Today in the my watercolor class I demonstrated painting white flowers and soft-focus bright or dark backgrounds. A neighbor graciously allowed me to pick a huge bouquet of Matalija poppies from her gigantic bush so each artist had their own flower to paint.
To save time I only painted a quarter of the flower before going on to paint the background. This made it a little difficult to finish the painting after the class since by then the flower had completely changed so I just pretended a little.
To paint the background I started by making three different puddles in little bowls: Permanent Alizarin Crimson, Quinacridone Gold and Winsor (phthalo) Blue. I used a separate brush for each color to keep the colors clean. Then I just worked my way around, washing on little gold, a patch of red beside it, a splotch of blue, letting the colors touch and mingle.
To warm up for today’s demo I did this sketch last night using my fun new green Pitt Artists Brush Pen and then added watercolor. And I spelled the flower name wrong. Which I’ve been doing forever, or at least since I painted the first one several years ago found on my website here.
Jana Bouc, Artist 