This post will help you respond to the following Spellbinder Instagram post.
“Experiment with a watercolour painting of gorgeous springtime flowers. You can paint a field of flowers and/or flowers in a vase. What colours, shadows and vibrance can best convey the unique specialness of flowers?”
One of the most distinctive features of spring is the gradual colouring of the land after the dull, washed-out colours of winter. Flowers are at the forefront of this newfound vibrancy. While they are beautiful to look at, they can also be a real challenge to paint. Painting with watercolours, as the above prompt challenges you to do, can also present its own difficulties. Here are a few ideas to help you get started.
- Blend reality and imagination. You could use the outline of real flowers as your starting point, and then bring them to life by filling them with your own colours. You could have a yellow bluebell, or a pink daffodil. Alternatively, you could recreate the colours of real flowers, but create your own shapes. The possibilities here are endless.
- Try using watercolour pencils. Watercolour paints can often be challenging to control, so if you want to begin with something that achieves a similar final effect to them, but which allows more control and greater margin for error, then watercolour pencils are the way to go. They also lend themselves well to recreating the intricate detail of flowers.
- Last, but not least, practise! Very few of us can create the ideal picture straightaway. Begin by practicing and experiment – whether that is sketching vases or individual flowers or creating the perfect colour for your picture. Practice on spare sheets of paper and keep these practice sketches and paintings. They will all help to tell the story of how you got to your final painting.
Hopefully these suggestions will help you with this prompt – please do let us know how you get on and share your creations with us!
Ned Vessey, Blog Co-Ordinator
Photo by Nick Collins from Pexels.
Read this blog post on Medium under Spellnotes.