How to Paint Orchid Petals | Sugar Flowers

Watch more How to Make Simple Sugar Paste Flowers videos:

Learn how to paint orchid sugar paste flower petals from cake designer Amy Noelle in this Howcast cake decorating tutorial, part 4 of a 5-part series.


Before I add my petals to my center, I want to add a little bit of paint on
the throat of my orchid. I'm doing that, with just a little bit of food
coloring. In this case, I've chose a little bit of burgundy food coloring.
And I'm using a stiff bristled brush, not a soft brush, because I want to
have a lot of texture. Once I have my color on my center, I want to leave a
little bit and paint all the way around, just the edge, leaving a little
bit in the very edge, unpainted, as I go around. I can decide how much
color I want.

There are so many different varieties of orchids, that there's really no
place to go wrong here. You can add a lot of dots; you can add a bunch of
lines. Sometimes, I'll even go in and add a little bit of a line down the
center as well. After I've added that little bit of color, I'm going to add
some petal dust, a dry technique to my petals. Each of the petals, so I'll
just take my paint brush and dip it into a little bit of petal dust and
brush off the excess petal dust. I can always add more. I can't always take
it off.

So I'm just going to hold my petal. I like to work on my petal upside down,
so I concentrate the color at the center, the base of the petal, and then
brush all over the front and all over the back of each petal. Remember, for
an orchid, we'll need five petals to go all the way around for our
completed flower. So we'll dust five of these, and then we're ready to
attach them altogether to create our flower.