Hi!
Florals are my favourite thing to paint, they always have been even before I discovered oil paints. The only reason I considered it was because of my background in watercolours, particularly loose watercolour florals. I therefore had quite a collection of flower pictures saved on my computer, and not so many pictures of anything else I felt competent at painting. The size of my floral pieces has grown with time but this month I've decided to go back to the size I feel comfortable with. So in the first 25 days of July I am aiming to produce one 3x3inch or 4x4inch floral canvas to really reconnect with the painting I love.
I've done so many experiments with my flowers over the years. At first I was by no means concentrated on hyperrealism which is the style I have since adopted. I instead extrapolated pictures of flowers themselves and placed them on an abstract background, which was either created before or after depending on the size of the canvas.
After painting some landscapes and getting a little more comfortable with the concept of a background I started working on hyperrealism. I enjoy the smooth and blended look of it, which I find much harder to achieve in watercolours which leaves my watercolour paintings with a more abstract backing. The first real attempt at this was my painting 'Carnation Giant', the biggest painting I had ever done at that point. This was a new lesson in blending, particularly the background petals and the background more generally. The most important lesson I learnt was to do all the background first, because blending a background next to some detail seemed to mess up the details.
For my miniature series I decided not to go for complete hyperrealism but instead use an element of realism while letting myself have a little more freedom. I didn't want to have to go into minute amounts of detail for this project since I'm producing paintings so regularly and so far this seems to have worked out well!
While large scale florals are some of my favourite to paint and to observe, but I have a soft spot for smaller canvases. When I'm looking for a painting which I can just sort of do to regain confidence, or just for fun I am far more likely to tend towards a small canvas. I find them far more practical to keep, more delicate to paint, and easier for me to do while I'm also meant to be studying. I started producing these during A levels and now at university in the middle of seemingly constant chaos I hope that miniature painting can bring me back to where I started.
These were always small scale because I preferred to perfect one small flower rather than to come up with a composition that included a myriad of different flowers. This spoke especially to the part of me with no concept of scale since I wouldn't need to think about the relation between multiple flowers. I could instead focus on the scale of different parts of a flower. Luckily for me, every flower is different so the slight lack of perfection in my scaling doesn't cause too much of an issue. In my practice this month I've started appreciating the small details of flowers a bit more and capturing them in a less detailed way than I would be able to on a larger canvas.
These are a few of my favourites from the first few days, there are plenty more to come which I look forward to painting and sharing with you! If you have any questions about any of my paintings feel free to contact me.
See you soon,
Imogen
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