This new painting finished last week was painted from a bunch of reddish pink tulips that I'd bought, as Winter is here in Sydney, it seemed the perfect time to paint some more tulips. The main aim in this painting was to practice painting the glass vase, using the reflection of light and to give a sense of transparency. I think water and glass are two very difficult things to paint well.
I referred to my book "Painting Vibrant Watercolors" by Soon Y. Warren. Her paintings are magnificent and I find her technique very inspiring. She is a watercolour artist, but her paintings are almost photorealism. The detail and technique is amazing. There is a whole chapter in her book on how to paint crystal vases. So I read it carefully and tried to apply some of the techniques such as leaving areas of reflection white, painting in the shapes that the light refractions make. My vase is much simpler in shape than a cut crystal vase, so it was not as time consuming or as difficult as I originally thought it would be. I'd like to try to paint a cut crystal vase one day. That would certainly be a challenge !!
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The Floriade festival in Canberra (Australia) has just come to an end this past weekend, having showcased a huge variety of Tulips, these colourful bulb flowers that bloom during September / October Spring season in Australia. Last year I was fortunate to travel to Canberra for this fantastic festival and took hundreds of photos for reference photos for future paintings. I'm drawn to the simplicity of the petal shapes and the dramatic beauty of a field full of tulips, such as in the middle photo above.
Tulips are a Spring blooming perennial bulbous plant with showy flowers. Most tulips produce only one flower per stem with petals usually cup or star shaped, with three petals and three tepals to a stem. Tulips come in a variety of colours except blue. On the left (above) is my painting of orange coloured tulips that I did probably almost ten years ago. It's one of my older paintings, so it's high time I pay some more recent attention to this beautiful colourful flower... http://fineartamerica.com/featured/tulips-sacha-grossel.html Below are two paintings of tulips by one of my favourite artists Georgia O'Keeffe. One (left) is a close focus rendition of the centre of the flower (Pink Tulip 1926) and one shows the more classic tulip shape (Pink and Yellow Tulips 1925). |
AuthorSacha Grossel is a practising Visual Artist from Australia. Archive
February 2019
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