Today I wanted another shot at embroidery on a watercolor painting.
I came up with a fantasy-like, pre-historic plant form.
Here are the stages of the work.
Am I done now?
What do you think? Did I go too far? Or not far enough.
It could have been worse. I considered adding beads.
At least the activity was relaxing and restorative.
This month I signed up to take a class taught by the frugal crafter, Lindsay Weirich.
https://lindsayweirich.teachable.com/p/loose-juicy-watercolor-florals
Since today is Sketching Sunday, I am sharing a few of the quick and loose flowers that I have painted while following her instruction.
None of these took longer than fifteen minutes to do. They certainly help me fill up the blank pages in my watercolor sketchbook.
How are you spending your week-end? I hope you are making time for fun stuff.
I have been saving this image from Unsplash for the time when my skills were sufficient to paint it. I think I’m ready now.
There are several challenges:
It took me a few days and several stages.
Before I proceeded to the next layers, I reserved the edges by coating them with masking fluid.
Final painting. To render the curves of the foreground leaf, I decided to add a dark color band which doesn’t exist in the original photograph. I used a blue Prismacolor pencil to draw in the delicate veins which are visible between the large ribs.
I like the glowing look of the flower. The crimson petal tips really come forward visually. I’m happy with the foreground leaf. I’m wondering if I need to darken the leaf in the background.
Maybe I will wait a day and see how I feel about it.
Painted on Fabriano Studio cold press paper with Winsor yellow, quinacridone magenta, alizarin crimson, prussian blue, viridian, gold green and sap green.
Yesterday I found a feather in the back yard and wanted to render it in graphite.
I decided the drawing would be a self-portrait of my hand holding the feather. Since I am left-handed, it was easiest to hold up my right hand about ten inches from my face and draw what I saw. To render the feather, I attached it to a binder clip and placed it on top of a thread spool on my work table. The tricky part was drawing each part in the same scale, so that it would look life-like.
This didn’t take too long to draw. During the process, I began to appreciate how tricky it is to make a drawing of a hand. I had to keep adjusting the alignment of my fingers as I worked. I wondered if I should include a cast shadow. Ultimately, I couldn’t figure out where to draw the shadow, since I was holding the feather up and away from all surfaces, so left it out.
Maybe I can convince someone to model for me so I can make a sketch of two hands.
Flowers are a popular subject for beginning watercolor students. So far, I have not been attracted to this subject. If given a choice, I would prefer to paint an animal instead of a flower. But today I decided to go for a rose.
And not just any rose. I picked a multi-hued rose, very close up. Obviously, I was ready for a challenge.
This photograph was chosen from a free-usage website, most likely Unsplash. Unfortunately, I saved it to my folder so long ago that I can’t remember where it came from. I was attracted by the assortment of warm colors. I especially like the magenta hues, because I recently purchased a tube of quinacridone magenta.
I used my Prismacolor pencils to emphasize the veining in the petals.
I’m reasonably happy with my first effort. But in retrospect, it would have been wiser to pick a rose of one hue – a red, red rose – for my initiation into painting flowers.
Daily Fiber 