How To Paint Flowers

In this session, I'm going to show you how to paint a group of flowers. In this case, it's daisies. Again, you need to put some quite dark foliage to really give them a nice contrast which is important.

I'm just going to go in and paint straight away without any drawing. You could be drawing out but I want to avoid that. What I'm going to do is to paint negative.

That means I'm going to paint the dark areas first behind the flowers which are a whole range of greens. So, I've got the colours here that I'm going to be using - ultramarine, quite a deep bright blue, cobalt blue, cadmium yellow, lemon yellow, some burnt amber which is very dark and gives a nice dark colour when mixed with the ultramarine and at the top here, we've got some burnt sienna that will give us, hopefully the darker areas in the middle of the flowers. Right, I'm going to paint a negative.

So, just looking now at the dark areas and ignoring the flowers, let's mix some green, quite dark green. I'm using a big brush so I can work quite quickly. I have to take some ultramarine and it's probably more blue than I have yellow because I'm going quite dark and I'll put a bit of brown in, I think I'll go with dark brown to start with, add a little bit more and just pick up the edges of the petal.

So, I'm painting quite loosely. I'm just looking at the shapes of the petals' make at the top. I've got a nice big brush here which means I can get around the shapes of those petals nicely.

I'm going to keep changing my greens when I go around, adding different colours in, so it doesn't stay the same because it's all kinds of different things going on here with these petals. One is coming on that side, that's got a petal in there, just try and keep the shapes of the petals which obviously come to a point that they're very irregular. So, keep the brush lively, keep the marks lively, keeping the shapes of the petals, keep turning around the edge of your petals.

Just going back up there, let's change my green slightly, maybe a brighter green. So, I'm only working loosely to the picture I've got in front of me. We've got a series of petals there, it's quite nice.

I'm going to go up now and paint the negative on the far above, quite a big gap there, changing the greens again as I go around, blue and green in there keeping it exciting, keeping account those petals, give it more water. Don't do it too much otherwise you will lose the strength of the petals. But working our way around, some petals are sideways on, some are flat on, so we see different shapes, okay, not too regular because we paint what we see.

I'm drawing with the paint, really, and I'm just putting the marks on as I see the petals. I'm not actually imagining what it looks like because the real thing goes stranger than what you could imagine. That's now leaving the positive in the middle of painting the negative.

And let's get another one in here. I might imagine another in here actually because interesting things are happening here in the middle. I've got interesting shapes, I want to turn that into a flower in the middle there.

That can do. I want to move the flower out, if I want to stay this one, I want to move the flower somewhere else. For the centers, I'm going to go to a slightly flat brush and I'm going to use some of my cadmium again, my cadmium yellow.

I might need a little more out there so I've used quite a bit of it. I'll put a little bit more out there. You don't need a huge amount.

I'm going to go in my center, going to add a bit of brown to the bottom to give it a bit of a rounded dimension. Okay, so as I look at them, they're not circles, they're slightly flat, okay, and the bottom is slightly darker so adding just a touch of brown in there around the bottom, gives it a rounded look in the center. I can use that brown over on my brush now to go up there.

The one at the top looks a bit of an older flower so it's slightly darker in the middle. That