Oil Painting - Water Lilies

Today I humbly present to you my oil painting of water lilies. Everyone is familiar with Claude Monet’s famous water lilies painting from his gardens in Giverny, France. He inspired a lot of artists to use water lilies as the subjects in their paintings and this is my version. This is certainly not as impressionistic as Monet’s, but I am reasonably happy with the result. It took me three tries to get the lily pads and flowers to look like what I wanted and I think my persistence paid off.

Water Lilies

12”x12” Gallery Wrapped Canvas

Below are my work in progress photos and my reference photo.

Blocking in the big shapes

I realized after this step that my colors were more saturated than I intended so there were several attempts to gradually tone them back.

Adding details to the lily pads

You’ll notice that the reference photo didn’t have any full lilies in full bloom and only a couple of flower buds. I thought the painting needed a better focal point and more interest so I added a single bloom and several more buds. Below is my first attempt at the flower. I thought it looked more like a daisy than a lotus flower so I scraped it off and started again.

Adding the Blooms

Reference Photo

I hope you like my version of Water Lilies and found my explanation of my process interesting.