"Peonies Fuchsia"

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"Peonies Fuchsia"

8 x 10 in

Oil on Canvas Panel

I've been wanting to paint just fuchsia peonies and glad I did so, they have so deep colors within them I wish I had all the colors in the spectrum to render their beauty.  As stated in my other posts about peonies they are not easy to paint and especially when painting with the color fuchsia, you have to be careful in the way you apply lighter colors to the mix.  Peonies have such beautiful textures to them thats one of the main things I enjoyed the most about them, playing around with the brush and experimenting to see what kind of textures you can get is beyond fun.  With this painting I also decided to paint some baby peonies, they look so neat from there beginning stages all curled up and when they blossom they are even more beautiful.  To have baby peonies together with the full blossom ones gives a nice feel to the overall painting.

I started with the usual dry brush approach using a bit of raw umber on the brush just to get the main placement of the drawing down.  I was not concerned rendering every petal at this stage I wanted to just concentrate on the overall composition and how sat within the canvas, later I'll be able to render the peonies to finish when the base is applied.  After the drawing is complete I stated all the colors at once from the background to the stems and peonies, reason I did that is to have a general feel of the painting.  When working on such an intricate composition and there's so much going on its good to see the color harmony between each object.  I keep the paints thin at this stage I try not to get to thick, keeping the paints thin creates a base so I can easily maneuver around with my darks and lights in the later stages.  The colors I used are quinacridone magenta for the peonies, ultramarine blue and cad. yellow for the leaves and stem, and ultramarine blue and naples yellow for the background. 

After the general statement stage I move on to modeling the forms with the peonies, I make sure not to go to dark at this stage just to get the form turning in a subtle way.  The colors I use to mix with the peonies to turn the form is ultramarine blue and ivory black.  Then I start adding the darker values and its specific forms using the same colors as stated before.

Then I added the lighter values and its specific forms, at this stage I'm bouncing back and forth between values and adjusting them to the right look.  The colors I used for this stage is titanium white, naphthol red and quinacridone magenta.  After the top peonies are close to completion I them start on the bottom ones, I first add the darker values and its specific forms as I did with the previous stage.  I'm using the same colors as I did with the other peonies.

Then I add lighter values and its specific forms and take them to a close finish, again using the same colors as I did with the top peonies.  Then I work on the leaves and stems, I start to emphasize the darker values and its specific forms.  The colors I used in this stage were ultramarine blue, viridian, yellow ochre, cad. yellow pale.  After finishing the leaves I then went around all over and started softening edges, doing this effect pushed some peonies further back and in turn left the other peonies in focus.  I know I've said it in the past how important it is to soften edges and keep some sharper, but I cannot stress it enough.  Edges can make or break you'r painting its vital to understand them and pay close attention to them.  With my initial stages I like to keep all the edges soft this allows me to gradually build up in values and keep the form turning.  The later stages I start to add sharper edges to show more focus or where I want your eye to lead.  Edges are important in many ways they are fundamental from rendering and turning the forms to finishing the last touches in you'r painting, never lose sight of them and experiment as much as you can with them.  Thanks for stopping by and viewing, I hope you enjoyed this one!