Tuesday, March 4, 2014

LILY OF THE NILE - Stems and Buds

I've complete a few more buds and stems and have mostly completed a third of the painting.  Nothing really to note here....just going to keep going and I will give you  more info when I get up to the big flower.

Monday, March 3, 2014

LILY OF THE NILE - Stems and Buds

After being fairly happy with the background, I took off my masking fluid.  I can always go back and adjust my background afterwards.  I then started on the bud on the very top.  The colors I used for the buds are ultramarine blue, permanent rose, thalo blue, winsor yellow, and sap green.  I mixed the ult.blue and perm. rose to get a bluish pink violet color.  By dropping in thalo blue in spots, it brightened it and gave some good highlights.....always study the photo for color nuances!  I then scrubbed out the center highlights and then added winsor yellow to them.  There is sap green toward the base of many of the buds.  It flows well into the stem. The stem has violet and pink highlights in it on top of a sap green base color.

LILY OF THE NILE - Background

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.

LILY OF THE NILE

This is a photo of the Agapanthus flower taken when I went to Hawaii.  I am starting a painting of it and so is our class....if it ever stops snowing!