For anybody who’s interested, here’s a tutorial on my tropical flower.
First, I fill the white canvass with a gradated background of two slightly varying warm pure hue greens. Some may say, “green is cool, isn’t it?” Well, it’s sort of relative. For instance, all greens are cooler than orange; yet, within the context of just “greens” there are varying degrees of warmness and coolness. Lets look at the Photoshop color window below.
In a big-picture sense, I’ve indicated where the warm and cool colors reside along the spectrum. However, lets say a cool red is needed for the shadow side of a red cube, I would then pick from the cooler assortments of reds from the top of the spectrum. If I wish to be really colorful, I may even dip into the lavenders and blues. Hopefully, this makes sense.
Next I sketch in the flower loosely and rearrange the composition a bit from the established photograph. I omit the vine since it was a distraction and add another bulbous plant to the comp. I chose three bulbous plants because I like odd numbers and they work well for creating interesting asymmetrical yet balanced paintings. There’s two smaller ones on the left and a big heavy one on the right; as result, there’s some harmony and balance established. I also cropped the edge of the big plant, thus making it an odd number – only one cropped plant in the composition. Just remember, asymmetry and odd numbers = beauty.
During the second stage, I apply warm pure hue colors over my sketch except for the cool magenta on the petals. For the “Colorist School of Thought”, try to establish form with more reliance on temperature instead of darker values. The image below, although rough, succeeds in portraying form merely by the different applications of temperature. If you were to apply hue/saturation and desaturate it completely, you would discover that there’s not an extreme range of values that make-up the composition. In essence, it’s all accomplished through various temperature selections.
At this stage, I blend the solids a tad with a pressure sensitive brush. Any brush will work, it’s good to experiment with a variety of them.
Next, I tighten-up the flower and add some texture to various petals. Sometimes I create my own textured brush, often though, I just grab something from Adobe’s pre-existing library. As I continue, I add some pure cool blues with the cool magenta areas of the flower. These two colors are then carried into the shadows of the bulbous plants. I add some different blues for variation.
I also sample one of the blues and paint in some abstract forms into the background. Once the colors are established, I repeat a lot of them to maintain continuity and harmony in the piece.
At this phase, I wanted more pop from the flower so I played with Levels just a bit. This didn’t correct everything, so I used a big brush (set to Overlay) and applied a dark rich green to the background.
From here, the overall painting is fairly established. This is the fun part because I get to tinker and experiment. I further refine the piece using a multitude of different brushes, both textured and soft. Sometimes it’s good to use an airbrush or a textured brush set at very low opacity and, choosing an object color or background color, gently tap around selective edges of the forms letting them dissolve in the atmosphere.
After much tinkering, I create a separate layer set to Vivid Light, sample the brightest yellow from the flower, and dab one big fuzzy airbrush stroke over it. I’m happy with the luminous atmospheric glow it exudes and decide to end things from there.
Note: As I work, I constantly flatten my work then create a backup layer. I believe one can accomplish a more painterly feel to their work by working only on one layer as opposed to many.
Your work reminds me a bit of that of Audrey Flack in terms of the brightness of the colors:
