Art Blog

Sunflowers Yellow & Brown 03

Sunflowers 04 Sunflowers Yellow & Brown tutorial 03. The petals are all started with a good yellow and orange wash. Now, the center of the blossom can begin with shapes that render where all the seeds are developing. This area on the blossom is an area where I have to simplify what I see and stay away from trying to render every single detail.

Sunflowers 05 You can see how the introduction of green strokes and puddles of paint create a rich dark hue in the background.

Sunflowers 06 The seed centers are darkened and finished in more detail. The petals close to the center are darkened also and the shadows that are cast on the different petal shapes are added. Adding more of the green foliage in the background helps to separate the main characters even more.

Sunflowers 07 The addition of some purple alongside of the greens makes even darker shapes behind the blossoms.

Sunflowers Yellow & Brown 01

Sunflowers Photo Painting Sunflowers in Yellow & Brown tutorial. We are fortunate to have an abundance of all different kinds and colors of sunflowers in our garden each year. This artist takes many photographs that inspire rendering their beautiful colors and surfaces.

At this point in time around the world that is amazing. The sunflower is the Ukraine national flower or is a sign of their resistance forces. So, it must be a real goo time to learn about painting sunflowers.

Sunflowers 01 See how much variation in value exists in sunflowers for each and every petal and the centers of the blossoms. This painting is a real practice in getting good gradations in the watercolor wash. Each petal goes from real dark to really light on the tips. They are not only yellow in color set a full pallet of paint up for this project. The blue-gray dots seen in the middle are watercolor resist (mastik) reserving white areas for better details later on.

Yellow Rose 03

Rose Yellow 09 Yellow Rose 03 Tutorial. Applying a green shadow line along where the lower flower petals separate from the vertical standing petals is gently softened by adding a small amount of clean water below the line. I can also use a paper towel to dry my brush and then pick up any excess amounts of pigment before it dries. A very adjustable feathering procedure.

Rose Yellow 11

Continuing down to the foliage I add burnt sienna with hunters green to render those surfaces.

Rose Yellow 12 This image shows how much the colors fade as they dry. It really is okay to use a lot more pigment than you would normally feel comfortable with.

Rose Yellow 13 A lot more of the darkest shadows and brightest highlights have been rendered here in the blossom and on the foliage. See the completed art anytime at the online gallery here.

Yellow Rose 02

Rose Yellow 04 Yellow Rose 02 Tutorial. I can turn to fill in the background areas after the flower and foliage are sufficiently defined. Using a weak solution of alizarin crimson I selectively create different areas of wet. Then I can carefully place drops of heavier concentrations of color into these wet areas. A large drop of crimson travels through a lake entertaining the eye as it spreads where ever it wants to. The watercolor seems to have a mind of its own. My darkening drops begin with accentuating the outside borders and are mostly made using alizarin crimson.

Rose Yellow 07 At this point, I alternate between adding drops of purple, with bright and thick drops of cadmium red. It is scary to put this much color and allow it to spread on its own but honestly, the color pales a great deal as it dries. Being bold is good! I love the way that these brilliant colors make their own gradual nuances.

Rose Yellow 08

Green mixed with red makes for a wonderfully dark black pigment. This shows well with the foliage green mixing with the reds around the exterior of the front blossom. See how the green really sets off the crevasse between the horizontal petal and the vertical petal surface.

Yellow Rose 01

Rose Yellow Photo Yellow Rose 01 Tutorial. When your garden provides the perfect yellow rose, you just have to paint it. This photograph captured all of the curving surfaces so well that I could not resist.

Rose Yellow Sketch

Beginning with laying out the blossom I add some stem, leaves, and smaller buds alongside. I work with the arrangement until I feel a little interesting movement happening between the shapes and sizes.

Rose Yellow 02

Beginning with lemon yellow as the palest, and adding Azo Nickel yellow and then even some light cad I begin to get the first petals to curve and show me their light. Each and every petal has highlighted areas, medium tones, and the shadows making up the changing surfaces. Petals are not flat. Rose Yellow 03 As more of the petals are given their yellow base washes I begin to see the magic of three-dimensional illusion begin to appear. Flowers are so very amazing with the way they curve every which way showing light hitting their surfaces in ever-changing values.

The rose foliage is also given an initial watercolor wash in light yellow and thin sap greens.

Sketch a Rose

sketch yellow rose

Sketching

To sketch a rose is the first step in any flower painting project for me. My photograph is cropped in real close to show only the petals on the yellow rose of friendship bloom. The way the light changes the yellow into gold is magnetic. However, it really doesn’t speak to me so I end up adding a long stem and another bud on the left to give your eyes a place to journey. I’m beginning to see some action in the layout with the addition of the foliage and bud, and am ready to proceed now.

Yellow Rose 2 With this beautiful yellow rose sketch, I carefully recreated the petals from the photograph and then lay it out on the table right next to where I begin to paint. I also have the actual flower in front of me as I begin to paint so I can get the colors right but the first part is usually dark areas taken from the dark values in the B&W print. My goal is to get the soft light to yellow fading (wet on wet) on each petal surface first and then add in shadow.

Reference

Yellow Rose 1 I am not going to use mastic to reserve the whites, instead, I plan to be careful to reserve the light areas of the paper. These first three images show the desk setup with the reference materials, paint pallet with brushes. Working on the first three petals establishes which colors seem to work best. After wetting the petal area, I fill my brush with Aureolin Yellow and drag along the darker edge to the center leaving a puddle of color at the center, this one lets other colors wash over it. Using a darker orange-yellow named, New Gamboge, to drop in color where more brilliance in the yellow is desired. Yellow Rose 3

Plumeria in Process

Plumeria White Ylw 02 — Plumeria White & Yellow 02

This watercolor of plumeria in process recreates how the flowers look when they are rinsed and spread across a kitchen table while stringing leis.

Notice the yellow-centered white plumerias have a brilliant center fading out to white edges and tip. To accomplish this I wet the entire petal area so I can do a wet-on-wet process with the paint. Fill a brush with Aurolean yellow. Begin applying by pulling from the tip on the outside edge of the petal to the interior in the center and lifting the brush. This leaves a wonderful puddle of light yellow bleeding out evenly and gradually to the outer edges of the petal. Do the other side of the petal.

The next shade is New Gambouge, which is a kind of orangish yellow. Same brush loaded with color, then pulling from about 3/4 or 1/2 of the petal length to the inside and lifting again at the center to produce that darker orange tint in the center. Do both sides of petal. In the image below, you can see how the New Gambouge further defines the radiance of that center area and push it into the distance.

Darken the Center

Apply using a light touch with a smaller brush of Daniel Smith Quinacridone Gold or an orange-brown to your liking, to emphasize edges and the center even more. I notice a darker shadow right under the edges of where the petal folds up on the sides remaining white. This underneath surface of the petal is where I apply the darker color sparingly.

Shadows

Finally, with the same small brush, I drop a little pool drop of Dioxazine Purple right in the middle where you would insert your needle to string a lei. Purples are a perfect “shadow maker” for yellows. The wet surface lets the purple bleed naturally out into the petal making an incredibly believable shadow and depth. I also use this same purple in very light washes to create drop shadows where the flowers overlap each other, edge outlines, and stem peek out from behind.

Reds and Pinks

The same steps are taken with the red plumeria sing the wet-on-wet process. Using a light wash of Alizarin Crimson, adding Purple Lake, touching with Vermillion then more Alizarin Crimson in the middle. Last is that drop of Dioxazine Purple in the center. For the pink the same steps but what I noticed is that there is almost a stripe effect with the different colors on each petal. I start with an Alizarin Chrimson, adding Vermillion, adding Pyrrol Orange, then Cadmium Yellow Pale in stripes that I let bleed into each other. Again, the last is that drop of Dioxazine Purple in the center.

More posts like these are under the category of “Watercolor”

PLUMERIA memories

PLUMERIA memories can be painted if you have enough pictures of them stored away in your mind. I used to make lei’s all the time. Before I know it, I am simply painting the colors and textures that I remember. I can almost see and smell the flowers in my hands and these memories seem to guide my brush.

plumeriaWhiteYlw — plumeria white and yellow

Right after I finished my client’s piece, I started on another plumeria memory for a birthday coming up. She is family who made many lei’s with me. Starting with multiple sketches of flowers until I arrive at an arrangement that suits me, the process begins.

The plumeria tree has big pointed dark green leaves and produces a thick stem that branches out to multiple pods, creating a bunch of blossoms. Plumeria is a 5 petal flower with pointed ends spreading out in an equal circular fashion. It has a sturdy tube from its petals-creating an easy-to-string tube stem that begins as a cone shape coming down from the blossom which then reduces into a smaller diameter where it anchors to the pod.

While picking, you have to take care to keep the milky sap off of yourself. It really is poisonous but honestly, I have never known anyone stupid (lo-lo) enough to eat that yucky tasting stuff. I remember doing the “wash your hands” thing right after picking or lei making. It was so sticky and tasted quite vile (pilau) if you ate something and licked your fingers afterward.

A Youth of Lei Making

Lei making is truly an art and many Hawaiians excel at creating gorgeous and fragrant creations that are a joy to see and wear. My favorite lei is puakinikini it has an almost magical entrancing aroma. In elementary school, lei designs were fun and simple. But in high school, things got serious to enter the May Day Lei Making contest at the state capitol.

We had large plumeria trees lining the dirt road in the front of our house. People used to come and knock on our door to ask permission to pick. Those trees provided the whole neighborhood.

There was a great big one that had thick white petals with bright yellow centers and a truly heavenly perfume. The thick petals allowed it to last the longest in a lei. Right next to it was an established old tree with blossoms that had a more slender and thinner type of petal. It had brilliant pinks and a yellow center, with not so sweet a fragrance, and didn’t last as long.

The only color missing was dark red, so I got a branch from a friend to plant in the backyard. It grew into a beautiful tree right in the guava orchard area. It took a couple of years before it was big enough to supply “a grocery sack-full” of flowers to work with, but even with little amounts of the dark reds some really interesting patterns and designs in our lei making through.

More posts like this are under the category of “Watercolors“.