Colouring the middles of flowers can actually be quite daunting. It can be tempting to always grab a yellow pencil and just fill it in. Although this can look rather pretty, there are lots of different approaches that could be taken. I have chosen a flower from World of Flowers by Johanna Basford to show you an alternative technique.
The first step is choosing the colour. Flower centres vary a lot in colour and they can also be any colour you wish to make them from your imagination; there is no need to always be realistic! I have decided to colour this one in dark blue and black. I will use Black Widows pencils and a white gel pen.
The brand of pencil is not important, but I find having three shades quite useful. I start with the darkest, in this case zephyr blue and start in the area I wish to be darkest. This could be around the whole outside or one side. I have decided to do one side darker than the other.
I have put more layers on the left hand side and less and less towards the centre to fade it out. Now I will use my mid blue colour which is starry night.
I have used a similar technique, starting at the point I started to fade the darker blue and using my largest amount of layers and reducing those layers to fade it until I got to about 1/4 the way across. Then I use my lightest blue. I do the same thing, overlapping the mid blue and then applying fewer layers as I move towards the right-hand side, finishing with a gentle layer.
Next I repeat the steps again to darken the blue.
Lastly, I use the white pen (I use a Sakura gelly roll 08) to add some shine to it. I add it to the darkest part as that gives the highest contrast so it stands out more. I try to make an arc shape to imitate that of the shape of the flower centre. I am now done!
I have a playlist of videos showing different ways to colour flower centres that you might be interested in looking at. You can see them by clicking here and a few of the videos can be seen below.
If you are interested in finding out more or purchasing any of the materials that I used you can click the links below for more details.