Hello, everyone!
Today I decided to participate in the contest.
The theme of the contest is "Nature", and all participants draws everything what they subjectively represents under this word.
I will show the process of oil painting.
Recently I visited the museum-theater of Salvador Dali in Figueres and was inspired by the extraordinary atmosphere of surreal painting.
I really like the ability of talented artists to create extraordinary illusions in the picture, the use of new color and compositional combinations that amaze the viewer. Especially I like double pictures, in which the author imbues a dual semantic plot. Dali created such pictures, an example of this - "The appearance of a person and a vase with fruit on the beach."
There is such an amazing master among modern artists - Oleg Shuplyak. Don’t forget to look his works, they are really beautiful.


The picture I want to show in this post, I called "The Face of Nature". Of course, it was possible to come up with a name in the spirit of Dali, something like "The appearance of a person and the flight of songbirds over the blossoming shore of a mountain lake", but it is not necessary.





I'll tell you a little about the process. For work, I used a primed canvas on a circular stretcher with a diameter of 20 cm, oil paints «Ladoga» and synthetic brushes number 4, number 2 and 0.
At first it was necessary to think over the plot. I thought that I could depict the contours of the face, nose, eyes, lips and eyebrows from natural objects. So it came to mind to delineate the face with trunks and branches of trees, to designate the eyes and eyelids as flying birds, to slightly mark the eyebrows with a cloudy haze in the sky, to draw a hint of the nose like mountains, and to paint the lips with a flower on the front view. The nature really has a flower that looks like a woman's lips - psychotria elata or Psychotry sublime.
I drew the contours of the picture with a pencil.





I decided to start painting from tree trunks, outlining the contours of the face. For the bark, I used ocher, umbra burnt and Indian yellow paint. According to the idea tree trunks with flowering vines could at least simulate the girl's hair.





Translucently painted the sky, mixing white and blue paint, drew the contours of the mountains in the background, with turquoise mixture painted the lake.





With «Indian yellow» paint drew the soil, drew with green paints the vegetation, with red and English red painted the flowers.





Without waiting for the drying of the first layer, I compacted the color contrast of the drawing with the subsequent application of paints, I indicated the volume. With a thin brush painted the texture of flower petals.





On the vines added bright spots of flowers, applying immiscible smears of red and blue colors.





When the picture a little dried up, drew the foliage on the trees, strengthened the details in the picture with a fine brush, applied light glare. The picture is ready.





Some details.








I finished the picture and met the dawn from my window. 4 am on local time. See, what a beauty - the sky is like pearl.





GIF with all stages of work.

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I apologize if you find mistakes in my text. Unfortunately, my English is not perfect.