It has been forever since I painted anything let alone an oil portrait. I have to learn technique all over again. I just haven’t had much desire to paint during Covid and this one was drawn out over a year ago.
The background will be more of a dark brown rather than the black that the under painting is now. Today I started the first layers on her face.
I worked on correcting values, colour, and unifying washes for the shadows. It’s finished except to wax it for protection and frame it tomorrow once I’m sure it’s dry.
The last couple of days I didn’t have time to paint (babysitting my three grandson’s). Today I concentrated on values and small washes of colour. I have to get the underlying values correct before I add unifying washes for shadows over large areas. I’m about 80% finished which is good because the deadline is in two days. I’ll be doing a lot more tomorrow.
Finally, most of the petals have at least some colour on them. Next comes the harder part, adjusting values. I will pick the lightest and darkest values in the petals and start adjusting each one to make them lighter or darker according to those two points. I also have to soften any paint edges that need it.
More work darkening the already painted petals and started on a few more. It’s amazing how dark the values have to be to show a white flower in shadow. Once I get all the values and colours right I’ll unify the whole painting with a very light golden wash. There are really very few pure white areas.
Today I continued adding dark washes in the background. It will be black when I’m finished. I also started the first washes on some of the petals. The flower is half in shadow so many petals will be very dark as well. I couldn’t do a lot because of the wet paint all around the edges.
I had originally started drawing this on a prepared board to paint in oils. It is going to be for our art club’s annual show for this year’s theme “Flower Power”. The deadline to submit the information and a photo is the end of March. If the show was going to be online it wouldn’t matter if the oil wasn’t completely dry. But the museum has opened and is planning to hang our show so I decided that it would have to be done in watercolour. I quickly redrew it and have started on washes of background darks. It will be a challenge to paint swirls of white petals in high contrast light and shade.
Today I finally finished what I thought would be a simple flower painting. I’m still learning oil painting so there were a few oopsies as well as drying time between glazes. I had a hard time deciding how far to take it towards realism. I didn’t want it to look like a photo. It was also an experiment with Black 3.0. It didn’t turn out as black as I imagined when in bright light but in room lighting I am happy with the feeling of depth it brings.
I worked all over the painting once again adding glazes of colour, correcting lines, values, edges, and shadows. I then painted the outside and front edges of the cradle board it’s painted on with the Black 3.0 as well as two coats over the background. I found out you can’t paint the black over oil paint. It acts like a resist. Good thing they were just small corrections. I attached hanging hardware on the back and I’m calling it finished. Thanks for following my progress.
Today the last glazes of colour on the petals were dry enough to work on again. I corrected the white highlight on the petal, worked on the stamens some more, added some shadows behind them, and worked on the leaves. Errors around the outside of the leaves will be corrected when I put in the black background. It’s getting close to being done.
I did another glaze of colour on all the petals and they are basically finished except there might be a few touch ups of details after it dries. I was in too big of a rush to put shadows from the stamens over the white part of a petal and it spread. I worked some more on the stamens as well but still have more work to define those.
I let the painting dry for a couple of days to make sure the layers had dried completely. If not, they tend to move around as you put on another glaze of colour. This morning I did more glazes on almost every petal and filled in the first colours on the last petal. I worked on the stamens as well. I still haven’t decided how to treat the raw wood edges of the cradle board.
Today I added more glazes of colour but had to work mostly on the petals on the right because the ones on the left weren’t completely dry. I put in a base colour on one of the top petals as well. Most of the time was for laboriously picking out stamens deciding which ones were in shadow and which in sun. If you look closely you might see a tiny wasp start forming among the stamens.
I started picking out where the stamens are and worked on laying in the base colours on those more petals. I’m also finding the shadows. The photo was taken in bad lighting. No sun this afternoon.
Today was more of the same. I applied more glazes of colours to petals and leaves. I have to draw out the stamens in the centre before I can paint any more petals so I’ll do that this evening.
I worked another hour on this today. The colours you see are basically base coats to figure out placement, where shadows are, etc. I have to wait for these base coats to dry to add glazes of colour and details. This is an ugly stage that I have to push through. I’m working one petal at a time to start working on values.
I bought some Black 3.0 from Stewart Semple. It is one of the world’s blackest blacks. I am trying an experiment to see if I can create the illusion of a flower floating in a black void like space. To help with the depth and cut down on any light reflections I am using a cradle board upside down. I’ve drawn out the flower (see step 1), primed the raw wood with an acrylic base to keep the non archival board separate from the painting (step 2), and started trying out some red colours on the first petal (step 3). I can’t go farther until a get a good photo reference printed out to do colour matching. I haven’t used my art printer in months so it will need a little work. I’ll paint the flower with oil paints then the last step will be to paint the Black 3.0 over the black background. This experiment is just for fun but I’m trying it to get ideas for my paintings.
Step1
