Painting a Sunflower: Paint the big shapes, not the petals! - Live Oil Painting demonstration

The challenge for this week’s Friday live session is two fold:

Paint that flower without making any petals shapes! (At least, not at the start.)

Good light and shadow colours in a strong yellow

To make sure we do the first of those properly, I’ll be starting this incredibly beautiful flower with a WIPE OUT.

After blocking in the background - including the area where the flower petals are - we’ll be wiping out the light shapes, slowly and carefully.

Then we’ll mix colours for the light and shadow of the petals - yes, two colours only, one light and one shadow - and block the flower petals in.

Then, and only then, we’ll think about adding some more clearly-defined individual petals - but only if the flower is already well established. And we’ll be adding as few of them as possible.

Whilst we paint, we’ll be silently chanting to ourselves: “It’s the big shapes, not the details” 😄

Materials
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Surface: 10 × 8 inch Ampersand Gessobord Panel

Brushes: Hog filberts and/or large Rosemary’s Ivory flats for the backround, probably, and then more filberts and flat synthetics for the flowers and leaves.

Very likely I’ll be getting the dagger-shaped Rosemary’s Ivory brush for the petals right at the end, attempting to do them in a single stroke, as much as possible.

Medium: Linseed oil and a little solvent

Paints:
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Lead white (can use titanium but you’ll need to warm up your mixes a little with something like yellow ochre, or TRO and a little cad yellow)
Cad yellow
Quinacridone rose or other blue-red
Ultramarine blue
Transparent red oxide
Green Gold
Raw umber
Ivory black
Phthalo green in the leaves

Tools: ChromaMagic and the Paul Centore Munsell value scale.

Princeton spatulas, probably.

-----------------------------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

Subscribe to my email list to get notifications of future live streams and other random stuff about painting in oils: https://www.learning-to-see.co.uk/sub...

If you're interested in learning with me, you can see the online art school I run here: https://courses.learning-to-see.co.uk...