Flowers remain a popular image for oil paintings.
Oil paintings showcasing flowers enjoy life-long appeal. Legendary painters Claude Monet, Paul Cezanne, Frederic Bazille, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir's life-like paintings celebrate centuries of floral adoration. Artists looking to improve their techniques welcome advice from seasoned painters. Professional artists Delmus Phelps, Lola Ades, and Pamela Kay share tips they've tested over many years of commercial artistry.
Comfort Level
Use oil painting materials to fit your comfort level.
Delmus Phelps, a commercial artist since 1974, advises artists to work with materials sized to their comfort level on easy-oil-painting-techniques.org (see References 1). He recommends starting with a small 9 x 12 inch canvas, and moving up after your comfort level and technique improve. Work with assorted round brushes from 00 to 1 inch, three to five of the same size flat brushes, and three large artificial squirrel or mop-end brushes for painting flowers, advises Phelps.
Colors
Specific colors make a rich palette for floral paintings.
Titanium white, cadmium yellow light, cadmium red medium, ultramarine blue, burnt umber, yellow ocher, and ivory or mars black, suggests Phelps, make a rich enough color palette to paint flowers. Mixing them provides the colors needed to create floral paintings. As an artist improves her skill level, of course, she can add to her palette.
Sketching
Put the flower off to one side of the canvas.
Sketch flowers and leaves before committing paint to canvas, instructs artist Lola Ades in her timeless instructional guide, "Oils: Floral Bouquets," penned in 1998 (see References 2). First position the flower to one side and down from the center of your canvas. Draw the leaves and background after positioning the flower.
Complement Your Flowers
Apply a dark green for the leaves that complements the color chosen for the flowers. Paint leaves from the outside edge to the center vein, overlapping your strokes. Form the petals of the flower, then work toward the middle. Ades recommends using the mop brush to blend the petals.
Bold Flowers
Contemporary artist Pamela Kay, who's taught art school since 1988, advises using bold, bright colors for the flower heads in her book, "Aspects of Flower Painting With Oils" (see References 3). She advises cleaning brushes with linseed oil. Using a clean brush softens the division between light and shadow by blending the seams.
Finishing
Paint basic leaf shapes using short strokes, and practice using long strokes on the large flowers in the painting, instructs Kay. Finish your floral painting by working simultaneously on the background and the flowers. This helps to balance sunlit areas and shadows.
