Flower Power - Finished!!

When I left you last time, i had just completed my second attempt at this painting. I hope that my experience with this image will be helpful to you as you work through your own paintings.

 

I was somewhat happy with my second attempt, but it was still not what I hoped for. This time I cut a 34 x 38" piece of hot press paper, taped a nice wide border around it and started all over again.

First of all, I masked out each of the flowers, and spattered some maskoid on the background. I wanted a variety of sizes of spatter so I used different size brushes, and changed the direction of the way I held the brush so that the spatter would make an interesting pattern.

Once the spattering was dry, I painted the figure using all watercolor (no fluid acrylics); instead of realistic colors for her hair, I used sienna, violet, mauve, brown, and green.

 I knew that

I would be able to drop in all of my spring greens on the background and let them mingle on the paper; by adding more pigment and drops of water, I could create lots of blooms and run-backs, which is just what I wanted.
 (I know, usually in watercolor, these are the very things we try to avoid!)

 

Flower Power

I am happy with this painting as it really expresses my feelings.
It's a giant leap from the photo and definitely a big improvement  from my first attempt.

I am sharing this with you in the hope that it will be an encouragement to you. There are times when we just have to persevere until we accomplish what we are dreaming of.  It's also so important to know your materials. In this case, it would have been much more difficult to achieve this lively, textured background using cold press paper. It would have been a totally different painting.

In my next post, I'll share some ways that I make decisions about making changes in a painting without having to make corrections on the paper.

Until then, happy painting!

Please leave questions or comments; I'd love to hear from you.