Friday, April 30, 2010

Flemish Flowers

One dream of my childhood, was to paint flemish flowers. Since it looked quite difficult, i never dared to do it, until I realize that Photoshop is easier than traditional oil. So, I spent almost all my free time in the last weeks to reproduce a Flower Garland from Jan Davidsz de Heem. The reference is one file found in Google, but resolution was not always sufficient, so sometimes I tried to guess some details.
This is the original of de Heem:


And here comes my repainted (no photomanipulated, if one wonders):


Painted using only the standard Photoshop chalk brush, with some jitter, to get a feeling of organic material, and sometimes a little texture.
A couple of flowers in the original seems to have been painted with pigments which have decomposed during  a couple of centuries, to judge from the almost absence of values: the red tulip and a jellow flower. The latter has been completely repainted using as reference a Rosa Foetida, which I guessed it was the flower represented in the original, adding some orange details, just for fun:


I added also a blue Morpho butterfly, just because I'd like to have a little more blue in the picture:


Then another couple of closeups:



Have a nice spring!

6 comments:

Unknown said...

Very nice work, I like it!

TopGun said...

Wow.
wich device do you use to paint? a tablet pc?

Morgaine le Fée said...

Thank you a lot, you're very kind!

@TopGun: yes, I use a tablet + stylus Wacom (intuos4). You paint on the table, and see the results om the screen. At the very beginning it wasn't really trivial :)

TopGun said...

Great results IMHO.
it wasn't really trivial; it wasn't :)

I presume you use a Mac OS, isn't it?

Morgaine le Fée said...

Thanks :)
But now it's like to draw with a normal pen.
We have a normal PC at home. (unfortunately with windows vista, which is a quite bad choice...)

TopGun said...

windows it's a quite bad choice.....

Vista it's the wrost os from millennium edition.
I'll try 7 but, I'm planning a full switch to linux.