I began by masking out the stems and buds on the left side....anywhere that the background touches the flowers on the left. Then wet on wet I painted the background. Using sap green, ultramarine blue, winsor yellow for the main parts of the background. I added orange sections with cadmium red and winsor yellow. Most of these colors I dropped in on top of each other....not mixing on my palette. I did mix sap green and ultramarine in places to get a dark, but also put in some of those color separately. I also added an M. Graham color of cobalt teal in places. After that was dry, I went over it in certain places again just to darken. You don't have to re-wet the whole area....just parts you want to change. After that was dry again, I actually removed some paint with a wet brush, scrubbing and blotting out those areas I wanted lighter and also with a rounder scrub brush, made little circle halos around.
