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hey everyone and welcome to the studio it's demo day and i'm going to be painting a still life and this week we're going to focus on flowers as a still life and i chose sunflowers for my still life subject because i really love to paint sunflowers but they're tricky sometimes i really find that it's tricky with pastel to get the yellows as vibrant as you want so i'm going to give you some tips for that what i want to talk about before we get started is just a couple of ideas to help you with painting a still life if you're making the transition from painting other subject matter like i am because i mostly paint landscapes there are some things that you can keep in mind and i'm going to go over these in a lesson that you'll get this week there'll be a more complete lesson but i just want to show you the board over here and talk about it for just a second before i start painting um i'm going to share with you this week the the five things that you need to think about when you are doing a still life you need to pick the stuff what you're going to use um and you want things that go together that relate somehow and again i'm going to expand on all this this week actually i'm going to expand on all of this stuff the whole month light it up you've got to consider your lighting situation um compose with success and this is what i want to talk about today consider what you're going to do for your background and then consider your color all right so here's what i want to talk about for today because i'm gonna have to compose this um still life i'm gonna be working from a photo but the the three things that i keep in mind when i'm painting a landscape are the same three things that i keep in mind when i'm painting a still life so it's very easy to say okay if i want a strong composition uh what or successful painting what do i need to do i need to create that visual journey remember we talked about moving the eye through the painting where's the eye going to go orchestrating the eye movement you need to do that even if you're painting a a jar of flowers you need to create some depth you want it to look three-dimensional on a flat surface unless you're trying to go for a an abstract and you need visual harmony that means your color harmony your background needs to relate to your subject in landscape we talk about your sky having to relate to what's happening on the ground in a still life it's this the background ver as it relates to the subject so these are the things i'm going to be keeping in mind as i paint today um one thing i wanted to say i i thought of this when i was getting ready to do the video and i just wrote it down as quickly as i can why still life how is this going to help us to improve our skills number one still life doesn't move okay so whether if you're painting it from real life setting up a still life it doesn't move it allows you to play with your technique so really no matter what your level is with pastel this is a helpful thing if you're new to pastel you want to understand how to get the right kind of marks how do you get the fat marks versus the tiny marks versus the the linear marks and that kind of thing if you're advanced with pastel how do you really finesse your mark making how do you really uh maybe you want to change it up maybe you want to simplify maybe you want to expand your mark making repertoire if you're working with a still life you don't have to worry about you know um a car coming to block your scene or or trees blowing in the wind that kind of thing it doesn't move that leads me to the next thing and i'm going to start the demo should you paint from a photo or should you paint from a real life still life setup i am i'm going to paint for a photo for the videos and that's just simply because it's easier for you guys to see you can see the photo as i paint if i had a still life set up we'd have to be figuring out you know picture in a picture that kind of thing um so i think it's going to be easier if i do a photo and i paint 99 of the time from photos however if it is at all possible for you to go out and get a a bunch of flowers you go to the grocery store go to um costco has great sunflowers if you're if you have one nearby but if you can get some flowers even if they're from your yard and stick them in a in a vase of some sort and paint from life you are going to get so much more out of this still life experience because you're going to be able to see the colors more accurately the shapes more accurately everything it's three-dimensional the way you look at things in real life is really different from a photo so i encourage you to get some flowers this week to play with if at all possible all right so let's move on to the demo for today okay i'm going to be working today on a square piece of uart paper um not sure what grid it is probably 400 400 that's usually what i get 400 or 500 i am going to be working from this photo this is a photo that i took um there will be some changes that i'm going to make i i i like the way the flowers are arranged i'm actually not going to change that but i don't think i need the butcher block thing and i certainly don't think i need the fence and as a matter of fact i have to really decide how what i'm going to do with the background do i want to just make it a solid color do i want to suggest the fact that it's up against green i don't know it might be a little bit overwhelming with the green so i'm going to um play around with that and see what i'm going to do with the background one thing that you can do when you're not sure of a background that's when you do those quick response studies that we did last month so if you were to do a very quick study you would be able to kind of play with your options all right so let's when i'm placing a still life i know that i don't want a small thing in the middle like here like this and have all this empty space around that's boring that's not going to be an interesting composition if i can attach part of the subject to the edge that's going to be a good way to expand the composition so that the eye says oh okay there's much more to this it's not it's not contained in this small little area so i'm going to first start off by putting in the table it's on an angle in the photo but that's not necessary that i have it at an angle i know i want it slightly off center so a lot of times what i'll do when i'm doing a drawing is i'll just make some tick marks to say okay this is how far i want it i don't i don't want the uh i want the base i think it's a little picture is what it is i want it to end here here and here would be the top of it this is going to be the big flower and here's one thing i am not going to do a um complete full detailed drawing of this scene i'm only going to put in the big shapes the reason why is because if i were to take time to draw this perfectly like every petal every leaf oh i do like this one big leaf over here if i were to take time to draw it in detail like as i was saying every single petal i would have a problem because i would want to copy exactly what i saw and then what i would end up doing is the drawing would become precious meaning i would end up coloring it in rather than painting all right now we have i'm going to be um so what am i trying to say as i'm trying to think and talk at the same time what i'm trying to say is don't get too caught up in your drawing just lay out the big simple shapes and that's really all you're gonna need uh otherwise you're gonna it's gonna you're gonna be too tight um and i want to be more expressive with this so i've got this handle and it's kind of at a strange angle the point of view of it so let's see if i can manage that okay now the other issue and that was on our list is we have to consider the lighting where's the light coming from and and unfortunately in this photo it was actually backlit right the sun was setting it was um like very late afternoon and so there's no light on the flowers themselves um they're backlit but that's not going to be so interesting for this because i don't even see any shadows i am going to take out my artistic license and make the executive decision on where the light is coming from and then i need to be consistent with that light and shadow so i'm going to let's just say that the light is coming from the top left which means the top the left side of everything will be illuminated and then what does that mean i'm tripping over the dog right there on my feet that means that the vase is going to be casting a shadow over to the right now occasionally if you don't have the lighting set up in your photo and you are going to invent the light which i'm doing here i put this little mark up here so that i remember to be consistent with the light and the shadow that i create um so you got to be careful of that all right the next thing that i want to show you before i start painting is the pastels that i'm going to be using so if you remember from the intro video that i did i painted pairs i used colors by value alright so i had the dark column the middle dark the middle light and the light and then i had these brighter greens so it's basically choosing one color and four values of that color so when i looked at this i hadn't put it away and i looked at my pain my photo i said you know what i can use all of these colors the only thing i'm missing really would be those brighter or the the yellows and the yellow oranges for the petals so why not just use this palette and just um add some of these brighter yellows so i've got some cool yellows warm yellows and orangey yellows and i'll explain more about that as i get to it alright now the next thing i have to decide is how am i going to block it in what am i going to do for an underpainting um i i think that i want to keep it simple today and i'm going to just do a dry wash underpainting so i'm going to go and grab a piece of pipe foam and i'll be right back and then we'll start okay i'm going to be using um these four hard pastels these happen to be the new pastel brand and then i'm going to rub it in with a piece of foam insulation that i actually got in some package um so it feels dense i think it's going to be good but it's an experiment all right so the first thing i'm going to do is i'm going to block in all of the dark areas so i squint at my scene and what is the darkest areas the centers of the flowers i'm using a dark blue whenever you can connect your dark shapes it's always a good idea so if i can connect these darker areas on this um right side of the flowers that's good it's also dark kind of at the edge of this vase or it's really a picture and at the bottom of the picture and i'm going to actually expand the dark to include the shadow okay so that's good so those are the darks um the lightest values are going to be the actual picture itself um so i'm going to use a pale blue i'm actually going to use a little bit of a darker i lost my line there where does this face end actually one thing you don't have to be perfect with your drawing but when you're drawing the actual objects like your plates and vases and things like that those have to be a little bit more precise we can get away with uh flowers that aren't perfect but we have to be a little bit more precise with our our vessels and i'm going to be giving you some tips on painting those things in an upcoming post there's a lighter blue in there and i'm mixing hard with soft because this is just the first layer the underpainting next i'm going to paint in some of the flowers but i'm going to be using in a reddish orange color for this the reason why is i really want to um [Music] make my yellows vibrant so i want to give them a head start and incorporate some nice warm colors in the flowers also you'll notice that these particular sunflowers are not just yellow there's there's quite a bit of rusty oranges in there and you'll also notice that i'm not painting individual um petals at this point i'm just making marks to suggest those petals and i'm doing this because i don't want it to look like they're just cut out and pasted on now i'm going to take a little bit of purple and layer that on the dark areas that i've already established all right so what is left we've got some green leaves so let's block those in so if you're wondering how am i choosing these colors that they're they're pretty much local color meaning that's the color that these things really are um usually i like to choose colors that are not local color but in this case i'm going with local color just to mix it up a little all bit one thing is i don't always i have a similar technique for everything i paint but i don't always do the same thing all right so there i added a a brighter green now we have to consider the background that means the table and i'm gonna oh i see what i haven't there we go if you have this pastel dust you don't ever want to blow on it blowing on it puts the pastel dust in the air that you breathe if you you can see the particles are heavy enough that they fall down they're not in the air you're not breathing them unless you blow on them and put them in the air so that's why you just want to tap to get those particles to fall all right what are we going to do about the background hmm let me think one thing that we can do is incorporate the complementary color of yellow because we have a lot of yellow in here and the complement of yellow is purple violet so we could have a purple back certainly we could have the purple cloth would we want the purple to be in the background where would we want to suggest the trees and i really don't think i want to suggest the trees i think the reason why is it'll be just too busy too much going on there's a lot going on with the flowers so i'm gonna just take a light value of the violet and use this for the background now remember it you have to sneak it in behind that handle so what i've decided for the background is going to be just a simple color field and it's going to be the complement of the dominant color which is yellow so i'm going to take this piece of insulation i need a smaller piece and i'm going to rub it all in and the reason why i want to rub it in is because i want to get rid of the all these little light bits and pieces that are coming through from the paper color now if this paper were already toned or if it were a [Music] more of a neutral middle value color i might not rub i might not choose to rub it all in now one thing that i'm doing i'm going to do it right now and i will also try to remember see this hard edge where the background two background colors meet if i were to leave that as a hard edge it may be that the eye would go right to that so i want to soften it so i'm going to just take my pipe insulation foam and soften it remember we want the flowers to be the star and not the background all right so now i've got it all blocked in so what i'm going to simply do is go in and use the pastels and start layering beginning with the darks so we'll start with this supposed to be a dark blue but i kind of think it's black why why i think it's dark blue i don't know so that let's just go with a dark um gray down violet i'm going to remind myself as i do this is i want to keep things um painterly you know kind of expressive with my mark making i don't want to get too fussy so i'm the way i can do that is i can start by using big uh flat areas of color first and then gradually add the detail i love the detailing in the centers of these flowers but i'm going to wait until i get a little bit further now i don't have a dark green so i'm going to put the dark green in the centers as well as in some of this foliage some of the leaves [Music] and one thing that i'm doing is i'm looking at the the photo and i'm not copying it exactly same thing is if you were painting it from life you would not necessarily have to paint the pet petals and the arrangement exactly as they they are now i'm going to take the terry ludwig super dark which is the eggplant color and i i'm going to go in on the center where i see it where it's darker than anywhere else so not the whole thing but just around the edges and in the center in the shadowed area i'm also going to use it right at the edge of the picture where it touches the table so you can see the difference when i added that what i call super dark um so if i were to use that everywhere it wouldn't have that impact so you want to be a little bit more um reserved with it all right now i'm going to come in and put in some of the middle dark areas so i'm going to take a middle dark blue and paint the darker portions of the picture and i have to keep in mind where's the light source remember the light is coming from the upper left so i just want to be mindful of that so that way that's where i'll add the light i might add a little bit of this up in the foliage the reason why is so that we can have some visual harmony have them relate to one another a little bit i'm also going to add it down into this cast shadow okay i'm going to take another middle dark value from my selection there and go lightly over the blue again just to make it more interesting i can make it one color but then that wouldn't be as interesting put it down here i think i'm going to just darken this foreground just a little bit more so that i so it doesn't just feel like it's falling off the a table and then i'll make the shadow a little bit darker we'll come back and fix this and i will be talking to you more about backgrounds all right where are we now um let us finish up with this vase a little bit i'm going to go back with the initial blue that i um started with and just put it in again and i'm going to make my marks kind of follow the contour of the you know the shape that i'm trying to paint now that's too light for that area there because remember what hap what did we say that's not where the light is coming from so i've got to go back and add a little bit of dark to this one this is a little bit more involved than painting a landscape so it's a little bit more going back and forth i think all right now let's get going with the flowers themselves so the first thing i'm going to do is i'm going to add some i'm going to go from dark to light so what we do is i call this turning on the light so i start with the darkest color that i see in these flowers so it's kind of a dark reddish brown i'm going to start with the dark reddish brown we can always make them lighter and brighter so start darker all right and now i'm going to jump to these extra pastels that i had pulled out so i want to add some orange and now this is where i'm starting to play with the shapes of the petals and i'm going to get to a point very quickly where i'm going to decide which which ones need to have more refining that was a little too pale for me too peachy so let's um go with a little more of a yellow a yellow orange that was a little bit too i don't know no that didn't do it for me this one's better and i'm not really worried about the petals being perfect as i've said all right i'm gonna give it i can tell already that i'm starting to um feel the tooth of the paper a little bit so i'm giving it a quick blast of workable fixative um so that i can get a little bit more with my layers a little bit more um texture in the petals okay let's see adding a little bit of a brighter orange oops and then we have to now start to uh decide which flowers are going to be the star which are going to be the supporting cast where are we going to have the most clarity i'm going to pull some of these petals off so that they fill up this space a little bit see this is a little bit of an empty space on the right side so i'm going to just pull a few petals to give a little interest over there i don't want to lose my big leaf in here so i'm going to go ahead and put that guy in a little bit more give it a little bit of light and while i have this green out i'll go ahead and reinforce all of the green foliage within these flowers a little bit of bits and pieces in there add some white to them and remember i'm using the same colors that i used for the pears and i like to do this um when i paint if i paint something a lot of times i'll i will leave out the palette and i'll reuse them several times all right now i'm looking at this just briefly and i say to myself it looks like someone gave this the the flowers came in with the scissors and just cut off this side also feels very heavy in here so before i go any further i'm going to take my background color which was that pale violet and i'm going to go in there and create some air some negative space just come in with the background and break it up a little bit so that it's not such a dense area so this is okay so this is a landscape technique right uh when we are creating tree holes for sky holes or you know we do we're going to do the same thing in our still life we need to create interesting positive space as well as interesting negative space while i have this in my hand i'm going to add another layer to the background i'm adding a layer of pale blue and remember this is the light side so i'm going to make this a little bit lighter and while i'm at it i might as well add the highlight to the picture i keep forgetting what i what i call it all right now it's time to turn on the lights with these sunflowers this is the fun part so i'm going to take a warm yellow this is a yellowy orange and i'm and it's a it's probably a schmincke could be a sennelier but it's a super super soft pastel so i'm shouting right now so what i'm doing is i'm pushing down as hard as i can to get a nice eye thick textured mark and i think a lot of times with yellow it's really hard to get the vibrancy so if you start by putting in darker colors first and then coming with a super soft pastel that you can really i call this shouting you really shouted on um you're going to have more more luck getting that vibrancy and it's really frustrating because as you could see until i put on this yellow it wasn't looking like much of anything as far as vibrant flowers right so you you've got to say to yourself you know i know i'm working up to it i've got to have a little bit of patience because it's going to come and i will get it but i have to do the bottom layers first right you've got to build your foundation to your house before you oh sometimes i press so hard that it breaks that happens build the foundation before you start decorating and that's what sometimes that's the that's the boring part right if we really want to increase the vibrancy i'm going to take a cool yellow this is a lemony yellow so i'm going to mix the warm and cool together and this helps really helps them come alive but this is where i need to pay attention i really only want to have clarity where i want your eye to look so we want to kind of come up into the flower so let's just maybe make this one on the edge have a little bit more detail and then some of these guys right in here and they lead us to our star this big flower up in here and let me just make some oh that's not a good one at all look at how what is that let's get rid of that so i brush it out come back with my background color and that's how you fix it that's how you can make corrections all right the other thing you can do occasionally if you really want to get those flowers to be light is come in with a pale yellow this is a a light yellow like a lighter value yellow and sometimes i'll go in and add that just to uh the tips it just sometimes really helps it feel like it's has that sun sunlight if i were to do a pale yellow everywhere though then it would not feel sunlit so now we have to work on the centers and this is the fun part i'm going to take let's see this is the right one you see all those little dots in there oops i'm gonna just go in and do some stippling with the pastel so basically just making some dots you can use softer pastels you can use harder pastels and you know take as much time as you want a lot of times i'll use a variety of of the colors in there so that they optically blend together and they're more interesting you don't see them in the these centers only really in this one now we need to talk about harmony right color harmony we have used a lot of purple so i'm going to put some purple dots in my center this is just so that we can get everything to relate to one another i'm going to use this purple just to kind of add a little bit of a harder edge just to refine that vase a little bit more and it would be really great if i could add a few bits and pieces of blue now a bright cobalt blue would be perfect but i don't i didn't um bring one out my the next thing that i'm going to do and we're getting to the part of every painting you know that you know the drill where you have to stop and evaluate right and see where you're at because when you're on top of it it's very very hard to know what else the painting needs um so i'm to the point where i'm going to stop and evaluate but i'm going to just show you one thing that you can do to a background to make it a little bit more interesting i'm going to take the color that i used down in the on the table and i'm going to just make some linear marks and pull it up into my background and then i'm going to well take a little green i'm gonna add a little bit of green because why there's a lot of green in the subject itself so what we're doing is we're having the subject talk to the background and just make a few linear marks which just makes a little bit more interesting to look at so i'll let this one rest i may make adjustments if i do i'll certainly share those with you but basically what i wanted to show you in today's demo is start simple don't worry about having a perfect drawing because then you're going to color it in rather than paint start using with the start the side of your pastel make broad marks and then gradually add detail and gradually get the use the brighter and more intense colors so i hope this has helped i hope you get some flowers and have fun painting this week we will move on to other still life subjects later in the month but this week is flower week and i hope you are going to have a lot of fun and let's paint you