Lily

 

Last week some beautiful flower bouquets were given to me (for my birthday) and after a few days an orange lily in one of these bouquets opened its first flower. 

Looking at the lily from behind, with light shining through the petals I decided to make a reference picture and paint this beautiful flower. Of course there are more buds and some leaves in the picture and I just liked painting these.

The buds are turning orange from green and the leaves have the orange colour of the petals reflected on them. I have set myself a challenge but I wanted to do this as good as possible.

For this composition I chose only the top part of the flower, where it comes out of the vase. Both flower buds in the upper part of the painting are growing from the stem I have painted, but the spot where they get a separate stem is hidden behind the leaves. I was looking for that spot, until I realised where it was.

After I decided on the composition I made a line drawing, using the picture as my reference and started painting, layering the colours of both the flowers and the leaves and saving the highlights by not painting these areas. In the end I just pulled over a bit of clean water, so the colour of the buds or leaves would be visible on the highlighted area.

The background is not painted at all, mostly because the lily almost fills the whole paper.

The information about the materials I have used, the size of this painting and its availability can all be found in my Tumblr blog.