Learn how to a paint a sunflower with a watercolor crayon resist. The combination of crayons and watercolor paint just can’t be beat.

Learn how to paint a sunflower with a watercolor crayon resist. — Sunflower Painting

There’s a reason why artists have been drawn to sunflowers for centuries. Their bright colors and generous size can’t help but inspire those who try to capture them in a work of art. And if they were good enough for Van Gogh to paint over and over again, then they’re good enough for students to practice drawing too.

This project takes advantage of a simple, straight-forward look at a large sunflower, is drawn with crayons and painted with watercolor. The crayon lines not only add a nice texture, they keep the paint colors from running together too.

For your best results, I can’t recommend highly enough working with real watercolor paper, and liquid watercolor paints. The bright, textured color that you see in my sample is purely thanks to that combination. I found my liquid paints at DickBlick.com, but any brand will do. You can use it straight from the bottle for a super bright look, or add a bit of water to tone them down. Either way, the colors stay nice and true and it’s easy to paint a background without constantly mixing the right amount of water with a tablet in a try.

One last tip — when making the initial drawing with a pencil, encourage students to draw extra, extra light. Yellow and orange crayons are a bit transparent, so dark gray pencil lines will show through if the lines are too heavy. This is the project to work on light sketching skills, which are always helpful, and can really make this sunflower painting shine (pun intended!).