Hi everyone! I have prepared 5 projects for my students in August. These are shorter tutorials and much smaller paintings, but I think they are really nice. All of them are for beginners, but of course those of you who are intermediate or advanced artists are very welcome to give them ago. This time the sizes of these paintings are very small (four of them are 6″ x 4″/16 x 11 cm and one is 11.5″ x 7.5″/29 x 19 cm), but you can resize the outline drawing however you want and paint bigger if you like.
I created each of these small paintings in order to show you the particular techniques, so that you can practice them and use them also in your own paintings.
So here they are. I’ll write a few words about each of them. At the end you’ll find a video preview.
1. Blurred backgrounds with lights
In this tutorial I will show you a technique which I call soft dry glazing. I use it to create backgrounds which are blurred and may consist of many colors. Additionally I will show you how to create light effects in the background. Of course this may be used in many other situations (I can think of for example street lights in the night). In this tutorial we will focus only on the background, I’m not going to show you how to paint this lily, but of course you can also add it to your painting.
2. Hydrangea exercise
In this tutorial we will be practicing mostly wet on wet technique. As you know I use it often and I think it’s good to master this technique. We will not focus on the details here, but more on the technique itself. The reference photo shows much wider view of the hydrangea. This is a simple composition that I created specially for the purpose of this tutorial. I will also show you how to create lost and found edges which we also created in the sunflower tutorial.
3. Iron Cross Flower
In this project we will focus mainly on wet on wet again and also we will practice some negative painting technique.
4. Tiger Lily
In this painting we’re going to use the priming method of painting on the petals and soft dry glazing again in the background.
5. Poppy and camomiles
Finally a fun painting which can be changed easily according to your vision. We will have a reference photo, but we will create our own composition. Of course you can paint the same composition as I did, I have prepared an outline drawing for you, but I will show you the idea of how you can paint something like this and hopefully you will be able to create your own composition with poppies and camomiles. This will be also a practice of wet on wet painting and wet on dry.
Here is the video preview:
