Quick Camelia

Watercolor on Arches paper, 7.5″ x 10″
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Tonight was painting group and it was late by the time we got around to painting (after looking at each other’s paintings from the past week and random chatting). I snipped a camelia off my bush and had an idea of a loose flower with ink over it using some new colors I got from Daniel Smith. Except the colors were recommended at the workshop I attended in February for creating textured backgrounds, not for delicate flowers (oops…Strike One).

While I was painting I got really interested in the glass bowl and completely overworked the flower (StrikeTwo). The colors were muddy (they would have been fine for an old textured wall though) so I started adding white goauche mixed with pink to get back the lights and made a mess (Strike Three, you’re out!) (Please pardon the baseball metaphor.)

I decided to wash off the flower and try again. With a small sponge and clean water I wiped off all the pigment that would come off, used my hair dryer to dry it and quickly and more loosely repainted. It’s cheerier now. Since I scanned the sketch before I painted, I can easily print out the sketch on another piece of watercolor paper and paint it again even brighter without having to redraw it (although the drawing was actually a lot of fun) except for straightening out the bowl a bit since I was working fast and didn’t notice it was a little off.

Here’s the original before the flower got washed off:

(Ick)