Painting irises, step by step

I have just completed a new painting of purple irises. It has lots of detail and has taken me quite awhile to paint it. I photographed the whole procedure, for this blog, and for my own interest as to how a painting changes. I will show you how I did it...

 Here goes....!  The first step putting some background colours on the canvas. I used acrylic paint here.

I changed my mind straight away about the background colours, as you can see!!  I then painted some very rough, sketchy irises in to get a "feel" of the painting. The idea was to possibly keep some of these in as background.  

I drew a rough outline of an iris, copied from one of my photos, and painted it white. When the paint was dry I then drew in all the inner details.

I painted some preliminary detail on my first iris, and repeated the outline drawing and white paint stage with two other ones.

I have drawn in the detail on my 2 new irises .I added another iris on the left hand side, painted pale orange, instead of white, so I could see which was which. I have now covered up quite a lot of the background flowers.

I am now building up layers of detail on all the iris flowers. I have started to experiment with background pattern at the top right. I have changed paint from acrylic to Chromacolour, which I will use for the rest of the painting. I am now working with much smaller brushes.

The painting is now getting a bit more complicated and detailed. These 2 stages show how I have added an additional iris at the front.This is just about to burst into flower. I have also added some buds. One at the bottom got removed fairly quickly though!  I have removed some of the original background flowers.

I have now removed all the background flowers as I thought they were a distraction. I am experimenting with ways to fill up the background, plus still adding detail to the main irises. I am painting all the foliage with lots of stripes of different greens.

I have added some new leaves on the left, some new buds at the bottom, plus played around with the background a bit.  However, it is still not quite right!!

I removed  some of the new buds at the bottom, plus removed a few leaves.Then I changed the background again, concentrating on vertical bands of changing blues. I brightened it all up a bit. At last this is finished!!


Here is a bigger version of the finished work.....

I will put this one up for sale soon. I have entered it in to a competition, so will see how that goes first. I have already started two other paintings in a similar style. These will be featured on another blog post in the future.

Comments always appreciated...