Painting Flowers through the seasons
Part 7 of 12 - Watercolour – Poppies
These are slides from my six-hour film where I explore and demonstrate different materials and methods to paint flowers throughout the seasons.
I will give a brief description of each painting here but clearly the film is far better and in more depth.
Watercolour of Poppies
Watercolour paper, 140 lb Not. Masking-taped to a board.
For this painting I use a 1” oval mop brush and a small round brush, no 10, plus a set of watercolours.
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After lightly drawing out basic outlines of my composition in pencil, I applied a thin wash of warm yellow, cadmium yellow. Chrome yellow will also do. Then it is a matter of delicately and carefully using wet in wet as it dries, and glazing over areas where you want a hard edge or flat, even coat. This is done, at first, with slightly heavier coats of the same yellow and then into cadmium orange.
I have to remind you that all colours have warm and cool variations. Lemon or aureoline yellow are cool yellows and are also opaque and transparent, respectively! This makes a big difference when glazing, etc. Chrome yellow is warm and yellow ochre warmer still until you then move further into the reds. Bright red and cadmium are very warm, and then rose cooler or more purple. Finally moving from mauve/purple and into the blues, Ultramarine being warm and then cobalt and finally cerulean blue, the coolest or more “icy”.
Once you have built up your poppy petals with the yellows, oranges and reds, the centres are completed with ultramarine, purple and even a little Prussian blue, which is very dark.
I painted a wash of aureoline yellow for the background and dropped in wet-in-wet some cerulean blue to give an illusion of cool distant green; then did the same between the stems with cobalt and ultramarine, gradually mixing the blues with cadmium yellow to make some stronger greens. As the paper dries, then so you can paint harder-edged details and stems.
Here is a detail of lost and found edges as I use wet-in-wet, wet next to wet and wet over dry.
Finally you see my final work. Painting this way enables you to remain loose or tighten up as you wish at the end.
