Rainbow Palette

RAINBOW FLOWERS

This weekend I attended a watercolor class taught by Helen Shafer Garcia.  It was held in the Ecke Building adjacent to the beautiful succulent garden at the San Diego Botanic Gardens, Encinitas, California.  

Seven very enthusiastic women attended this workshop which Helen called Botanica Watercolor.  She was very generous with her knowledge about painting and about gardening.  At the end of the day, we left with three paintings and succulents to plant in 
our gardens.  

I am sharing a very simple painting of flowers.  I could easily call my painting Surprise Flowers because I had to follow step by step directions and, low and behold, the flowers emerged!

I began by wetting the surface of Arches 140 lb cold pressed watercolor paper with a 1" flat brush.  I added water for about one minute until the paper was shiny and saturated. 

Then I used a #12 round brush, I chose cadmium red and dropped it in by lightly touching my brush to the surface of the paper. I dropped in cadmium yellow next to the first color.  I was careful not to drop opposite colors next to each other to prevent making gray.  I added pthalo green and dioxizine violet until the combinations were pleasing to my eye.  If you try this, leave some of the paper white. 

Next I looked for shapes that resembled flower petals. I used a 2B pencil to lightly outline the shapes.  Then I chose diluted permanent rose as a contrasting color and filled in around all of the shapes until there was no white showing.

Lastly, I used ultramarine blue to make shadows where the petals overlapped.  I wet the petal that was being overlapped and brushed a thin line of ultramarine blue at the edge of the petal.  The pigment gently bleed away from the edge giving the appearance of a shadow.