Inspiration and practical advice for aspiring realist artists
This painting was the last one I managed to fit in before daffodil season finished here in the Cotswolds. Just when I was warming up to them.
They were fast becoming a favourite subject, but the countryside around here will yield more subjects as the year progresses. The roses will be here soon!
Yes, more daffodils!
This piece was painted live over two sessions. I’ve added recordings of the streams below.
Of course, being on lock-down at the moment means kids at home, and my littlest, who’s six, finds the studio especialy fascinating! He features quite a lot on the first stream.
Flowers are hard to paint.
Yellow flowers are particularly difficult.
It’s the shadows.
You see, especially on high chroma flowers, it’s often impossible to get high enough chroma in the shadows. In paint, we lose chroma quicky as we go down the value scale.
Three Daffodils, oil on panel, 7 by 5 inches My last chance at daffodils! For the last few painting sessions I’ve been doing studies of daffodils. They’re fascinating to paint because of the high chroma and also the narrow value range from light to shadow. To do them well means a lot of careful control.
It’s spring in the Cotswolds and that means colour is back.
Specifically, yellows. Specifically, daffodils.
Now I know that a lot of people struggle with high chroma yellows, and the problem seems to be mostly in getting the shadows right.
It is tricky to get the shadow colours right, because you need to keep the chroma very high.
Every morning, I pile the kids into the car and we head off to school. Despite the chaos, I treasure this part of my day. I get to spend some time with my boys. They’re hilarious and they make me laugh, without fail, every morning.
I also get to drive through the breathtakingly beautiful countryside that we live in the heart of.
You’ve probably often heard people say that you should paint what you see, what you know.Well I don’t think that’s the whole story.
Let me explain: What you know can trip you up, yes. But it depends what type of knowledge we’re talking about.
There’s a kind of knowledge that actually helps us see better, paint better.
It’s a surprising approach to colour. It seems almost scientific at first.
And I think that when people first come across it, it throws them a little. Because we’re so used to thinking about colour in very vague and mostly emotional terms.
So when someone starts to wonder what colour things really are, and wants to try to translate those colours into paint, this vagueness obscures something that is, in fact, rather straight forward – if only we can find our way through the fog.
The pain seemed to come from nowhere. I suddenly noticed that my ankles and feet felt like they were on fire. I was so absorbed in what I was doing that I hadn’t noticed the shade I was standing in recede as the hot Provence sun moved across the sky in a direction I hadn’t
Painting experiments are kind of like scouting missions. You blunder off into the unknown, thrashing around and hoping to find something useful you can bring back. Occasionally, you do. I’ve been searching for a different way to paint flowers lately, especially roses. If you paint them too precisely, they look like they’re made of porcelain.
