In this short blog session, I will be talking about creating the optical illusion without really adding a lot of detail and spending hours on one small section of your painting.

Base(underpainting)

When painting flowers, I like to start with a muted, low chroma base: the colors I used in the painting to the right are burnt umber, ultramarine blue and to warm it up a bit, I mixed in a tiny amount of yellow ochre,(I recommend mixing the umber and blue first so you don’t get a greenish color when you mix in the yellow.) I recommend for people who are just learning how to paint to start off with more of a muted underpainting; this ensures more of a realistic effect whilst you build the level of chroma you desire from there. Layering low and high chroma colors can create a beautiful and realistic focal point. As for the application technique, I hold my brush about the halfway mark on the handle, and I loosely and lightly make semi-circular motions to create the shape of these roses. It is important that you stay loose with your brushwork in the underpainting and building stages of the painting process. I know it can be difficult not to go straight to the details, but it is vital in the process.

Achieving Detail

Once I have my base established, I will now add in the midtones; the midtones, in my opinion, are the most important values of color and they make up most of your composition, highlights and shadows are important as well, but if you want more realism, you use far less of them in most cases. Using the tip of the brush at an upward angle, I make smaller half circular shapes between the pieces negative space, to create the shape that will really catch the eye. 

Highlight and conclusion

The last thing I do is take a mixture of mostly titanium white and cadmium yellow and add little dots of sparkle for the highlight using a small round brush. These steps always help me with painting flowers and it will usually only take me 20 to 30 minutes to create, depending on the size of the composition.