Floral

Sunflower #7 – On Watercolor Paper

| cathmary1030

This painting was done by “winging it” — meaning, no specific reference photo. I wanted to try building out my sunflower with a base of green petals. Below is the result. I’ve layered the petals with Liquitex cadmium-free lemon, and cadmium-free yellow medium, as well as yellow ochre and dioxazine purple.

I did this on a piece of 6×8 300-lb. watercolor paper.

Sunflower #6

| cathmary1030

I’ve been unsatisfied with my sunflower painting so the other day I googled “how to paint sunflowers in acrylics”. The search results were a bounty of different YouTube videos. Well, naturally, some sunflower paintings appealed to me more than others so I watched about half a dozen.

What I found was, naturally, everyone has their own way of painting sunflowers. Some start with the background, some start with the dark center of the flower. However, the colors they chose for painting the flower were largely in sync across the board — and with my own paintings: yellow, yellow ochre, burnt sienna, burnt umber, etc. etc.

One process I decided to try, though, was to do more layering of the petals, and start with a round of yellow ochre first, applying the brighter yellow afterwards. This painting on an 8×8 canvas was just from my imagination, and the mix of all the sunflower pictures I’ve been looking at lately.

Yellow Rose

| cathmary1030

I wasn’t particularly satisfied with my pink and white roses in the vase a few posts back so I tried winging this one (on 6×8 watercolor paper). I like the colors, but this is a pretty abstract “symbolic” rose.

Sunflower #5

| cathmary1030

I’m still fired up about sunflowers, and trying to improve. This work was based off the image by Nadine Doerlé from Pixabay.

I did the background is dioxazine purple, a complementary of the yellow. (I think I’m better at drawing out the sunflower than painting it!)

Step 1 – draw out the flower; Step 2 – paint the background

Then I painted the flower petals and the center.

And, last steps.

Sunflower #4

| cathmary1030

This 6×8 painting of a sunflower is based off the image used for Episode 29 of Artists Network Drawing Together series. What I did differently from the others I’ve painted was that for the shadowed part of the leaves, I mixed my yellow with a touch of Dioxazine Purple to desaturate it (rather than using Yellow Ochre). Ditto for the center of the flower; there’s a lot of the purple mixed in with yellow (although I also used Burnt Sienna and Burnt Umber).

Here’s the work-in-progress.

And here’s the finished piece.

Meadow Wildflowers… Using Modeling Paste

| cathmary1030

This painting was based off an image by RÜŞTÜ BOZKUŞ from Pixabay, and an article I found on the UK site Painters Online. I used an 8×8 canvas for this work, and took photos of each step I took.

Step One was to apply the modeling paste. The horizontal “goop” was to signify clouds; the vertical lines was to signify weeds and plant stalks.

After applying the modeling paste and letting it thoroughly dry, I went in my own direction rather than following the Painters Online demo.

I used a gray green mixed with a yellow green for the grasses, and a gray blue for the sky area.

Green is reportedly not a good color to use alone when doing landscapes and meadows. So, my next step was to apply a transparent orange glaze (using Liquitex Gloss Glazing Medium over the green paint, and let that dry thoroughly.

After the glaze dried, I added a darker value in the center bottom (to match with the reference photo) as well as adding a glaze of Cadmium Red Medium Hue for the clouds.

Next I painted the flowers, using Dioxazine Purple with some Titanium White, some yellow flowers, and highlighted the stems with Gray Green, yellow, and Burnt Sienna. I retouched the grassy area with some green. Then I added some of the Dioxazine Purple mixture to the clouds in the sky, and called it a day.

(The photo here doesn’t fully reflect the periwinkle/purple color of the flowers; they look too blue.)