Urban Sketch of a Tavira house with Bougainvillea 

Bougainvillea Makes Me Happy

There’s nothing like a vibrant bush of bougainvillea around doors and windows or draped over a balcony or fence, to evoke that summer holiday feeling.

It’s always been a favourite of mine, and never fails to bring a smile to my face. When we lived in Turkey I never got tired of taking photos of buildings festooned in bougainvillea.

Now that we’re in Portugal, every town and village in the Algarve has multiple buildings draped in bougainvillea, and they’re all just screaming to be sketched and painted.

Looking for Bougainvillea Tutorials

I’ve spent a lot of time across many years, looking for inspiring bougainvillea tutorials in ink and watercolour. There are some out there, but none of them are in a style that I covet.

There’s lots of watercolour-only tutorials, that create a soft and ethereal feel, but try as I might to shrug them off, I’m devoted to ink lines. Finally, I’ve given up on looking for the perfect ink and wash bougainvillea tutorials, and will have to just figure it out for myself. I had a couple of recent attempts at painting bougainvillea here in Cabanas and Tavira:

They were passable, but not memorable, and what I wanted to do was to create a toolkit of tips and techniques for sketching bougainvillea on auto-pilot.

Sketching Scottie’s Ink and Wash Flower Tutorials

A couple of weeks ago I did a Sketching Scottie flower tutorial which consisted of six different studies of smaller plants. My intention was to develop a good use of line and wash in small floral subjects, and work my way up to a bougainvillea bush.

I like Sketching Scottie’s free and easy style of sketching and painting, and I was happy how these turned out. The success of these, in the style I want, encouraged me to start practicing the same techniques with bougainvillea.

Steps for Painting Bougainvillea

I experimented with the same techniques from the flower tutorials, and wrote down the steps I took to create the ink and wash style I’m aiming for.

I learnt something new with each study I made, and these pages are really useful resource references for the next time I want to sketch bougainvillea.