Painting a beautiful (and very complicated!) yellow rose - Live Oil Painting demonstration

This is a really beautiful David Austin variety called “Bring Me Sunshine“.

We could all do with a little cheerful warmth at the moment I’m sure!

I know I said I was going to do a second session on the Rocktrumpets - and I will, probably next week - but this week I wasnt to demonstrate something about simplifying really complex flowers, so I’ve chosen this one.

There are inumerable variations of yellows and oranges in this gorgeous flower.

And the first thing your attention is drawn to, most likely, is that wonderful centre of the rose.

And I’m guessing you’re probably thinking:

Oh my, that’s beautiful!

And then:

Oh my, that looks hard to paint!

So we’re going to be IGNORING IT COMPLETELY of course, and doing our best to:

. Simplify the colour right down
. Create the overall form
. Carefully handle edges
. Paint expressively

Only after we’ve done all that will we allow ourselves to start thinking about all that complexity - and you know that’s going to be the most dangerous point of the painting!!!


Materials
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Surface: 10 × 8 inch Ampersand Gessobord Panel

Brushes: A mix of large hog filberts (Cornelissens) and flat synthetics today. Most likely the palette knife (Hobein MX no.1) and the dagger brush will feature too.

Medium: Linseed oil and a little solvent

Paints:

Lead white (titanium will work, but the goopyness of Rublev lead white will work better in the mixes)
Cad yellow
Ultramarine blue
Quinacrodone rose (any blue-red will work)
Transparent red oxide
Green Gold
Raw umber
Ivory black
Phthalo green

Tools: ChromaMagic and the Paul Centore Munsell value scale.

-----------------------------HELPFUL LINKS-----------------------------

The app I use to investigate the colour is called ChromaMagic. You can find it on the Apple and Google Play stores, and there is also a Windows version. It's very inexpensive and extremely useful! If you struggle at all with judging values and colours, or with mixing, this is a great tool to help you calibrate your estimates by giving you immediate feedback on how close your guesses come.

You can get the Munsell value scale - which allows you to translate values from the app directly to your painting - from Paul Centore on Ebay here, also very inexpensive: https://www.ebay.com/itm/223003792036

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