Blog

I'll continue this step-by-step series on the daffodils by first admitting to a big OOPS!  When I went back to this painting again I got caught up in working on the background and the finishing process in general and almost had the canvas covered before I remembered I was supposed to be taking photos. There's still a lot of lessons in these next few steps though, so I'll go ahead and post them. The first one below shows the step where I stopped in last month's blog and I'll add some descriptions of how I was handling the background and foliage as I moved toward the finish. At this stage, I had most of the flowers and their edges at a place where I pretty much planned to not touch them again. 

Notice how many of the background and foliage notes are transparent, up against the opaque notes of the petals. This is really critical because playing the opaque and transparent notes up against each other helps to capture a feeling of depth. Also, working the edges back and forth when you have opaque paint up against opaque paint is a terrific way to create mud.

In this step I have the canvas almost covered , beginning to add more opaque passages and starting to consider the entire canvas in a more abstract way --thinking about what areas I might want to play up or down and how I want the viewer's eye to travel around.

There was a time in art school where my approach to a background like this would have been to identify one pigment or mixture that looked closest to that color and try to paint the entire background with that. It was a fundamental shift in my thinking, and my artwork, when I was able to quit simply matching colors and instead aim for the effect I was trying to capture. What I'm trying to do is convey a 3D effect of light and depth on a flat surface that is only 2D. That means recreating the color of the background is merely the starting point. Even if I had a color that was an exact match to the fabric behind the flowers, it's still not likely that alone would reproduce the feeling of depth that I'm trying to achieve. For this reason I might use 4 or more colors to visually describe what I'm seeing rather than just one. (To be clear--- a background that is a flat color with little or no variation can be effective if done well. I'm just explaining what I'm doing in this painting and why I'm doing it.) My objective is to create a background that doesn't come forward and stays subordinate to the flowers yet still has interesting movement and texture.

These are the main colors I was using to paint the background. Mars Orange isn't one that I usually have out on my palette but in this case I decided the painting could use some notes that were slightly lighter and leaned more toward yellow than Terra Rosa. The 2 pigments at the top are very dense and opaque while the 2 options at the bottom are very transparent. 

Most of the opaque passages in the background were put on toward the last when I was more confident about the decisions and felt I could put strokes down without moving them around a lot. There is a mix of brushstrokes, palette knife strokes, transparent areas and opaque areas across the entire painting surface that help to give the composition a feeling of unity. With the foliage, I rearranged or 'borrowed' leaves and stems from other areas to balance the arrangement and create movement. The goal wasn't for the viewer to be able to count the stems but rather to compliment the blossoms and show them off to their best advantage. When the focal point is already established, it's much easier to compare any notes or edges in the background or the foliage to determine if they are stealing thunder from the center of interest.