Warm Welcome Roses and Blackberry Blossom – oil on panel, 8 x 10 inches
This painting is up for auction until August 9th 2019.
Serendipity
Sometimes, good things happen by chance.
These roses are a small, rambling, climbing variety called Warm Welcome. Fittingly, they grow up the side of the house just before you get to the front door.
I’ve been looking at them and wondering for a long time. Could I reach that chroma?Could I translate them well into paint?
Then Michelle decided that the rose was rambling a little too much and gave it a serious pruning.
I rescued a few of the fallen flowers, picked them up and brought them in – at first just because I wanted to save them and thought they would brighten up the studio nicely.
I grabbed the first thing to hand in the studio – this little ginger jar that I’ve painted so many times – and popped them out of the way on my still life shelf.
And paused.
There was my next painting sitting right in front of me.
It rarely happens this way for me. Usually finding subjects is a long and drawn out process, requiring much thought and rearranging of objects.
But these beautiful little flowers just arranged themselves and said “paint us”.
So I did 🙂
Changes
And it seemed to me that they wanted a slightly different approach, that would allow me to be a little more free in the way I translated them to the panel.
Perhaps it was just because their colour is so strong. Perhaps because for the last while, I’ve been gradually painting more freely and working from the overall effect more than the individual elements of the subject.
So I began this painting by trying to establish the main elements of overall value and colour balance before I did anything else.
Stream
I did most of this one without the cameras on, but I did stream the final session on it.
It was a challenging day for light: from heavily overcast to bright sunshine, so the camera exposure goes up and down a little.
But I do show the palette and talk about what tube paints I used and how I use them, and also how I’m consciously working more with relationships than absolute comparisons these day.
I’ve always done both, but lately I find the balance is shifting a little.
Best wishes,
Paul
Thank you Paul for a lovely video. Great to see how you capture the flowers with such a loose style yet still retain the detail. Quite a difficult process not to muddy the subject especially one as delicate as flowers.
Paul Ranson
Thanks Paul. It is tricky, I find the best way is to work very, very slowly!
That is a wonderful painting Paul.
Just beautiful!
Best, Kathy
Thanks Kathy 🙂
thanks Paul – another great demonstration and great help !
You’re very welcome Yvonne 🙂
Just to say – that photo at the top, the one with the painting on the shelf with the jar alongside and the fallen petals in front of the painting.
That, Sir, is absolute genius. It’s perfect in so many ways.
You could almost do a painting of that photo of that painting. Those Dow composition studies really pay off !!
Hah! Yes they pay off in so many ways, they were some of the best focused practice I’ve done. It’s such a shame so few people do them.
Hi Paul,
While watching your final stage tweaking around the RHS edge of the flower bowl I noticed that your painting has changed the position of the curled leaf on that edge of the flower bowl to a position in from the visual edge. This exposes the full edge of the bowl and the line of the edge seems to bulge a little too far to the right. In the physical detail image this curled leaf partly masks the edge of the bowl and gives a quite different image and shape to that edge.
Was the change in the leaf position deliberately changed for some reason or was this due to your side on view from your easel position?
When you were talking as you made adjustments to this edge of the bowl trying to resolve what you felt was a problem I spotted this variation and wondered if this created what you felt was a problem but you had advanced too far to identify the effect of the change to the leaf location.
I thoroughly enjoyed your film but felt obliged to raise this point.
Regards PEEM
Hi James,
Probably it’s just that my viewpoint is a little different than the camera’s. But it could also have been that I was changing it for the benefit fo the painting. Sometimes you just need to make something work without having to repaint the whole thing, and the needs of the painting can override accuracy sometimes!