Hi, it's Anna Mason, and in this video I'm going to show you
how I went about painting this massive peony flower in watercolour.
Peonies have to be one of the most beautiful flowers,
personally I had to have them in my wedding bouquet.
If you have a passion for peonies too, let's look at how to paint them
so that you can have a year-round reminder of their gorgeousness.
I began with a faint pencil drawing of all of the petals, and peonies have a lot of them.
The drawing serves as the foundation for the painting,
so I used a projector and traced this from the photo that I had taken and was working from.
Then I used a really watery pale pink mix which contained plenty of the bright pink Opera Rose
and applied it with my biggest brush, a size 11 pointed round brush.
Next I applied a watery yellow-green to the stem and to the veins in the leaf,
before applying a watery more blue-green colour to the rest of the leaves.
Then I returned to the now dry flower and using a size 8 brush
applied another watery pink mix to everywhere except the lightest parts of the petals.
This allowed me to be able to see where those lightest areas were
so that I could make sure I preserved them as I began to build up the colour to the petals.
With that dry, I jumped in with my smaller size 5 brush to work on the darkest colours in the petals
with a thick, rich dark red mix containing plenty of Permanent Carmine
as well as some Quinacridone Violet.
I watered it down to work on the edges of these shapes where they would need to transition into lighter colours.
Next I used a lot of different colour mixes to work on the mid-tones.
They were variations of pinks using Opera Rose as a base and adding in Burnt Sienna where I felt the hue needed to be more muted and more red,
but also versions where I added a touch of Quinacridone Violet where the mix needed to be more blue.
I even added a tiny hint of some Payne's Grey to the mix where a more shadowy less saturated hue was needed.
I always made sure to only apply paint to dry paper and I used that accurate drawing as my guide
as I looked back and forth to the reference photo looking for areas to darken.
With those mid-tones darkened I could see that some larger areas of petal in the lighter mid-tones needed darkening,
and for that I used my big brush and a muted pink-brown mix.
With so much darkening done I began to enter the adjustment phase where I could see that the darkest tones now needed a further layer to darken them more.
I also added in dark detail and pattern to some of the petals at this point.
I'd avoided doing this until now as I'd wanted to get the petal colour around them dark enough first
so that this dark red colour didn't bleed in if I needed to darken up around it.
Then I focused on the lighter tones again and used a mix with some Payne's Grey to add the shadow effect to many of the paler petals on the outside.
Next, I used brighter but still quite watery mixes to gradually darken the mid-tones with further layers.
But before I could accurately judge how much darker to take the petals,
I needed to get the really dark greens of the leaves painted.
So I started by blocking in the dark areas between the veins with a mix of Permanent Sap Green and Payne's Grey.
Then, I placed a light glaze over the whole leaf to darken it all and then picked out the darkest areas with another layer of thick paint.
I painted the stem ensuring the right side was darker to give it a 3d form.
Now was the most fun part of the whole painting - going down to my smallest brushes and picking out further details to the petals
as well as neatening edges darkening a little more as I added those details
so that it got to the point that I felt I needed to do a final darkening of the leaf and stem to bring them back into balance.
Then I made a couple more tweaks and the painting was finished.
Full video classes showing how to paint a whole host of flowers like this are
available now in my online school suitable for beginners and more experienced painters alike.
If you've enjoyed this video please subscribe to my YouTube channel and then hop on over to
annamasonart.com where you can take a full length video class for free
and find masses of resources to help you pick up your brush and paint the way you've always wanted to.
Thanks so much for watching and I'll see you soon to help you create watercolours with 'Wow'.