Flower arranging looks straightforward, does not it? All you need is good looking flowers and to put them in a nice vase. Compare your arrangement to what a florist does, and you immediately notice a big difference. A professional arrangement looks composed, controlled, and complete. A novice’s work is often random and messy. But here’s good news: that is just because they don’t know a few professional rules which is easy to learn.
One of those is knowing the shape of arrangement you are aiming at. It could be a round one, a tall vertical one, cascading or a modern asymmetrical shape. It gives your work an overall look and makes your life easier while arranging because you then know where each flower should go. When this shape is missing, the arrangement can easily appear cluttered and out of place, even with beautiful flowers.
Focal points are essential as well. In the professional world, we don’t put flowers all over the place with no thought given. There is usually a focal point to the arrangement, with other flowers and filler placed around it to lead the eye. It helps in building hierarchy which prevents the arrangement from looking flat and lacking direction.
Spacing of flowers is something that is not done by most amateurs. We tend to make our arrangements quite full and dense, and that is not the goal of a professional arrangement. They leave gaps in their designs so that flowers and foliage has room to breathe. These gaps of empty space also serve the purpose of outlining the overall rhythm and readability of the arrangement.
Height variation is also a key principle in a pro florist’s arrangement. If you have the flower heads all the same height, it will look too straight and stiff. Varying stem lengths in an arrangement makes them more dynamic and interesting. It gives the arrangement some life, so instead of a boring bunch of flowers, you now have a piece of art.
The color combination and balancing should be also considered in the final arrangement. Professional florists don’t just take any color they find at random. The color combinations must be balanced. You must understand the interplay of colors so that you know how you want your arrangement to look, whether it should be serene and tranquil, or lively and expressive.
The final point for this article is about repetition. This refers to the same flowers, colors or shapes repeated over and over in your arrangement. This helps in achieving overall unity within the design. If there are no repeated elements in your design, they can look disjointed. Repetition helps to give you a sense of overall harmony and thoughtfulness.
The final, and probably very important, factor to consider is technique and the care taken to put the whole arrangement together. How well you cut the stem of the flowers, how much water you put in the vase, how you condition your flowers and so on, can have a huge impact on how your arrangement looks and how long they last. You can have the best design of flowers, and if they wilt away quickly or are not well prepared, it will lose its impact.
At PetalCraft Course we want you to focus less on memorizing the theory, and more about learning by practicing the different techniques in the flower arrangement. You will start to understand the composition when you start to appreciate the flowers and their shapes as design components of the whole arrangement. You start seeing beyond flowers.
At the end of it all, there is no need to make professional floral arrangements look complicated. They just need some attention to be made so they do not look cluttered and messy. Understanding how you can control the shape, size, color and other elements will enable you to make simple flowers look like professional ones.