Month: January 2017

I love to paint sunflowers.  I have done a number of pictures of sunflowers and never seem to tire of painting them.

I learned a neat thing from Homer Allbritten, an artist friend now deceased, about using a “mother” color.  He said to add a single color in all mixtures throughout the painting and this would easily achieve a unifying effect.  I don’t think I always do this, but I am more pleased with my paintings when I remember to do so!

More artificial flowers used as models.  The pears are also in my inventory of artificial fruits and flowers.
Richard Schmid, an artist I admire, said that a painter should ask herself several questions:  Which side of the subject is lightest?  Is the color clear and sharp or diffused? Where are the lost edges?  What are the most powerful colors?  Where is the thick paint going?  Where is the thin paint going?

These are two of my paintings of roses.  The models were artificial flowers standing in for my real ones which are not blooming in January.  Acrylics are very different than oils and it takes a lot of blending to make petals seem dewy and fragile.  Not sure I totally succeeded!

I did another study of zinnias from my front yard but this time I tried to show the stems in water.  This was hard to do, and I looked at a number of other artists’ paintings to see how they did it.  I think that one of the tricks I learned was to paint the surface of the water in the bowl first as an ellipse, then to paint the water in the bowl and the glass reflections.  After this, I painted the stems stopping them on the water surface.  Next, under the ellipse I painted the rest of the stems.  The water does distort the placement of the bottom stems some.