Watercolor paintings, tutorials, and videos
Mine came out tighter than I would usually do but for me that is always the case when talking through a painting. I may touch this up and finish it off later.
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Watercolor daffodils today and aren’t they perfect if you need cheering up! The wonderful Paul Foxton is continuing his livestream painting sessions during the corona virus lockdown and I managed to actually catch him live and be organized enough to get the reference photo printed out in readiness.
I think I really quite like this one. It has an ethereal quality to it that I like and considering that daffodils are really hard to paint it was pretty successful.
This is the current state of play with the rose paintings. I chose a more subtle range of values for this one and went straight in with paint with no prior drawing. This turned out to be more successful than I first thought. The previous two weeks of drawing roses definitely helped me keep track of the rose construction and where the petals are. It’s been a pretty successful series I think – lots learned at every stage.
Here’s the full set :
Yellow watercolor roses were a bit of a departure for me. However, I’ve been avidly watching Paul Foxton’s oil painting videos on Facebook. He has a fantastic way of telling you what he’s doing that is incredibly instructive. I highly recommend looking him up and his website also has a wealth of information on it. He also runs online courses which I haven’t investigated yet but I may well do when I’ve saved up some pennies.
But anyway. I was watching him paint a still life of 3 yellow roses and thought that I’d like to have a go at that just for a bit of an experiment. I took a quick screenshot of his setup and just went in with paint without drawing. This is not my usual way of working and frankly I thought it would be a disaster and I’d end up throwing it away. However, I took it seriously and tried to carefully measure the colors and values and match them as best I could. Amazingly I got a lot closer to what I was intending than I ever thought. Now, things aren’t perfect by any means but carefully measuring the colors and values I got a lot closer to the effect I was hoping for than I usually do with flowers.
The main things that helped me was very careful consideration of the hue and value (with a bit of attention to chroma) for each area. I tried to hit it first time (failed for the most part) and in subsequent layers to keep any extra pigment within that value range. This kept me from making the flowers too muddy. Close attention to the hue kept the deep parts of the roses close to the original.
There’s lots of stuff I’d change of course. The vase is actually a different shape and the edges of the flowers are too crisp. I misread the background color and made it too red and the leaves are a little too broad. I still didn’t get enough chroma in the depths of the roses and there isn’t a lot of form to them. Oh I could go on and on…..
And the main thing I would do differently is that I did this from a screenshot. I should really be sitting in front of actual flowers. I don’t have a great lighting setup for that right now but I’ll be rectifying that in the next couple of weeks.
Oh and the final thing – painting flowers is exhausting!! This took me a couple of hours I would say but I was basically useless afterwards. Very intense. Constant concentration and judgement required and one false stroke and all is lost. Never let anyone tell you flower painting is for wusses.
Oh and the final final thing – I actually did two. Here’s the first.
Another go at the tulips. Greens are always tricky so I calmed them down quite a bit on this one.
After something clicking with the irises last week I thought I’d try my old nemesis – sunflowers. All that yellow can be overwhelming and it’s really hard to get the petals without them looking extremely rigid. In this case I think the balance between definition and looseness is just about right. One for the win column.
