CONTROLLING WATER AND PAINT
First a little about controlling the water and paint. There are a few YouTube videos that explain it pretty well. One is by Steve Mitchell Mind of Watercolor.
There are a number of variables, paper, brushes, paint type. If your paint is too dry you get hard edges and it doesn't spread smoothly. If it is too wet, it can be uneven and leave blooms as the paint dries at different rates.
One bad habit is to dip your brush in the water constantly, even when you are not changing color. Think of it as cooking a broth. Start with the amount of water you want, then add ingredients. If you keep adding water you continue to dilute your broth.
So start with a puddle of water on your palette, and add your paint to it gradually until it is the shade you want. Then don't dip your brush in water unless you plan to dilute the color. Your damp, not wet, brush will pick up more paint and not leave a puddle.
If you do end up more puddly than you want, the fix is easy. Just use a thirsty brush to sop up...this leaves more even paint than just blotting with a paper towel. If you tend to get too much water in your brush, try running the ferule over a sponge to remove some of the water.
If you find your brush is too dry, don't keep wiping the brush, and be sure you have the puddle of paint the consistency you want.
Mind of Watercolor controlling water
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFenH6TdSuw
Waterolor Misfit -4 easy steps to watercolor control
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFAIOAZhR-E
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-o3T-nFpFg
MIXING GRAYS
I have another blog on mixing grays. (See "More than 50 Shades of Gray" May, 2018) This one today is just discussing making a formula for a very neutral mix that you can either warm up or cool down .
One formula used by billie showell, an amazing botanical painter, is 2 parts French ultramarine, one part cad red, one part cad lemon.
Immediate problem. I don't have those colors.
SOOOO..... what'll you do?
If you look at the formula, she is really adding equal parts of true opposites on the color wheel: one part of cad lemon and one part cad red = 2 parts orange...the opposite of French Ultramarine. So what I need is something that will give me a neutral gray (not too warm, not too blue). I have French. For the yellow I need a lemony yellow, so I chose Hansa yellow light. You could use any lemony looking yellow. For the cad red, which is about a neutral red (not real orange, not real purple) I used permanent red. Use what you have.
I passed out a sheet on making grays from using complementary colors. Find one that works for you.
This sheet was a free download from ArtTutor.com called Cheat Sheets. Love it. Wish I had it 20 years ago.
From this neutral color, you can add permanent rose to make it pinker; yellow to warm it a bit; and blue to cool it.
PAINTING THE FLOWER:
This arum flower is a photograph from Scotch Macaskill on Paint My Photo. The method I'm using to paint this is more of a "botanical" style, and just one of several ways to "paint white." I took some tips from Billie Showell, an award winning botanical painter.
Draw your flower very lightly. Don't put in any lines you don't need. Erase heavy pencil lines so you can just barely see them. That isn't necessary on darker flowers, but yellows and whites will show the pencil lines.
The picture below shows the sketch on the right, and on the left, the first layer of glazed neutral (mid-tone) paint. In a way, you are putting on an underlayer of shading for this lily, paying attention mostly to forming the shape of the flower and its shadows. First, wet the entire section you work on. (I did not wet the stamen) Shiny, not puddly. This is the most neutral and light wash of the grays. I paid attention to the deep gray around the stamen? and the shadow areas.
(apologies to botonists: I don't know a stamen from a pistol on a lily)
Dry completely. Erase any unwanted lines.
Next step. Make your neutral mix a little greener. (I used cerulean - a green biased blue-- and hansa light) Wet the upper area - yes, all of it--and drop some of the green around the tips. Let it bleed into the edge of the flower. While wet, take a small brush, and run it through the gray/green tip and drag it down into fine lines in the direction of the curve of the lily. Move to the the bottom of the lily, and glaze over the bottom and stem of the lily with the greener mixture. With a thirsty brush, lift paint from the center of the stem while wet to create a highlight down the center of the stem.
On the front "lip" of the flower, I needed to strengthen the dark area. I wet just the lip (after the rest was dry) and applied the greener mid-tone (neutral) on the curve line and let it travel down the lip of the petal.
Dry completely.
Wet the lower part of the lily and add some yellow to the right side. I used a warmer yellow, like New Gamboge. (warm has an orange bias)
With my stem wet, I continued with the yellow down the stem and strengthened the green with a mix of cerulean and hansa. Again, I lifted the center highlight of the stem. (It is easier to do this lifting now rather than the end of the painting when it is dry) For the yellow center, I wet the small area and dropped a warm yellow (New Gamboge) into the center and let it move out to the edges for a softer effect. I added a bit of burnt orange while damp to the very center.
when dry, I darkened the shadow of the stamen on the left side using the neutral with yellow added to it. (because the shadow would also have a bit of yellow reflection) I also strengthened the shadow on the right side.
There is still more to fiddle with, but I will post that later. Mostly it will be "more of the same," gradually strengthening my shadows and greens, and cleaning up some edges.
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