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!

Pumpkins in 90 minutes

Another 90 minutes sketch from yesterday evening. This one also a copy from a old photo:

The mouse in the pumpkin

A second project was to paint a still life from a live subject. The easiest I hade at home was a pumpkin:

Its round shape is ideal for a beginner because it makes it easy to paint values and so on. The photo doesn't show what I saw from my point of view, so don't compare it with the painting.

Well: when I started, I realised that the precious old Wacom pen was dead. Dead! We'll never know if it was a question of age or the consequence of having a toddler going around and playing with everything interesting he found on his way. So I had to use the old dear mouse, instead. Maybe I'll think about a nice Xmas present to myself...

Dish and pumpkin are painted on two separate layers; it is wonderful to have the possibility to change the oval shape size and proportions if you realize that perspective is wrong. But I realised that I must begin to practice with textures. And layers, of course. And everything else...

Beginning

I used to paint and draw until I graduate. Afterwards, I got a black hole of creativity until I met my boyfriend and got our child. Since I was longing for some free time, he gave me a present card for a oil painting course, incouraging me to begin again with some kind of "art" activity.

This was the result, a reproduction of the painting "The vegetable gardener" by Arcimboldo. I chose it because we though it could be a funny subject for our kitchen.


And below you can see the original version. Surprise!