How to Paint a Peony – Still Life Painting Course

Welcome to ‘How to Paint a Peony’.

In this course, I’m excited to guide you through creating the delicate details of a peony in an impressionist style.

You might feel intimidated by the complexity of painting peonies, struggle with basic drawing techniques, lack confidence in your colour-mixing skills, or are unsure of how to start.

Don’t worry; I’ve got you covered!

Course Outline

Introduction to Tools & Materials

Gathering Materials: Understanding what supplies are needed (brushes, paints, canvases, etc.)
What are the best colours to use? Which brushes? I go through all the tools and materials I use for the painting.

Prep Studies
Sketching Basics: How to draw a basic peony outline. Getting to know our subject by creating small thumbnail sketches and a ‘notan’ study.

Poster Study
Do you feel like you’re always overworking your painting or fiddling with the details? With the poster study, you can get expressive and try to create the concept in a few brushstrokes!

Lesson 1: Drawing
Discover how to prepare our surface, measure proportions and capture the shapes within the flowerhead.

Lesson 2: Pen & Wash
Focus on the contrast in the subject and create a still life that ‘reads across the room’ before we begin.

Lesson 3: Background
Balancing our background to add variety with brushstrokes, colour changes and values to draw our focus.

Lesson 4: Water & Reflections
How do you create realistic reflections in water? We’ll break down the vase into simple shapes and look for a warm, cool pattern with a simple block-in.

Lesson 5: Flowerhead
Colour Mixing: This section covers the basics of colour theory and mixing a compressed colour string for realistic peony colours. To paint the flowerhead successfully, we’ll pre-mix some colours. Spending 80% of the time on the palette and 20% on the canvas will help create freshness in your brushmarks.

Lesson 6: Finishing Touches
Petal Shapes and Textures, Add blushes of colour with glazes, glimmering reflections in the water, and delicate petals to bring the painting together.

Course Overview

Throughout this acrylic still-life course, you’ll develop essential skills and techniques to create stunning, realistic peony paintings. We will cover everything from basic brush strokes to advanced layering techniques, ensuring you can capture the depth, richness, and texture of peonies while still adhering to classical painting techniques.

After taking your course, you’ll feel confident in your ability to paint peonies, understand fundamental drawing methods to establish proportion, scale and form and paint beautiful peony paintings that you can set up at home.

What’s in the Course?

• 1 x Single-Stem Peony Painting from start to finish, based in the studio, working from a reference image.
• 1 x Impressionistic ‘poster study’ to develop loose brushstrokes
• 1 x sketches and Notan study – to understand our subject
• 9-lesson curriculum: study at your own pace (with lifetime access to these recordings)
• Step-by-step instructional videos so that you can follow along at your own pace.
• Each stage is a detailed yet easy-to-follow process.
• DRAWING TEMPLATE – line drawing to follow to help you overcome the blank page
• LIFETIME ACCESS to video lessons, download on separate devices, keep forever.
• Downloadable Tools & Materials List
• Downloadable JPEG reference images and reference line drawings.
• Printable Class materials list, over 3+ hrs of detailed video instruction.