How to paint Sunflowers with passion

Hello my name is Paul Priestley, welcome to another of my art tutorials. Today I'm going to be showing you how to paint sunflowers with passion, although not necessarily the technique that Van Gogh might have used. To do this we should be using the brush in a variety of ways. These techniques are brilliant for beginners and those with more experience. Right I'm going to start the painting by blocking in the centres of the flowers and for that I'm going to be using a little bit of burnt umber on my brush and a little bit of blue on my brush and I'm just going to be dabbing where I want the centres of flowers to be. So we'll have one about here. I would suggest not to mix the paint too much, just dab it on, create some nice sections here. Some areas you might put just a touch of red on the top, just leave it like that. I'll have another one probably about here. You see I'm just dabbing on, giving some nice textures to the piece and we'll do the same here but you'll notice with this one I'm doing something slightly different as you'll see in a moment. So create a little bit of texture, I'll just put a little bit of dark on here and a little bit of red on this bit here and just tap it in just to give a little bit more interest to the piece. Okay I'm going to wipe my brush now, give it a nice clean and I'm going to add a little bit of red. Now this is a crimson red because I want a fairly cool red and I'm just going to flick out from the side like this, it's important. Right I'm not going to clean my brush now, what I'm going to do is just wipe it so there's still red on my brush but I'm just simply wiping the brush. Now this is where we paint the leaves themselves. I'm going to start with this one here, I'm going to put a little bit of yellow, a nice mid yellow on my brush, plenty of paint on the brush and then I'm going to press on top of the red, press, twist, flick, press, twist, flick. Okay more paint, press, twist, flick, press, twist, flick. You see so you get nice bold colours and you can see you get some nice interesting stripes of colour, you're dragging the red through as well. So you're wanting to make this look bold and dramatic so you can twist the petals across. Van Gogh would have left nice big lumps of paint here, you can do the same sort of thing. Start the other one and paint this one simply across the first one. So just paint it across leaving nice big bold pieces. Press, twist, flick. The more you flick and twist the brush the more interesting these petals will become. For this one here I'm just going to give my brush a quick wipe and I'm going to just add a little bit of red just at the bottoms here because this one, a little bit of red here as well, that's all we need to do for this one. A little bit red there as well and I'm going to simply again just wipe my brush not to wash it and put plenty of yellow on again and we're going to have a flower now twisting over. So this flower is from the side and it's twisting down. Now the thing to do is not to keep going over this and playing with it. Leave the texture because the texture makes it look interesting. Okay I'm just going to clean my brush and we're going to just add a few little stems to it. So mix up a little bit of green by mixing obviously blue and yellow together. I'm going to paint a stem perhaps coming down here and maybe we'll have a little bit of the greens in here and maybe the stem or stem down here possibly and maybe a stem coming down from this one here possibly going behind the other one. Okay just put a little darker tone so just add a little bit of blue at the top here just to make this look a little bit more as though it's in the background. I'm going to wipe my brush again. I'm going to use basically a yellow tone here. You can put leaves on by just twisting the brush. Paint the leaf very very light so you just paint it almost like a flat shape. Do the same thing here. I do want to make sure I don't go over that little bit there. Okay just paint it as a flat shape. I might have one final one maybe a nice big leaf maybe coming down the front here possibly. Something like that and then just take a little bit of blue on your brush to add the shadow and blend it in on here so that you perhaps just working on top of this and maybe just suggest where the shadow will be to make the leaf look as though it's twisted very very simply as we can do as we've done here. Perhaps on this one I might put a little bit more maybe just down one side here. Okay so very quickly working with boldness with passion twisting the brush leaving the nice thick stems on there you get something of the essence of how van Gogh may have painted his with this sort of passion. Okay I hope you've enjoyed the video. Thank you very much.