I begun my last blog post with the goal of attempting to show all of the work that goes into producing a single painting, however the background information about the decisions that go into making a body of work became a post all of its own. That post helps show elements that inform the creation of a single piece in a series – and today its time to dig into that single painting – the yellow and purple lavender image displayed at the top of this post.
So this series has been an exploration of complementary colour relationships under both the older and newer colour wheels. Yellow and purple are complementary colours on the old colour wheel and I came to a point in the work where I needed to have an image with a yellow background and a purple flower.
I feel as an artist that its best to pick elements for my paintings where I have some personal feelings or stories to associate with the work. To be honest though while I very much like flowers and botanicals I don’t tend to have personal connections to many flowers. However I had a little think about purple flowers for this work and I actually did find one where I have an associated personal story, so that flower – lavender – became the botanical of choice for the feature.
When I was young we grew up in a garden which had lavender in it. I enjoyed them. I liked the scent, I liked the soft fuzzy stems and the bigger soft fuzzy petal-bits, I liked pulling them apart and extracting those tiny little not-fuzzy purple flowers that seem to be inside the bigger structure of the lavender. There’s not much to say there I suppose, I grew up with them and I liked them. Something that is perhaps a little more interesting is that when I was older my mother told me that the reason she grew lavender flowers in the garden is because she has a sister who is allergic to them and she didn’t ever want her sister to ever come and visit. Now my mother lies a lot and for all I know none of that is true – however she is exactly that petty so it certainly feels believable. So… lavender gives me an odd feeling. Its something that I liked growing up, and its something that I still like. I like the scent, I like the tactile nature of them, as I’ve grown up and learned more about making bouquets I like the shape of them and the way they can be used in design – but then there’s an odd negative tinge to them for me. Its interesting!
So. Thats my story. That is how I settled on lavender as the subject.
For many of my works in this series – though not all of them – I start with a coloured pencil and marker sketch. The first stage is a very light sketch. I mark the paper softly so that I can easily erase elements when I’m unhappy with something.
Once I like what I’m looking at the next step is one of my favourite parts – the inking. Its probably quite noticeable that I enjoy line work.
Oftentimes the linework step is actually where I’ll leave things if my goal is just a bit of preparation/planning for a painting as the colours I can achieve through the oil paints are very different from the colours I achieve with pencils however this time I moved on and coloured the image. First the foreground and then the background.
With this particular piece I considered that the painting I was preparing for was going to be on a tiny little 5″x5″ canvas and that my sketches were larger than that and seemed like it would be tricky to scale down. With this in mind I worked on another little design, something I thought would be easier to scale down. I went through these steps up to colouring the foreground but did not colour in the background this time.
With this planning done it was time to get onto doing the painting. Rather than do a little write up for every step here I’m going to post images of the process of this work without commentary as I feel like they are fairly self explanatory:
The final two images there are the same painting – just rotated. So this is the basic process for creating a work. With this particular piece though there was something about it that was bugging me. The point of my complementary colour series is to explore the brightness of the colours and the way that complementary colours serve to artificially brighten each other. The purple tones for the flowers here were too muted in my opinion and it wasn’t quite achieving what I’d wanted. It was still a perfectly fine image and I wanted to keep it in the series I just also wanted to continue the exploration by including flowers with a brighter shade of purple in them. I didn’t want to redo this work, I wanted to keep it in the collection. I just also wanted to add another painting. So I made another image with a different composition with those brighter colours that I’d wanted.
So there we go. Thats it. There’s the process of one little 5″x5″ paintings from start to finish. 😀
Also if you, like me, think that this design looks excellent on a throw cushion then you should consider checking that out on my redbubble store.
