Fireworks Card

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Flower Card

Did you recognize this as another painting from that same photograph? This is actually a greeting card I did about a year before the large painting. As the instructor at my art class pointed out, it’s quite a bit darker than the photo. The background, especially, is too dark, but I like the depth it creates. I kept putting on more and more of the pure paint color to try to lighten it up; I later realized you add white to the paint to get the lighter shades. And lighter shades make all the difference in a painting!

Fireworks Photograph

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Reference Photograph

And now, here is the photograph that I used for the “Fireworks” painting (view it here). You can see how the painting followed the basic structure of the photo, and the front flowers have the same tilt and overlap. The colors are a little different, since I did the painting to match our living room. The flowers are also arranged much more geometrically in the painting, which has some good effects but does look a bit unnatural. Are there any other differences you see?

Fireworks 6

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Framed Painting

And now . . . my finished painting in its hand-made wooden frame. Final touches included fluorescent highlights on the petals and a few more details for the bachelor’s buttons and flower centers. I was pretty pleased with it, and entered it in our local Madison County Fair with several of my other paintings. They all won First Place! (To be entirely truthful, each one was the only entry in its category—but the judges still seemed to like them a lot.) “Fireworks” now hangs proudly in our living room over our newly-covered sofa.

New! You can now purchase this painting as a greeting card here at my Countrygirl Art shop on Etsy.com!

Fireworks 5

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Filling out Foliage

Can you spot the difference? It’s the leaves this time. I already had a good dark background in there, so all I had to do was add a lot of thick, light paint to bring the leaves out to meet the flowers. Besides each leaf having a light and dark side, the foliage gets light towards the background. It was quite a job! I also realized (toward the end) that I needed to create an overall pattern in the tangle of green to lead the eye around the picture. How do you think I did with the paths in the foliage?

Fireworks 4

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Flowers

Those highlights really pop now! I used lemon yellow on the black-eyed Susans, dusty rose and gold on the coneflower, and light red for the zinnias, blending it into the darker shades on the petal edges. The background flowers, though not as sharp, are also taking shape. Those blue blobs will hopefully turn into bachelor’s buttons. I’ve also worked a lot on the flower centers. The next step will be giving the foliage more depth to match the flowers.

Fireworks 3

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Priming for Highlights

Are you wondering what all this white paint is doing here? If I were to just paint the highlights over the petals, the dark colors would show through and tint the paint. So artists often do an undercoat of white to make sure their light colors are bright enough (lighter paints, especially yellow, tend to be more transparent than darks). It can take two or even three coats of white paint to really cover up the dark paint. This painting is still in the “mess stage” (professional art term thereJ…), before all the elements have quite come together.

Fireworks 2

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Background Darks

Here is the beginning of the shaded areas of the picture. Dark colors are vital to all paintings. They give depth, create feeling, and punctuate the future highlights. I have had paintings that just didn’t “pop,” and that’s usually what the problem was. You should also use the darks to create general patterns and paths through the painting, especially in foliage like this, which I haven’t done very well so far. Remember, this is only my second large canvas to paint!

Fireworks 1

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Undershading

Here is one of my more recent paintings, from last July (Fourth of July, that is—hence the name). If it looks washed out, that is correct, since this is only the underpainting. I’m trying to establish where the shapes, lights, and darks are, while keeping the colors close to what I want them. This painting is a collage of wildflowers from our flower beds, and I’m trying to match the colors to our new sofa cover fabric. It’s going to be interesting!