Sunflower Oil Painting

Sunflower Pencil Drawing and Oil Painting Overview

A good idea before rushing into painting a sunflower is to sketch out the sunflower image first. By first sketching the features of your art subject will become more familiar to your mind. As you draw out the sunflower on your drawing board the shape, contours, edges, contrasts, shadows and many other details become evident. Drawing your art subject first is like placing a road map in front of you. It's seeing the whole painting from the beginning to the final designation or the first brush stroke to the completed art work. My early art works would begin without a completed composition in mind and for most of those art works they ended up being scrapped.

Composition of Sunflower Oil Painting in Mind

In this oil painting a sunlit cloudy sky will make a good background for a large sunflower. I transferred a photo image I took of a sunflower growing in my backyard to a grid drawing pattern. From the grid pattern the sunflower can easily be placed in the composition any where and drawn at any size.

After some thought as to where the sunflower would be placed in the composition the background features are sketched in. The horizon line is set about mid way in the composition. Distance hills roll up from the center to the outer edges. Hills on the right side of the composition are higher then the hills on the left side of the composition. A reason for creating the background hills in this fashion is that visual distance conveyed.

To split the composition and add some interest a river makes a good addition. A meandering river flows from the horizon line down the to the bottom of the canvas. For the river to contribute in giving depth to the art work it is widened along it's downward path. We make the river shore lines reach up towards the tops of the hills adding to the effect of depth. Lines of each element point to a focal point with the objective to give visual depth to the overall art work.

Some techniques for this painting that helps with creating distance is fading the hills between the sunflower and background sunlit areas. Thoughts on particular shades or hues, richness of color play a part also with the effect of distance. Constant reflection on light as you progress in this art work is necessary or else you could loose the effect of distance.

As you paint give thought continually about how the sunlight will be shining on different areas in your painting. What portions of the background hills, the river and the shores will be sunlit? Most important to ask is how much will the reflection of sunlight on the pedals and leaves of the sunflower need to be painted? How does the sunlight move from the sky area down and around the sunflower as it travels through the atmosphere? Think about contrast, light colored areas and dark colored areas, where do you want the center of interest to be?

Step by Step Sunflower Drawing

Before doing the oil painting a better understand of the characteristics of the sunflower it's good by drawing an outline of it. An outline enables the contours or shapes that make up the sunflower to be drawn correctly. Then with shading and detailing the different areas of the sunflower image will bring the sunflower closer to realism. We will cover drawing techniques on drawing which will help to better understand some of these art principles.

Base Layer of Oil Paint

The background or base oil paint layer is brushed on to make a road map as it where for this oil painting. It's beneficial to know or have a near to finished picture in mind so as to tell what steps are needed to complete your painting. By painting a base layer your also able to check the perspectives of your painting, where the shading and the highlights will be.

					Oil Painting "Sunflower" from Grid Drawing Pattern
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