Still Life: Flower - Basic Layout

Now that I have an area for doing still life's, time for more practice. Last night, I began another attempt at a still life. Still lots of work to do.

After my last aborted attempt, I realized that I wasn't paying attention to what I was doing. The drawing was wrong, the lighting was wrong, the colors were wrong. Overall, an extremely miserable attempt due to the fact that I wasn't paying attention to what I was doing. This time, I decided to slow down and do the painting.... don't worry about what it will look like in the end. The end will take care of itself.

So, Melissa (my wife) had received a flower from the restaurant where we went for our Valentine's dinner. She suggested that that would be a good painting to do. Since I am awful about painting flowers, I decided... "Yeah! The only way that you get better at something is to practice it." So, I decided... time to paint a flower in a vase.

The first thing that I did was to tone the background with a warm burnt sienna/burnt umber mix. Then I just laid out the basic shapes. The nice challenge to this is the clear glass vase. Since I've just started the basic layout, I only concerned myself with the general shape.

So far, I've worked about 1-1/2 hours on it. Today, I should be able to continue work on it and finish it up.