20*30 oil on stretched canvas March 2015. I decided to paint poppies on a larger canvas for my mom for the upcoming March 8th – the so called “international women’s day” celebrated only in Russia however:) whatever is the reason it is always great to give presents and attention to our loved ones!
I once painted something similar using the same technique from an online lesson. This time i went with almost double the size and some variations like amount and positions of flowers, color scheme etc.
I started with a light purple underpainting using three main colors: titanium white, cobalt violet hue and cadmium red hue, later added yellow ochre:
Now this time i decided to try regular oil paints without the watermixable to see how i could operate that way. I must admit the not thinned out of the tube paint was pretty stiff and more difficult to put on a canvas than the diluted with little water water mixable ones. On the other hand, i learned a trick: if you get the paint out of the tube and play with it smashing with a palette knife several times, it gets more flexible! As the paint was thicker then usual i applied it to the canvas mostly with palette knife leaving the right amount of paint on canvas, and with a stiff wide brush:
I first got rid of the white color on the canvas
Once the canvas was light purple i scribbled the approximate shapes of my flowers. They later turned out to be too small so i had to improvise and enlarge them on the go when applying the colors:
After that created the grass with the palette knife using permanent green light, viridian hue, burnt sienna, lemon yellow:
Proceeded to my favorite part- the red application! I and added different variations of red i had to my pallette:
cadmium red light, alizarin crimson, karmin, cadmium red deep. As you see i have all different brands of paints. I got them from ebay just to try something other than winson and newton i had from a craft store.
I mixed several shades of red and played with it:
I loved the final result, which is not always the case, especially since that painting was going to be a present:)
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