Sunday, March 11, 2012

Work in Progress: Summer Wakening (Another Layer...)

I am continuing to experiment with the limited color glazing technique I'm learning from Jeannie Vodden's class... On one hand, it really test one's patience since the pale colored glazes seem to take forever to reach the usual color intensity and value depth my usual wet-into-wet approach can achieve in one or two passes; on the other hand, it really works wonders in bringing subtle color interest and harmony into a painting, especially a flower with relatively little local color variations like this. With multiple glazes, even the dull shadow area seems to glow, and the subtle color identities in warm and cool parts of the pedal keeps viewer's eyes entertained. I never would have thought one red, one yellow and one blue can bring this rainbow of color onto the paper! -- Yes, I've heard about it, but doing it with my own hands really made me think that maybe I should explore the potential of using only a few colors in a painting more in my future exercises... 


Summer Wakening, 
Watercolor on Lanaquarelle 140# Cold Press Press Paper , 10"h x 8"w, WIP 5

I'm nearly done with the mid-valued area of the rose now. Next steps are to put in the case shadows and form shadows. Darker values are more challenging with this particular palette, as Permanent Rose only goes to mid-value range, and Winsor Yellow is a very light color. I may have to introduce Alizarin Crimson here to extend the value range in the shadows. We'll see...

Repeated glazing is easier on the Lanaquarelle paper this piece is painted on compared with Fabriano papers, but Lanaquarelle is not as tolerant to abuse as Arches, so I'm trying to not get to crazy with repeated lifting and reglazing for any given area. However, wet-lifting does work beautifully on this paper comparing to Arches, and I was able to get the delicate value changes describing the roundness and folds of pedals using this method.

3 comments:

  1. Hello Arena!layers & glazes make wonderful your rose!Patience is required !!!
    Wetting and dropping my works run...LAYERING AND GLAZING my works grow slowly: that is the question!

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  2. Arena, you are achieving amazing hues and depths with three pigments! Are you painting wet on dry throughout the painting?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi Kathryn, I'm painting wet on dry using this method, excepting occasionally dropping in thicker blues and mixed purples in area that has dark form shadows when the wet-on-dry painted colors are still wet.

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