NEW! Order a Painting Critique LEARN MORE
with Richard Robinson
Love painting flowers? Start here. Learn the best studio setup for still life painting, see the structure of a flower and paint its subtle beauty. We’re starting off nice and simple with a single yellow rose (great for beginners!) and we’ll get progressively more complex in the next 3 lessons. Enjoy!
Whenever you’re ready! The lesson is available online any time, and your access to the lesson never expires.
As long as you need! Your access never expires, so you can come back again and again.
Sorry, no you can’t download the video. This is to avoid piracy. You’ll always be able to view the video on this site though.
Richard is a talented full time artist, who loves painting and teaching.
Hi I’m Richard. I’ve been painting my whole life and back in 2001 I traded my graphic design career for the humble life of a full time artist. I love painting, and as it turns out, I love teaching too.
Nowadays I balance my life between parenting, painting, surfing, travelling and teaching. My work is regularly featured in international art magazines, in galleries in New Zealand and America, on TV and in my Mum’s house.
I give outdoor painting workshops in interesting spots around this beautiful planet of ours and love encouraging people to paint. Two of my favourite artists are John Singer Sargent and Joaquín Sorolla.
My painting website: www.nzpainter.com
I’d love to be your new teacher.
Richard is a master artist with an exceptional skill in identifying and communicating key factors to making successful paintings. I have found his video workshops an excellent resource for improving my own work.
"The Yellow Rose" 8 x 8" Oil on Canvas by Richard Robinson.
When painting flowers it's important to use as few brush strokes as possible in order to keep the colours clean, especially in the lights. To help with that we can paint with a large brush first and finish off with a small brush. It's also vital to keep squinting at the flower to be able to see it as an interrelated whole - to be able to compare lights with lights and darks with darks.
"Sketch for The Yellow Rose" 8 x 8" Pencil on Paper by Richard Robinson.
It's so instructive to just focus on drawing before we dive into the paint. In this sketch I was first trying to see the structure of the rose - the way each petal revolves around the centre line, and then focused on the way the form is revealed by light and shadow. Remember to find your lightest light and compare each light to that, and do the same for the darks, comparing each dark with the darkest dark. Always compare like to like. It's not helpful to compare a dark to a light because the gap is too big to be meaningful to us. I used a 6B pencil to make this drawing, hence the grainy look. For a smoother finish (but lighter darks) use a harder pencil like a 2B.
"Roses" 40x50cm Oil on Canvas by Elena Sokolova
Beautiful movement and simplification of forms in the painting, Elena. That's something I strive for in my own work too. The variety of colour in the background is adding a lot of interest as well. The drawing could be a little better and some of the shapes in the two large upward roses could be altered or removed in order to make the rose shape more easily readable. When I paint an object that has an odd looking shape in it that somehow spoils the form of the object, I modify or remove it for the sake of readability. Overall a very pleasing painting - something to be proud of.
"Yellow Rose" 11x14" Acrylic on Canvas by Mike Robles - Altered
"Yellow Rose" 11x14" Acrylic on Canvas by Mike Robles
Beautiful job Mike! Nice to see you really focusing on the drawing in this one and also achieving that vibrant glowing effect in the centre of the rose. Great to hear too that you scraped off the first one and painted it again - persistence! That's paid off in spades and I also noted others saying how they improved from one painting to the next in this project. That's the beauty of small studies like this - fast improvements! If there's one thing I might look at changing in your painting it would probably be to add a little light on the table cloth. You can see in the altered image how it makes the fall of the cloth more believable and also breaks up that large dark space. Other than that, great painting!
"Valentine Rose 2" 9x12" Oil on Canvas by Sharon Casavant
Wow Sharon you've really looked hard at this beautiful rose and seen all the subtle variety in there. It looks great! The low key (overall lower value) treatment adds a touch of mystery to this as the flower reaches up for the light. The only thing I could pick for improvement in this painting would be the drawing of the subsidiary roses that look a bit clumsy compared to the big one. Loose is good, but not at the expense of good drawing. Touch those up and you've got a winner here. Good one.
"My First Yellow Rose..." 24x30cm Oil on Board by Silvana M Albano
Nice work Silvana. I can see from your painting that adding more space around the subject suddenly makes it a quieter, more restful image. The drawing is pretty accurate, colours are good, brushwork a bit tentative in places, like the centre of the rose where you've lose a few more edges than necessary because of dabbing, whereas a single confident stroke would yield a crisper edge. I like that you've thought to lightly over brush the textured board to suggest the texture of rough cloth. Nicely done.
"New Zealand Rose" 20x20cm Oil on Canvas by Siobhan
Great work, Siobahn. Plenty of subtle colour changes, strong drawing, bold design, elegant brushwork and interesting shapes. Perhaps an edge or two could be softened around the perimeter but that's really nit picking. Good job!
$15.00USD
$15.00USD
$15.00USD
$15.00USD
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