How to: O’Keeffe Black Glue Flowers

1. . Looking at Georgia O’Keeffe paintings you can see how she liked to get very close to her flower references. In many of her paintings the flowers were a single bloom that bled off all four edges of the painting. This may help kids to look at the boundaries and framework of their paintings in a different way.

First draw with a pencil, a very simple outline of the petals and center of the flower. Emphasize simple because drawing a lot of detail with a glue bottle is not possible.

Mix black tempera paint into a glue bottle – enough to get a nice dark black color.

Draw over your pencil lines with the black glue bottle. Carefully angle the bottle to minimize the amount coming out of the bottle. Don’t worry about being exact, the next step of painting will cover the pencil lines..

2. Let the glue lines dry completely so they won’t mix into your painting. After it’s dry, use watercolor to paint your flower any color. You can paint right over the black glue, making a barrier for the watercolor paint if you don’t want it to bleed into other areas. The black line makes a nice contrast to the watercolor paint as well.