Painting on Copper panel

Proteas, Roses, Anemones +on looseness, softness and flower friends

16”x20” oil on copper panel

What a beauty! Now that you see the finished product, lets rewind the process.

First off, I am already very familiar working on reflective surfaces as I do a lot of gold and silver leafing as base layers in my work.  So to begin with - I already knew I would love having warm reflective tonal bits peeking through everywhere and would love the slippery slick surface.  Much of my work is actually on various types of metal leaf, gold, silver, copper, and some variegated metal leafs.  But this copper panel from artefex was just….pure joy for me.  

I had a piece already planned out with an orange background - something I actually have never done before (the orange background- usually I tend to deep dark blue backgrounds).  Really the orange ended up working perfectly with the reddish hues of the flowers and as a fabulous contrast (near compliment) to the deep greens throughout.   

Stage 1: Blocking it in:

The lighting always makes capturing these images tough - in my studio I have a skylight which I love but it does create a top light that is especially reflective (see the bright washed out section at the top?) and the lower portion is reflecting the darkness of the studio and easel. Don’t get to led astray by those details- pay attention to the marks which give you an idea of how I decided to approach this painting.

First - I lightly sketch the shapes.  That also gives me time to get comfortable with how different mediums flow on this surface and how transparent the oil is.  For this painting I used a medium I mixed myself, 1:1 of linseed oil and turpentine.  To be more specific - my favorite brand is is Chelsea Classical Studio as they are non-toxic mediums and smell like…LAVENDER! Because they are literally made from lavender.  Amazing.  This one is the Lavender Spike Oil Essence - you can get it here and I mix it with the same brand of Linseed oil.  I like the combo- you have the thinning and drying quality of turp, but mixed with the linseed a bit more body and not so runny.  So I’m just getting an idea of the composition and spacing here, and starting to block in the major players in terms of color.  See the red blob? I know I will have to get to painting some needle-like protrusions on what will become a red pin-cushion protea, and I also know that working on this slick surface will have to be a two session painting as it will need to dry in between in order for me to get the detail on that protea - so getting that red blob down first was part of the plan.  I know in the wonderful dry Arizona climate, it will be dry within 24 hours, given the minimal and faster- drying medium.  I also wanted to test out how my background color would play in, so you can see a swash of that orange on the bottom left.  SO with the first few strokes I already am getting a sense of if my color scheme is coming together.  I have the dark blue centers of the anemone, the majors greens, the red protea, and the swash of orange, which actually works as a close friend to some yellow leucadendron coming up later.  So an hour in and I can feel confident my colors are working and we are headed in the right direction.  

I love how the reflective copper shows through the brush strokes. I was using some bristle brushes so you can see in the rose centers where those lines are…that is the copper showing through. It is so very slick and I love that. It gives me the choice of - do I want to take a big old soft brush and feather all the marks out? Or leave the brush texture in and the copper showing through ?

I have all my darks in, and those are so important to the value structure of the piece.  The darkest darks are typically the greens in most floral pieces as I tend towards flowers that have a local color value in the middle to high range.  I have left the light areas the copper. Because of the lighting, it can be tough to tell that it is actually the bare copper showing through - on the bottom half it appears as a dark value, the top half appears as a light value.  At this point I have the value structure in, the warm centers of the roses, I’m feeling good, let’s hit the lights!

Putting in the light values and softening edges

You can see that putting in the light (and covering up that copper that was showing through) really helps to start to feel like the piece is coming together. I also decided to soften the brush strokes that were so visible in the roses so you can see on the rose on the right (that circular warm middle value blob) does not have any visible lines. I just took a big soft brush and with a fan type motion got rid of those edges. Ahhhh soft. As interesting as they are, it is the deep center of a rose and so needs to be pushed back, not brought forward. Hard edges brings things forward, and individual lines from brush hairs are essentially tons of tiny hard edges. So I brushed them out.

Nearing the finish line here - time to get as much of those lights in as possible.  I love working wet -into -wet on roses.  To me it is just easier - there is a nice soft warm center and the darker values and subtle temperature shifts are already in.  All that is left is to hit it with thick, light value paint.  

One thing I wanted to make sure on this piece was to do as little as possible. I have a history of being an over-worker over-doer on my art, and it looses it’s freshness when you over-do. Honestly, we all could use a little more looseness and self-acceptance, like, let’s let there be a few curves here, am I right? That’s actually closer to reality anyway. I wanted this to stay fresh and feel real. So for example, I told myself that rose on the far left - it is fine. It’s done. In fact it’s perfect. It is on the edge of the piece away from the central area of focus, it really doesn’t matter. Don’t touch it. In years past I promise you 100% of the time I would go back and try to make it more clear. This time, I succeeded in letting it be and loving it.

I haven’t touched on the Berzilia Baubles at top, bottom, and center or the Alstromeria on the right just hugging the rose.  I’m telling you those are some of my favorite players in all my arrangements…they get the least media coverage but they hold my work together.  They each deserve their own blog post and I intend on doing them justice at a future date.  Thank you for showing up for me, Berzilia and the Trader Joe’s all time favorite, Alstromeria.

In the picture below, however I want to draw your attention to those lovely brushy marks.  

Those little smears done with a big brush just pulling wet paint around, those are all intentional.  Coming from a realist traditional classical background, I never understood how people came about making those marks. I thought they were luck.  Or random.  or accidental.  Sometimes they are all of those.   But most of the time, I would say 95% of the time,  they are intentional.  Areas that I think need more softness or connection, they get swiped.  I’m not always right, and it is a bummer when you swipe out a part that wasn’t supposed to be swiped.  But then you just repaint it.  Sometimes I think of  these flowers as a group of friends.  Some friends are talking to each other, some aren’t. Some of them need to look a little more like they are friends, like they “relate” to each other.  I will either add some of that color by painting it in (see that green in the deep shadow of that white anemone? It talks to those green berzilia balls…) or I  will “add” that color by connecting the two shapes together and the two paint colors blend together in a swipe and now they are talking to each other, but softly.  (I could do a whole other blog post about how flower friends talk to each other).

With 90% of the painting done, I leave it to dry. As copper panels are slick, the paint just kind of lays on top, and you can’t build up dark values of thin paint while still wet. You will end up wiping the paint right off.  So any area that I want to be darker but still have thin transparent paint, I have to leave to dry before going back.  Which, in the end, works out in my favor, because stepping away for at least 12 hours keeps me from working on things that don’t matter and so don’t need more work (that rose we talked about earlier?) And later I came back, found a few darks that needed to be darker to create more depth, a few lights that needed to be thicker and lighter, and hit the rest of the orange background.  

So there you have it.

This 16”x20” copper panel painting made me happy, went quickly, and my mom said it was like a box of chocolates. I thought that was a great description. All these treats that go together in the same box of deliciousness but each one has it’s own variation on flavor. Connections. Talking. Relating. Enjoy the beauty! As of right now this piece is available for purchase, so please email me for inquires. Cheers!

EDIT: this piece is sold