Wild Fennel

I just had to go back to using muted colors after my last exercise. It's more in my comfort zone. I'm sorry I didn't photograph this in the various stages to show how I painted this piece. I started out masking out the fennel flowers, drawing them very loosely with various dots of masking fluid and joined the dots together to give the appearance of fennel flower heads. I also masked out some branches and splattered some masking fluid randomly onto 140lb Fabriano cold pressed paper. Once dry I started adding the background colors of indigo and Daniel Smith's Pompeii red. After that dried I added more branches and spatterings with masking fluid. When dry I sprayed the watercolor in parts with water and added a darker shade of indigo mixed with a little alizaron into the wet areas and waited for it to dry. I then removed all the masking fluid and loosely wet the flowers and painted them first with Aureolin yellow and then, while still wet, I dropped in some transparent yellow to give them a bit of depth. These flowers are somewhat of a greeny yellow, leaning towards mustard color. I had to try out several yellows on a piece of scrap paper to get the right hue. Layering always helps to give a painting more depth.