How to paint textured expressionistic flowers with acrylics

hey i'm justin gaffrey and today we're going to do an abstract flower paint when i learned how to paint i kind of started painting flowers because it was a way i could paint to learn how to use a knife and paint composition and color and so flowers are like a nice organic shape they don't have to be perfect and you can pretty much make up a flower if you want i usually use like an inspiration of a flower but mostly i just evolve into making made up flowers into a composition of color and texture basically the short of it is this knife right here is the main knife i use when i picked up this knife i was like oh that looks like a flower petal and what made sense to me was scoop knife on this paint and make one petal with this and that's kind of the direction we're going to move in this i was inspired by van gogh sunflowers it was a great way for me to learn to use this knife and practice and kind of create my own technique out of it however i got kind of bored doing sunflowers and it's like i need to do another flower so i did a poppy however painting poppies is exactly the way the look was kind of boring to me so i just kind of created my own version of a poppy and what's happened over the years is all the flower pieces kind of evolve into like made up flowers and they're basically just composition in color let it rip so now i have no idea what i'm painting just trying to figure out how to make that into a square because it's like a branch coming out as i said this is kind of a loose abstract interpretation of flowers and i have a little bit of the titanium white i'm just putting this down i have a little wet i like to paint wet i'm wet when i'm painting the composition like this so the colors blend in a little better basically what i'm going to do here is imagine there's a branch coming through and flowers are just kind of dripping down like branches coming out the side i'm not sure exactly where i'm going to go with this but it's going to be something like that it's good to kind of use this as the white i'm not messing anything up and i can kind of see generally what my idea we're going to go with in all honesty i i really don't have i i really don't know exactly what i'm doing here so we're all going to kind of figure this out almost together so basically i want to kind of create an ambiance in the background just like just a little bit of blue in the background likely most of this is all going to be covered so i'm not really worried about what it really looks like right now just to know that the area where that branch is going to come through is going to come through in a little bit of blue area this painting will probably have a good amount of white space in it so these colors pop out one of the things is besides phthalo green i make all my own greens and one of my favorite greens that i like to make is indian yellow in ultramarine blue and we'll have kind of a semi-transparent appearance on it i'm going to take some of our titanium white heavy texture right here on my palette and i've got this screen here you can see kind of that's the way it's going to look over the top the green which is the indian yellow and ultramarine and so so i just created kind of a stem and this is going to be the kind of the foundation of things branching off of it and as i said before i really don't know exactly where i'm going with this but why not let's put a big old leaf on this thing these are kind of impressionistic forms here i'm not worried about perfect but here's an important thing to know if i get the paint just right on the pallet it's going to look much better so you can see it's kind of almost taken shape of the form of the knife itself one thing i realized too is i don't do good on certain angles i usually like to set up my canvas on the angle that's most comfortable so i'm going to bear with it here and so now i've got me a nice little basic vine right there and i'm going to imagine maybe it has some big old pink flowers on there or yellow so this is one of my favorite things about working with heavy texture and like the medium viscosity color see this color right here is kind of really this is like a typical tube paint here of like a medium to heavy viscosity but it's not super thick what i love is i get a nice glaze of it on top of the knife here i'm going to take it over the white and create a nice dollop and you see those nice variegated lines i'm actually going to let this be what shows so like that when i pressed those down i pushed it in and so this one since it looks so good on the knife i'm going to try and keep what was there and now this is just kind of like a nice little flower bulb there and i'm not worried about every stroke being perfect because each one's a little different i kind of like that i know so i got a nice simple composition here and i got to figure out how i'm going to keep going with this here and i kind of wish i would have pre-planned it but i'm gonna have to figure it out all right i think we need to add some yellow into this filled up my palette already and generally use a lot of paint so i fill up my palette really quick so this is our hansa yellow mixed with titanium white in the bag here it's kind of nice and convenient to just dollop it out like that right there so you know what i'm going to do so i know this is gonna be the bottom of the painting i'm gonna switch it for right now so i can kind of work on it on an angle that's comfortable to me because i have a good i have a good tendency to to work my palette knife this way and when we start doing all the finished work we're going to turn it back down so this imaginary plant has multiple different flowers in it it's kind of what's fun about this is we can do whatever we want i might be going a little fast here but basically what i'm doing here this is the bottom of the knife i'm twirling it in there and i'm getting a nice little dollop on there and what i'm doing is i'm just i'm kind of dropping it and let it slide off the knife and pull it up so oftentimes what i do is i mix my own colors in the bags and so i'm gonna make some more green in here and what i'm gonna do is put some indian yellow in the bag some ultramarine in the back mix that all around and i have a nice green inside the bag you see and you can either scoop this in from a container or just pipe it in and now i have i just put titanium white in the bag i'm going to cut just a little bit of that bag off these little stems here that are going to connect these little yellow so you can see here this nice white and yellow nice a little bit of white in there to contrast from the other one and i'm making stems that are joining the main stem here and i'm not worried about them being perfect this is kind of impressionistic so if it doesn't meet it it's fine it's kind of so i'm gonna go ahead and turn this back over again because now i'm gonna use the same bag imagine that all these little branches are gonna come out but i pushed a little bit of the paint out so it's a little bit more white and these would be like little viny stems coming out give this some body here and i got to realize now that gravity is pulling this down so i'm going to start dragging them down i'm going to come back and do that more in a minute so right now i got a little titanium white i'm just going to kind of paint around this to fit so that blue just shows through a little bit and to give it more of an impressionistic look kind of blending that blue into the outer part here to the white and it's okay like right there i've grabbed a little green probably a little bit more than i wanted to but kind of balances out the colors and starts bringing them together see like right here i can grab a little bit of pink and start giving a little bit of color there so you can see i'm going kind of really loosely here now i'm going to add some water and basically what i have here is just a trigger water bottle here that you know you get at the anywhere you can get them at the hardware store the grocery store i kind of want these colors to kind of homogenize here and each one of them will probably bleed into the other a little bit i'm going to go back and put put more that white in there to start blending in if i had to ask myself i'd say i probably put a little bit too much of the blue in there but that's okay get some more of that titanium white so we know that this is the bottom and i'm going to start pulling this stuff down and kind of give it an abstract look and that's okay if a little that color pulls in there because we're again we're doing kind of an abstract foil here plus we're given the the even though it's mostly going to be dominant white so these colors will really pop a little bit of that color blending in there gives it a little bit of homogeneity there but if that's a real word but it homogenizes the colors a little bit so it's just not stark plain white and even if i pull these little stems off i don't care because i'll go back and add more i'm going to pull upward there because i'll be able to tell if it's up or down so right now i want to get some of these colors to really pull down because see that little yellow i like that and there so i'm going to get under that and just pull it down a little bit more maybe i'm going to pull this little pink down and pull some of this pink down it's a nice abstract look there so i'm going to come back in here with this bag and do some more of those stems that i kind of lost there and you can just kind of pull them in wherever you want you feel that you need them and like even if you want to come over this flower here to give it a little bit of dimension you know the the stem would still be doing that in nature even though it's an abstract so again gravity pulling them down and if you see something you don't like you know you you know like uh see an area that you don't like you can go back and cover it let's see if i can find an area i don't like and maybe we can introduce a new color let's maybe pull in a little bit of kind of ultramarine white which make kind of a very light lavender color probably use a little bit of that magenta in there too and maybe this will kind of homogenize the blue that's in the background it's just like these little blue accents they don't even have to be attached to anything and that blue doesn't overwhelm any of the other colors in there this kind of balances them out a little bit see like i think that blue is a little too dark in there i'm gonna put a little blue accent in there pull some of this blue down too for more that abstract look so basically all these flowers i didn't mean to do that we'll fix that in a minute allows me to be kind of very free in my movement and i'm really there's these are not real flowers i'm just thinking about composition and color balance and so we got a choice here we can let this be but i kind of like that this is all white here because this is all colorful so i'm going to go ahead and get this out of here i don't want it you could just scrape it in there and i could put it in here anywhere i want and scrape it down in i'm going to get some more white and bring this back to being all white there a little bit of color there is fine but not too much it gives this this dead space here kind of gives a little bit of a concentration on the color there so you don't have to fill up the whole canvas or the wood panel here so the good thing is i love painting on these hard surfaces you put pressure down when you're going here so i'd say i'm almost done i'm going to go ahead and use this bag here and cut my hole a little bit bigger and i'm going to enunciate this main stem a little better just a couple more pink accents in there and one thing and again i don't know exactly what's going to happen until it happens but i want this stem to stand a little bit better so i'm going to i made a little bit darker green to just come out in a few places to accentuate and so i kind of like this is going on here but i want to give it a little bit more texture to pull in what's going on here and there's a chance i could ruin it see what happens actually i think it's kind of good i think i'm good i think i like it i'm done so there's a nice abstract floral that was fun to learn composition and color okay so you know a lot of times i do a fully textured painting on a wood panel however this is this has texture that pops out but it's the whole canvas the whole wood panel is not textured so there's probably less than a quart of paint on this so it doesn't take a ton of paint to paint like this a lot of it's just open space which actually accentuates the texture which is a great way to paint i paint both ways flat backgrounds and fully textured backgrounds so what i'm going to do with this painting is you need to kind of let it dry at no more of a upward angle like this or completely flat on a table or on your easel and i'm going to put a fan on it overnight this will probably be dry enough to hang with this amount of texture to stand up vertically tomorrow but within a couple days under the air it's going to be dry enough so basically i've been doing this a long time and i can pretty much put together a composition to me painting identify it just like cooking you know you start to recognize colors just the way you do flavors and the way flavors complement each other and so with this being an abstract composition that resembles flowers as i said these are not particularly organically correct of any kind of flower that exists that i'm aware of however i would suggest that if if you need inspiration look at a flower look at what it looks like and see if you can simplify the element to create it in an abstract form that's much more simpler and it's good to get comfortable painting that way to get that freedom like you saw the way we moved through this i i honestly and i'm not joking i had no idea what i was gonna do when i started painting and i had to figure it out i'm actually sweating a little bit because i had to like figure this out as i was going it's almost like a competition to myself it's like okay if i could figure this out in 30 minutes so but i've done this before and if you haven't done it before take a look at at a flower or another composition look at a floral bouquet you know that on a vase or anything you know or just a limb hanging in a of you know in your garden or your yard and just find a way that you can loosely replicate it and then add whatever you want so yeah i'm going to put a fan on this it'll dry and hang it on the wall so i'm justin gaffrey with gaffrey art material so subscribe to our youtube page let us know what you guys want me to teach you how to paint next or just little techniques you want to know or what kind of materials might help you figure out what you want to do at gaffrey art material we specialize in these heavy body acrylics these super heavy textures we have all viscosities of paint as well and we want to hear from you so thank you gaffreyartmaterial.com you

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Id: Z_jGe6xxj_0

Length: 21min 47sec (1307 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 12 2020