Annie's Rose

My daughter Annie and step sister Val were moving to a new apartment. I offered to paint Annie a macro floral for the living room, and she gave me several photo reference options to choose from. I chose this rose, and cropped the photo to really get into the heart of this glowing flower. This time, for a challenge, I would go as big as I could. Watercolor paper comes in 22"x30" sheets, and this was how I painted it. It nearly covered my entire drafting table, and it took one whole day just to paint in the veins. It was while painting this rose that I added 'bigger brushes' to my shopping wish list.

Yellow Rose

There were two projects in CharM's macro tutorial, the second one being a sunflower. While others in the online class moved on to paint Char's richly colored version of the sunflower, I chose instead to paint this delicate rose. Part of the sunflower lesson was to discover how to darken yellow when in shadow. How do you make yellow darker anyway? Yellow cannot get very dark on its own, and adding black would only dull it. Artists' trick: add orange or green. Consider this the next time you look into the depths of a yellow rose.

The Macro Floral Tutorial

As I explored the WetCanvas! website, I discovered that someone simply called CharM was conducting an online tutorial on painting a close up of a peony in the format known as macro. I had done a bit of that already, and was eager to learn more. The class was well underway when I joined in, so I had some catching up to do. Through sharing questions, struggles and progresses, eventially about twelve artists from all over the place completed their own version of this peony. Thanks, Char.

Watercolor Canvas

There is a fairly new product available to watercolor painters which enables them to apply watercolor paint to canvas. Although expensive, this would be worth a try. I new technique was required, as the paint handled much differently on the poorly absorbing woven surface. I found that I required a looser style, and moved the work in progress from the drafting board to my rarely used easle. As with the pinecones, this poppy was an image from WetCanvas' Image Reference Library, or IRL. Many more would follow.