“Tulips”, 9×12″ pastel on paper by Annie Dash Studios
The beautiful tulip symbolizes unconditional love and rebirth, while pink tulips represent affection, caring, good wishes, and joy. While they are in bloom for a relatively short period of time, seeing them brings joy to my artist’s heart.
While visiting Spring Mill State Park in Mitchell, IN, I was drawn to this group of pink tulips growing outside the general store building, and took this photo of the gorgeous blooms:
“Peonies” photograph by Annie Dash
Continuing my floral portrait series that began with “Magnolia”, and “Rose” in watercolor and moved to pastel painting with “Iris”, and “Hydrangea”, and “Peonies”, I am proud to add Tulips to this collection.
As with the other artworks in the series, I used PanPastels to produce a painterly look for the underpainting of the flower blossoms and background, then added Rembrandt soft pastel sticks, Faber Castell Pitt, Caran d’Ache, and Carbothello pastel pencils for all the detail work. I wanted to highlight the beauty and delicate color of the blooms against the stone background and soil. I painted in many layers to achieve this. Here is a video overview of the completed piece.
This was quite a complex and challenging work to complete but I absolutely loved working in the pastel medium to create this piece!
I always work from extremely high quality reference photos with professional prints, and recommend this for other artists as well. In fact, I was inspired to study photography in college and beyond from my desire to get high quality reference photos (you can learn more about that in the About page).
The floral portraits in this series are available as fine art giclee prints in the Online Shop. The “Tulips” original piece and prints will be available as well in the future. Sign up for the Newsletter to be notified when it becomes available for purchase.
I’m wishing you and your loved ones a day filled with affection, caring, good wishes, and joy!