Coloring Sugar Flowers with Petal Dust

Putting powdered food colors onto your sugar flowers is one way to really enhance the look and bring them to life just a little bit more. It's a really simple process. It just takes a little bit of time and of course the right products. So what you will need to get started is just a couple of brushes. Make sure that these are edible food brushes that are, not necessarily edible food brushes, but just brushes that are only used on food. You don't want to mix your mediums. I have a little bit of cornstarch, and this is really here just to provide a lightening effect for any of our flowers if our darker colors go on too dark, or you can even mix your powdered sugar with a color in order to lighten it. And then of course we want some petal dust. Now, there certainly is a difference between petal dust and just a powdered food color. So please be careful when picking the powdered food colors that you're gonna use. So the powdered food color really is intended for placing into items like chocolate or buttercream, those types of items. This is petal dust, and this is very specifically made for dusting your flowers. So you just wanna make sure that you find a brand that you like, there's lots out there. Some of them are a little bit richer in color, and some of them take a little bit more in the sense of layers of application to get a color. So one of the brands that I really enjoy using is Crystal Colors. Another brand is Roxy & Rich. Both of those are great colors that really have strong potency to each of their layering effects. So I'm just gonna use a hydrangea blossom here, and what's really nice about hydrangea is that they have a gradient of colors. So not all the petals are always the same. Sometimes it's a single petal that might have some color, sometimes the whole blossom is a solid color. But typically they're variegated, they have a lot of different styles or shades of colors. So what I'm gonna do is actually start by using one of my lighter colors. This is more of a bluish gray color. And usually what I like to do is I use a fan brush for a wider application. So in this case, we have a fairly wide petal, and so I am using utilizing a fan brush to be able to cover the edges of all of those. Now you certainly can come in with a smaller brush, especially if you just wanna put a single line through the center of a petal or just capture one edge. So depending upon what your goal is in putting color onto a flower, you might pick one brush over another. So I'm gonna go back to my fan and all I'm gonna do is dip it into my powdered color. And then I usually just tap it a little bit because that gets all the chunks of powder off of my brush, so that when I go onto my flower, I'm not gonna have really big streaks of color. So just holding onto the edge of the flower, and I start on the edge and pull forward. And that is just going to give me a really pretty effect that starts at the edge of a petal and moves forward. You can always add more color, but it's more challenging to take it back off. So I always start really light and then add more as I need it. And being able to come from the edge of the petal and moving forward allows you to really build up the color just on the edge of the petal. If I were to start in the center of a petal, we'll flip this one over. If I start in the center, then I'll get sort of a line there. You'll see it a little bit better as I move to a darker color. So let me grab the royal. So instead of pulling from the edge, I'm just gonna pull from the middle. But you get a very stark line of color wherever you start and stop with your brush. So if you are going for that look, then that's okay. But if you look at hydrangea, they have a tendency to come from the outer edge of the petal and move the color to the inside. So even though I have brushed over this a few times, you can still see that initial brush mark from my first application with the darker color. So you just wanna be mindful of what look you're trying to go for and how to achieve it. And usually it's by starting on an edge and moving in. Even if we were to do one petal versus all of them or half a petal with the brush, you still wanna start from that outer edge. You could also start from the center. So as long as the center of the flower you're working on has a really dark center, you could start in the center and pull away. And in this case, just doing a line and sort of fanning out. So you can see both the method in which you apply the color as well as what type of brush you're using really affects how the color is applied to each of the blossoms. So it really is a matter of each individual style of flower being addressed appropriately. So as you work through any of our gum paste videos, you will likely see how to create the flower as well as how to dust the flower, because each of those flowers will be dusted in a slightly different way. So I encourage you to play with your dusting as much as you can, because it really does impact the overall look and style of your flower. And you really can create some unique looks depending upon the flower of your choice. So in this case, I'm gonna just do a little bit of overlay as well to kind of give this a secondary color. Because no new color that we are gonna apply is ever going to just be perfect on its own, you can blend. So in this case, I've used a darker royal, as well as a lighter like periwinkle color. You can blend this on the flower itself, or you can actually go in and blend here on your piece of parchment. So just pulling those two together creates sort of a third shade. And I'm gonna bring in one more just so you can see a slightly different version of that. And I actually like this color. When you're blending together on the mat, you just sort of get a more uniform color, that to me just looks a whole lot prettier. It's not so choppy. So if you look at the difference between the two, you can really see the periwinkle and then you can really see the royal. Where on this one, it's just sort of a nice blend of the two colors together. So again, there isn't a right or wrong with this particular method of blending. It's a personal preference, and it really, again, depends on the style of flower that you're utilizing. As far as the centers of your flowers go, you can see that I have a couple flowers that don't have centers, and then I have a couple flowers that do. The tendency for me with particular flowers, especially something like a hydrangea, is to actually go ahead and dust the flowers before I put my centers in. Because the centers tend to be a completely different color compared to the flower, or it might be the same color, but it's usually a slightly lighter version of it. So it just really, again, flower choice and color choice really go well together. They definitely depend on each other and depend on which particular flower you're gonna use. So this is just a very general overview of how to apply some dust to your flowers. I would look to some of the other videos regarding specific flower choices and how to dust those appropriately.