Photo Gallery: July Painting Project (Daisies)

Daisy, daisy, give me your answer do… and what beautiful and interesting answers we have had for this painting project too! Enjoy!

By Katherine: This was just supposed to be a test piece and was done on a 30cm x 60cm piece of wallpaper lining. I used acrylics and watercolours. A bit of a mess really!

From Marion: It’s not a mess, it’s captured the sense of enthusiasm that daisies have, growing where and how they will (unless you’ve a formal garden with rigid planting) and dancing about under the sun.
By Mark: I enjoyed this one. It’s about 5 inches by 5 inches, acrylic on 360 gsm paper.
From Marion: Beautiful rich greens, with sense of depth, movement, and the cheerfulness that I associate with daisies.
By Cathi: My first effort was done really quickly. I used water colour and masking fluid to keep the flowers whiter-than-white!

From Marion: I’m looking at this and wondering why I’ve never thought to combine pencil and masking fluid, because it totally resolves the hard-edged look of masking fluid white areas that I don’t really like. I do, however, keep wanting to straighten up your painting!
By Cathi: I did enjoy this month’s subject and had fun doing something a bit different with it!

From Marion: Do I detect the influence of the “cut up” from May’s project…? After a bit of pondering I’ve realised that I keep wanting these flowers to be water lilies rather than daisies, but can’t decide whether it’s because the cutout shapes feel like waterlily leaves or it’s the sense of pond in the background.
By Bee: A first quick daisy picture done with Sharpies.
From Marion: I’m intrigued by how the blue background at the top could feel so airy whilst the green and the bottom feels like I’m looking down at the ground, yet both are merely a single colour; how my brain adds and interprets.
By Bee.
From Marion: I like the energy, colours, variety of angles. Looking at the lower left, there’s yellow peaking out beind the green, giving a sense of sunshine and depth. I know layering is one of my enthusiasms, but it’s tiny bits like this that show how effective it can be.
By Eddie: “These daisies get into your head. I was scribbling with a biro while watching TV and this popped up. Promise it’s the last for this month.”
From Marion: That your fingers are leading you to daisies is making me smile! There’s a lovely looseness to this, interesting mark making with an energy and freshness. You might try this approach using an acrylic marker pen and then watery acrylics around it.
By Eddie: “The one on the left was drawn with the dropper of Payne’s grey acrylic ink and on the right with Indian ink and a brush. I then added gouache until I felt I had done enough to make them interesting and, hopefully, avoid overworking.”

From Marion: “I did a little happy dance seeing these, that joyful feeling that comes from nudging someone in a direction and seeing them run with the idea. Both have a lot I like about them: the looseness, the balance of suggestion and representation, the feel of the ‘hand of the artist’.
By Eddie: “I did a tonalist version in oils.” From Marion: I like it for being so different to your other daisies, that you’ve taken a now-familiar subject and tried a different approach.
By Eddie: “As soon as I saw your concertina book I grabbed the sketchbook, pen and watercolours which sit beside me and played while watching t.v. I enjoyed the looseness and freedom from anxiety a sketchbook gives. I tried but failed to keep this feeling with this larger acrylic.

From Marion: Theoretically we should be able to do a larger painting with the vitality of a sketchbook pieces, because the evidence is right there that we can work in this style. The key is to somehow break the “this is now a serious painting” mindset that overrides the looseness. One thing that may help is to do the bigger version on paper still, not canvas.
From Claire: This is my attempt in watercolour, looking at your photo and my windswept flowers in the garden. I decided not to add other media to tidy up the loose petals and vegetation because I would have been fiddling. At the start, I intended to do four small practice pieces but these two on the left were too fiddly so I did the two on the right as one picture ignoring the tape.

From Marion: The white where the tape was makes it feel like I’m looking through a window (I’ve a whole book of paintings by Matisse with just his views through windows). You’re absolutely right to leave it loose like this, it’s got such sense of movement, of swaying in the breeze.
By Sarah: “In the middle of the night I realised I had not preplanned any firm of composition for my painting and ended up making the one painting into two. I even put an intial signature on the bottom, being happy with my process and result.

From Marion: When you showed me the photo of your painting whilst it was still a work-in-progress, I’d wondered what you might do with the ‘gap’ between the two sections, but didn’t point it out as I wanted to see if you’d resolve it. This is the perfect solution.

And one from June’s bluebells project:

By Claire: Tried a watercolour to get back into painting. It.was such a cold miserable day that I looked back to the glorious heatwave and dug out my yellows to suggest sunshine through the trees , mixed on the paper and added oil pastel, trying to keep very loose. I wasn’t happy with lots of foreground trees I had, so cropped it.

I’ve had fun with daisies myself this month, starting with my concertina book daisies (see this blog post for a video):

Which led to this painting on canvas:

SOLD “Ailsa’s Daisies”. 50x20cm, acrylic on canvas

And this mixed media painting on paper:

Foxgloves and Daisies painting
SOLD “Foxgloves and Daisies”. A2 size paper, mixed media

As always with painting projects, if you’d like to share a photo of your painting(s), please email it to me, send it via social media, or post to the community section of my Patreon. There’s no deadline on any of the projects, I will simply include it in the next photo gallery.

Happy painting!

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