Write it on your heart that every day is the best day of the year.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Saturday, January 29, 2011

Orange Day Lilies

This painting is going to be the subject of my lesson for the class I am teaching on Monday night.  It is 7" x 11" and is painted on Canson 140 lb. cold-pressed watercolor paper.  I used orange and red orange, sap and hooker's green dark with alizarin crimson added to the greens for the darks.  I first poured the oranges onto wet paper and then lifted areas that I wanted to be lighter.  After drying it well, I mixed a series of different greens, and after wetting the background with clear water, dropped in the different greens indiscriminately right up to the edges of the flowers.  I finished the painting by negative painting darker greens around  the leaves.  The last step was to detail and define the flowers with deeper orange.  I darkened the orange with ultramarine blue for the shadows.