It’s summer and there is sunflower everywhere, at the florist, in the garden, at the garden center, printed on clothes, and fields and fields everywhere ! So it’s the perfect time to paint it !
it’s quite a simple flower on the first sight and it’s also a flower very loved by artists ! I didn’t dare to paint it until this week because i was afraid to copy event not intentionally someone’s work. It’s weird because i paint so much flowers and some are even more painted by a great variety of artists ! For this flower in particular i wasn’t able to see what i wanted it to be until now. Before starting the real deal, i tried to make a tiny study that you can see above. It wasn’t great at all. There a lot of things that doesn’t work for me one this one. But it gave me an idea !
Why not start my painting “the wrong way” ? Lot’s of artists says that with watercolor you have to start light and build colors with layers. But what happens if i decide to start dark right away ? Well there is an evident problem here : the first dark layer will smudge and will be reactivated with others layers on top of it and i don’t want that. There is a simple solution to that : acrylic ink. It behave quite similarly to watercolor but once dry it is waterproof !
It was a good call to shake things a little bit because the result is so much more interesting !
Painting sunflowers in video
Supplies :
Brushes : Escoda Ùltimo nº18, Escoda Ùltimo nº8 rigger.
Paper : Arches hot pressed.
Colors : Indanthrene blue (Sennelier), Amazonite genuine (Daniel Smith), Nickel azo yellow (Daniel Smith), Aussie red gold (Daniel Smith), Rose madder lake (Sennelier), Acrylic ink smoked grey (Liquitex).
And here you have the finished painting (click to enlarge) :
