Windowsill Geranium

I’m still playing around with quinacridone gold as a background wash. This time, I dropped in five splotches of violet, hoping to get some interesting browns.

I failed to take a photograph of the initial wash. But the results reminded me of the geranium cutting I started a few months ago.

The most striking thing about this photograph is that it is backlit. The leaves furthest from the viewer are the lightest. I really wanted to capture this impression in watercolor, and today is the day to try, using my quin gold washed paper.

I painted leaves on top of four violet blotches, and the pot over the bottom one. To make green, I added a small amount of cobalt blue to the gold. When that didn’t give me a bright enough color, I tried lemon yellow with the cobalt.

As I worked, I felt strongly that the painting was falling well short of my vision for it. But instead of giving up, I kept adding more layers, working the shadowed areas with violet and lifting paint from the highlit ones. Continuing to work, I dropped in white gouache mixed with a little lemon yellow into the background and also into some of the leaf veins. To finish, I layered a bit more gold into corners of the background.

I wouldn’t call this my best work. But something good is beginning to happen. There is a sense of shape – the lower right leaf is the best example. The varying layers of color are bringing a depth of color that is suggestive of the natural world.

I will be painting geraniums again, and soon.

Quinacridone gold, Winsor yellow, cobalt blue and carbazole violet on Fabriano Studio cold press paper.