How to Paint a Daisy

Daisy Demo Painting 5x7 pastel

One of the things I did at my 2nd Wildflower workshop this past weekend was to demonstrate how I paint certain flowers such as daisies, poppies and Queen Anne's Lace. I pointed out to my students that often we have a certain symbols in our heads to represent each type of flower and that symbol prevents us from really seeing the actual shapes of the flower. As a result, our flowers often look stiff and unnatural. In this demo, I showed how daisies aren't really yellow circles surrounded by white petals (our symbol) I showed how I start with the darker colors first and gradually add the lights. If you look closely you can see that I haven't used any white in my petals.