Painting a Floral Summer Still Life

Daffodils in a Vase
Acrylic on Canvas Panel
6 x 6 in/15.2
Copyright Byrne Smith 2018

Well, the daffodils quit blooming a few months ago.

The summer heat is about to cause a lot of other plants and shrubs in the backyard--roses, coreopsis, African daisies, day lilies, and some varieties of lantana--to stop blooming and go into survival mode as July and August approach. For now, the firecrackers, roses of Sharon, and hibiscus seem to be taking it in stride.

This not being a gardening blog, I'll explain.

When the daffodils were blooming, they were quite striking, and so I wanted to paint them. I also firmly believe summer is the time to do different things, and that goes for painters, too. It's a time to unwind and re-charge.

If you follow The Painting Life, then you know I rarely paint flowers or still lifes for that matter. Summer should relax and re-charge you.

That's what painting daffodils did for me. I hope you like it, and I hope you're doing some relaxing and re-charging yourself.

Mixing Acrylic on a Canvas Panel

Cooling Off
Acrylic on Canvas Panel
 8 x 6 in (image area)/20.3 x 15.2 (image area)
Copyright Byrne Smith 2018

It's been a couple of weeks since I last posted. I was busy working on a few paintings and also cleaning out my collection of old art magazines, columns, articles, reference photos, etc., etc. They had stacked up and become almost useless as I didn't know what was in any of those stacks.

But I digress. I also decided to tweak my acrylic palette slightly. It was based loosely on one Colley Whisson used--not sure whether it's his current one or not. (If you don't know his work, he is a well-known and respected contemporary Australian impressionist oil painter.)

Anyway, the palette was basically warm and cool primaries with a couple of earth tones plus cad orange, pthalo green and white, of course. Previously, I didn't include cad orange as I felt it superfluous since I could mix cad red light and cad yellow light. I had sparingly used pthalo green, as we all should; however, more recently, every time I used even the slightest amount, it overpowered whatever color(s) I mixed with it. So, I decided to banish pthalo green and just go with the cerulean blue, which was the warm blue already on the palette (it has a green tint anyway). And I added cad orange.

Also, I am attempting to mix more of the colors on the canvas itself rather than the palette. This, as you know, was the method used by the Impressionists, but it's not as easy as their paintings make it look. Daubs of color next to each other sounds easy, but it's not-- just one more thing to master in the painting life.

The result is today's image--an attempt to paint a cool motif to make me think I'm cooler on a hot summer's day. Hope you like it.

Another Fixer-Upper

Before

West of Roswell

Acrylic on Board

24 x 24 in/61 x 61 cm

Copyright Byrne Smith 2017

After
West of Alamogordo
Acrylic on Board
24 x 24 in/61 x 61 cm
Copyright Byrne Smith 2018

If you recall, I posted several blogs recently about how it's never too late to re-work one of your "completed" paintings.

I want to tell you about my latest fixer-upper. I also wanted for you to be able to view my "before" and "after" efforts and judge for yourself--and hopefully encourage you to consider doing the same.

I finished the original painting almost a year ago, in July, 2017. I felt fairly pleased about it, enough so that I varnished it and hung it in my home. Every day I would see this painting multiple times just passing by.

As time passed, I began to notice minor things that I thought, gee, I could do better than that. What began as a few minor issues became, overtime, glaring errors that bothered me every day and every time I passed by (at least in my mind).

So finally, last week, I took the painting down, and it became my latest fixer-upper. It was acrylic on board, and I checked if it were OK to paint acrylic over acrylic varnish. It is.

The main thing I did was to remove the figure and the pathway. For some reason, neither seemed to fit into the New Mexican motif. Monet could paint fantastic figures in fields, me, not so much.

With the figure gone, I felt I needed to re-paint the foreground to look more naturally arid, which it is. I brightened the earth tone and color with broad, horizontal strokes. I also darkened the foliage of the lone tree and randomly added darker, horizontal strokes to make the scene appear to be in bright sunlight, which it was.

To add interest I decided to change the locale so that there is now a view of the White Sands National Monument. I used zinc white for the distant white sands and re-titled the painting. Lastly, I beefed up the cumulus clouds by adding more white to the puffy tops.

I hope you like my "after."