Techniques for painting a bumble bee
When the sound of the BUZZY bees is the voice of the garden, I know that summer has arrived!
Bees have much to teach us, they fascinate us, they are beautiful, and their importance to mankind is beyond measure. Their distinctive colour, and FUZZY appearance is so captivating. I find myself just watching them in and amongst the haze of picturesque flowers going about their day.
They give me so much motivation and are often a reason I pick up my paint brush.
When I focus on a bumble bee, I really notice their distinctive orangey yellowy hues. There is an iridescent burnt orange hue when you really look close up amongst their lightest yellow tones. An important part of painting in loose watercolour, is matching the different shades together as closely as you can; this will help create a more realistic impression.
My good friend Kara (and neighbour) kindly supplied me with a beautiful bumble bee photo she had taken. I couldn’t resist using it for this sketchbook tutorial as it shows off the bee’s form, colour and fuzziness. The inclusion of the lavender flower with reflective purple hues compliments perfectly.
You can use this photo too, or use my painting stages as your reference when
I have worked very closely to capture the hues and fuzzy texture with my paintbrush. With this study, I layered frequently using yellow and orange hues to match the tones across this Bumble Bee’s body. I kept some white areas within my painting to form the transparent wing, while lifting and placing various hues to the legs and antenna.
I loved every moment creating this pretty bee using the vibrant orangey yellow hues and accentuating the bees form with dark hues. The additional loosely painted lavender flower brought my bee to life even more with the beautiful contrasting purple hue. Here’s how it turned out:
What do you think?
Do Bumble Bees make you think of Summer too? Let me know in the comments below.
Techniques for painting a bumble bee
You know that it’s getting warm when you finally hear the little bees flying around again. I think bees, and especially bumblebees, just look so incredibly cute and fluffy, which also makes them a great motif for a drawing. In this post I’ll show you how to draw a bumble bee with watercolours.
You want to draw a bee too? Go watch my video, where I show you how I did it!
In the first picture I drew a bumble bee with black fineliners, yellow acrylic paint and a white gel liner in my brown sketchbook from Matabooks. The sketchbook is one of my favorites because it has a great structure and the cool thing about it: it’s made of grass! As a reference, I simply picked out some nice photos from Google.
General tips for watercolour paintings
- Painting with watercolor is considered a difficult painting technique, because you can hardly correct mistakes. My Tip: Start very light on the first painting layer to avoid dark stains where you don’t want them. Go darker when you have established the right outlines and basic shading.
- Watercolor paints dry very quickly. This has the advantage that you can quickly hold a finished picture in your hand. This also means that you have to be quick when you want to paint e.g. gradients.
- Buy the right paper. Special watercolor papers, which are available in different sizes, weights and surfaces, are best suited for watercolor painting. In my opinion the paper is more important than paints or brushes.
In this video I worked with ordinary watercolor paints and Faber Castell Polychromos (colored pencils, highly recommended because of their high opacity). I have been really enjoying the use of my water tank brush for painting lately.
