Good morning everyone. Today I’d like to show you my beautiful sunflowers, painted in acrylic on paper. Actually, I’m quite pleased with this effort and, as I said in a recent post here, I feel like I’m finally making progress. Because this picture seemed to come together fairly well.
Anyway, I also tried something different here and I used gloss medium for the bright petals and leaves. Just a dab when mixing the sunny yellow, the vibrant green of the sunflowers. Not to mention the rich purple of the irises.
In fact , the other intention of this project was to try to work in a looser style. That is, not to concentrate too much on precise detail and leave something for the viewer to work out. In other words, not to paint the picture to death! Well, I did manage to loosen up a little, but I clearly need more practice!
Now, just for the sake of contrast, I painted this sunflower in watercolour last year. And here I tried to show the accurate shape and arrangement of the petals and the seeded centre. But the actual brush strokes were quite loose and gestural. So, you see there’s clearly more than one way of painting beautiful sunflowers!
All my artwork is for sale at reasonable prices. Have a look at more flowers in my Gallery here.
I think you get more impact with the cropped painting at the top. Margaret. Perhaps crop slightly higher.
Thank you, Graham. After I did this sketch, I painted a few more on small square canvases, there’s something appealing about close up flowers.
Both the watercolour and acrylic painting is beautiful. I also like the transparency of glass vase.
Thank you so much! Our tutor told us how to do the vase – just an outline and a muted background. Now, why didn’t I think of that!
Very nice, Margaret, sunflowers always make me smile! I love using a gloss medium, so many uses and wonderful effects!
Thank you, Tiffany. Yes, the gloss medium certainly worked – I must use it more!