Sunflowers

Watercolor Painting by Dennis Pendleton. I have always loved painting sunflowers and I have even done some in watercolor that are 40 x 60 inches. This is a small painting that I did on location in Washington Park here in Denver during one of my weekend workshops. I started by drawing the big sunflower then added five smaller ones in an interesting arrangement. Rather than exactly copying the flowers as I saw them I arranged them to suit myself. I then added a few buds but did not draw the leaves.

For the petals of the sunflowers I used lemon yellow, cadmium yellow, transparent yellow, and yellow ochre. For the darker values I added cobalt violet which is the complement of yellow and for the centers I used burnt sienna and a touch of Vandyke brown. The stems are olive green, perylene green, along with cobalt violet and mineral violet. After all this was dry I added a few dots of lemon yellow to the centers. Lemon yellow is very opaque and with very little water it will cover a darker color.

Now for the leaves. With all the warm colors in the sunflowers I wanted the leaves to be cooler so I mixed cerulean blue with olive green. I drew the leaves in with my paintbrush then surrounded them with perylene green and mineral violet. Those two dark colors made the leaves and sunflowers stand out just the way I wanted. You can see where I added a few dark spots on the leaves to show where they had been attacked by insects.

A combination of hard and soft edges is always important and you can see where some of the leaves soften into the background with soft edges and the yellow gold petals of the sun flowers are hard edged which moves them forward. I thought the smaller sunflowers did not relate to each other so I spattered lemon yellow on them to make more of a connection. This also related them to the dots on the center of the big sunflower. I have sunflowers in my garden that are about a foot tall and I hope they survive so I can use the as future painting subjects. Happy Painting! Dennis Pendleton