After painting the sunflowers in my two previous posts — as much as fun as it was — I wanted to make my flowers more artistic and less symbolic. I was reading blog posts from Karen Margulis, a pastel painter, and was inspired to up my game.
This was done in pastel on a terracotta-colored 6×8 Pastel Premier 4-ply board.
After doing a quickie version in pastels, I decided to a similar scene in acrylics. This was done on 7×10 300-lb. cold-pressed watercolor paper.
Here’s the work-in-progress (right) and the finished version (left).
This was just a quickie because I didn’t have a lot of time, yet I wanted to paint something. It was done on a 6×8 white Pastel Premier 4-ply board (from a sampler set I got at Dakota Pastels a few years back).
I didn’t even use all the pastel sticks shown below — but one thing I would do differently would be to paint the centers last so as not to smear the yellow shades with the darker brown.
I’m trying roses now, using a reference photo from PaintCoach’s Patreon site. This is the background done, on a 11×14 canvas.
Wow! I’ve actually made 100 paintings. This one was my first from life rather than a photo. And, man, these sunflowers are in bad shape! I bought them specifically to paint them, but I’ve been drawing rather than painting for the last week or so. (I did take some photos of them right when I bought them, though, so I can try again.)
I decide to use my new Green Earth paint for the stems and leaves (mixed with my go-to Chromium Oxide Green. I used Diarylide Yellow for the petals, and a mix of Burnt Umber Light w/ Carbon Black for the faces of the flowers.
I wanted to try a monotonal work; this was done on a 6×8 canvas. The painting is based on an image by experimentMR from Pixabay.
I think it looks better at a distance.
I did this quick study from memory and on a 6×6 canvas panel based on one of my own photos. I had previously underpainted the panel in an Ultramarine Blue-Titanium White mix, which seriously affected the magenta paint.
For this study, I used another of my own photos — this one taken one evening in early December of 2021 from my backyard. The Moon was actually a crescent at the time, but I had a cheap smartphone at the time with a lousy camera, so it looks full, and I carried on with that in my painting. Jupiter is shining above the Moon, and Venus is near the silhouette of the chimney.
This was done on a 4×6 piece of 300 lb. cold-pressed watercolor paper. The house silhouette is blue-black, and the sky was painted in tints of dioxazine purple. The Moon, Jupiter and Venus are painted in a yellow-white mix.
This painting was done in acrylic on a 4×6 piece of 300 lb. cold-pressed watercolor paper. It’s based off of a photo I took of the waning crescent Moon one morning back in November 2021.
I felt the original image of the sky was too gray and blue, so I changed it up at bit. The sky was painted with Liquitex BASICS blue gray; the pink is Cadmium Red Medium Hue from Golden, and the Moon is Titanium White mixed with Hansa Yellow Light (PY 73).
BetterLateThanNeverArt 