This tutorial is more detailed and complex than the last one, so take a popcorn or a notebook or a canvas with oil colors, you decide :)
I started this work with a drawing. We just need a quick sketch for this kind of painting. I used a fibreboard with priming. Be careful because priming on a fiberboard is bad for pencil, it's really hard to erase the pencil from this material. We don't need a lot of details in a drawing, just only big proportions of main parts of the flower and some action lines. So, with this information, we can later work with colors. Don't try to draw everything, don't try to make it perfect, just try to find the main composition. You can see, that in my preliminary drawing everything is done very approximately.
My palette for this painting included:
- carbon black;
- violet;
- ultramarine;
- phthalo blue (I added just a little bit of this color in the end of painting process);
- viridian;
- emerald green;
- dark brown;
- natural umber;
- burnt umber;
- carmine;
- sienna;
- yellow ochre;
- cadmium yellow;
- Naples flesh;
- titanium white.
When you work on oil painting it's better to start with shadows in the darkest parts of your image. And only then you can work mid-tones and in the end with lights. I started with a drapery. It has a violet color and it's the main background of a flower. I mixed the colors: violet, ultramarine and a little bit of carmine. I used the carmine in shadows because the light is cold and shadows were warm with such lighting. Shadows must be transparent, that's why try to mix the colors with more solvent if you need to add some lightness inside these dark parts. And be very careful with white color in shadows, better even don't use it at all at this stage.
After the first layer of drapery, you can move one to paint a pot. I got an interesting texture inside this glass pot and wanted to paint it with some details. There are some roots of an orchid and bark. The first strokes were quite light to designate the texture. You need to clean up your brush with a piece of cloth every time you want to change the shade of your color mix. In such case, your color will be clean and bright. Then I added some dark parts of the roots and bark.
Also, we need to remember about the big form of this glass pot and work with large shadows to make it three-dimensional. Small shadows of a texture inside a pot we can add at the end of the painting process. We work from big to small forms.
To paint this glass pot try to perceive it like a cylinder with light, mid-tone, shadow, and reflexes. Glass material catches a lot of reflections from other objects nearby so you can see some different colors on it. Also, it has many highlights and we need just to find them and repeat in our painting. Be careful with the brightness of these reflexes and highlights. We need to have the recognizable light and shadow parts of a pot. These details can break up a large shape and it will make the whole object flat and two-dimensional.
Then I added a back part of a glass pot and some details inside the bark texture. We need to cover up all white parts of a painting at mid-stages to find the main relations in color and lightness between different parts and objects. I used different shades of green, brown, sienna and carmine with umber in shadows. Also, I used a little bit of carbon black, but be careful with this color, it can easily make your mix dirty.
After covering the light spots on a pot, I started to work with leaves. The leaves are quite warm in a green color. Try not to use a lot of green color from tubes, better will be to mix it with blue and ochre or yellow to make a shade more complex and less open. I was working with all three leaves and stem simultaneously, mixing different shades of green color. The stem has a dark part at the downside and light on the upside. That light part was underlined with background contrast at the end stage of painting.
Every leaf is different in lighting and color shades. For example, the right leaf has light upper side and downside with a shadow. So, I started with this darker part and then added a light stroke on the top with some white color in the mix. The left side leaves are warmer because they are in a shadow part and the right leaf is a little bit colder. The silhouette of leaves was fixed at the end with a second layer of background drapery.
I started to work with flowers from yellow centers using cadmium yellow and then added some white and other shades to make different parts with more diversity. These parts have different sides and lighting scheme so don't make such details in one color and tone. But we don't need a precise rendering here. The petals I made with a mix of white color and some other shades. These flowers were rendered with an opaque thickness to make them a point of interest of the painting. I must say, that that white color is must have, especially if you want to make a pasty picture. The variety of colors and tone makes petals more alive and complex. I used ultramarine and blue (on the tip of a brush, plus a lot of white) in light parts and umber in shadows.
After all of that, I added a new layer to background drapery because the first layer was too light. And with the darker background, left side leaves became less contrast and the right side leaf became more expressive. The light source was shining from the upper-left side, that's why the right side had more illumination on it. The whole right of a model is a shadow section with blurred contrast. This relation between light and dark parts of the same object makes it more real and three-dimensional as a result.
In the new layer of a background drapery, I added more thickness to a mix with a titanium white color. I was experimenting a little bit with a texture after adding a lot of solvent at the beginning. It can be quite interesting to make such unpredictable effects. Wet mix with a solvent can organize a layer of painting with some transparency. We can see this white priming on the fiberboard under our painted colors. In this work, I tried to combine different thickness to form different cover layers of my painting.
At the end stage, I was adding some details and deep shadows. Also, I added more of highlights on white flower petals. For this highlights, I used a white paint with a tiny amount of ultramarine or blue.
Sometimes we can change our focus from light relations to some small ones. But try to see the picture as a whole. Also, a little bit of frowning can help you to see some of your mistakes.
Then I was finishing the petals of this white flowers and was adding some deep shadows beneath these objects. The glass pot was finished at this point with a correction of its symmetry. The illusion of glass object was rendered with small shadows inside a pot, large tonal relations, and highlights. The cast shadow of a pot was added also at the end with a usage of warm tones of carmine and violet.
Every part of a painting needs to be a little bit different from others in the case of nuance and also to give the viewer's eye
a hint and an interest in a simple form. I like to make a lot of corrections at the end stage but your perfectionism can ruin the fresh look of your painting. So, stop early, before the painting is messed up with too much of corrections. Try to leave it with a fresh look, not dirty and stale colors. The finish is more responsible than the start of this kind of work.
If you have some questions you can leave them in comments or even send me an email at [email protected]. Also, check out my 1-to-1 online lessons, I have a trial lesson for free for new students.
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Have a nice day!