to paint.

Materials used

Watercolour paintbrushes – Size 6 round, size 0 round and an oval wash brush
Paint colours – quinacridone magenta, cerulean blue, cadmium-free yellow, sap green, raw umber
Cotton watercolour paper – I used Winsor & Newton professional cold-pressed 100% cotton paper
Pencil, preferably a 2H or hardness grade that will allow you to very lightly draw the flower
Washi tape

Start with a drawing

Start by lightly sketching the flower. For this painting, we’re going to draw it from a side view. Think of the flower itself as a triangle with curved corners, topped by a gumdrop. Your initial triangle drawing will help you keep the overall shape of the flower as you draw the flower itself. Now, within your triangle, draw each petal. Have a few of the petals overlap each other. Feel free to look up an image of a cone flower to help you see how petals typically grow. Remember that there are occasionally gaps between petals where the petal connects with the centre of the flower. Each petal has a little notch at the end as well. The stem is just a simple, slightly curved line.

Adding colour

Now it’s time to paint. Cone flowers come in a variety of colours, and for this project, I’ve chosen to paint this one as a pink flower, because I love the intense, but slightly muted magenta hues of some of the flowers.

For all the steps to paint a cone flower, follow along with my echinacea watercolour painting tutorial on my Youtube channel. It’ll take a few layers of colour to develop the painting, which is easiest to follow by video.

Once you understand the basics of painting a single flower, you can move ahead and paint multiple flowers in one painting, adjusting the angle and shape of the flower itself. Learning the basics gives you the building blocks to paint far more complex compositions with echinacea in the future.

Did you like this tutorial? Try my beginners watercolour tutorial on painting pussy willows.