Tag: flowers

Yellow Roses

yellowroses_annadennis_oilpainting
Yellow Roses, oil on wood. 30cmx 40cm.

I had some yellow roses growing on a wall and with all the sun and dry weather this summer the blooms were at their best!  This is an oil study I painted before they all disappeared.

In this painting I mainly used a flat brush. For me brushes are an important part of my equipment and the flat brushes especially because I find them to be the most versatile because you can make many different strokes, a wide stroke, a narrow stroke and then by twisting a triangular stroke which helped with the petals.

This summer I have been busy with lots of new works and I will post some them as soon as my computer is on the mend 😉

The Beginning of March.

In these two sketches from life I aimed to capture the movement in what was infront of me instead of fussing over a bigger composition and trying to make a more interesting picture. A raging torrent after a big storm and a sun filled, bright yellow Mimosa tree that was exploding with yellow flowers are just a couple of March’s crazy offerings.

Today it is International Womans Day and it  seemed a good day to post a picture of Mimosa (in Italy it is the number 1 flower today!) and lets give hope and courage to women and their familes fleeing from war torn countries.

branchofmimosa
Branch of a Mimosa Tree. Oil on board, 20cm x 30cm.
sketchofriver
Sketch of a Torrent. Oil on board, 20cm x 30cm.

The Back Terrace

The Back Terrace. Oil on Board, 25cm x 35cm.
The Back Terrace. Oil on Board, 25cm x 35cm.

Zinnia flowers are the lazy gardeners best friend. Last year I started off with just a few and this summer they had grown everywhere, a forest of colours attracting so many butterflies and hummingbird hawk-moths. They are late summers last burst of sunshine and even though autumn is here the sun is still shining on this terrace!

What struck me to paint this scene was the way that the brightly coloured flowers light up against the dark background which I think helps to break up some of the bushy leafy greens.  After a bit of experimenting to get the flowers to jump out I decided to dull down and darken the green leaves while using different variations of colour, value and chroma to keep the green interesting. To express the brightness of the flowers which bring a bit of excitement into an otherwise big area of green I tried to keep the reds as saturated as possible, paint does not come close to real life’s value range and it is suprising how colours in nature are brighter than the colours you can make on the palette!

Ciao!

Rosa Gianca

White Roses. Oil on board, 25cm x 35cm.
White Roses. Oil on board, 25cm x 35cm.

I have these white roses in my garden grown forty years ago from a single cutting taken from a rose bush by a man in the village nearby. With its dark glossy leaves and pale cream flowers it puts on a show during the spring without weakening to disease like most roses do. I was proudly told by the locals that the rose was an antique variety and a native rose from the area. Here near Genova when speaking in the Genovese dialect it called Rosa Gianca which simply means white rose.
During the spring I noticed the same variety of rose growing in most gardens out and about and I discovered after painting it that it had been created in the early 1900’s in France and was then diffused in most of Europe with the French name of Albèric Barbier!

Purple Haze

Wisteria. Oil on board, 26cm x 42cm
Wisteria. Oil on Board, 26cm x 42cm

One of the most exciting things in Spring is waiting for the Wisteria to burst into cascading purple flowers (yes, my life is pretty exciting 😉 ) but after painting this I am pretty glad to wait another year until it flowers again.

Apparantly purple is a colour linked with royalty and mystery and it is also a difficult colour for our eye to discriminate because it has the shortest wavelength in the light spectrum. I definently found this to be true while painting and comparing the flowers to the green grass!