Spring flowers at the sunset.

20*30 oil on stretched canvas March 2015. The canvas was stretched by me 🙂

The spring is supposed to be here! I decided to create a spring mood with this fresh and joyful painting. The original picture was at my favorite web source for beautiful photo shots National geographic.

I can almost smell the spring, flowers, grass! Why not try recreating the feeling with oil paints?

I started with water mixable oils for the sky: white, french ultramarine, yellow, red:

..added horizon line in dark colors green, burnt sienna, blue, purple:

Left side of the sky is much darker than the right one. I used help of a little piece of cloth to smooth out the transition from darker parts to the lighter ones. After that found the spot for the sun and proceeded to clouds. Oh i had so much fun with those:) I spent at least an hour trying to create natural, fluffy clouds! My main instrument for that purposes was my finger!

Left picture on top shows how the clouds turned out to have too rough edges. Overall i reduced the number of clouds and smoothed the edges, which you can see on the right top picture.

For some reason i decided to leave white spots for the front flowers and not to paint the whole field. Later i realized it was a better idea to cover the whole field and then if needed remove excess paint on the intended spot for a flower. The background flowers were created with small palette knife.

I used purple violet, red, white, blue, yellow for the flowers. For the field burnt umber, green, yellow, raw sienna were used. Here is the finished painting:

It was a pleasure creating the light/dark combinations. Loved how i could create the sun rays, for which i used white, pink, yellow with a brush and my finger.

Here are some details of the final work:

And, my least favorite part-side by side comparison of the original photo and my painting, which reveals that my flowers are of a much less vibrant color. I might even go back and add some more light purple later on. Overall, i am satisfied with the experience:)