Sunday, February 12, 2012

Work in Progress: Peppermint Rose and Petal Light

In the show season (beginning months of every year) things can get quite crazy -- I am juggling the small daily painting pieces alongside with the bigger ones that are meant to be submitted to juried shows, struggling to get both into the limited time frame, plus all the photography, framing, shipping ... And I'm sure I would not be the only one here!

In the frenzy of things I did manage to get another rose painting started:


Peppermint Rose,  
Watercolor on Fabriano Artistico 140# Cold Press Paper , 8"h x 8"w, WIP 1

In addition, I am struggling to try to finish the underpainting on the leaves of Petal Light #1. The difficulty here is to really see the subtle color variations in the shadows of the leaves, which would add interest to these otherwise even, featureless areas. Shadows on photos taken on a sunny day are normally too dark and colorless due to underexposure, so I have adjusted the brightness/contrast of the photo to bring out these otherwise invisible color changes. They may be all lost after the overpainting is done, but at the underpainting stage, I think it is better to put in too much information than too little -- I can always choose to paint these information away wet-in-wet during the overpainting, after all...


Petal Light #1,  Watercolor on Arches 140# Cold Press Paper , 10"h x 8"w, WIP 3

2 comments:

  1. Stunning work I love your water color paintings of flowers!

    ReplyDelete
  2. I do love the rust-red edges on the rose leaves. And both paintings look intriguing, as ever, Arena!

    ReplyDelete

Thank you so much for taking time visiting and commenting on my blog! Your feedback and encouragements are things that keep me going with I am feeling down or frustrated... I will try my best to reply to every comment ASAP but sometimes life gets in the way and I am a bit slow in my response. I would like to apologize if that happens...

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