Close Cropped Flower

Georgia O'Keefe is famous for her large oil pantings of extreme closeups of flowers. Cropping paintings of florals closely give them an almost abstract and very feminine appearance. The following link takes you to a sight where you can view many of her paintings of flowers. http://www.georgiaokeeffegallery.com/Floral.aspx

Here is a close up photo that I took of a tiger lily.  I cropped it even further with a  pen outline on the photo before I began to work on the pastel painting.

Unlike Georgia O'keefe I chose to work on a smaller suface 9" X 7". I chose suede board as the base since it holds a lot of pastel layers and has a rich smooth look in the final project. I sprayed with workable fixative between layers of pastel and finished with a final fixative spray when the work was completed.

The final project is brighter, smoother and softer than the photo. You can almost feel the velvet of the petals.

The following are photos of flowers I took and cropped upclose . Use them as reference material for your own pastel paintings or take some photos of your own to experiment with. Don't be afraid to crop the photos even closer to emphasize a certain element of the flower.