How I Make a Still Life Painting
Ok well how I actually make a painting is explained in full in my online course, The 3 Hour Still Life. But in this blog post I want to share the inspiration/story of my floral still life paintings. It starts with the object- what do I feel like painting today? What color palette, feeling, shapes, subject matter seems interesting. To me, drawing and painting from life is always interesting and exciting, so I choose subjects that I think (or know from experience) collectors will enjoy having in their homes. Who doesn’t love a floral piece of art here and there around the house!? And when you add a spot light to give the still life light and shadow, the shapes are abstracted anyway. So the idea that I would get bored of flowers just doesn’t happen to me- the things I love about painting are there every time I sit down to paint a flower! Color mixing, seeing light and shadow, laying color beside each other to create shapes, layering color to affect edges, and creating an interesting and pleasing composition. Still life has it all :)
This year I needed to paint a lot of flowers to meet my gallery quota, and I know in the mid summer I want to buy flowers at the farmers’ market every weekend. So I got started with what was free, blooming, and in my own yard- daffodils and hellebores. These start popping up around February so I had plenty to paint throughout the early spring. I’ve also grabbed a few tulips and sunflowers at Trader Joe’s!
Below are some images that show bits of my process- lighting the object, my easel and palette set-up, the drawing stage, adding color, and finishing with the background and cast shadows. I always work bloom by bloom, finishing one whole flower in one sitting because inevitably when I sit down to paint the next time, the flowers will have moved a little! The vessel is always last because it will not move. Some fun ways to switch it up (other than changing the type of flower) are to lay the flowers down, paint potted flowers, use unexpected background colors, crop the composition, or paint the flowers larger than they are in real life!
