Author: cronesinger

Pears are a favorite subject of mine to paint.  I’ve done lots of them.It is generally better to paint 3, 5, or 7 pears and not an even number.  Some think that two objects can be boring, but three is exciting!  In this painting I tried to remember a technique I learned from watching Julie Ford Oliver’s web site and blog.    She calls it fracturing (avoiding too many sharp edges) and she achieves wonderful results with this.

Somewhere I remember admiring roses in a blue bowl, so I decided to try to paint a blue bowl with roses in it.  My model was actually a white bowl, but after I carefully shaded it and painted it in white, I used glaze and glazed over it with blue.  The shadows can easily be seen through the glaze.  It is an old master technique that I learned a long time ago–paint everything in brown tones with careful shading and then glaze over with color.

Every year (except this one) I have bought tulips and planted them in large pots so I could have painting material in the spring. This past October was so warm  and dry that I knew it would be hard to grow  tulips because they require at least 6 weeks of cold weather to bloom.  So I dug out my trusty artificial tulips and found a few photographs of tulips to paint this picture.

Here’s a technique tip:  You can remove acrylic varnish with alcohol but you can make corrections on top of Liquitex gloss or matt medium varnish.  Remember to reseal the entire painting with varnish when you have finished.

Last week’s post was a sunflower painting.  Today I am using the same models but rearranging them.  Next week you will see another version of sunflowers.  I like to do a series of paintings on the same theme.

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!