Thursday 25 September 2014

Painting Gladioli and Rudbeckia , step by step

Here is a new painting based on two of my favourite flowers, Gladioli and Rudbeckia.  I have worked in acrylic and acrylic gouache. The style is bright and colourful.

Here is the finished painting, and then you can read about the stages of creating this ........   I will put a larger photo at the end.


I have worked on a long thin canvas.  I quite like this shape for floral paintings.  

My inspiration came from the flowers growing in my garden. I took several photos and put them together in Photoshop, to get a rough idea of the sort of painting I wanted to create.  As you can see, I did not tidy up the photos that much, as there is plenty of original background behind each flower. I added some blue to give a rough idea of background.



So now back to the actual painting. Firstly I covered the whole canvas with a very sketchy coat of blue acrylic. This is cheap acrylic, as most of it will be overpainted. I drew some of the outlines with pencil,  and then went over them with white paint, so I could actually see what I was doing!




After this, I started adding some additional colours with very basic shading. I have upgraded to a better quality paint now!




Next I repeated the process with the other two gladioli, and I started to add in some leaves.




Following this I worked in to the background, with lots of small dots and dabs of paint. I painted in the Rudbeckias a bit more, and started to think about light and shade on the leaves.


Next I added deep shading to the Gladioli leaves, and added a new leaf on the left side.  I also extended a few more of the existing leaves. However I felt the leaves overshadowed the flowers, so they needed to be changed!!  I also had not added any foliage for the rudbeckia, so needed contrast in the leaf area of the painting.




My next stage was to  soften down the shading on the gladioli leaves. I also started adding extra layers of shading and detail over the whole painting. I also added a small Rudbeckia bud on the left, along with a layer of Rudbeckia leaves.




The final stages involved working detail and shading into the new layer of leaves. I removed the Gladioli leaf from the left of the painting. I put masses of small detail into the flowers. This has been painted in my usual style of tiny dabs of paint.