How to paint sunflowers in a lavender field in stages

Lavender fields fascinate with their beauty and aroma in life. Many of us artists strive to repeat and convey this beauty in canvases. If we cannot compete with the aroma, then lavender fields with sunflowers are one of the common subjects of paintings.

Video how to paint sunflowers in lavender (in Russian)

Despite the fact that I already had several paintings with lavender fields, I decided to still practice this plot.

The first task at the initial stage of drawing is underpainting. The purpose of underpainting is to color the entire canvas with basic shades in order to get rid of the white canvas and divide the whole picture into color spots.

The blue sky and distant trees are paint very quickly in the future, the haze will significantly alienate them, so I see no reason to invest time and energy in them. For the rows, I used ocher, and for the rows of lavender a mixture of blue and burgundy.

After the field underlays and sunflowers are drawn, you can add refinements to the picture.

You see in the photo, visible thinning touched the field and row spacing. Round brush number 2 made a lot of strokes in the form of how lavender inflorescences will be arranged. For them I used a mixture of blue and white with the addition of pink, ocher, green, and red shades of paint.
For row spacing, I took ocher and yellow with shades of purple and red. Even at this stage of drawing, you can see how the rows get volume, and the aisles become flat.

Leaving the field alone while the paint “dries”, I decided to distract myself and take up the long-range plan. With a thin layer of a violet hue with white I made a haze that he shaded well in order to alienate the trees. At the same stage, we need to draw a little and our sunflowers, which grew in a row of lavender. I made smears on the flowers of a sunflower in the shape of future petals, for this I used cadmium yellow and ocher, also introduced different shades into the foliage, these are yellow, red, blue and brown

The penultimate stage in drawing. Here, all attention and efforts are completely thrown to refinement and drawing of sunflower petals, its foliage, row-spacings with lumps of earth brightly lit by the sun. Also pay attention to the rows of lavender, which go into the distance, naturally there is no clear depiction in them, but the bright sky casts a glare on them and this must be shown.

For this, the final stage, I pulled out my thinnest brushes and set about drawing the finest stalks of lavender with flowers. Each smear lies down according to the growth of lavender and of course each of them is of different shades. The work is very painstaking, but fascinating.

I did the same with the colors of a sunny flower, specifying the shape and shades of each petal and center. The final additions to the shape and richness of the shades of the leaves gave them realism.

On this picture was completed and sent to dry.