Light on the Lily

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I love lilies in my garden. They smell so sweet, and look so elegant.
They are fun to paint, as the curling petals make for interesting shapes and shadows. The three dimension of the anthers and stamens are like little floating bits, perched on long delicate tendrils. I will post the stages of the lily flower painting in my next post for those of you who wish to see the steps in painting this watercolor..

Apple Blossom -two ways

I posted this to show the Apple Blossom we were painting in my watercolor classes, one shows the flower cluster without a background, and the other with a background added after painting the flowers.

Here is the finished painting.

As I discussed in the previous posting, the luminous dark background was achieved by painting several layers of color by glazing one over the other allowing the previous color to shine through. Little bits of more intense color were dropped in to allow for a more interesting effect than just a flat background.

Clematis

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I thought it was time to add a few flowers to my blog, since I do more of them and landscapes than I do the still lifes. I really love the look of close up flowers especially when they have a lot of contrast.  I painted this for my watercolor class , but they did not get to it as a subject to paint, as we were too busy painting apple blossoms. I will post one of those from class as well. The only way to really get the luminous darks is to glaze the color on in layers,  that way you can see various tones coming through each other like stained glass.

It's fun to paint that way, but it takes a lot of time,  and you have to be patient and wait for each layer to dry sufficiently first.