I sketched these angel wing begonias the other day and sat down to paint them. Thought it would be a quicky watercolor sketch!
Here's the original photo. I edited out the background in my head at least. Who wants to paint the dog water bowl?! And too many leaves!
I used masking on my whites - yes, including the dots in the two right hand leaves and washed a nice soft yellow background.
TIP: To make dots use the end of the paint brush or a toothpick if you need tiny ones....works with paint or with masking fluid.
Then I started on those leaves....the left one first. And the trouble began. Scrubbing became my new BFF. Adding green paint and scrubbing it off. Three hours later or was it five? I thought the leaves were doing well.
Time for those beautiful flowers....as you can see the color is wrong, wrong, wrong but it was the best I could do.
Scrub, scrub!
I tried every red I had in my pallette...Alizarin, Windsor red, crimson lake....none on the pallette worked. They were too orange, too purple - just wrong!
Scrub, scrub! I was not happy at all!
Then I remembered I had more reds in my paint box. I tried EIGHT reds!
Daniel Smith and M Graham Quinacridone Rose and Red were my new friends. But I had lost my whites scrubbing off all those reds. Gouache to the rescue.....finally about TEN hours later I was done.
I thought it was a total disaster for hours, and then those two magic quinacridones fixed my problems.
I even had to repaint the background because I smeared paint all over it...sigh! So messy!
My point is...sometimes the best paintings I do feel like they are NEVER going to work....but I keep slogging on and magic can happen!
Moral of the story don't give up!
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
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