Best wishes to your creative joy!
How to Draw a Realistic Mushroom
Drawing simple shapes is a great way to get your drawing skills rolling. The circular “hat” and simple stem make the cheerful-looking, red mushrooms easy to draw. In this video tutorial, I show you how to draw realistic mushrooms with colored pencils.
A bright red toadstool mushroom in your path is a sign of good luck in parts of northern Europe. Siberian shamans would ingest it to enter trance, and it’s even connected to Santa Claus. Ancient Vikings used it to become fearless in their ferocious raids.
I have selected a nice photo with a small group of Fly Agaric mushrooms as a reference. Since there are three of them, we will consider composition too. First, we outline the mushrooms with a regular pencil. After painting a watercolor base, it is easy to make a realistic drawing with colored pencils.
Using imagination and creativity is important also when you make realistic artwork. Contrary to what you might expect, your imagination can be greatly enhanced by this practice.
In the video, we go through the following steps:
- Outlining the mushrooms with a soft pencil. No need for shading whatsoever.
- Mixing the colors we use to paint the watercolor base. We take cues from swatches picked up from the photograph
- Painting the watercolor base, both mushrooms and the ground
- Letting it dry (use a hairdryer so you don’t have to wait)
- Drawing all the details with colored pencils. This includes shading, texture, variations in colors, and highlights.
- Painting the white spots with white gouache. Use it sparingly on stems to enhance the trunk shape. Gouache is like watercolor, only the pigment is much denser so that the paint is opaque.
Do you want to skip drawing the shapes and rather go straight to painting the watercolor base? You can download a PDF with the drawing for free, and then trace it. (Members: check your newsletter for login details).
How to transfer line art
- Draw with a soft B or 2B pencil on tracing paper.
- Turn the tracing paper over.
- Draw with a hard pencil to transfer the drawing to watercolor paper.
Simple as that. When you download the free PDF you will see why it is so simple. The drawing is flipped horizontally/mirrored. Why? It’s so that when you flip your tracing over, it’s the right way down. Check my article with an easy step-by-step tutorial: How to trace onto watercolor paper.
How to Draw a Mushroom for Kids
Hello everyone! In this drawing guide, you will learn how to draw a mushroom for kids step by step. With the mushroom sketching instruction, you will not only learn to sketch, but you will also learn something new about nature.
Mushrooms are living organisms consisting of a stem and a cap. Mushrooms come in many types and fall into several categories. The main thing is to understand that mushrooms are not only edible but also harmful and dangerous for humans, which cannot be eaten. We have prepared a sketch of a mushroom in a classic form, which will be very easy to draw. Thanks to simple instructions, anyone can draw a mushroom, regardless of skill. Let’s start!
Time needed: 20 minutes
How to Draw a Mushroom for Kids
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Start with the grass. First, draw the straight line. And then draw the texture of the grass in a zigzag line.
Draw the stem of the mushroom. Draw the stem of the mushroom convex, tapering upward.
Draw the basic outline of the cap. Draw the large mushroom head. To do this, make the upper part convex, and the lower one smoother and wider. Decorate the cap as shown in the instructions.
Bottom of the cap. At this stage, you need to draw a rounded outline of the lower part of the cap, which separates the upper part of the cap and the gills.
Gills lines. Sketch some straight lines to represent the gills of the mushroom.
Color the artwork. Paint the top of the cap brown, and paint the inner gills and stem beige. Color the grass under the mushroom green.
Thanks for painting with us! We hope that our drawing lessons help you create great pictures.
