3.12.2012

Wild Fennel


Going outside my comfort zone again to have another stab at painting flowers. I love the wild fennel that grows so plentifully around our area. The background around the yellow flowers is not in contrast enough to make them pop. I should have used a violet hue - the compliment of yellow - to make the flowers pop more. I always have problems with the backgrounds when trying to paint flowers in watercolors - not in choosing the color, but actually painting it. These particular flowers are made up of little dots and it is difficult to paint around them afterwards without it looking like a deliberate outline around the flowers. To get color vibration going the background color needs to be of the same value as the yellow of the flowers, which would have made it difficult to put the background in first without making the yellow flowers look dull. 

3.02.2012

Dawn Light


I decided this week to paint the same picture (more or less) from both a vertical and horizontal viewpoint. It sometimes helps to decide which is the better format. I also painted the vertical on hot pressed paper and the horizontal on cold pressed paper. I took them both to class and the consensus was that the horizontal was a better painting, the reason being that in the vertical I virtually divided the painting in half, something one should avoid. Of course there is an easy fix, to just crop the vertical watercolor but what I liked about it was the texture in the hills, which works much better for me on hot pressed paper. I am going to repeat the horizontal on hot pressed paper because I do like that format better.