Watercolor Week 6

This week was so great!  First of all, we were done with rhythm painting and I could stop being completely embarrassed during class every day!

We started the week with a trip up to the Thanksgiving Point Gardens where we spent the whole day taking photos to paint from.  I got so many beautiful floral pictures for this project and so many that I want to paint on my own as well.

We spent the week focusing on negative painting, a technique that is perfect for lots of overlapping objects, like leaves and petals of a flower.

Here’s my first try (sorry, I forgot to take step by step shots)

Over all I liked it, but I felt like it was a little over worked.  I’m having such a hard time remembering to let my lights show through.  I decided to take another try at it (this time I remembered my step by step shots!)

Start with loose sketch

Over your sketch do a very abstract wash, placing darks and lights basically where you want them, but make sure you don’t color in the lines.  The top picture is what the wash looks like right when I paint it, the next is the wash after it dries.  (the values change so much as the picture dries)

When your paper is completely dry, pick out the stems that are closest to you and paint around them.  Choose your colors according to what is behind the object- for this painting I did reds and yellows if the petal was in front of another flower petal, and blues and yellows if it was in front of leaves.

When that layer is dry, do it again with the next layer of petals.

And then do it again…

And again and again until you’ve worked your way to the last layer

Over all I’m liking my second version a lot better, but I want to try it with a different blue.  (I was using Ultra Marine which is a semi-transparent which is why the blue looks a little chalky on the final piece) .  It was a lot of fun and definitely something I’ll do again.