Contemporary Flowers in Mixed Media is more than a ‘how-to’ on flower painting, encouraging artists to explore new and exciting ways to create flower paintings that are unique and individual. The complexity of flowers and foliage shapes offers great potential for introducing some abstract and semi-abstract passages.
Beautifully illustrated, the book covers the colours, shapes, patterns, and textures particular to various flowers through the seasons. Spring has a section on mixing fresh greens with the vibrant colours of spring flowers and foliage. Summer includes an explosion of colours found in summer flowers, gardens and the countryside. Autumn flowers bring a myriad of stunningly rich hues of red, orange, yellow and gold. The colourful greys, blues and violets typical of a winter garden offer a great opportunity to work with a quieter, more sophisticated palette of colours.
As well as interesting ways of painting individual flowers, the book explores flowers in both still life and landscape paintings, pictured in woodlands, seascapes, meadows and hedgerows as well as vases. Creative use of a wide range of mediums, including acrylics, watercolours, different varieties of pastels, collage and texture mediums are dealt with in each chapter. The book is packed with exciting new ideas and ways of moving towards a contemporary and impressionist painting style.
About Soraya French
Soraya French is an experienced artist and teacher. She is author of several books: Dynamic Acrylics; 30-Minute Acrylics and Expressive Painting in Mixed Media. Soraya runs successful painting courses and workshops and writes a regular column for the Artist magazine.
