Digitalising nature for the sake of art

It's well known that I love everything to do with flowers... but when it comes to drawing/painting, I think my eyes don't have the required talent to artistically identify shapes and colours. 

Still, I told myself I wanted to draw flowers and I had to find a way to achieve this! And so I decided to take an ethical "copy-paste" approach to this:

1. I photographed as many flowers as possible
2. I imported my selected picture into my iPad digital drawing app: Procreate®
3. Using my Apple Pen, I traced the outlines of my flower into a new layer and voila! The main flower was drawn!
4. Working with different layers and techniques, I coloured in the flowers and added some extra elements to finalise my drawing.

If the frontal digitally drawn hydrangea looks extremely similar to the photographed one, it's because I digitally traced the original flowers on my iPad

The process in pictures

The below screenshots show how I used Procreate to make my hydrangea drawing!

I set up a blank layer on top of my photo and used a fine brush to start tracing the flower outlines.

I added some more blank layers to keep tracing the flower outlines, as having multiple layers gave me more control whenever I needed to erase or modify anything.

When all the flower outline layers were selected, they added up to create the complete outline:

Using some watercolour and airbrush brushes on a NEW layer, I painted the flowers trying to follow the colour areas from the photograph.

I added highlights and shadows to create the appeareance of depth.

The following picture is the same as the one above but without the black flower outlines. These were easy to be removed as they laid on a different layer.

Using the blender tool, I blended the highlight and shadow areas to create a more uniform colouring.

I added back the flower outlines to use them as a guide of where the central flower should have colour. 

I erased any extra colouring that fell outside the central flower to get to the final flower drawing: 

Since the flower outlines lived in different layers, different effects could be applied to them. Below you can see how some outlines have been changed into different colours. This was just part of me trying out different styles.

Once I decided on the style for my flower outlines, I created further copies of my flower. I made these flowers smaller so they would seem to be far away. I also blurred them out to enhance the depth illusion.

Once the flowers were done, I worked on the leaves!

And finally on a background that would help bring out the flowers. This was done with a mix of different brushes.

Below you can see how many different layers were used to make the background and leaves.

This is how the final greens would look like:

Now it was time to make the flowers visible and lay them on top of the greens!

I finally decided to make the smaller flowers darker to give the impression of being further away in the background. 

And after some hours on this drawing, the final piece was ready!