Doodle Flowers, It's Easy & Fun! With 6 Mini Tutorials to Get Started

You can doodle flowers to pass time, decorate a journal or sketchbook, make art or beautiful illustrations, practice a personal drawing style, and there are many more reasons to do so. Because really – does anyone not like flowers?

As mentioned by Lisa Congdon during her course ‘Become a Working Artist’ on Creative Live, the most sought-after patterns are florals. (It’s an interesting course, by the way – definitely recommended if you’re interested in becoming a professional artist.)

Which makes me quite unoriginal, I guess, haha. Nine times out of ten, when I start mindlessly doodling away, it begins with little circles that turn into petals and subsequently flowers. There’s something about doodling in the round and in a concentric motion.

Now, for all of you who are convinced they can’t draw, hold off on denying that you have any doodling skills for a sec.

It may be true wielding a pen or pencil isn’t your strong suit. (Or you may just have a hidden reservoir of untapped creativity waiting to reveal itself when the time is right.)

Either way, I bet you can still have some fun when you start to doodle flowers!

Let’s talk about the most basic flower for an instant. You know, with a heart and roughly four or five petals around its center. Yes, that’s the same one a preschooler draws. Even if you can’t draw anything else, you can most certainly have a go at that flower. (And do it better than a preschooler.)

Below, I’m sharing little flower doodles that can be equally easy and fun to draw once you get the hang of them. These tutorials show five-ish steps to follow along.

Take a look and get ready to tackle some floral doodles.

Needed Materials to Doodle Flowers

Why, not much: a pen and a napkin suffice.

But if you’d like to get real, some proper paper and pens won’t hurt.

I like to use a thick Sharpie, and for the details, fine liners have been really nice to work with. Staedtler pigment liners are absolutely amazing and indestructible. I’ve used this set for years. In fact, they kept working for so long that I lost them before they ran out of ink.

Part of why the pens mentioned above are so great is that they’re water-resistant. Being able to use watercolors on top of a pen sketch is a must – I love adding color last, especially in the case of recipe doodles like this illustrated pumpkin pie recipe.

5 Step-by-Step Tutorials for Doodle Flowers

This flower starts with a spiral. After spinning outward from the center, close the spiral. Continue with a few more petals around the outside.

Then, play around with a variety of thicker and thin lines to add some character. Lastly, you could add a stem and a leaf. A bunch of these in different sizes (without stems) would also work great!

The top of a heart, without the point – that’s how this flower doodle begins. Add the bottom and make it a bit larger than the top part. Where the two parts meet, add that funny little shape that I have no idea how to describe other than “what’s in the heart of an orchid flower”.

Next, keep building more flowers behind that first one, following the same flow. Near the top, make a few buds instead, decreasing in size as well. All that is left then are the stem, leaves, and a few details with a fine liner.

Those little spots in various sizes really drive it home, don’t you think? It’s most definitely an orchid of some sort.

A loose take on the “bleeding hearts” flowers, which are so pretty except for their name.

The steps below speak for themselves.

Oh, and please disregard the part where I ran out of room for the last doodle and let the one to the left of it cut into a leaf.

Sure, it would be a quick and easy fix to clean that up digitally. But I thought it’d be nice to let human error shine through. Because that’s what doodling is all about anyway: it’s imperfect, sometimes messy and/or quirky, but unpretentious.

The Plumeria flower has such a perfect shape that it can be tricky to get right. There’s very little margin for error. If the petals aren’t spot on with nature’s level of perfection, they’ll look off to the human eye as well.

With the 6 steps below, and some pencil lines to help out, you’ll be sure to get those petals in their proper shape and look lovely!

Achillea millefolium is typically considered a weed.

Winnie the Pooh says: “Weeds are flowers too, once you get to know them.” He’s so right about that, and they sure make for cute doodles.

First, jot down a cloud of dots. Choose the ones that will be in the forefront and draw those in full. Then, fill out the ‘umbrella-shape’ with the back layer of tiny flowers.

It can be a bit tricky to get the lines for the stems to all point to the same area.

Feel free to use a tool to help if you must! Or draw your lines right next to a straight object, so that they are spot-on while still having the ever so slightly squiggly hand-drawn look. After that, the bottom part of the stem is a breeze – and the leaf is optional.

Here’s the last one – for now. It’s one of my all-time favorite flowers to doodle. Not sure why. These humble beauties come together effortlessly. They’re very relaxing to doodle.

And when the petals are a tiny bit different each time (like overlapping a little, a lot, or not at all) that’s not merely okay; it is part of their charm! In nature, flowers of the same ‘kind’ are never carbon copies of one and the same either.