Iris Flower Acrylic Painting Tutorial How to Paint Realistic Flowers

Hi there, and thank you for joining me for this acrylic painting tutorial. My name is Marianne, I'm an artist and educator, and in this video, I'll be showing you how I painted a realistic iris in acrylic. This painting took several months of on-and-off work, and we've got a lot to cover, so let's get started. We'll begin by adding a layer of burnt umber to the entire background and the darkest sections of the flower. You'll notice the brush strokes are quite visible, which is exactly why I start with this layer. Dark colors often go on streaky, but those streaks disappear when you add a second layer. By starting with the burnt umber, I'm sneaking in warmth under the background and pre-empting streaks, and I do the same for the darkest parts of the petals. Once the burnt umber is dry, I move on to the black background. I like to mix my own, rather than using black straight from the tube. My usual combination is burnt umber with ultramarine blue, and for this painting, I added a touch of quinacridone magenta to keep it warm. By placing this mixture over the burnt umber base, it creates a deep, even finish with a beautiful richness. Now, if you're finding this tutorial helpful, I invite you to download my free 36-page ebook, Introduction to Acrylic Painting. It covers canvas prep, transferring your drawing, varnishing, and lots of other tips and techniques I don't cover in this video. You'll find the link for this in the description below. Next, we start the petals. This first layer is called blocking in, and it's where we add large areas of color without worrying about blending or detail. This is important because it fills in all of the blank canvas and allows us to accurately read our colors later. At this stage, I'm focusing almost entirely on values, which is crucial for creating a realistic flower. Values are how light or dark a color is, and they are even more important than the hue of my color for realism. Think of a black and white photograph. It still looks real because of how the light and shadow sculpt the image. If your painting looks flat or lacks dimension, it's usually a values issue. The shadows aren't rich enough, the highlights aren't bright enough, or the lighting just doesn't make sense. This is why I focus on my values in the first layer. You can always adjust them later, but values are the foundation of realism, so I try to get them as close as possible. Before I talk about the colors I'm using, I'd also like to thank photographer Eva Graal for working with me to secure the rights to paint her beautiful photo, which she titled Shadow Dancer. She was an absolute dream to work with, and we've arranged it so that artists enrolled in my painting flowers or color mixing courses have access to this image. You can check out her other work on Instagram through the link in the description. Now let's talk about the colors I used. For this iris, I worked with a modified split primary palette, separating my reds into warm and cool versions to achieve a full range of purples, reds, and oranges. Now a full split primary palette would divide all of the primaries into a warm and cool, so there would be two reds, two yellows, and two blues, each with a warm or cool undertone. But for this piece, I mostly just needed to split the reds. In painting, very few colors, including primaries, are perfectly neutral. Most have either a warm or cool undertone. Warm undertones lean towards red, orange, or yellow, while cool undertones lean towards green, blue, or purple. So you can have a warm color like red that has a cool undertone, and a cool color like blue that has a warm undertone. Now once you understand these undertones, your color mixing becomes so much more flexible and vibrant. You can mix colors with similar undertones to keep your mixtures bright and saturated, or use opposing undertones intentionally to create softer, more neutral tones. I've listed all the colors I used for this painting in the description below, but let's take a closer look at the reds specifically. My two reds were Quinacridone Magenta, which is a cool red with a blue undertone, and Cadmium Red Medium, which is a warm red with a yellow undertone. The Quinacridone gave me vibrant purples and cool magentas, while the Cadmium Red Medium helped me achieve warm apricots and muted purples. If you'd like to dive deeper into color mixing or flower painting, I'd love for you to check out my two courses, Painting Flowers in Acrylic and Color Mixing with Acrylic. In Painting Flowers in Acrylic, you'll create a gorgeous final peony painting, and in Color Mixing with Acrylic, you'll make your own 26-page color mixing guidebook. I'm also adding bonus lessons on this iris into the Painting Flowers course, so be sure to check out the links for both courses in the description below. Going back to the painting, don't be alarmed if your first layer takes a long time. I will admit that I'm a bit of a slow painter myself, and it took nine painting sessions to complete this first layer. It's honestly okay if you're faster or slower than me, but I do want to reassure you that the time lapse makes it look like I'm working much faster than I actually am, and getting these realistic results, at least for me anyway, does take time. The most important thing is to just keep going, and don't let yourself get stuck in the middle. We've arrived at the second layer. This is the layer where the painting really starts to come to life. It's where we can deepen colors and add the delicate veining on the petals. Blending also becomes much easier now. In the first layer, the canvas shows through, and blends often look streaky, but with this second layer, you can softly blend over the base, which keeps the colors rich and luminous. In this layer, I quickly learned that the veins in these petals aren't as dark as the reference photo might suggest. Photographs often exaggerate contrast so that we can read shapes better, but the lines running from the base to the tip of the petal are actually quite subtle. When I started painting them, I went way too dark at first, and it took a few attempts to get the values feeling just right. The bottom petal was the hardest for me, and honestly, this is where I struggled the most. The values here ranged from almost pure white highlights to almost pure black shadows, and the colors shift from warm to cool in both subtle and sudden ways. On the left, there are rich magentas. In the middle, there are cool bluish grays. And near the center, there's hints of hot oranges and browns. It's a beautiful effect, but getting it right was challenging, and I really had to tune my eyes to the warm and cool undertones of each color as I mixed. I also had a rough time with the veins here. When I first started putting them on, I used a lighter paint color, but I had a hard time seeing them, so I switched to a darker color just to get them in. This helped because now the lines created a map where I could get a better sense of the structure of the petal, but they were also way too dark, so I wound up glazing over them multiple times to lighten and adjust the color. I will be completely honest with you, I got stuck here trying to perfect this petal. My eyes kept returning to what I call sticky spots, which are the areas that tug at your vision because something feels off. If you're scanning your painting and you keep noticing the same problem area, that's a sticky spot. So to stop myself from getting too fixated, I used a little trick. I put a tiny piece of painter's tape on the mistake, like a bookmark or a promise to myself to return later. Doing this lets me acknowledge the problem while still moving forward, and I can come back to this section with fresh eyes when the rest of the painting is more developed. On this upper right petal, I painted soft, delicate veins by mixing a color almost identical to the petal, knowing full well it would dry slightly darker. Acrylics naturally darken as they dry, and I use that to my advantage. So as they dried, they magically appeared against their slightly lighter background. In the center of the flower, my colors were practically straight out of the tube for maximum saturation. When you're working with very saturated colors and you want to maintain that saturation, try to avoid adding too much white to your mixes. White bleaches the chroma out of a color, so I had to use it sparingly. If you want to lighten a red, such as cadmium red, without adding white, you can always add a hint of yellow. Not enough to turn the red into orange, but enough to raise the value ever so slightly. For the apricot petals in the middle, I wanted to work on both petals at the same time to keep the colors consistent. I mixed my range of colors in advance on a wet palette, which kept them workable for hours, and hopped back and forth between the petals. I also used different brushes for each color, which I think makes blending easier, since I can quickly switch brushes to beat the fast dry time. These petals here are probably my favorite, just because of how soft and fluttery they turned out. If you want petals to have this beautiful, rippled quality to them, aim for subtle variations of value. The sections on this petal catching the light are only slightly lighter than the parts in shadow, which help the petal feel airy and realistic. Finally, I returned to the bottom petal for a third layer. There was even more to fix here than I remembered, and it took me several additional hours of work, but the effort was worth it. I softened some veins, brightened the highlights, and reintroduced blues and oranges, which added some nice color contrast. Blue and orange are complementary to each other, so by emphasizing those colors, the petal became more dynamic and eye-catching. All of these little adjustments balanced the colors and brought the shadows and highlights into harmony with the rest of the flower. After over 35 hours of work, this 16 by 24 inch iris painting is complete. If you enjoyed this tutorial, you should definitely check out my other flower painting tutorials. I have an entire playlist that I'm sharing here, and be sure to connect with me on other social media platforms. Let me know if you have any questions in the comments, and happy painting!