Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Magnolia Flower with a Grisaille Underpainting


Magnolia Flower – 8" x 6" Oil on Canvas Panel

This flower inspired me to paint in a smooth and subtle manner. Typically I favor more active brushwork, however the beautiful creamy white petals just begged for a more subtle handling of paint. For this painting I laid down a grisaille underpainting (Susan Spar has a great blog post with photos explaining how to use the grisaille technique). Being that I was impatient, I did not stop to let it dry instead I then started adding color on top of my underpainting and worked on smoothing out my transitions.

This is the first painting I have completed where my goal was to minimize brush strokes and go for subtlety, however there are a few places where I added some paint texture to help catch light to emphasize the highlights and add a little sparkle.

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4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Liz the paintings are loking fantastic. I particularly liked the pealed orange!
Garth

eLIZabeth Floyd said...

Thanks Garth! I have been enjoying your travel blog, tucostravels!

FCP said...

love the composition in this one.
happy painting,
faye

eLIZabeth Floyd said...

Thanks faye, it was fun zooming in on the flower.