Posted on 6/12/2018 6:03:57 PM
By Tracie Thompson
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Peonies, 12x16” oil on linen
Peonies, 12x16” Oil on Linen. This painting is available on my website, in the “Landscapes” collection (for now, I am putting my floral works there), at $450 unframed. For those of you who paint, or might like to start, this may be of interest: All the soft, varied tones in this painting were done with six paint colors, plus white. The colors are: Ultramarine Blue Quinacridone Gold (a very transparent amber yellow) Azo Yellow (a very bright, neutral/almost green, translucent yellow) Quinacridone Rose (very pure, transparent, relatively light magenta pink) Alizarin Crimson (deep, transparent wine red) Cadmium Red Light (bright, opaque, very warm, nearly orange red). The deep greens in the leaves are Ultramarine + Quinacridone Gold, an absolutely gorgeous, dark, natural-looking green. Indian Yellow will produce something nearly identical but my tube of Indian Yellow, brand new, has vanished into the ether somewhere. I used Quinacridone Gold with a tiny bit of Ultramarine (to create a warm yellowish green rather than a deep, blue-green tone) with tons of mineral spirits, as a very thin wash over the entire surface before I began. All that pink in the flowers seemed to call for a green undertone and I found it served me well. Some of it actually shows through in the lighter colored blooms and parts of the backdrop/table top. The brighter leaf greens are Azo Yellow and Ultramarine and some amount of at least one red. I blended touches of Cadmium Red Light into most of them. The main pink in the flowers is Quinacridone Rose, a color I haven't used much before, but which gave me exactly the middle pink tone I wanted. The deeper wine-colored flowers have their shadowy parts layered in Alizarin with a bit of my dark Ultramarine/Quinacridone Gold green added. Highlights, touched in wet-into-wet, are Quinacridone Rose + white. Where I needed some warmer tones of pink in the blooms, I made those with Cadmium Red Light, lots of white, and a bit of pale warm green to imperceptibly soften the effect. The yellowish tones in the blooms are Quinacridone Gold with plenty of white. I used Quinacridone Gold instead of my usual Cadmium Yellow Medium because that amber quinacridone color is so subtle and transparent, and made something immediately closer to what I saw in front of me. The grays in the surroundings are all mixtures of the palette colors in varying ratios, plus various amounts of white. Where I wanted cooler, bluer tones, more Ultramarine. Greener colors, more of one of the yellows; and so forth. Those areas are almost entirely painted with a small palette knife which caused some subtle linen texture to emerge through the paint. I liked that effect, so I left it rather than brushing it out. I wasn't using any medium in this painting, or any thinners after the initial green wash was applied. The lighter colored petals are particularly thickly painted, many of them with my palette knife, so this will take some time to dry. I'll note that it's far from a precise representation — I was going for the feeling of the blooms, not exact accuracy — and I enjoyed the risky feeling of leaving parts very unfinished, undefined.
