Melanie Florio

This still life is of my beloved morning cup of coffee in my favorite jadite mug.  

Since the mug is from the 50’s, I decided to paint it with a soft 50’s color palette.  I put it on a table cloth also from the 50’s, compliments of my grandma’s linens.  I was also kind of feeling girly that day and wanted to paint in pastel colors also.  It took 4 to 5 hours to paint from start to finish, and it was painted on a fine linen…what a difference the smooth surface of linen makes!  

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I painted with a different process for this painting.  Usually I go from the darkest general shapes to the lightest general shapes, and don’t get into the details until the entire canvas is at least covered with paint.  For this painting, I only partially followed that process, because I wanted to paint each flower (with details and all) in one pass.   That way, the flower would remain in the same position….it wouldn’t go blooming or dying on me mid-paint-stroke.  

I documented the process step by step.  

I have a trick for painting pedals which works especially well for ranunculus.  I use a filbert synthetic haired brush, dip it in the paint mixed with lots of linseed oil, and paint each pedal stroke by stroke, or pedal by pedal.  I love the way the synthetic haired filbert creates crisp flower pedal edges.  

Another discovery on the painting is that fabric is much easier to paint when the weave is heavier.  Drapery has always been a challenge for me, but in this thick woven tablecloth, the folds were much easier to understand.  I think the pattern helps create the illusion of folds as well.  

Fun fun fun!  

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For this painting…which for the life of me I can’t get a good photo of… was sort of an obsession with the color orange.  Here was my process for this one.  

1. Light drawing with turpentine and yellow ochre paint.  

2. Biggest darkest general shapes went in first.  This happened to define the drawing, as it was the negative space surrounding the still flowers.  I used a lot of raw umber with cadmium red.  HOWEVER…I should have made it darker in the beginning cause later in the process I had to go back in and darken it up!  (I’ll get to that part later.)

3.  Next I started painting the midtones in the vase, clementines, and then flowers.  I used lots if cadmium color, alizarin crimson, and yellow ochre for the flowers. 

4. Lighter midtones in the flowers…First what I do is paint a darker blob (in this case..a dark reddish blob).  Then, I go on top of this with a lighter value (orange), a touch of oil, and a soft filbert brush (great for pedals), and I try to paint the pedals (try to just see them as orange shapes) emerging from the shadow shapes as accurately as possible the first time around…I like to try to get it on the first try, cause the values don’t mush together and the pedals remain fresh and crisp.  

5.  Then I put the lighter values on the pedals, clementines, and vase.  

6.  Final touches of highlight finish it off.

7.  Ok, and here was my big whoops moment, because the painting wasn’t as dramatic as I wanted it to be…so I then went in and darkened the background everywhere except around the lightest parts of the flowers…cause I like to create glowing effects with the light. I also glazed down some of the flowers on the left with an warm dark mix to push them back into space/ exaggerate the atmospheric perspective.   

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This is a little 8x10 oil painting.  

I started with a simple drawing in turpenoid and an earth tone, and once I had the drawing in place, I started painting the bigger darker shapes (the bottom of the glass, adn the red checkers in the foreground.   I worked my way up the canvas, and painted from dark to light, and general to specific.

 I made the top of the painting lighter to show some depth (really exaggerating atmospheric perspective).  In the top 4th quadrant of the painting, I painted the light color first and put the darker (but still light red) on top of that.  This is a good way to make sure that atmospheric perspective takes effect.  

The tablecloth was so much fun to paint! 

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For this painting, I used some flowers left over from my friend Trae Mundt’s art show (here is her website ).  I once took a workshop at The Art Studio in Westminster with David Leffel, and he told me that adding cadmium colors to shadows creates a luminous effect, so I do this from time to time.  I also like to play up the light hitting flowers by adding a sort of halo around the really bright ones: the example in this painting being that around the cadmium yellow gerber daisies I mixed cadmium yellow into the background color (raw umber), and created a gradation expanding from the petals into the background.  

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This is a still life I just painted of a very old perfume bottle, maybe from the 20’s?  I used a yellow light to create a very warm glow on the objects. 

The hardest thing about making this was that I was painting it in the dark!  I don’t have a very good still life set up in my studio because it is lit with overhead florescent lights. Whenever I want to create a still life, I have to turn the lights off and just light my objects.  If it is night when I start, the room gets really dark.  It really does make the still life glow though.  This creates an interesting challenge, and I am sure there is an easier way to do it!  Suggestions welcome.  

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This painting was an experiment in reds.  I used an old photo of my grandma as reference…and liked the ordinary subject matter or someone fixing her hair in the mirror.  This painting came to be in such an odd way.  I was almost finished with it (top photo) but knew there was something critical missing, so I put it away for a month or two, and then one day I woke up, looked at the painting fresh eyes, and knew just how to finish it… and a few minutes later, it was done.  It just needed little darker details in the face.  I also darkened the hair and fuzzed up the edge of it.  The colors are actually more accurate in the top picture…but you get the idea. 

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