hello luvs and paintingfool :)
firstly, thank you for the great comments :) oh dear... luvs... your questions are a little too technical for me, but i'll try to explain :) well.. the sunflower is definitely one stroke... that's how i learnt it anyway. i didn't base the mirrors because they already came in that black and looked totally cool! i didn't follow any template for the sunflowers, i just drew circles (centers) where i wanted the flowers to be then painted the petals on. i use like perhaps 5 colors (waterbase acrylic by jo sonja)and did perhaps 3-4 layers of petals... the colors for the petals were : yellow oxide (the brownish petals at the base), light yellow and warm white. for the upper layers i loaded warm white + light yellow then tipped the brush with yellow-orange and then some of the topmost petals were just warm white tipped with pale gold. i normally don't use pale gold on sunflowers but seeing that they were christmas gifts... i thought to give the flowers some 'glow' :) based the centers with a medium brown (hiding all the flaws at the base of the petals :) the petals were drawn outside to in) then used an old stiff brush to stipple burnt umber on the outside of the flower center, and yellow oxide + moss green to stipple the center of the flower center. i then used a stylus to put the dots on the center (warm white, light yellow and moss green) finally, i spattered the whole thing with pale gold using a tooth brush. wiped off any access spatters i didn't want, hence you only see the spatters near the flowers... to give it some magical stardust qualities :) (i think) finished off with 2 layers of satin varnish. for the elven mirror, i first designed the motif on a piece of paper then copied the design onto a transparency (some how i always prefer to keep my designs on tracing paper or transparency... transparency last longer and u can actually flip it the other way and do the opposite if needed) (i also use transparency for stencils.) then i transferred the motif onto the mirror using white transfer paper. the rest was just filling in the blanks. i use warm white and did like 3 layers to have it properly based. i also use the aid of a medium call 'stroke and blend' by jo sonja so that the painting is smooth. for the topmost layer i used pearl white to give the motif some luminescence (tho it just looks white in the picture) shaded parts of it with very diluted pale gold for dimension. finished off with 2 layers of satin varnish :) oh dear... i hope i'm not too long winded :) but those are the techniques i used (if you can call them techniques :) hope it helps :) | 
