Turn Silk Flowers into Luxury Wall Art | Elegant DIY Floral Painting Tutorial

Painting with flowers. Hi, welcome to another video. My name is Katherine Bergman. I'm a florist with over 30 years experience designing weddings and events, sharing all things floral with you each week. Today we're going to create this beautiful elevated silk flower painting. You ready to make something gorgeous together? Let's get started. Okay, so for today's craft project, I'm going to show you the materials you need. First of all, you're going to need a framed canvas. So I was lucky I was at HomeGoods and found this. It's a 24 by 18 frame and it has a beautiful piece of linen here. It's actually a bulletin board, but I was going to paint it and I thought, you know what? This natural linen background is actually beautiful for our project. And the hardest thing to find for today's project are half urns. I found this on Amazon, of course, it's a set of four. So you get four pieces of this and it's just a plastic urn that's been cut in half. And you can see that it's just a little half urn and it's really cheap plastic, but we can paint it and make it look nice. And it comes in two parts like this and you get four of these. So you can make four of these paintings if you want. So it's like a wall vase type of thing. And so what I did here was paint it with grayish blue chalk paint. And then I use this great gilding wax. It's a gold gilding wax that I found on Amazon to go over. I went over the gray paint with that gilding wax with a dry brush to give you sort of an antique urn without it being spray painted looking. And you're going to need a glue gun. Any glue gun will do. You're going to need a piece of styrofoam cut to fit inside this urn to arrange your artificial flowers in. And then just an assortment of artificial flowers that you like. I have here peonies and tulips with spring branches and some greenery. Anything you like your color that goes with the color scheme of the room you want to use this in. I want to use this in my powder room. OK, I'm going to show you how we're going to set this all up. OK, so we're first going to glue our urn and styrofoam to the frame. So what I did was found the center of the inner center of the canvas, the inner part of the canvas made a little pencil dot right there. I found the center of the urn and I put a little tiny pencil mark right here. And you line these two up if you want your urn to be centered. And then I'm going to put a pretty low because the arrangement is going to be pretty large up here. And then you're just going to glue it down with your hot glue gun. I'm just going to run the hot glue along the seam or the edge of this urn. Then we're going to go ahead and glue the top of the urn. It's a little tricky to do this because you don't have much of an edge to work with. So you kind of want to glob on your glue and any extra you can always clean it up. OK, so now our urn has been secured in place and we just have to glue the styrofoam in here. OK, put lots of glue on that styrofoam because we're actually going to be using it to hold our flower. So we need to be very secure on the canvas. So I let the glue dry for about 10 minutes so that we're ready to work. And now the styrofoam and the urn is very secure on the canvas. And I've elevated it with two tall books because I think it's a little easier to work sort of flat, but at an angle easier than if you had it on the easel. Putting my art history degree to work. These are my textbooks from college. And I'm going to start with setting the large lines with greenery and flowering branches. Now, the way I envision this design, it's to the flowers are going to go off canvas. I wanted to enhance the three dimensionality of the design by having the greenery and some branches go off off the edge of the frame. I don't need it to. It's not a real painting, right? So I think it's more whimsical and interesting to have it stick out above your frame and outside of your frame makes it more three dimensional and interesting. That's just sort of my take. I'm going to set the lines with the greenery first. OK, we're going to set the lines here. So that's my own personal preference. If you wanted to stay within the gold frame, you, of course, can do that. But I think it's fun to have it come out of the gold frame. So I've got the Nandina greenery, and then I'm going to now put in some flowering branches, the Styrofoam. And I'm just trying to make sure the design doesn't look too flat. I think I'm ready now for some focal flowers. For the focal flowers today, I have these faux peonies in this corally blush color. And you can choose flowers that match your decor. I was thinking of doing one that's sort of wintry with Magnolia. That would be really beautiful, I think. So now you're just designing flowers like we do every week, right? We have some pretty peony buds. This is also a great thing to use if you're doing a wedding for your guest car table. I actually made one of these for my sister's wedding. You can see my video of her wedding. And I don't know if I showed this, but we actually put this on a beautiful gold easel and put it at the table where the guest cards were. It doesn't take up a lot of space on the table, but it gives you a really interesting and beautiful accent. OK, now I'm going to add in some tulips. I have some very beautiful tulips here. Oh, here's another peony bud. I think I want this one to be a little closer to this one. So we have a nice tight focal point here. Now we're going to add in our tulips. I got these beautiful tulips that have the fully bloomed tulips as well as the buds. So they look really, really realistic in this peachy color, which I like very much. I don't know if it's secure or not. Of course, the first time I did so much better. Wonderful thing about working with foam flowers is you could bend them however you want. I wish I could do this with real flowers. And then to make it look three dimensional, I want to have a tulip coming out here. You can fix it once you have it all in, too. Then we're going to add in some more greenery and flowering branches. Here's some tulip greenery. I have a stem of very pretty Queen Anne's lace here. Looks so real with the foliage. Really nice one. Add that in here. Sort of balances our flowering branches over here. So for me, the key to very realistic looking faux flowers is color. Just want to make sure the color is not too strange. Like you see these colors in nature. So I tend to like to use a lot of whites and greens with faux flowers because it's more realistic. Like just don't get a teal rose or a royal purple rose or something that you just don't see real flowers in that color in real life. And I have more of this Nandina foliage. I'm going to add around here to have it come out of the arrangement. Just kind of do it how you would do a real arrangement, whatever shape or dimension you like. And I'm being careful to not make this composition too flat. Because I want it to look very three-dimensional when it's on the wall. Add a piece here and have it cascade over our urn a little bit. That would be really pretty. I'm going to have these sort of woody branched, looks like bridal veil spirea. I'm going to add in here just for like that tendril-y look. I want this maybe more here or like here behind the peonies. Okay, I'm going to take a look again. Make sure everything looks good. I think we're done. You can always fix it. Oh, this peony fell out. You can always fix it once it's upright and even when it's hanging on your wall. Okay, and I think we're done. I'm going to put on the easel and take a look and we can kind of fluff it up a little bit. So we're all done. This turned out really well. It's not very difficult. It's basically doing like a one-sided arrangement in silk. Against a canvas and frame and you've created an elevated craft project that you would be proud to feature in any room in your house. This floral painting could be displayed on a beautiful easel like this or hang on your wall. I'm going to use this in my powder room. So I hope you had fun today and learned something. I don't usually do a lot of craft projects. Didn't show you a popsicle stick birdhouse, did I? I wanted to show you something high-end and elevated, something that you can actually use. And doing it in silk means you could feature it in any room in your house. As always, please like and subscribe and send me a little comment to let me know if you're going to do this this week. Go out and source the materials for a fun project this week or just treat yourself to some beautiful fresh flowers. Remember, flowers are nature's little luxury. And I will see you in my next video.