Step 3 and other stuff

TILE UPDATE:  MY TWO BENCHES AND TABLE ARE DONE!!!....well, except for the bull noses and name plates.  We also have 670 of the sculpture pedestal tiles made, with only 1100 left to make.  And fire.  And glaze.  And box.    Sigh.....
back to watercolor.

So, here's the original photo again.  One of the hardest concepts, I think, in watercolor is to paint from light to dark.  In other mediums like oil and acrylic you paint from dark to light.  The reason behind it makes total sense if you think about it, though.  In watercolor a card laid is a card played.  You can't take a color back out once it's on the paper.  You can't cover it over with another color.  It just gets darker.  So you have to plan to build one light layer over another, until you finally get to the definitive darks.  Light to dark, the new mantra!

In this next step I've added some of the pistils and stamens in the flower.  I'll want to paint freely over them, so once they dried, I used masking fluid to fix the color.  Again, I can go back later and make them darker, but I can't get them lighter once they get too dark.  I've also deepened some of my yellows, and started adding a layer of light peach.  Peach is a tough color to mix.  Here I've used a Naples Yellow and Alizarin Crimson combination. The Naples Yellow is a creamy sort of color that combines to give peach instead of orange. 

More peach, and now bringing in some orange highlights that will make my red really pop later on.  The prescribed method is to paint all one color, again, light to dark, and then layer over it in successively darker shades.  I like to paint separate petals, and then use some overlaps to tie things together.  I like each petal to stand out.  Starting to look like a flower, huh?