How to Paint Wildflowers | Sculptural Acrylic painting | Justin Gaffrey

hey my name is justin gaffrey with gaffrey art material and today we're going to do an expressionist floral painting of flowers these flowers are dominant with this periwinkle color here and so we're going to paint the piece today with periwinkle all right that looks good okay one second so the idea behind today's painting is to feature periwinkle as a color i think about flowers a lot is just composition and color and texture and i'm not really sure exactly what i'm going to be painting today i just know i'm going to be using this color periwinkle and when i paint flowers i don't really paint them organically correct they're usually impressions of various flowers so today kind of reminds me of like when you watch a cooking show they get an ingredient and you know you're going to cook food but you don't know what you're going to cook yet and i know today we're going to use periwinkle and we're going to paint flowers and that's all i know so i'm going to start with the background and i'm basically going to put a complimentary color that i think is going to work well with the periwinkle which is our phthalo green mixed with a little bit of white and it's going to have this kind of deep turquoisey aqua blended with light turquoise colors and most of it's just going to just barely show through the stems of the flowers what i predict and i'm not worried about it looking like anything it's just color that's going to glow through there so it just needs to be impressionistic you're not really you know i'm not really sure what i'm painting there but it could be water in the background it could just be reflection of light and i want it to be very loose and so while the paint's wet i'm just going to spray a little bit of water on there so it kind of blends in organically and not a lot if i turn it upside down i'm catching all the drips before they go down and hit the floor so it keeps it really clean but also gives it a little bit of organic feel to take away some of that brush stroke in there and i'm going to brush in some of the more deeper straight phthalo green to give it a deeper tone accent you know brushing it in along the bottom and scraping it so we get nice contrast from light to dark so my second complementary color is going to be magenta and so even though periwinkle is the primary flower i'm going to do accents of magenta impressionistically in the back before i actually paint the texture just so i know there's like a depth of color behind there that represents the foreground color as well and i'm just loosely going to be just be splotching that in anywhere i feel that i need to as if those are flowers in the background kind of fading away and so again i just call this kind of impressionism of just you know representing something far away and now i'm going to bring in some of the periwinkle which is the acrylic color which is not as thick as the texture and the same thing as i did with the magenta i'm going to do some impression in the background to kind of just you know let that show through in there and so again most of this is going to be completely covered up and you can go as loose and heavy as you want in this area it's entirely up to you because like i said most of it's going to get covered up so here i'm going to just pipe in titanium white and brush it right over the top with the periwinkle i actually meant to grab the periwinkle texture but like i said i'm just kind of moving through this so here i'm pulling out the direct periwinkle texture color and so i'm doing this kind of loosely and i'm not you know just kind of do it unconsciously so that's why that happened and you can see how the flower fell there it doesn't matter i'm just going to pull it all together and now i've kind of set the stage of the way i'm going to do this and so since i did the two flower petals in white in the back i'm going to have to just probably keep that pattern maybe maybe not and so i'm going to be working on making the stem here and i'm putting some green in this bag and so you put it in the pastry bag and you kind of line the outside and i'm piping the periwinkle and white in there and mostly that's not going to show up it's just going to be the green showing but it might bleed through a little but that's okay because it gives a nice balance of color and it gives a variegated look so something bleeds through the green which is the viridian green then you'll have the same complementary colors and it keeps a nice balance in there and so when you're working with these bags you got to keep them tight this is just like working with cakes and everything you can see the green on the outside and all the colors are going to pull through there and kind of grab it now often i practice always to kind of get air bubbles out and practice my stroke with the bag on my palate just so i get a nice flow i think it's really important is to always practice your flow it's like a in sports and anything and you have movements you want to practice your hand movements because it creates muscle memory so when you go back into paint you're you're gonna flow a lot better and so basically now that i got the first periwinkle flower built out i was just testing it to see if it's all going to work out and now i'm just going to randomly put them all through the the wood panel here and i'm starting with the titanium white and i'm going to brush it over again with the palette knife of the periwinkle acrylic color and so i'm creating a pattern of a flower and it's two petals in the back and it's going to be one in the forward and the one in the forward will be the solid periwinkle and so i'm using the bottom of the knife and again you see the practice of the stroke pushing it up and out and you get that nice variegated glow through there even picked up some of that magenta but it's okay you can see in there there's a little bit of the viridian green in there and none of these you know like i said they're not organically correct but they're going to represent the shape of a flower oftentimes i also like to paint over the edge of the panel i don't frame my panels often i paint on these two and a half inch panels so they hold the texture well and they kind of feel like they're floating off the wall so i purposely try to bring the paint over the edge of the panels i'm basically just going to continue on now with this same pattern of finishing up the flowers and finishing up the stems with the viridian green here and drawing down and that's just the pattern that works best for me i go up or down but you can see i kind of just do a little bit more at the base of the flower to give it the the stem that creates the foundation base and i use my palette knife to just kind of pull it in to to blend into the flower it's not necessary it kind of looks good without it but you know i'm not consciously really thinking about this and just moving through this kind of organically and that's what comes out of it but you're more than welcome to take your time and think out this process i painted a lot of flowers in my life i don't paint them as much now but they're very intuitive so i just kind of move through them this is also a good practice to learn all that muscle memory and build those intuitions to just paint freely like that and so now that you can see i've got the primary foundation of the piece ready to go with the periwinkle which is the primary feature color that i wanted to focus on this piece and so i have to think about now all the secondary and complementary colors that are going to balance out the periwinkle clean off the palette now i'll use all this paint here i'm scraping up for other areas of the painting but i'm trying to clear off here so i can create another palette for my secondary colors [Music] i'm gonna start with the titanium white and we're gonna mix it with a little bit of the magenta coming in and this is going to be our secondary flower color so i'm just kind of rolling that paint on there and i'm going to try and create a composition of a petal [Music] with this little petal knife here [Music] and i'm trying to figure out here of what the composition of this is if it's going to be an open flower or a side view flower and it looks like i'm choosing kind of a side view there sometimes i do them when they're open i just you know i'm kind of studying to see what looks best and maybe what's not organically natural or normal because these are expressionist pieces so i'm just going to keep finding my spaces where it fits in to fit in these magenta flowers and i'm just basically searching the wood panel for space and the composition and you kind of just start to learn to fill those open voids and where it's all going to balance out at i'll just keep continuing to put these pink flowers in and working on what the structure of that flower is and i'm not worried about each one being identical so i'm mixing different levels and different intensities of the magenta and it kind of gets a very natural feel and not everything looks so uniform i believe in oftentimes when i'm doing an expressionist piece to just be very loose and not try and that way you get to feel the movement of a painting you feel the the liveness of it and if and there's nothing wrong with sitting around you know composing the compositions but i also like this loose it's kind of playful so i'm just bringing in some complimentary colors and texture on the bottom i'm using some of that leftover paint that i had to kind of build some foliage and which is mixing the viridian green with all the random colors and you can imagine on the base of a flower field wildflowers there's random grasses and weeds and flower leaves and things and so that's just that kind of impression i'm putting in the back we actually just finished the batch of paint right here and this is the great thing about having a paint manufacturing facility right here in my art studio and it's just it's how i test my paints it's how i work with them and this paint is actually still kind of warm just right out of the batch so i'm going to finish building out the stems here and put the lighter paint in there and so i have to work out some of that viridian and i'm just pushing it out so i can get a lighter stem color there and i'm not worried about that because i'm going to continue to use this paint in other areas of the painting but you can see there on the top of the palette where it's darker and now it's coming lighter and just so i get a nice contrast and these are going to represent grasses and just kind of starting to fill the voids all around with the grasses and like i keep saying these are not organically correct colors very bright aqua tones you know you don't really see florals in natural grasses in this color sometimes you see reflections of light similar to this however i'm not really worried about that again because i said this is all about color and composition and texture and so i'm just focused on on those three things and i'm pulling in those grasses in through the voids and again it's good to always practice this movement on your palate before you do and also just a reminder to keep that bag twisted tight because it'll create air pockets and if you get a big air bubble in there it'll explode on the wood panel and if it explodes on the wood panel don't worry about it just put a flower over that exploded area and that just keeps the movement going but it's probably just a good idea to just practice you can just put plain color into the bag and just practice the movement watch videos on cake decorating you know to work how do you work the pastry bag so i'm just pulling in across the top to show the finishes and tops of those grasses to give that composition kind of a very airy feel and having those grasses come up over the top of the highest flowers and i think i'm going to just put just a small yellow accents and these will just pop out a little bit i don't want them to like overwhelm the entire piece so there's just going to be some minor accents just to give it a little bit of contrast and color because these these tones of the aqua color and the magenta and the periwink will just need just a slight compositional like different color that pops out and that yellow is super light and i actually mixed that yellow with a little bit of the green so it's not so deep yellow and warm because all these colors are actually really cool you know there's the yellow is going to be the warmest color but i'm kind of keeping that a cooler yellow without being a deep warm yellow to keep that composition nice and cool but have a little bit of contrast and value to it you can see there the yellow flowers are just kind of created like flower buds you know and i'm using the side of the knife to just pop them through and then get some just a little bit green in there to kind of balance out all the aqua greens to get some more of the green using our kermit green mixed in with all the colors on the palette and so by mixing the same colors on the palette i'm still going to keep it somewhat complementary and balanced but that kermit is just going to give it more of a green than the aqua color so i'm going to go ahead and just fill the bag with the green i'm not worried about coating the outside like i did the other ones because this is just going to finish out straight of the color that i'm putting in the bag which is the green and white and eventually when those green and white start coming out together together they will come out in a variegated look and which is kind of cool because it'll start out kind of more solid and as i'm finishing up it becomes more variegated and it gives it a more natural look so everything doesn't look identically the same and it's okay if it's identically the same it's just what i'm going for here so i'm using this green to balance out the stems and it's it's like it's hard to say it's not too warm it's not too cool but it's just gotten just enough contrast to balance out those colors so as i'm finishing up these greenish yellow bulbs here and putting in these stems for that little bit of contrast and value i feel like i want another deeper contrast but it needs to be really kind of slim almost like a highlight of a deep contrast and so i'm not going to use black but i'm going to use our deep deep green and i'm not going to dilute it very much so it's going to have the appearance of being almost black but it's actually going to be green and i'm just you're not going to see the undertone paint in there most likely and if you do it'll only be a little so i'm just using up some of the paint here i have on my palette to fill this bag and i'm creating that green on the outside pretty dominantly because i want this contrast to be really sharp i want it thin so i cut a really thin hole in the bag so these lines stay really thin and they work more as like like deep tone highlights than they do like you can see as i'm going through i'm going less and less each thing is getting smaller and smaller with the periwinkle being the largest and i'm working down in these black looking almost highlights just become just just just more value balance in here you can see here i think i want to add just a little bit of bright yellow but it's going to be really small so it doesn't overwhelm and take too much warmth in there but i need some of that contrast and value in there just a very small amount just the same as the black is i mean i'm sorry i keep calling it black but it's green but it's in my mind i'm looking for that tone of black i'm gonna cut the bag tip really small again here too so i don't get too much on there since that yellow is so deep we don't need a lot it's just tiny little pops in there to give it just some contrast in there i'm deciding i'm trying to decide you know what that sizes me i practice the one piece the one flower in there the yellow and the dark to make sure it's going to work before i went all the way now i see that it's going to work and i'm going to go ahead and just put the stems in and kind of fill them in where i feel like they need to and your mind will kind of go to the impression anyway your mind sees that there's the dark contrast so it doesn't have to be perfectly all the way down because we don't see grasses all the way to the ground when we're in a field of flowers and grasses anyway just still looking for voids and i'm going to pop those little yellow lines in there and i'm just dragging them across the top there and i'm trying to make a connection into every end of those dark stems and sometimes i miss and it's okay and so now i went in dark and i guess i decided to go white and just and this is the like the last balancing part of bringing this all together is bringing the white in there and i pretty much think i've wrapped this thing up now for the most part i'm going to keep my palette covered with a little bit of plastic wrap i use these deli wraps because i use them all the time but you can use plastic wrap like you know in your kitchen it's a great thing to cover your pallets especially if you think you're going to be painting in the next day or two you know so you don't have to scrape that up but if you were not going to be painting for a while you could scrape up your palette paints and put them in a pastry bag a ziploc bag a cup anything that you can seal it up really good but it'll last pretty good and what separates this style from traditional impasto the texture is extremely exaggerated i use whatever it takes to get the texture that i need i never really learned how to paint traditionally and as a self-taught artist i had to apply the texture to a knife the way that made sense to me color is probably one of the most important things that you draw your emotions from you can find our products at gaffreyartmaterial.com and so now that the piece has dried i've let it dry overnight and so everything is dry to touch and i just want to bring in some just finishing areas around the wood panel and so i'm trying to accentuate the periwinkle color and i'm just what i call this dry brushing and i'm just catching the edges of the panel to give it this nice periwinkle border which kind of kind of glows on the white and so these parts are really not necessary but sometimes i like to just have a little bit of um of paint dripping in there to kind of homogenize it together totally not necessary the painting is fine as it is sometimes i go really far with it and i do deep washes over the entire piece [Music] but i'm gonna pour in some of our number five which is this nice perfect viscosity liquid that is good for dripping and i'm gonna bring the same colors that are a little bit watered down so they kind of drip into the piece there and this number five works great right out of the bottle just squeezing it in there and that watered-down periwinkle kind of blends as it's pulling down and it works out really well and sometimes i have to give it a little bit of pull with the brush and sometimes it'll just flow on its own depends on how much i put on there kind of like really just ties all the colors and by the way the painting is dry enough now that when i put water on it it doesn't intrude on all the flowers and even if i wanted to i could rinse it off if i messed it up at this time because everything is dry now it's not 100 dry but it's dry to touch it's just a little bit soft right now so i'm just going to continue on to bring those you know drips and homogenize those colors in together it gives it a little bit more abstract feel too which is kind of nice [Music] basically i just use um a spray bottle i get from the hardware store and just it's just straight water in there and so now i'm going to bring in some drips into the magenta and just pop that in there a little bit and let that drip in i don't know really how far we're going to go with it i'll just keep going until it looks right and as i said it's not really necessary but it's something that i feel like that i like to do on these pieces but if you want a much cleaner look just don't worry about it you don't have to do the dry brush and you don't have to do the dripping but i pretty much think i'm about wrapped up here on this piece i think that um i'm pretty happy with it now with the drips and the dry brushing and everything all put together and you can see kind of those colors in the background that i put in originally just kind of barely glowing through there but yeah this is it this is the painting and we are all done [Music] [Music] so thanks for painting along with me today and please let me know what you want to paint next and go to gaffreyartmaterial.com for all your acrylic paints and painting needs and please like and subscribe

Channel: gaffrey art material

Views: 8,727

Rating: 4.916883 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: E1thOtSeW_c

Length: 21min 53sec (1313 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 04 2021