How to paint shabby chic roses

By Caroline Dupuis

You will need:
Acrylic paint - yellow, green, red, pink, and white
Paint brush

I’ve had a lot of questions about how I paint my roses with my  swooshing technique. So here is a tutorial to help you to make your own.

It really doesn’t matter what brand of paint you use. I use yellow, green, red, pink, and white. I use a lot of white, so I have a litre of white. You’ll only use a minuscule amount though. Also use a regular brush. Not too big, not too thin. Keep the colours in the caps and some white on a small piece of paper. Okay, let’s get started.

Step 1. Start with adding red dots to mark where your flowers will go (there’s some white in there because I didn’t clean the brush after dipping it in the white. VERY IMPORTANT! DO NOT CLEAN YOUR BRUSH between steps. Mixing up all the colours gives it a great look. Back to painting roses!

Step 2. Load your brush with white, pink, and red.

Step 3. Here’s the swoosh technique. Swoosh one way, under the dot like you are writing the letter ‘u’ from left to right.

Step 4. Then swoosh above the dot from left to right.

Step 5. Now just paint back and forth adding swooshes going out further and further until you like the size of your rose.

Step 6. Here I’m adding white for a highlight. It’s really easy. Once you have something that suggests a rose then STOP! Sometimes my red centre gets lost and I have to put it back in.

Painting leaves

Step 7. Mix just a bit of yellow and green. Load your brush. Have more green than yellow. In the photo I added too much yellow so I added more green. I’ll fix that later. The best is when you have a bit of pink/red showing through the green from not cleaning the brush after painting the roses. I’ll fix my mistake by sticking another rose in there.

Step 8. The rose buds are so simple. Just load the brush with pink, red, white or however you like. And drag the brush from the leaf toward the outside of the painting. Done!

Step 9. I made a front door using the same technique. But here you will see I added some white in the leaves for more contrast.

Step 10. To make faux panels I used a light brown colour for the outer edge. The tan goes on the top and the right to look like a shadow. Then mix a little white to make a lighter version of the same colour and put it at the bottom and the left. You could even add more of a shadow with some watered down black and put it on the inside of the darker tan lines.

This is the way I make my roses. I’ve tried the classic way of painting them, but it takes too much concentration. This is much easier.

By the way, I have no secrets. If you ever have a question about anything I’ve made please don’t hesitate to ask. Hope this rose tutorial helps you out!

See more of Caroline’s work at cinderellamoments.com.