Flowers for days

Wine and paint

It’s a good combination right?

On Saturday night, 22nd May, I hosted my first ‘wine and paint’ night! It was a lovely group of 5 people, allowing for more free flowing conversation (and wine).

Preparation

I had to come up with an image that would be be both easy to complete and something that the guests could be proud of.

I found a lovely image of a rose bush and did my own test so I could figure out how to then teach it.

Set up

Paper plates are your friend! (Especially when you need multiple palettes…)

They’re extremely practical because they are easily disposable. In the future I hope to have a studio where I can store non-disposable palettes so there isn’t so much waste.

I provided all the painting supplies and everyone brought their own wine and nibbles.

Begin!

It was time to start painting!

• Plan plan plan:

  We started with outlining where the roses would go, followed by the leaves. This way the background wouldn’t end up covering the whole canvas.

• Mixing:

  Next, we mixed our main background colour- green! We made three shades for the shadows, leaves and highlights.

• Painting time:

  First the background colour was applied to fill in all the space around the flower and leaf outlines. Then the middle green was used for the body of the leaves, topped with strokes of the lightest shade for highlights.

• Mixing…again?:

  Time for the reds! This time four colours were needed- three shades of red and and a salmon colour (pink-orange)

• Flower time:

  Starting from darkest red up to salmon, curved strokes were used to make impressionist petals of roses in each of the flower spaces outlined previously. The salmon was used sparingly at the end to make highlights.

Some of the guests decided to take a bit of creative licence and do their own floral arrangement. We ended up with 3 rose bushes, one tulip bunch and one abstract garden scene.

All lined up! They flowed together nicely, with an extra little blue wren in the corner

All in all, it was a lot of fun and I can’t wait for the next one!

Hope to see you there!

For more behind the scenes and further artworks check out my Instagram and Facebook