I am so ready for winter to be over for some reason. We have had very cold weather and then we’ve had a lot of snow. Winter is always beautiful, I love the white, the crisp, the sparkle of winter, but I dislike the cold and I am so excited to grow things!

Recently I was talking to a friend about painting, and she had commented on her wedding bouquet. She loved her bouquet but it was real flowers. Obviously it died fairly quickly and even dried it’s not the same. She commented on possibly having one of the beautiful pictures of her bouquet painted.

This got me thinking, I usually paint fairly up close detailed flowers. I have only done one bouquet, many years ago. I went in search of flower bouquet reference photos and found a really beautiful pink tulip bouquet. I love tulips, and every single spring I tend to paint at least one tulip picture.

I decided to paint this one on a 1/4 sheet, which measures 11×15 inches. There are only 3 main colors, Permanent Rose, Lemon Yellow, and Sap Green, and one color, Payne’s Grey, mixed with the other color combinations, used to darken the really dark areas.

I really liked how the reference photo had a softness to it, the background being a similar color to the flowers. I didn’t want everything to be in focus, just the three flowers in the front. I ended up having the fourth flower on the bottom right more in focus than I had originally thought, but I think it creates a flow to the picture that otherwise would have been missing.

Contrast is an important part of any good painting and with the background and the flowers being so similar in color, I knew that the shadows had to be dark for that needed contrast. These shadows were created by mixing the pink and the green to create a brown for the majority of the shadows, and adding the paynes grey for the really dark shadows.

The pink and green mix was also used in the shadow areas of the flowers, just in a different ratio than for the shadows around the base and leaves. That’s one thing I love about watercolors, mixing different amounts of paint creates different colors in all the mediums, but how much water that is added affects the tone.

The flowers in the reference photo were almost totally pink, but there were a few little highlights in yellow. I decided to highlight that a little bit more by adding more pops of yellow in the petals as well as throughout the leaves. I also like the flow of the painting from the bottom left corner of detail to the top right corner of faded pink.

This was a fun painting, and I love how the finished piece turned out. I can always spot the little imperfections, but that makes it uniquely mine. The last thing to do now is to get this piece digitized and turned into prints, cards, mugs, and anything else I can come up with! This will be available on my website for sale hopefully the beginning of next week!