Painting Still Life in Gouache by Kevin Scully

Author:Kevin Scully
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781847979780
Publisher: Crowood

The painting is finished with just a few simple shadows and highlights in solid colour.

Your arrangement may also be spoilt by the flowers dropping some of their petals. If this happens you may choose to either leave them out of the picture altogether, or include them anyway if you feel they add something to the composition.

Demonstration: Flowers and Shadows

‘I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.’

Claude Monet

The colours used in this painting were:

Permanent White

Cadmium Red

Alizarin Crimson

Burnt Sienna

Raw Sienna

Viridian

Pine Green

Ultramarine

Lamp Black

Yellow Ochre

The pastel paper used was Canson ‘Mi-Teintes’ Sand

This was painted on a summer’s day with strong sunlight streaming in through the window. The objects in this set-up are not especially connected in any way, but when carefully arranged they made a pleasing composition.

A large sheet of golden brown paper that had been lying around the studio for some time, waiting to be used, was pinned to the wall and a white cloth was draped over the end of a table. The other objects in the picture were moved around a few times until a satisfactory composition had been decided upon.

The appeal of this arrangement lay in the way in which the rather angular leaves and flower shapes were echoed in the geometric patterns created by the shadows on the wall. Similar colours appear in both the shallow dish and the two bowls, while the whole picture is balanced by the curves of all of the objects on the table. It was decided to paint the background, flowers and white cloth in a fairly loose, painterly fashion, while the objects in the foreground were afforded a bit more detail.

A sheet of pastel paper was chosen for this painting as it was just about the right colour for the basis of this richly coloured arrangement. It was only lightly dampened before stretching, to prevent it from tearing. The composition was drawn directly onto the paper.

All of the items in the picture were painted with a thin wash of their local colour, without worrying too much about accuracy at this stage. The strong shadow on the wall was painted with a large brush loaded with diluted Burnt Sienna and this established its strong shape. A line was painted in Pine Green around the roses to establish their shape and position. Because they were fairly pale in colour, this line was painted to prevent the staining effect of the green colour straying onto the petals. It is very easy to get lost when painting a mass of tightly packed foliage and flowers.

The background was painted using Permanent White, Burnt Sienna and Raw Sienna. The first shape to be painted was the shadow on the wall behind the flowers. This was first painted with a mixture of Burnt Sienna and Raw Sienna and then overpainted with the same colour with some Permanent White added. The rest of the background was painted at speed using a mixture of these colours wet-in-wet. Quite a lot of the original pastel paper can still be seen in this painting, particularly on the wall and tablecloth.

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