I wanted to try another loose flower watercolor since I really need practice in this area. I'm not a realistic painter, I like to do representational flower pieces. I recently bought two books by Ann Blockley, one titled
Watercolour Textures and the other,
Experimental Flowers In Watercolour. They are both great books full of wonderful examples for creating texture in watercolors and painting loosely. They inspired me to try this watercolor. I took this painting to class for critique by
Jerry Stitt. He liked the texture in the green area which was accomplished by flicking dark paint into the wet watercolor, then using crumpled tissue paper to create the illusion of leaves and greenery. When painting this I was mindful of something Jerry always tells us, "the fewer shapes the better". So although you see three flowers here, they overlap to form one shape. He said that if I had made them separate flowers the painting would have looked spotty. I was also mindful to make each flower a different size - another point that is is always drummed into us. Whether it be flowers or trees or houses, vary the shapes so they don't become boring. I painted this watercolor on Arches hot pressed paper using scarlet lake, brown madder, windsor green (yellow shade) and burnt sienna.
