Painting Flowers Step by Step: Radiant Reds

Watercolor artist Birgit O'Connor writes:  "Flowers are gorgeous and joyful in a bouquet or a garden, but I love to paint blooms up close, so I can bring to light their intricate, often convoluted, forms."   In this step by step flower demonstration she paints with a mix of Winsor red, permanent alizarin crimson and quinacridone magenta with vivid results. .

Color Temperature Creates Depth and Form

Jane Jones explains with a painting demonstration how color temperature can create the illusion of depth and form.   Jones writes:   "Giving attention to color temperature subtleties in your paintings can make a big difference in your spatial illusions of depth and form."

Realistic Painting Demos by Sorin

European realistic painter Sorin created two realistic oil painting demos on his website SGallery.  Both are on the same page.  The first series of photos demonstrates the photo-realistic scene shown below and the other photo-tutorial is the goat shown above.

"Bluebonnet Time", demo by William Hagerman

William Hagerman demonstrates his realistic oil painting methods in a free eBook showing a step by step progression of the landscape painting shown above.

Hagerman writes: "My painting method is a layered approach, therefore it is developed in successive stages. After drawing my composition on canvas with thinned paint ...I begin my block-in using full color mixtures starting with the darkest mass first.  By starting this way, I find it easier to judge the value relationships between adjacent areas."

Color: How to see it and how to mix it

Artist William Hagerman writes: "Understanding color and how it behaves is a fascinating subject and whole books have been written on color theory alone. There's so much on the subject of analyzing and mixing color, how our eyes perceive it to the psychology of color, not to mention how pigments react in mixture, that it can become rather confusing in a hurry and even frustrating when you just want to know how to mix a particular shade of green or any other color."

Read what Hagerman has to say about hue, intensity, value and color mixing.

Pigments: What are they?

Artist William Hagerman says:  "In simplest of terms, a pigment is a colored material ground into a fine powder, which is then suspended in some type of media that acts as a binder to hold the pigment together and giving the resulting paint its adhesion...In oil paints, linseed oil is generally used as the binder..."

For the artist there are some important factors to consider regarding pigments when selecting them for use.   Read more on this topic at Hagerman Art.

Painting with Four Colors - A Dog Portrait

Watercolor painting lesson from Cyrille Jubert.   Cyrille says: In this lesson I'll show you how you can paint with just three colors plus one and get a portrait rich, vivid and colorful.   The same applies, no matter the subject....an object, a landscape or a character.

Hyper-realistic dog by Cyrille Jubert

The hyper-realistic portrait of white Labrador by Cyrille Jubert.  Cyrille shows steps that detail how to paint in watercolor.  Eyes and nose are essential elements in carrying out the hyper-realistic portrait of a dog, plus the nuances of "white" fur.

(Note:  Page is in Spanish, if you need to translate, go to Google Translate, select language and type in text or a website address to translate entire page.)