Painting Roses: Ignore the petals! Simplify the form first - Live Oil Painting demonstration

Video Description

These roses are a David Austin variety called Wollerton Old Hall. I’ve been growing them for a few years now, and I love their round, bowl-like shape. It’s also a very good opportunity to talk about simplifying the complex forms of flowers. Looking at these beautiful roses, and thinking about painting them, you’d be forgiven for panicking and diving into the petals straight away. But that would be a mistake. Today, I’m going to demonstrate how you can paint these roses more convincingly by seeing them as little cream bowls first, and then adding the petals. I’ve shot this set up to make a stark composition of light and dark shapes too, so nailing the values and edges will be very important! Materials Surface: 10 × 8 inch Ampersand Gessobord Panel Brushes: Hog filberts for the backround, probably, and then mostly flat synthetics for the flowers and leaves. Rosemary’s angled eclipse, ivory flats etc. Medium: Linseed oil and a little solvent Paints: Lead white (can use titanium but you’ll need to warm up your mixes a little with something like yellow ochre, or TRO and a little cad yellow) Cad yellow Transparent red oxide Green Gold Raw umber Ivory black Possibly a little phthalo green in the leaves Tools: ChromaMagic! And the value scale of course. We need to NAIL those values and chromas. ------------------------------HELPFUL LINKS------------------------------ The app I use to investigate the colour is called ChromaMagic. You can find it on the Apple and Google Play stores, and there is also a Windows version. It's very inexpensive and extremely useful! If you struggle at all with judging values and colours, or with mixing, this is a great tool to help you calibrate your estimates by giving you immediate feedback on how close your guesses come. You can get the Munsell value scale - which allows you to translate values from the app directly to your painting - from Paul Centore on Ebay here, also very inexpensive: https://www.ebay.com/itm/223003792036 Subscribe to my email list to get notifications of future live streams and other random stuff about painting in oils: https://www.learning-to-see.co.uk/subscribe If you're interested in learning with me, you can see the online art school I run here: https://courses.learning-to-see.co.uk/bundles/paul-foxton-online-art-school