Saturday, June 13, 2015

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!

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Your poppy paintings are some of my favorites and this one is no exception! I love the simplicity of the poppies themselves and the hints of other buds and stems that surround them. It's kind of geometric combined with the natural shape of the flowers. Very nice!

I recently started a poppy painting and it turned into a bit of a disaster. I'm letting it sit for awhile and I just look at it and wonder if there's any hope for it...or if I should just paint over it and begin again??