Demonstration Art

This week, there are two sets of guidelines for how to paint chrysanthemums. The first illustrates how to paint the heads of chrysanthemum blossoms at different angles. The photo below is an example of blossoms facing in different directions.

Note that some blossoms face nearly straight toward the viewer while others are seen from various angles. The illustration below shows how to render that effect in paintings.

Decide what angle you want a blossom to have, draw an imaginary oval around where the perimeter of the blossom will be in your painting, and place the stamen in the appropriate position. Then paint each petal from the perimeter to the stamen with two outline strokes. This approach can be adopted for many painting subjects.

The following illustration shows how to paint chrysanthemum leaves. The Japanese word for these kind of 5-lobed leaves is gokiyonketsu. Its meaning is that the leaves are like hands with 5 protruding points like fingers and 4 indentations like the spaces between fingers.

The leaves on the left are rendered with 5 strokes each--one for each lobe--using the mōkkōtsu-hō technique and sokuhitsu (slanting strokes). The leaves on the right use senbyō-hō.

Here is a sketch of a complete chrysanthemum plant for practice.

Demonstration Painting

Be sure to review the guidance above for painting blossoms at various angles to the viewer and for painting leaves. For my painting, I used the kōrokutensai-hō technique for the blossoms. I used senbyō-hō (line strokes) to outline the petals and mokkotsu-hō (boneless) strokes for the color inside the petals. For kōrokutensai-hō, it doesn't matter which comes first, but in this painting doing the line strokes first is a lot easier.