Soothing Still Life Art Tutorial: Learn to Paint a Calm ‘Green Mood’ Scene

Hello, my dear followers!

«The green mood» is a still life with the field flowers. Today I would like to present you my new work and tell you about some oil painting techniques which can help you create a similar still life. The undermentioned painting techniques will help you paint the «red», «yellow», «purple» or any other mood, I mean a still life.

You will need the following materials in order to paint a picture with the field flowers:

the oil paints:

• White
• Cadmium Yellow (the Medium one is preferred)
• Madder Lake Violet (or the Red one, or even both);
• Phthalocyanine Blue
• Cobalt Violet
• Cobalt Green
• Grass Green
• Viridian

also you will need the following items for our oil painting workshop:

• a paint thinner
• a cloth
• the palette knives
• the brushes
• a canvas

Let`s start our still life art lesson

First of all you should slightly soften a dry surface of the canvas. Take a big brush, dip it into the paint thinner and quickly cover the whole canvas.
Background:
Then take the green paints and make several mixes of these green and the white (in favor of green). Apply a small layer of a green paint with a palette knife on the surface of the canvas. Use the lighter paint on the right – there will be the illuminated side. And use the darker green on the left – there will be the shadow. Apply the paint with the palette knife to a true vertical.
Mark a «skyline» approximately at the first level of the lower edge. Use the darker green paints starting from the skyline – I mean the surface where a vase with flowers will be placed.

At the next stage of our online painting you should smooth the background with a soft cloth (gauze is also good) in order to blur the structure of the vertical brush strokes and make the background more interesting. Use this cloth and make very light brush strokes, slightly touching the canvas from up to down – thus you will get an unusual texture of the background.
You can blur the brush strokes at the bottom of a vase horizontally.

Sketch out a vase and a napkin:
Sketch out a round vase placed on the napkin in the center of the canvas with the help of a brush or a palette knife.
Then tincture your napkin the white color. Before you start painting over the napkins, you should use a cloth and remove the green from the part of the canvas where the napkin should be placed. Then cover the napkin with quite dense layer of the white using a palette knife. You should take into account that there will be more shadow paints on the left and the bright white on the right.

Vase:
Give the volume to the outlined round of vase, outline the shadow, light and fleck on its surface. Use the shadow paints from very dark green with blue or violet to the intense dark green color. Outline a halftone using the green with the different amount of white. Draw a fleck using the bright white with a bit of Cadmium Yellow.

Green leaves:
Then you should mark the dark green in the depth of the bouquet. You can do this using the green with a bit of blue and violet.
Apply the dark green underlayer almost on the whole area of the future bouquet mainly on the left (shadow) side. Do not apply the paint densely; you can even remove the excess of this layer with the cloth.

Flowers:
At this stage of our free oil painting lesson you will learn how to paint the flower. Our bouquet will consist of the white field flowers of different shades. For this purpose your will need to create the various light mixes of white and: Madder Lake Red, Cadmium Yellow, Cobalt Violet, Phthalocyanine Blue and other…
Use these light mixes together with pure white and sketch out the flowers. Use the brighter warm colors on the right and more blue and violet on the left. The brightest and the most expressive flowers should be placed above the vase fleck. Draw the middles of the flowers with dense and not diluted paint: violet, blue, madder lake red.

Make the bouquet more airy:
Make lots of brush strokes with a palette knife: light petals, flowers, green leaves, breath of wind and so on. Mainly use the light colors. Leave the similar brush strokes all over the table where your bouquet is.
Then finalize the light and the shadow on the table and the napkin. Make several dark brush strokes with the Cobalt Violet and the pure Phthalocyanine Blue in order to show the shadow under this napkin.

Berries:
In order to make your painting more interesting, scatter several berries of the chokeberry, black-current, guilder and sea-buckthorn (whatever you wish) on the table. Mark a fleck on each of the berries and the shadow under the berries.

Add some more details, remove the unnecessary brush strokes and signature the painting.

That is all. Our free painting lesson online is over. You have done the great positive work:)

I wish all of you good luck and new success in your creative work!