How to draw clovers【and its flower crown, with explanation of flower language】 | MediBang Paint - the free digital painting and manga creation software (2024)

Four-leaf clovers of lucky charm are the plants which are easy to draw and put in illustrations as motifs.

This time, I’d like to show you how to draw clovers in 3 types: leaves, flowers and a crown made of clovers.

Useful for your story creation! The language of flowers in clovers

Most people know that clovers represent “Happiness” as the language of the plant, but there’s more.

Leaves of clovers have individual languages for each leaf like “sincerity (or trust/ dearness)”, “hope” and “love”. And with four-leaf clovers which are rare in nature, the language of “happiness” is intertwined.

Four-leaf clovers also means “be mine” “revenge” for their language.

And what’s more, as a whole plant, not for leaves, clovers symbolize “promise” and “think of me”, so it must be fascinating introducing clovers in your creation, while implying the meaning of their flower language in the scenes.

Let’s draw four-leaf clovers

When you think of clover, you may imagine heart-shaped leaves. In fact, that is actually the leaf of a different plant from the clover, called the “wood sorrel”.

Clovers have round leaves, but depending on the curvature of the leaf due to the veins and the angle from which it is viewed, it can look like a heart.

Now, let’s start drawing a clover.

①Line drawing

②Paint the base color (using Bucket Tool)

③Add shadows

④Draw the pattern of the leaf. Add yellow where the light hits, blue where the light reflects. Decrease the opacity to blend colors. Add shadows a little for the dark spot. Adjust the whole image to look lively, then the painting is completed.

If you find it difficult to draw clover leaves and the size of the leaves is uneven, you can make it easier by drawing guidelines. Set “Brush Settings→Segments→Vertical2: Horizontal2”.

Let’s draw clover flowers

Now let’s draw clover flowers. Clover flowers have something petal-like in plenty, and that would make you think it burdensome to draw. Complicated images can be drawn by learning their structure.

Petal-like thing of a clover flower is actually a tiny flower itself. Inside of them, stamens and pistils are embraced. Many of these tiny flowers come together to form a single ball-shaped flower.

It blooms from the inside out radially, a form that might be at first glance confusing to draw. If so, try to think of it as tiers of 2-3 stages. That makes drawing easy. Now let’s start.

First, draw lines that will work as a clue for drawing the flower. Clue lines of a flat cup shape will help dissolve the concern when drawing from different angles of view.

①Draw clue lines

②Draw line drawing

③Paint the center in green

④Finish with adding depth by shades

When you draw a lot of flowers for a crown or draw flowers in the distance, you can deform flowers and draw them with details omitted so that the picture will be well-balanced. If that’s the case, draw silhouettes of flowers of about 2 stages in the center, and add a round haze in green in the middle. This simple method sufficiently creates a clover.

Let’s draw the crown of clovers

Now you can draw both leaves and flowers of clover, so next, let’s draw a crown of clover.

Just like drawing flowers, drawing crowns can be way easier with the knowledge of its structure. So we are going through roughly how to make actual flower crowns. We make them by binding flowers or leaves to a bunch of 1-2 flowers.

Basically, the round part will be hidden by leaves and flowers, but you should draw it since this can fill the gaps and also serves as a clue for the shape of the crown.

①Draw a circle using edge pen and ellipse tool.

②Increase circles by duplicating the layer and integrate them into one layer.

③Draw leaves and flowers as if creating a flower crown for real to make it easier to decide intervals or layout of leaves and flowers.

For the step③, I used brushes named “4-Leaf Clover” and “Clover Flowers” in MediBang Paint.

There’s also a “3-Leaf Clover” brush available in MediBang Paint, so it must be lovely to incorporate these 3 brushes to use together.

(Text・Illustration/ Amane)