Wednesday, April 25, 2012

April 2012

So here I am only one week left in April.  This month the only thing I worked on was a challenge that my roomie Mollie (from PF Splash) posted.  She had gorgeous poppies in her garden (she lives in TX) and gave us a demo and told us to have at it.  So I took one of the photos is this is what I did with it. 

I actually took photos along the way so it is sort of a WIP (work in progress).  I really didn't know if it would come out like I had envisioned but actually it is close to what I was thinking.  Maybe not as neat as I would have liked but I finished it and I still have a whole week to accomplish some other paintings.

I chose one of Mollies photos and then enhanced the colors a bit on the computer to get a brilliant red which is what I had in mind for this poppy. I traced on tracing paper and then again to 10 x 14 WC paper. I had mixed a lot of colors on paper as seen below.

I first began applying Napthol red in varying values trying to put in light and darks sort of. I also then mixed a real dark of diox purple and ultramarine blue so that I could get an idea if I thought it was going to work. On some of the petals I tried to do glazes of peryleen maroon to show the napthol underneath it,



I continued to work on various petals but then decided to work on the center to see how that would work. I had gotten this cool phalo yellow-green DS and never used it so used some of that, some sap green put in a bit of lighter napthol and tried to carefully put in the really darks.

On the green pods I used a bit of the phalo y-g and some light sap and threw in some DS sleeping beauty gen. tourquoise.


At this point I did send it to Mollie and asked what she thought as I really didn't have confidence although I liked the bright colors. I vascillated on the background but the info she sent back to me confirmed what I wanted to do. So I mixed darker bits of the colors in the poppy but added some phalo blue and peylreen here and there and did a couple of coats to make it as dark as I wanted. And this is it the final.




I learned a lot painting this poppy.  Will definitely try poppies again as I just love them but now need to move on and pick something else to work on or finish some of the paintings that I have started and need to finish.  Big decisions. 



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