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Our plane got in on the island of Kauai a few hours before we could check into our timeshare, so my wife and I hung out at a local shopping center. While she was out exploring the shops (i.e., shopping, which I don't enjoy), I was sitting there enjoying the nice weather and tropical plants. I noticed what I would have to call a hibiscus tree. Normally they're bushes, but this one was big. I snapped a close up photo of a bloom and later decided to try that one as my third watercolor painting attempt.
I've decided that accurately painting a flower teaches you an awful lot about what that flower looks like. I understand a lot more about what all hibiscus flowers look like after dealing with this one.
The first issue was finding paint to make a proper pink color for the flower petals. Quinacridone Magenta is the only one that I've found that makes a decent pink. I didn't try anything major new with this one, but the subject matter was quite a bit different from the previous paintings. I spent a lot of time trying to get the branches and leaves right, as well as getting the right feeling to the flower petals. It was also a bit tricky to get those pollen thingies to look right.
The only thing left was to do the background and you can tell that I hadn't put enough thought into that. I left it this way for several months, and eventually saw a painting in a restaurant that gave me an idea of how to fix it.
I'll show the fixed painting in a couple of days.
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I've decided that accurately painting a flower teaches you an awful lot about what that flower looks like. I understand a lot more about what all hibiscus flowers look like after dealing with this one.
The first issue was finding paint to make a proper pink color for the flower petals. Quinacridone Magenta is the only one that I've found that makes a decent pink. I didn't try anything major new with this one, but the subject matter was quite a bit different from the previous paintings. I spent a lot of time trying to get the branches and leaves right, as well as getting the right feeling to the flower petals. It was also a bit tricky to get those pollen thingies to look right.
The only thing left was to do the background and you can tell that I hadn't put enough thought into that. I left it this way for several months, and eventually saw a painting in a restaurant that gave me an idea of how to fix it.
I'll show the fixed painting in a couple of days.
Much better! Sometimes i will add a patch of opaque white, let that dry then paint over that with a dark color and scratch in my byline with a fine pointed object.
