Blog Archive

Saturday 9 March 2013

Painting of irises and malvas.

I recently finished a painting that I started last summer. I had a lot of beautiful irises and malvas growing in my garden. I had just finished doing a detailed painting of irises ( see blogpost Painting irises step by step ) and wanted to do something on the same sort of theme....yet a bit different!

You can see the easel set up in the garden here for the first view of this painting. I painted some outlines of purple irises, and divided the background space up with vertical lines. Having done the previous iris painting with a mainly blue background, I decided to continue with the idea. I have started to block in some of the detail on the flowers.
I am using acrylic paint at this stage.




The next stage of the painting shows the addition of some pink malva flowers and a few more vertical lines to break up the background.


The painting was abandoned for a while, and by then it was too cold to paint outdoors. This next stage shows how I am concentrating on the negative shapes in the background, rather than the flowers. I am breaking up the flat surface with dabs of paint.



I now have a massive jump to the finished painting. I am not sure why I did not take photos of any more stages in between!  As you can see I have added some more pink malvas to the bottom of the painting. 

However, the main work I have done is to move this away from a straightforward painting, to one that is much more patternlike and the focus is on sections and colour changes. The background lines follow through the flowers and the colour is altered along these lines. The flowers and the background shapes get tangled up in one another. 

I have worked in to all the dots and blobs of paint, to create a textured and vibrant surface. At the start I used just acrylic, but I finished with Chromacolour, using a small brush for the last few layers of dots.



Here are a couple of close up sections so you can see the technique a bit more clearly.






This painting is for sale on Mini Gallery. Please have a look  click here

Comments always appreciated.

2 comments:

  1. Really like this painting. Thank you for such an interesting article

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  2. Thank you for sharing your wonderful painting.I have been really inspired by looking at the ideas`you have presented here. I will try some of these techniques in my own work. However my skills are not as good as yours by a long way. You are a very talented and original artist.

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