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Day 16 of the 50 Day painting challenge - Indian Blankets - by George De Chiara

Indian Blankets

My first spring in Texas, which was a mere eight years ago, I was struck by all the wildflowers that bloomed along the highways and empty fields. At the time, I didn't know the story of why we had so many wild flowers or where they all came from (thank you Ladybird Johnson!), but I was instantly hooked on the color of them. From that point on, I looked forward to each spring and the blooming flowers. Sometimes I'm able to go out and paint these wonderful flowers from life, but other times I have to capture them in photographs to be painted at a later date. That's the case with today's painting. These Indian Blankets grew in our back yard last Spring. We only had one plant with a few blooms on it, but I was still very happy to see them right in my yard. Unfortunately, I didn't have time to paint them when they where blooming, so I took a few photographs of them. Today I remembered about those pictures and pulled them out to paint. Below is how this painting came to life.

 

My block in for today's painting is very loose with just a few well placed strokes of color to let me know where I'm going to put the flowers. While this looks like a simple block in, it did take a little bit of time to work out the placement of the flowers. If you look closely, you can see where I wiped out a few and moved them around a little.

 

I started off by painting the flower with a combination of my palette knife and brush. Once I had a pretty good start to the flower, I started to paint in some of the background. Mostly, I'm trying to clean up the drawing of the flower, but I'm also keeping an eye out for any opportunities to do some negative painting. For those of you not familiar with negative painting, it's basically the idea of painting the shapes around another shape rather than painting that shape. For example, if you look at the area right below the flower I've painted, you can see I used a few well placed strokes of darker color to give some indication of stems and leaves.

 

Now I'm looking to get a few areas to near completion, so I paint in the flowers around the area I started with and try to work my way to the edges of the canvas. I continue to paint the flowers with a combination of knife strokes and brush strokes. In real life, this plant did not have these two blooms. The one in the lower left is a copy of the one in the lower right. I just rotated it a bit and scaled it down a little. I felt this area would need a bloom in it, otherwise it would look too empty. I did some of this work in Photoshop before I started painting.

 

I'm just about done now. I've continued to paint the upper portion of the painting the same way I've done the lower part. For each new flower, I mix new colors that have a slight variation to them. I'm also constantly mixing new green mixtures to keep the background interesting. From here, I'll paint in the final flower and then give everything one last pass. You can see in the last image below, I added in a few strokes of pure or near pure color here and there. I did this to give the painting some pop, but also to lend a little interest to some of the areas of the painting that needed a bit more punch. I need to always remind myself to be careful when doing this. It's very easy to over do it.

 

The final painting.

 

Indian Blankets

Painting Details:
Larger Version available here
Size: 6x6 inches on canvas panel. 
Medium: Original Oil Painting
Frame: none
Availability: Click here to bid.

Signed on front. Signed and dated on back.

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Topics: 50 paintings in 50 days challenge | Daily Painting | flowers | landscape | oil painting | Step by Step