weekend painting!

I guess the title said it all but nothing says the story like an illustration:

so, my hubby was thinking of revamping the bedroom with a new paint. and I also felt like we need a change around here especially because there were a couple of paint buckets sitting around...lol

although sadly after my close-to-perfect job of painting we had to move!! but I enjoyed splashing paints around anyway ;)

Watercolor-Lilacs- Step 2 - Let's finish the flowers :)

This weekend I had the chance to work on my lilacs a little bit.

Colors i used for the flowers was a mixture of Madder lake, Carmine and Ultramarine Blue.

Flowers Step 1:

For each petal I just added a very pale wash and then loaded the brush with more saturated (thicker) paint and painted the lower parts of each flower that would normally stay in the shadow. I was carefull to follow a curvy shape for the darker areas to suggest that the flowers are actually three dimentional!

For letting the light petals stay out more I sprinkled some sea salt grains. and in some other areas as an experiment while the paint was still wet i dabbed a few dropps of rubbing alcohol. The effect of rubbing alcohol can be seen on the left middle flowers on the above picture.

Next step is to shape the petals and make the flowers look fluffy :)



I was not that pleased with my lilacs at this stage which is not a good sign but...hey we will see;) a lot might happen during few steps.

Flowers Step 2 :

Flowers Step 3:

watercolor-Lilacs - step 1 - sketching

aren't Lilacs pretty? I always wanted to paint them but never actually had the courage! Lots of petals, lots of highlights, lots of color gradiant...If you look closely each lilac is a cluster of small flowers, Isn't it intimidating!

Well i thought to myself; " I have to do it; If turned out good, well good!and if not then I will cry! ....kidding :P If not hopefully it will be a lesson learnt"

so I gave it a try :) Same as my previous post on Pears, I will show the steps with explaination, and this time I try to add a little more detail:

1- First I drew the lilacs with a pencil. I tried to make it a detailed sketch, so I even drew the petals in the areas that would need darker washes of paint.

Then applied the first wash of Sap green to the leaves. I tried to add a little bit of Ultramarine Blue in a few strokes to make some leaves darker.

Next, with a masking liquid, I masked off the areas of highlight

well lots of work already...I was quite happy at this point, but also exhusted ... so the rest had to wait for another day...

Fingers crossed, hopefully I will feel as happy as the washes of color stack up!

How about some pears!

Lets paint some pears!

I was looking through flickr to find a subject to paint and came across a beautiful picture. I decided to go with watercolor and here is the steps to the final result.

1- I drew the shapes of pears with a pencil.

2- added a wash of Cadmium Yellow and Sap Green with some Cadmium Red splashes for the pear in the middle, also a bluish gray for the shadows.

3- one more wash of  Cadmium Red & Yellow+ Sap Green to all pears, removed some of the paints from the highlight areas with a q-tip.  Then while the paint is still wet loaded my brush with a thicker paint and dabbed on a few spots on the pears to give them a more realistic look. Next applied a third wash of paint, preserving the highlights. This made my dots go very faint so I added some more dots of sap green to show the cute spots even more :)