Peony Paintings (+ A Few More)

Here is the post of my peony painting I did in August. Peony is my favorite flower, and I neededd more decorative pictures for my walls upstairs. I started by finding a reference online that I liked. I used the grid method to transfer/draw the design on a 16" X 20" canvas from an 8"X10" size. The grid method takes a while, but it is effective. Then, I did a light red underpainting. You can't really see it in the pictures though. I haven't been that great at doing underpaintings, but I think doing a red underpainting really made the green background more vivid (sounds counterintuitive, but color theory is weird like that). I was also very loose with my interpretation of the background. I wanted the flower to be the focal point (obviously), so I left out most of the details of the background greenery and just laid down the very basic colors and values for it and moved on. I didn't spend a whole lot of time on it--less is more!
For the flower itself, I basically went from petal to petal. It sounds difficult and tedious, but it's really not since I'm basically painting a similar theme over and over again. I had a couple tricky spots where I got impatient and didn't let the paint dry before moving on, but nothing a little gesso and patience couldn't fix. I left the middle for last. I thought it would be my hardest area, but it really wasn't and it didn't take me that long at all. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. I went to Walmart and bought a frame and hung it right where Erik had pulled out the old intercom box upstairs, so it was nice to have that ugly spot covered with something pleasant like a peony painting.

Background is finished.

This painting was worked petal by petal...

Petals are finished! Time to paint the middle.

All done!

*****************************************************************

I small square painting/drawing I made using paint markers. It just copied a picture I liked. I hung it up in the craft room. It was fun to do and didn't take too long.

****************************************************************

In Iceland, I collected lots of stones with the intention of painting them. This is just some of them that I did, I made some Halloween ones later. I thought I had grabbed lots of rocks, but now that I've painted most of them, I wish I had grabbed some more!