Wine and Roses

This wasn’t a successful piece, but i did learn something.   I have to fully understand the shadows, shaping, and cast shadows before just blindly following the directions.

This one gave me a lot of trouble because the directions were to erase as much of the graphite (of the design) as possible while letting you still see the tiny areas to paint in various colors.  I’m thinking my graphite wasn’t too dark to begin with and then erasing, I had no guidance.  There are a ton of little areas to paint in certain colors and ways.  It felt like paint by numbers while wearing a mesh scarf over my eyes.  It was frustrating!

The subject matter isn’t that interesting to me.  I realized that perhaps I don’t need to paint every lesson in the book, but the ones that are more of what I would like to paint.  I’m more “into” pottery and glazes than I am crystal and glass, so this isn’t a still life I would be interested in painting.  I do love flowers and that is the part that is really not successful because I didn’t understand the shape.

I did learn how to create the colors in the wine, how to use neutral tint to darken and deepen the perylene maroon.  The leaves are ok.  but moving on to the next lesson and also some of my own designs to translate what I’ve learned.  I also sat down and made notes on all I’ve learned in a notebook to help solidify it in my brain.

 

Good enough to eat?

I did lesson #2 twice…hope this isn’t a pattern…i would hate to have to do lesson #10 ten times! Here is the first attempt

At this size especially (7.5″ x 11″) the shadows on the icing are difficult. One of the many lessons this process has taught me is to practice the new techniques on a smaller piece of 140 lb paper. Yes, one would think that was intuitive but for me it wasn’t!

Once i realized the icing wasn’t done to my satisfaction i rushed on the blue green trim on the card.

This is truffle #2:

At 150% of the size and with practice, i am happier with it.

Seedpods, lesson learned

Lesson learned: don’t use up colors that are on a palette, just to be frugal. It’s only paint, and not tons of paint either. I used up colors to make this painting, and I wasn’t happy with them nor how it turned out. Afterward, I washed out the palette, and the colors seemed to go ON and ON forever, but that was part of the problem, the colors left on that travel palette were the strong staining ones.

Someone on the watercolorworkshop yahoo group suggested they would have placed the bottom pod to either the left or right, and I definitely see that — it would be better than the “T” formed by the pods as they are positioned here.

I’ve decided I don’t like filling up a palette and having tons of choices, I prefer to pick a limited palette for the painting at hand and I think I “fuss” less with it using that method. What method do you use?