Flower Power, Part 2

Happy as Sunflowers, pastel, 12 x 9

We're continuing with our floral series in my pastel class. Happy as Sunflowers is my demo from this morning's class. Sunflowers have such a vibrant yellow color that screams louder than anything else you would probably also have within your still life set up. In this case, I did indeed want the sunflowers to be the star of the show, so I chose the rest of the setup using darker values. To keep color harmony, I made sure to sneak in some deeper yellows in the vase and table surface, while also adding some of the cooler hues from the shadows into the sunflowers. In the finishing touches, I found that I needed to add even more cools into the yellows of the sunflowers than I originally thought. Otherwise the yellow areas just become too monotonous.

I'm finding that, especially with florals, I need to keep the initial stages of the painting as abstract as possible, and only "think flowers" later in the process. I started with a monochromatic underpainting of dark blue/purple using an alcohol wash on mounted Uart paper.

Below is an unfinished version of the painting...where I left off at the end of my demo. The finishing touches were completed after the class.