Poinsettia Watercolor Step by Step

Now that all the holiday craziness is over, I’m finally getting around to posting some of my final paintings from last semester!  (it only took me until a month after Christmas!)  Here’s a little painting I did of a poinsettia.  I was lucky enough to have a teacher who owns a custom framing shop and for our final we all went there and learned how to frame one of our pieces.  It was great!  Now I have a fun little Christmas piece to hang up each year.  Here’s the process I used to get there-

First, I drew in my flowers and glazed yellow.  When that was dry I went in with some red.

I slowly built up the intensity of the red and yellow on the top of flower with lots of glazes.  I began to work the leaves the same way.

Added a vase and a bit of a shadow to ground the flowers and that was that!