Oil Painting of "Yellow Lily Flower" Artist Lesson

Print Out Grid Pattern

For this portion of the Yellow Lily art lesson you can use pages five, six or seven from the Yellow Lily Grid Drawing Package. You can obtain your free grid drawing package by requesting one from short form in the right column above grid sample image. You will find page five contains a pencil line image for doing an easy line by line transfer. If you like viewing the contrasts between lights and darks then using page seven will be more to your liking. Page six is a full color image for art reference.

Yellow Lily grid pattern transferred to canvas highlighted image.

Sizing Your Grid Pattern

First to consider is the size to make the Yellow Lily image on the artist canvas. For this oil painting I wanted to place the Yellow Lily on the left side of the canvas with a large meadow and warm sunny sky in the background. Something to keep in mind when transferring the image is that all the squares of the grid drawing pattern are a half inch in size. So it's just a matter of multiplying a half inch by a selected number to get the size of the squares I need to draw size of the grid pattern squares on my canvas.

I doubled the size of the grid pattern squares on my painting canvas to one inch in size. This makes the Yellow Lily image just over twelve inch in the horizontal direction and near sixteen inches in the vertical direction in size. The Yellow Lily grid image now makes up about one third of the canvas on the left side after it is transferred for the art composition.

If your using the full canvas, there's an easy way to transfer the image by measuring the canvas size first. For example take a canvas that is twenty inches by thirty inches in size. Divide the canvas width by the number of squares that make up the Yellow Lily flower image in the horizontal direction. There are thirteen squares that make up the flower image width. So the canvas width of twenty inches divided by the thirteen squares of the Yellow Lily grid pattern image makes the grid squares for the canvas 1.538 inches in size.

Rounded to 1.5 inch squares times thirteen means the full Yellow Lily image width will be nineteen and a half inches wide. This is important to know if I'm going to center the image or place it to the left or right on the canvas.

Formula : Canvas width size 20 inch divided by 13 grid pattern squares equals 1.5 square size.

Under Paint of Sky Area Brushed Around Flower

First to be painted in is the under paint of the sky area around the art subject. Everything in a artworks composition reflects a portion of light emanating from a source. In this artwork the source of light is the warmth of the golden yellow sky.

Painting this way provides to an artist a guide for the colors of the Lily flower. Where your areas of contrast are going to be are more easily discernable. And painting adjustments can be made in the early stages of the artwork before progressing too far. The Grid Pattern Package provides a reference photo but the colors used for the Lily flower can be changed depending on your desired composition.

Lily Flower Under Paint Brushed In

Creating the colors for the Lily flower the green-yellow side of the color wheel was used. The palette contained Sap Green, Cobalt Blue and Lemon Yellow. Once the under paint is done it's a good time to look at where your darks and lights will be painted.

Artist oil painting of yellow lily flower.

A practice done by many an artist is to stand back from the artwork and have a look at it. Before doing any more painting squint your eyes while looking at your painting to see the differences in contrasts. This helps in locating your focal point and other changes you may want to make in your artwork.

Painting this way lets me brush in the darker and lighter green colors where I choose to. It sets in place the artist road map giving me direction to finish the artwork.

The Lily Flower's First Colors Painted

The photo reference included with the Grid Drawing Pattern Package becomes well used at this time of the painting process. I am constantly checking the colors and the lighting. In my painting I have moved the placement of the light source so the shadows and highlights on the reference photo of the Lily Flower have changed.

What is important is the various colors can be discerned from the photo reference. That is unless you want to change your colors to your own liking. To create those colors I mixed Sap Green, Cadmium Yellow and Burnt Umber in different degrees along with Titanium White. For the shadow areas I mixed Crimson Alizarin with some Cobalt Blue to create a Lavender color. In the third brushing of the base colors different areas are more defined. Now the details of the Lily Flower features can be painted once the oil paint is dry.

More Fine Oil Painting of The Lily Flower

Computer images are some what different then when you view the real oil painting but this does give you an idea of the Lily flower thus far. As the shading of the leaves and pedals takes place it creates a Lily flower that stands out quiet considerably from the background. It is almost 3d in that as you look at it a feeling of being able to pick the flower right off of the canvas becomes evident. If you look at image four of the whole oil painting you can get a better idea of this painting concept .

There is a little more brushing in to be done on the lower three pedals. After the remaining pedals are painted it will be time to review the placements of colors. I will be doing more tweaking with hues in the shadow areas and the locations of contrast. The goal is of creating a flower with a more realistic look.