Uncontainable Joy

Faith is born and sustained by the Word of God, 

and out of faith grows the flower of joy.

JOHN PIPER

SOLD

Uncontainable Joy  ©2015 Karen Mathison Schmidt

10 x 20 x 2 inches • oil on 2" deep cradled museum quality Ampersand ClaybordTM

private collection • Mountain View, California

After working on my new commission for most of the day, I painted this poppy painting on Claybord, just for something quick and fun. (Not that the commissioned painting isn’t fun. It’s SO much fun and I can’t wait to show it, but for now it must remain secret.)  

Anyway, back to the poppies: using three poppy photos for reference, and starting without a sketch, I used acrylics for the underpainting, just quickly laying in a sort of abstract background, warmer on the left and moving to deep cobalt blue on the right, using a 1½ inch flat brush. 

One thing I’m learning with the Claybord is to use very light and quick brush strokes to spread the color on these first layers; otherwise it’s easy to brush off the paint you just applied. 

After letting the underpainting dry for about ten minutes, I loosely drew the poppy blooms in using dark transparent magenta. I used my No. 16 bright brush for this and for all the rest of the painting.

After I had all the blooms placed where I wanted them, I proceeded to paint in all those luscious reds: rose madder, permanent rose, cadmium red medium, vermilion, cadmium red orange and cadmium orange. The centers are mostly cadmium yellow medium and titanium white.

Last – keeping in mind that I wanted the background to have a really loose, abstract feel to it – I painted in the stems and loosely developed the suggestion of other plants and flowers in the garden, along with a few poppy pods, throwing in some gracefully curving grass blades to add to the movement and variety of visual texture.

Tomorrow I will continue with the commissioned painting, and then do a little more on the Pontoufle painting, so check back in after you’re done with all your Saturday doings!

Happy painting!