Well, it's springtime and the blossoms are out,
and that means painting flowering shrubs.
But how do you capture the immense complexity
of a whole forsythia bush, like this, without
getting caught up in the individual blossoms?
Well, the key is: get the character of the
overall plant first and then
subdivide it down to the individual
blossom shapes, then you can convey
the feeling of the whole plant.
(lively music)
I'll be painting with watercolor and gouache
in a watercolor sketchbook. And yes, you can
mix watercolor and gouache.
And starting right out with the tip of a round brush
to paint the overall shape
of this forsythia plant.
Just a few little dots, almost, that
I can connect in my mind, will help
will help place the plant on the page.
And the colors are white, scarlet pyrrol,
cerulean blue, cad yellow light,
and burnt sienna.
I'll need that strong yellow in order to
paint the mass of flowers.
This is sort of the suggestion
of the average color in the light.
That darker, sort of yellow ochre color
on the right is the color of the yellow
in the shadow.
So, this is looking at the overall plant,
the overall shrub, as a single mass.
Painting a forsythia bush covered with
small flowers is different from
painting a figure. The complexity
and detail is almost overwhelming.
It's easy to fall into the tendency to
paint small flowers or leaves
in a relatively quick or generalized way.
But there are certain gestures or shapes
that are real characteristic of a forsythia,
especially the arching stems, which are held down
by the weight of the blossoms and bent over.
All of the stems rise up out of a cluster
in the middle, so I want to get that
shape or silhouette.
First by painting the yellow overall color,
and then cutting in there with that dark,
and now coming back again with
some little dots of paint.
(soft bristles rustling)
The thing I want to get to read first is the overall
silhouette shape of the plant as a mass.
And then I'm going to go in and
suggest the star-shaped flowers
just by showing them as thin shapes.
The goal is to blend the painterly handling with
conscientious rendering.
I'm trying to be aware of the character
and the color of each petal,
and record how the colors change
as the leaves move in and out of shadow.
I'm still using this round brush
to draw these fine stems
and they're intermittent, curving lines
because in places they're overlapped by
some of the petals in the foreground.
I find that the skills that I've learned from
painting the figure don't really help me
that much, other than learning to
measure proportion and shape,
when I'm painting foliage or flowers like this.
Instead I have to learn to paint textures
and suggest detail.
The big difference is, with forms like this,
you don't really have the normal rules of
form and shadow, and light and shade
and reflected light, because the light
is transmitted through the mass of flowers.
Complete imitation of every leaf
in a lush landscape is probably not possible
or even desirable.
Nor perhaps is the other extreme of ultra softness
or generalization.
One can be faithful to the character of the plant
without copying or imitating every detail.
Instead nature must be recreated or represented
as paint on the canvas.
In the links below the description
I've got links for all the materials,
brushes, paints, sketchbooks.
And I've also got a playlist of
other gouache paintings,
and a video of painting flowers.
You can subscribe to my channel to get the latest
and I've also got a website
with books and other goodies.
(shuffling shoes)