7 Step Sunflower tutorial

Greetings. I thought I'd start by walking through a kind of 'what's on the easel' type entry. I'll do a sort of step by step demo of an oil painting of one of my favorite things...a sunflower. This particular sunflower had apparently passed the date of approval from its previous owner and was on it's way to the great compost heap in the sky. Just goes to show you that if you look around, you'll see beauty in strange people, places and things.

Here's our subject

This little guy had some siblings...
I liked the slightly wilted look of these and played around with looking at them from various angles etc. before settling on this guy all alone.

Once the subject was decided on, I thought I'd do a kind of quick study so I'm going with 9x12. Big enough to frame and look good, but not so large that I'll be futzing with this for weeks.

Step number 1.

The drawing.

I used a mech pencil and sketched directly on the canvas. Some people like charcoal or a really soft pencil, but I find that you wind up fighting the graphite/charcoal in the next layer. It's not perfect, but it's pretty cleaned up and ready to go. Take your time. The drawing is the key, the cornerstone. Every subsequent layer depends on the drawing. If it's not right, the finished work will not be right. Be patient, do it right. You wont be sorry. I can't tell you how many of my students futz around 4 or 5 steps from now and try to adjust mistakes made in THIS stage only to admit that...what do you know, I was right...they needed to leave it alone and trust their original drawing.

In the next step will work on toning the image. But for now, just get the drawing right.