Painting Yellow Flowers - After the Workshop

Workshop attendees working with potted Daffodils

 

Painting process - copyrighted by Heeyoung Kim

 Yellow flowers are often hated to be painted, maybe because they are too pure to add any shadows. Their brightness intimidated us in the beginning, but we could slowly build up the frilly petals. White paper was carefully saved by painting its negative spaces. Using lots of layering of Aureolin and just a bit of shadow color, we could keep the Daffodils very bright.

 We were all just amazed by the varieties of yellow hues created by just one kind of yellow tube. That is the beauty of transparent watercolor.

It was fun and informative to see buds open and show off the most gorgeous color and fragrance, and finally create even more intense color when they die. Is there any part of nature not beautiful?

Painting Yellow Flowers

Compass Plant, Silphium laciniatum, Heeyoung Kim

I love flowers of all colors and try to paint them all, well, if possible?!?!...... 

After I painted this Compass Plant last year, I kind of feel like I can deal with yellow paint. So I chose Yellow as the theme color for my April watercolor workshop at Ryerson Woods, Deerfield, IL. 

Yellow Daffodils will be the subject. They are adorable flowers, but not easy to create an adorable looking paint of yellow flowers!!!! We so often end up with too dark or murky yellow flowers!!!!! 

I would share my experience with yellow color on April 2, 4 and 5. I hope it would be happy experience for others, too. 

Resurrection of Prairie Crabapple

Prairie Crabapple or Iowa Crabapple, Malus ioensis, Watercolor, copyrighted by Heeyoung Kim

I have been working with this painting for long. I have observed it through the full cycle from winter naked branches, new sprouts and buds, blossoms, and apples. And I chose buds and full blooms to give strong contrast to the dead tree trunks. 

Why dead trunks? Well, the purpose of this painting is to show how this native Crabapple  has been neglected in most areas, maybe because people believe other colorful  hybrids are more attractive. This specific tree was almost dead overshadowed by nonnative, invasive trees. When my plant scout took care of its surroundings by cutting the invasive trees, and let more sun shine on this beauty, it has slowly revived. New branches started to grow from the almost dead looking trunk. 

This painting is my tribute to this beautiful tree and the beautiful person who has taken care of it for many years only from concerns on nature. 

Simple Color Note

Horse Gentian or Wild Coffee, Triosteum perfoliatum, Heeyoung Kim

I have been totally thrilled for a few weeks to draw this plant. The bright orange berries were beautiful enough to draw my eyes, but its common name appealed more to me, well, frankly, as I am a HEAVY coffee drinker! Midnight coffee was even tastier while I was drawing this.....

When I do pre sketches, I put heavy shadows almost always, unlike common advise. The shadows are the most critical guide for my next paintings or ink drawings. When I have this much drawing, I can convert it with any kind of medium later. However, color note on top of the heavy graphite is not ideal, of course. So I color only a small part of each segment. Sometimes I just put color right next to the drawing, not within the target space. It is perfectly fine when I have just this much exact colors ahead.  This will be good guide even when the plant color slightly changes or fades. I might finish this in watercolor.  

Inspired by Winter Wind

Indian Hemp in Winter, Apocynum cannabinum, Watercolor, Heeyoung Kim

Artists can find beauty from totally unexpected things. On a very windy winter day I was walking at a park in my neighborhood. All dry branches, twigs and empty seedpods were dancing to the wind, but all in one direction. Those lines that were set by wind caught my eyes. 

When I looked around carefully, I found some interesting twigs with seedpod in varied colors: some were more brown still with lots of yellow, but some others very gray, but with beautiful blue. I could see brown ones were from that year, and gray ones were from the previous year.  Of course I could not pass the bluish branch, as blue is my absolute favorite color. 

As soon as I came home, I started to draw the lines right on Strathmore Bristol board (plate finished), very spontaneously without pre-sketch. Basically, the whole painting was done with blue, gray, purple and yellow.  This 'simple' and spontaneous painting gave me great joy during the windy, cold and snowy Chicago winter.   

Hairy Plants in Pen-and-Ink

Compass Plant, Silphium laciniatum, Pen-and-Ink, Heeyoung Kim

I applied the same technique (shadowing, not drawing for hairy parts) in pen-and-ink drawing. Considering that ink is not forgiving at all, I had to be very, very careful from the beginning. Drawing guide lines very lightly with pencil was a huge help. It was more challenging in ink, however, the effect was much more dramatic with ink than with pencil. 

Pencil, Pencil, Pencil..... Drawing Hairy Plants!

 acorn, cattail & hairy stem drawing - Heeyoung Kim

Drawing hairy subjects with pencil is quite challenging, because it gets darker and darker as the pencil strokes repeat. 

What is the solution?

                                 Do not draw! 

                                 Just shadow!

I started with simple lines. Then, I had to think in a completely reversed way. I mean, I started shadowing the  first lines instead of drawing more lines. At first it didn't look right, but with erasing and shadowing repeated, I finally could have the hairy effect. 

For the acorn, I had relatively big black negative space under each hair. Then I divided the space into a couple of more hairs, again by shadowing, not drawing.