5 Tips to Make Painting Flowers from Life Less Frustrating
The artists you love may make floral painting look effortless. But it’s much more complicated than painting the first flowers you see and love.
Acrylic artist Melanie Morris (Ep. 34) knows that floral painting can be frustrating. She also knows that you can alleviate some of that frustration by making sure you walk through a few simple steps before you ever pick up a paint brush.
Here Morris offers five great pieces of advice for getting your still life set up correctly so that you have the best chance of creating a painting you love.
START SIMPLE
It can be tempting to buy a large $30 bouquet and go at it, but if you're either just starting out painting or have just switched to flowers as a subject, Morris encourages you to start simple.
Melanie Morris has been painting flowers for a LONG time. This is not a simple set up.
But don’t worry, simple doesn’t mean... simple. With flowers it never does. You’ll still be figuring out shapes and sizes and color mixing and the like. You’ll have your hands full even with a simple bouquet.
Grab just a few flowers (more on that below) and cut them down to fit in a small 4” vase.
DECIDE YOUR COLOR PALETTE (Before Walking in the Store)
It can be overwhelming to stand in a public place and make a decision about something happening later. Our human brains aren’t great at this. And when there’s a cart buzzing around behind you and you know they are waiting for you to move away from the sunflower bucket, well, it's not a great place to be contemplating “Do I want my painting to be warm or cool?”
Luckily, you can make these decisions before you enter the store. Morris suggests you decide on your color plan and your shape plan before you go in. Maybe have a few you could use just in case there was a run on carnations.
GET ODD
The human eye loves odd numbers. So as you work to set up your simple still life flower design, make sure that you have three, five, or seven stems of each flower.
As you arrange your odd number of flowers, Morris says to think about how to move the viewer’s eye around the bouquet (and around the picture plane.)
For example, if you have a pink flower shape in the bottom left, add another in the right side and upper left. Move the color around and therefore the viewer’s eye.
SHINE A LIGHT
A strong light is your friend when painting flowers. (Really any subject.) Light defines shapes and gives you fun contrasts to work with including light versus dark and warm vs cool.
Your lighting setup doesn’t have to be complicated. If you have a window, you could set up your still life next to it. If no window exists in the right place, grab an inexpensive clip on light from the hardware store. Make sure that the rest of the light in the room allows for a real sense of light and dark on your subject.
In Morris’s studio she sets a clip lamp on the side of her window to create to create dramatic shadows.
Morris knows that light not only gives you more interesting shapes to play with, it also gives the flower shapes that don't have strong silhouettes a bit more variety.
THINK SHAPES
All flowers have a silhouette. Morris encourages students to think about the shapes they want going in.
Morris stays away from like shapes. For example, if she knows she wants sunflowers, she may not also include a brown eyed susan because they are essentially the same silhouette. Or she won’t use both gerber daisies and zinnias in the same arrangement because they are too similar in shape. She instead will choose just zinnias or just gerber daisies.
GET PAINTING
And always, Morris encourages you to just get painting. Follow these steps to help you start strong, and then it will be about learning how you work as an artist.
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