Flower Painting in the Wild is the latest full length (hour-long) instructional video from author, illustrator and plein air painter James Gurney.
As Gurney points out in the introduction, the approach to painting flowers he takes here is different than the usual flower arrangement in a vase common to still life or the traditional garden subjects found in landscape painting, in that it focuses on individual flowers, or small groups, in the natural environment of botanical gardens or as wildflowers along a stream.
Gurney focuses on what he terms at one point as “portraits” of living flowers in their natural setting, with four major sections, each following the process of a painting from start to finish.
He is painting here in casein and gouache, two underutilized painting mediums of which Gurney has long been an advocate, and there is discussion of their strengths and limitations, as well as plenty of demonstrations of technique. Most of the techniques would be applicable in other mediums in which you can work both opaquely and transparently, like acrylic or oil.
Like many of Gurney’s instructional videos, and particularly those in the recent “…in the Wild” series devoted to painting on location, there is considerably more to Flower Painting in the Wild than the title might suggest.
Throughout the course of the video, you’ll find lots of close-ups of brush loading and handling and paint application, as well as insights into painting plant forms, handling greens, controlling value ranges, simplifying complex backgrounds, painting shapes by both subtraction and addition and many more topics of general interest to painters.
He even gives a demonstration of the age old but infrequently taught method of using a grid sighting system to accurately transfer outlines and key points of a scene to the paper or canvas.
Flowers are a great subject for tackling one of the most daunting challenges artists face: complexity. Gurney devotes a good deal of attention to the process of simplifying complex subjects, and picking out the essentials needed to represent detail without trying to paint every petal and leaf. These same techniques can be applied to other complex subjects.
Gurney produces and films his own videos, and he has gotten adept at delivering a relaxed but polished instructional presentation at a lower cost point than most professional level art instruction videos.
He is sensitive to what makes a video like this useful to the viewer, with lots of cuts from the painting to the subject and back again, augmented by split-screen comparisons of them side-by-side, which I particularly like.
He also devotes attention to the palette and color mixing, a glaring omission from many how-to painting videos.
I’m not always fond of the use of time-lapse in painting instruction videos, because it can make it difficult to tell how the paint was actually applied, but here Gurney uses compressed time sequences to advantage by preceding them with normal-time sequences of painting the same passage, giving them context in terms of actual paint application.
The commentary throughout is dense with information on technique and the choices and decisions made in the selection of subjects, medium and painting approach.
Flower Painting in the Wild is a valuable resource not just on painting flowers, but on painting plants and landscape in general (the last segment, though it concentrates on wild roses, is essentially a full landscape), as well as a continuation of his instruction on using gouache and casein. It is also the kind of art instruction video that will reveal more on repeated viewing and study.
Also, perhaps in response to the experiences of painting in beautiful environments like botanical gardens, this video seems to have more of a poetic quality than Gurney’s previous efforts, with attention given to the cinematography of the subject flowers and even a philosophical quote from Victorian artist and critic John Ruskin.
Flower Painting in the Wild is currently available as a digital download (roughly 3GB) for $14.50 USD from Sellfy or Gumroad or Cubebrush, or as a DVD for $24.50 from Kunaki (the manufacturer) or Amazon. (I chose a digital download from Gumroad for my review copy.)
There is a trailer on YouTube, along with a ten minute sample, and more information on Gurney’s blog, Gurney Journey.
As always with James Gurney’s instructional videos, there is a wealth of supplementary information on his blog, which you can access with a search for “Flower Painting in the Wild“.
