Flower Face

The other day, I was following another of Ana’s tutorials on Facebook. It was an abstract floral painting using acrylic paint, intending to be a bunch of pretty flowers in a vase. As usual though things didn’t go as expected so I recreated what I had and made something funny and cute out of it!

The Orange Background

Ana also used orange in her tutorial but I went for neon orange! First we spread the paint on the paper using an old credit card. That seems to be a resourceful substitute for a palette knife, typically used by Ana in her work. So far so good!

Getting the Flowers Ready

To make the flowers we used a variety of colours starting with red, yellow, blue, green and light green and applied it on paper with our fingers. Though not in the tutorial, I added some light pink. Up to then, all was going well. Added the vase in metallic white, and then I wasn’t sure if the shape went well with the bushy bouquet of flowers. I nevertheless continued and painted the background in white to create some negative space for the flowers and added the leaves. My gut feeling though was that it wasn’t going work, but I wasn’t going to give up.

As my instincts told me, it just wasn’t working. The leaves looked very silly. I added more colours to the flowers but to no avail. Even changed the colours of the leaves to a different green but it wasn’t to be. It’s one of those frustrating moments in which you are not getting anywhere no matter how hard you try. And I was ready to cry until my boyfriend said, “Hey, that can be a face”! I think he was referring to the spiky green hair that was intended to be the leaves haha. So a face it is then! Added the eyes and tweaked the flowers a bit so it looked like “the face” was wearing some coloured beads. And here it is… problem solved!

One thing is certain. You can never tell if your artwork will go as planned especially if you are challenging something new but take a gamble anyway. Once you’re stuck with the “wrong” painting, there is only one way to solve it. Recreate! That’s the beauty of being creative. When Ana saw this painting, she remarked “You don’t need to cry. I think the end result is so unique! It looks really fun and different”. So there you go!