My Latest Flower Painting (“Floral Study”) and Its Development.
My Latest Flower Painting (“Floral Study”) and Its Development.
Floral Study
9” x 12”
Oil on birch panel
2018
Greetings Everyone,
In this post I thought I would share this long overdue floral painting and how it progressed.
Looking back, it has been a loooonng time since I worked with flowers. This quick alla prima I have to say was pretty fun to work on and I really do miss painting them on a usual basis.
A couple of days ago several bundles of different kinds of flowers were dumped on me as they were no longer fit to sell, so naturally I had to jump on the opportunity to paint them.
There’s nothing like chasing a fleeting subject like flowers to really shake up your painting routine!
At first I toned my painting panel with the usual burnt umber before a loose block in drawing.
Now after “juggling” these predominant shapes within the drawing, with a larger brush I then covered the background with a generalized tone with ivory black, venetian red and titanium white.
Then of course starting with my darkest darks (obviously the vase) I massed in the vase, keeping in mind to think of it in terms of value, form and mass rather than in terms of line accuracy.
Considering that time is of the essence with a painting of this nature, I continued onto the flowers with this kind of mental focus.
I have to say that for me it still is kind of a strange way of working for me in that you do really have to work faster while simultaneously having to observe in very slow manner.
Now at this stage I was working in my darks and very “hot” midtones while attempting to find the largest of planes on each of the flowers. At the very last I would selectively pull out the edges of the lights rather than focus on every individual petal.
As my attention has been bouncing all over the painting, I am now going back with a softer brush and attempting to work on some edges of the petals that I want to recede into space. When all the edges are uniform within a painting it has a tendency to look flat or cut out, so you end losing that necessary sense of space.
..Aaaand it’s finished!!
Overall I have to say that this kind of study was a hit and miss. While there are some things that I don’t like about it, at the same time I am confident that there were plenty of things about it that I enjoyed learning and that I can carry through on to my next floral painting.
I really like the colour composition, James :) The yellow really pops off the canvas well !
@veryspider Thank you so much! :) Painting flowers to me are simultaneously scary and exciting. And in many ways they're actually much more difficult to paint than the figure, simply from their translucency alone.
I wish I had access to more refrigerator space so that I could work on flower paintings longer ;)
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Hello @jameszenartist, thank you for sharing this creative work! We just stopped by to say that you've been upvoted by the @creativecrypto magazine. The Creative Crypto is all about art on the blockchain and learning from creatives like you. Looking forward to crossing paths again soon. Steem on!