Blue Hydrangea Inspirations

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The hydrangea's are in full bloom and calling for us to paint. Let's join Bentley in my garden and take a look around to find the perfect flower for our painting lesson.

Finding Inspiration . . . . . .

My neighbor planted three different hydrangeas together to get this glorious combination of colors.

Here . . . . . .

There . . . . . . .

Everywhere . . . .

Now that we have found our inspiration, it looks like we will paint my favorite color blue hydrangeas.



Cut blue hydrangeas in a basket are the perfect inspiration for my painting.

Here is my finished blue hydrangea painting.

Now it's time for a little lesson in painting blue hydrangeas. I have taken a number of painting workshops with California artist, Allayn Stevens, http://allaynstevens.com./ Allayn encouraged us to really look at the flowers and study how they grew before we started painting them. We learned to take apart flowers in order to understand their structure. Allayns' charming Laguna Beach French cottage and art was recently featured in Romantic Homes and Romantic Country magazines.

We are going to paint a simple pot of blue hydrangeas and I photographed a pot with two blooms for you to paint.

I took apart one of the blossoms so you can see the structure. Notice a single blossom has 4 petals with a little center. The leaf has a large vein down the center with lots of tiny veins radiating from the center of the vein. Also notice the blossoms are not a solid color - you can see light blues, violet and several shades of blue in the blossoms.

You can try tracing the leaf to get a feel for the shape of the leaf. The blossoms are almost round -I painted a round blossom using Liquitex Prussian blue. I also painted a single petal for you so you can see the shape. Next I painted the blossoms using Prussian blue mixed with white, as well as blue violet and ultramarine blue. I tend to put all of the colors on the brush at the same time in order to get the color variegation in the petals. The last step is to put a little center in some of the blossoms - do not put the center in all of the blossoms as you can not see centers in all of the real flowers.

Here is a little sample of a blue and purple hydrangea painting to give you an idea of how a finished painting will look. For the purple flowers I used dioxin purple to paint the round blossom and then painted the petals using a little white, lavender and blue violet. I used a lime green to paint the centers. I also mixed a little raw sienna with my green to make the veins on the leaf. Have fun with your little painting and don't be afraid to mix your colors together on your brush. I paint with acrylic paints as they are non-toxic and look like oil paint. The nice thing about acrylic - if you make a mistake - you can wash it off before the paint drys.

Thank you for visiting. I love hearing from you and sincerely appreciate that you have taken time to leave me a comment and to follow my blog. If you have any questions or would like to see me paint something special, please leave me a comment or send me an e-mail.

Have a lovely week. Blessings, Erin