How to Paint Lilacs

Do certain flowers bring memories from your past flooding in? Like when you hear that song, or smell that fragrance? When I see lilacs, the springtimes of my childhood come rushing back.

Here’s the weird part – I wouldn’t have even known that about lilacs if I hadn’t moved back to my childhood home.

The lilacs are no longer bushes; they’re full grown trees now, but I still managed to snag a few branches and clip some.

We don’t really have a garden. We have a yard that happens to have flowers.

Gardening? It’s another thing on my ‘To Do’ list. But it’s way, way down there.

Painting tutorials is much higher up on the list. So is making videos. Which, by the way, I happened to shoot of this tutorial. But I haven’t edited it yet. I was too thrilled about getting my computer back at 5 pm today with a working mouse!

I’m not sure when I’ll get the video edited because the computer goes back to Mr. Geek’s tomorrow at 9.

You didn’t think I’d try to hook a printer up, did you? Not a chance.

But this will give you a pretty good idea of how to paint lilacs if, like, you just can’t wait a few days for the video.

I might wonder a bit about you then. Because there’d be at least two of us in the club .

I started off by doing a purple watery wash for the background. A nice lavender basecoat would work to. Or even green. Take your pick.

I missed the first few still photos because I was trying so hard to be informative, yet entertaining {!} on the video. Here’s what I left out – there are five paint colors in this tutorial.

• Violet Pansy
• Lavender
• Wicker White
• Hauser Green Medium
• Hauser Green Dark

Take a liner brush with Hauser Green Medium and draw three curved lines for the lilac stems.

Add buds using Violet Pansy.

Below the buds, use Lavender to create the open blossoms.

Lilacs blossoms have four petals, but at this point you just have to dab the Lavender on both sides and fully in the middle.

 

So you basically get a huge lavender blob at this point.

Now take some Wicker White and start highlighting. This is actually the hardest part of this tutorial because the tendency is to paint all four petals of each blossom.

But, don’t. Paint some white blossoms on one lilac, then move to another. High, low, across. Stagger it so you don’t paint them all uniform.

I chose the lilac on the left to be the in the foreground so it has the most white on it, and the most full blossoms.

Now, I added white dots to a few of the blossoms, but you could wait until the very end to add the dots.

While you’re waiting for the white to dry, paint some curves with Hauser Green Medium. These curves will be the center vein of each leaf.

Then take some Lavender and topcoat all of the white highlighting, except the dots. The white still shows thru.

Now to add some shading. The easiest way to do it is to shade with Violet Pansy right next to wherever you painted white highlights.

Also add some shading between the top lilac and the one ‘behind’ it.

Then topcoat all of the shading with Lavender. This will ‘smooth out’ any brushstrokes that look too blotchy.

Fill in all the leaves with Hauser Green Medium.

Paint the center veins with white and highlight one side of the vein with white – just the curved part.

For shading, I used Hauser Green Dark. The main places to shade are where the leaves touch the lilac blossoms and also where the leaves touch each other. Decide which leaf will be the top and shade on the ‘bottom’ leaf.

You can add some shading on the concave curves too. It just adds a little more dimension.

Then topcoat all your leaves with Hauser Green Medium.

As a last minute thought, I added some stems. Although lilac stems aren’t really stems. They’re branches. But, we’re allowed to take some artistic license with our own paintings, aren’t we?

Highlight on the outside curves and shade on the inner curves and ‘between’ the stems.

It just dawned on me that it’s kinda fitting that my first video tutorial would be lilacs. This is the house where I started painting. And I’m back here again. Full circle.

Huh. Imagine that.

Do any flowers hold special memories for you? I’d love to know!