I haven’t had much success lately with flowers, I’m finding them very difficult to paint so after being influenced yet again by another online artist I decided to step back a bit, slow down, and draw. It turns out that this was a definite lesson in patience.
I’m finding Instagram and Pinterest to be fantastic tools for inspiration, they are both amazing resources for a visual artist looking for inspiration. Heck, I even use them for my job when I need design inspiration. So the reason why I was drawing the pink geranium today was because of a post by Katie Whipple.
Value compression. One of the most important parts of painting luminous many petaled flowers, and the number one thing I critique my students about. The black and white version of this peony isn’t 100% true to the values in the painting, but it gets the point across. Another reason why I have all my students start drawing flowers before painting them.
Her comment makes a lot of since, so I drew the geranium tonight all the while thinking of value and letting the color go. I’ll revisit that once I have a better grasp on all these subtle values.
