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Magic of Black Week 5: Paint a Still Life with Flowers or a Natural Form

March 22, 2023

This week’s challenge is to paint a still life with flowers or a natural form. There is no set medium and pastel, acrylic or gouache would all work well. The support does have to be black, either paper or a board primed with black gesso. The example above is gouache on a smooth black paper.

Unlike working with negative shapes, this time it may be that the object or still life group has a mainly black background. It may be useful to paint a simple object that you wish to include in the final painting to work out how your chosen medium works on your choice of support. It is an opportunity to use very opaque colour, and also thin veils of colour. My demonstration includes some Honesty seed heads, which being translucent make an ideal subject to illustrate this.

The following images may help you to get started. Choose as simple or complicated a set up as you are comfortable with. As previously, a white or pale grey well sharpened pastel pencil was used to very lightly draw in the main lines of the composition before going in with paint.

1. Main composition lines drawn in with pastel pencil using a light touch. Then the main lines of the flowers and vase were fairly freely painted with a small poited round brush before adding some thin veils of white and pale green to the vase to give an idea of its volume and how the light fell on it. Then a start was made on the flowers and adding thin veils of white to the honesty as can be seen in the detail below.
1a. Detail.
2. Once the main composition was established the Michlemas Daisy centres were marked with pale yellow/green and work on their paetals started keeping in mind the light direction so that the darker side of each bloom was painted more thinly or with a darker shade of purple. Started to indicate leaves and theyellow/green parts of the sedums.
2a. Detail
3. Work continued in building up the daisy heads and also on the red flowers. Some yellow ochre/white mixes and more pale green were added to the pot, gradually creating the illusion of its form.
3a. Detail showing work on daisies, red flower and highlights on the honesty.
4. The story so far; more layers will be added until the painting is completed. There will be more than a suggestion of the cloth on which the vase stands and the stoneware vase will be made to look far more solid. Detail of this stage heads up the post.

Looking forward to some really colourful work!

Your paintings:

Flowers from Delft
by Pam
Flowers in a Glass Vase
by Kate
Tulips
by Mali
Flowers in a Vase
by Liz
Daffodils
by Heather
Category: Floral, Painting Techniques, Still Life, Art Challenges: Ideas to try, Uncategorised
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