Make Flowers Your Muse

Watercolor Painting by Dennis Pendleton. It's that time of year, flowers are blooming in gardens and, for the first time, with the help of friends, I have started my own flower garden in front of my studio house. This is a painting that I did in Denver Botanic Gardens, one of my favorite places to paint. I have three weekend workshops there every summer and this is a demo that I painted in one of the workshops. Once I had decided on some flowers that I wanted to paint, an easy thing to do when flowers are everywhere, I started with a simple pencil drawing.

I always choose one flower or a group of flowers to be a focal point, here the little yellow sunflowers, and decide where to place them on the watercolor paper. I paint them first and decide how to show them off. In this case, I surrounded them with rich darks and then white flowers because that value change of light against dark always commands attention. As I continued painting, the flowers became less detailed and more abstract with an occasional flower with more detail. There is one spot where a red flower is surrounded by simple bits of yellow paint and a few stems, I leave it to you to find it, that I consider a secondary focal point. As the flowers get close to the four borders, I like to darken the corners as a way of keeping the viewers in the painting. I also crop flowers with the borders as a way of suggesting the garden continues beyond the painting.

For the yellow sunflowers, I used lemon yellow and transparent yellow so that they would vibrate between warm and cool. Their centers are burnt sienna and the surrounding darks are olive and perylene green. The white flowers are unpainted white paper with bits of cobalt violet and cerulean blue. I also used cadmium red, cobalt violet, cerulean blue, and rose dore for the other flowers. You can see how I left bits of unpainted white paper here and there throughout as a way of representing sparkling sunlight.

In June, July and August I have three day weekend workshops in Denver Botanic Gardens and you can join for one, two or all three days. More information can be found on my website dennispendletonstudio.com and, if you have any questions or would like to sign up, send me an email to pendletonstudio@gmail.com. Happy Painting! Dennis Pendleton