Blue Iris

A few blocks from our home, there is a ditch between a road and someone's fence. And there, from this lowly location, grew a handful of blue bearded irises. I don't know how they got there, but they were largely overlooked as cars raced past. Determined to do something about that, I returned later with my camera, and found myself eventually right in the ditch (it was dry) and even getting honked at. Nonetheless, I got what I was after, and this is the result. 

Pink Iris

Overall, 2008 had been a slow year for painting. As the year drew to a close, I finally finished this beautiful iris that had been started many months before during the studio tour. It sat, propped up on my drafting table, calling out to me to come and paint. It was nearly complete, but I knew it needed something more. At last, I darkened the background, and the petals burst forth in colorful triumph.

Amaryllis

This macro floral was painted in my usual way. I then mounted it onto a wooden panel and trimed the paper edges. The one inch panel sides were painted in casein, an opaque artist's paint. When dry, the whole thing was sprayed multiple times with a clear matte protective finish. In this way a watercolor painting may be hung without glass. It gives the painting a bold presence, resembling a work done in oil or acrylic.

Pink Lily

I really love it when a painting turns out realistically. It's one of the thrills I get when painting. As a realism painter, it is a goal that I strive for. I knew I was onto something with this beautiful lily when, as I painted, the photo illusion began to fool even me. This painting will be published in the Oxford Studio Tour 2009 brochure.

Poppy

This was not the first poppy I had painted, the other one had been done experimentally on watercolor canvas. This was done conventionally on 300 lb watercolor paper, as I nearly always use. Multiple glazes of pigment were used to bring out the flower's depth and vibrancy.

Red Rose

There is just something about roses. I was drawn back to them again and again. If the rose is the classic flower, then the red rose is the most classic of all flowers. I had to paint one to add to my rose collection. Here was another of those tricky macro compositions where the view is so close that no background or greenery shows. The eye is attracted to strong contrasts, and I used them here to keep the work interesting. But too much of a thing is......too much, and I glazed over this painting repeatedly to reduce the stark 'posterized' effect that was first created.

I find it amazing that there were actually nine different pigments used in this one red rose:

three reds, two pinks, a blue, and three greens.

Lilacs

I am a great one for saving scraps. I get it from my mother, who grew up during the depression and therefore was a better scrap saver than me. But watercolor paper is not cheap, so surely something could be done with my growing accumulation of bits and pieces trimmed from larger works.

I'm not sure how many 2.5"x4" paintings I had paper saved for, but it certainly was a lot. It was high time that I tried a miniature painting.

This was similar to the hydrangea in that the composition would be vital, as would be the lighting, to avoid a boring painting. However, even if I failed and it was boring, because it was so small, it would only be a little boring........

I got out my smallest brushes and went to work. It reminded me of knitting a baby sweater. Because the stiches, or in this case brush strokes, were proportionately so small, the miniature took just as long to complete as a larger work. In the end, I felt as if I didn't have that much to show for all the work that went into it. If your monitor is like mine, what you see will actually be larger than the original.

But I was pleased with the result, so I guess I could say that it was at least a small success.

Peach Rose

Peach is my favorite color of rose. I particularily like the Peace rose, or Chicago Peace. Peach roses were a theme in our wedding. I wanted to make sure that while I was painting flowers, I would do a peach rose. Working as usual from the Wet Canvas reference image library, I chose one with an abundance of opened petals. It reminds me of a ruffled Victorian gown with lavish petticoats.

Hydrangea

Meanwhile, there were more flowers to paint. I had been considering for some time how I might manage a macro of a clustered flower, such as a hydrangea. Here, without a contrasting background, the challenge would be keep the composition from having wallpaper sameness. Getting a good composition through careful cropping of the original image was half the battle.

This one took me three weeks to complete, as I was attending to my son who stayed with us while recovering from knee surgery. See the earlier post of Ian skateboarding........

Primary Colors

Just as I was starting this dalhia, I came across another Wet Canvas tutorial, lead by JJ in Australia. In it students were confined to using just three primary colors in their painting. I realised that the dalhia would qualify, and so was able to join in this tutorial as well.

It is surprising just how much can be done with such a limited palette. But then after all, the standard printing process uses only the three primaries plus black. The trick for the artist is in choosing which of each three colors to use. For example should it be a cherry red or a rust red, or one of dozens of other reds. And should that red that is chosen be matched with a caribbean sea blue or a navy blue? Lemon yellow or buttercup or mustard or ochre?

These considerations, and others such as paint brand, lightfastness, staining /non-staining characteristics, transparant vs granular etc, meant in just a few years of experimentation, I had acquired just over 100 tubes of paint. I tried to determine which were my twenty-two favorites in order to have the best paints fit my painting pallette. In the end, I could not do it and therefore invented and built my own pallette which would hold 96 pigments. It consisted of dollar store daily vitamin organizers and a tempered glass cutting board from WalMart. Total cost: $10. Don't, however, ask me what those 100 tubes of paint cost...........

Daffodil

After all that color, I needed to paint something delicate. It was the time of year for daffodils anyway. I was trying different sizes and shapes, and felt that this would make a good square format. The challenge was not to let the flower's center become a boring bull's eye.

Char's Sunflower

It was finally time for me to tackle the second lesson in the macro tutorial: the vibrant sunflower. Char taught us using her own example, that really exagerating or even changing the original colors can lead to a more dynamic painting. I hesitated at first, wanting to stay true to realism, yet I found that if handled carefully, what she suggested really was good advice. There is Artistic Licence after all.

Brown Eyed Susan

White petals are interesting to paint, because in watercolor white paint is not used. What really is painted are the shadows that give the white object visual substance. Ah, but then what color are the shadows? That is the job of the artist to determine, and then perhaps, to embellish. This crisp white little flower had a lot of blue in it. The painting also has an extra feature: my fingerprint accidentally got on the lower right petal. That's one of the things about watercolor. There is not much you can do about that sort of thing. Oh well. Gives it character, maybe?

Camelia

With it's rich luscious colors, this camelia was just begging to be painted. It took many layers of glazed pigment to build up the flower's beautiful richness.

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.