Pale Yellow Aglow

Daily Painting Challenge - Day 12

Flowers are always tricker than you think they are going to be and take twice as long to paint.

Here's a progress shot. You can see at this stage I have started putting in the yellow and the basic shape is there. I used a fair bit of purple for the shadows on the right of the flower.
At this stage I realised that although the petals are pale, they were too white, so added just a touch of a creamy yellow and went in with a smaller brush to add some definition to the center of the flower.

 

(6 x 6 inches)
15 x 15cm approx
Oil on Gessobord 

Rosy-Row

Daily Painting Challenge - Day 11

Similar composition to yesterday but with three different varieties of rose of varying sizes.
Even though I was trying to keep things loose, the white rose took me at least three attempts. The white has just a hint of yellow. I tried three different pigments before I got a flower that still looked white, not yellow.
I'd like to try a bigger version of this composition at some point.

I guess this challenge really has become about painting flowers.
So difficult to do a composition like this on a tiny little panel.


(8 x 8 inches)
20 x 20cm approx
Oil on Gessobord   

Printers Posy

Daily Painting Challenge - Day 6

Persevering with the Gerberas.
For this one I wanted to try an approach that a lot of artists use (but I don't use often) -which is 'blocking in'; ie you block in all the main colours and then you go back and add highlights and refinements later. The idea is that you start with an impression of the painting, getting the main colour themes right first. Not my comfort zone, but I'm trying to experiment with different techniques. I would not in general take this approach - I'm not generally a fan of working over the top of paint I have already laid down but I decided to give it ago here, just to see.

Here's a progress shot to show what I mean. At this stage I have really just put down three colours on the yellow flower: a bright yellow, a yellow ochre and a slightly darker ochre.
Then I went back in and added some definition. I think this worked really well with the yellow gerbera. It was much harder to do with the pink gerbera as the petals varied in colour from one to the next.

The little bud vase I picked up a couple of weeks ago in Crate and Barrel. I ummed and ahhed for ages as it was priced at $4 (big spend!). When I got to the checkout it was reduced to $2, so now I have 4 of these in different colours!

'Printers Posy' (the title), refers to the colour theme here turned out to be almost Yellow, Magenta and Cyan (process printers colours). I made this connection about half way through the painting.

(8 x 8 inches)
20 x 20cm approx
Oil on Gessobord