Garden Delight, watercolor demo

Garden Delight
9 x 9 watercolor
$100
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"Garden Delight" is a watercolor version of a similar painting I've done before in oils.  I did  this as a  quick demonstration /"paint- along" in my recent Painting Flowers in Watercolor class.

  

The first step before starting the painting was to examine and simplify the values within the scene. I actually took a black and white photocopy of the original photo and identified 4 large value masses: the lightest,(the sunlit peonies,) next lightest(sunlit tabletop), midtones (the shadows of the flowers and tabletop and the leaves)  and darkest (the background which provided a foil to contrast the light flowers).

 Once we had a value road map, I put down a warm glaze of a few different colors as an under painting to provide warmth underneath the background foliage which would be finished later when we go to the stage of adding the darks.  Used transparent colors- indian yellow, quinacridone gold , maybe a touch of burnt siena or quinacridone burnt orange.

Next added in shadows on flowers, tabletop and green leaves which are lighter than the dark green background will ultimately be.

 Continuing to work in a progression
from light to dark added in a rich green , varied background over the now dried warm underpainting.

To finish from here, made some subtle transitions and softer edges bridging the shadow and light areas of the peonies, glazed over the vase and did some fine tuning of shapes and edges to complete "Garden Delight" pictured at the top of this blog post.