Tips on Painting Flowers

Thursday has become painting day for my friend Shirley and me.  We start at 9 AM, lunch around noon, and keep right on painting until about 3 PM.  We have enjoyed our time together, and mutual critiques have helped us both keep on track.  It sometimes takes another's  discerning eye to catch improvements that need to be made.

Painting flowers is mesmerizing for the artist because so many techniques are used to create shape and depth to both the petals and leaves surrounding the flower.

A bit of an internet search found here was helpful in yesterday's work:

•Don’t be afraid to use bright colours neat from the tube for expressing the colour of flower heads.

•Applying the sunlit or pale colours before the shaded areas will ensure the rich colours of the flower heads will not be contaminated by the dark colour

•Don’t use black to darken the colour of the petals, but its complimentary colour, which is any opposing colour on the colour wheel

•Periodically standing back from the painting and using a wider brush than one might expect, will add boldness to any floral painting

•A good quality sable is essential for detail. A number 3 or 6 round is often ideal

•Over-mixing a colour might kill the life out of a bright colour. Allowing a few streaks of a colour mix to remain will add expression and life to any flower painting.

This is excellent advice which I attempted to incorporate into two current works in progress (below).

More definition and color delineation is needed, but these two pieces are coming along.  Just viewing these petals on screen already shows several areas that need improvement.