Here's a step by step of a painting I did at Gardenview the other week. I brought a vase of sunflowers with me and set it up in Henry's parking lot.
Here's the loose pencil sketch. Remember, you don't have to follow the
pencil lines exactly! The drawing doesn't have to be perfect.
The initial wash. I started with the yellow, painting beyond the sunflowers themselves. I then added the greens around the flowers, knowing that they would start bleeding into the yellow. I wish I would've taken a photo of just the initial yellow wash, but I was in the moment and forgot.
There was quite a bit of paint in that initial yellow wash, because those sunflowers are intense! I used a combination of Hansa Yellow (Daniel Smith Watercolors) and some New Gamboge (Winsor Newton) and Azo Orange (M Graham brand).
You can see that I've created a sort of "base" for the vase and left a large horizontal band of white paper in the middle. I thought that the flowers had a nice horizontal feel to them, and wanted to repeat the horizontal direction in spots so as to give the painting some rhythm. I've also added darker greens around the flowers. It's all loosey goosey at this point. Some of the darker greens started flowing into the left sunflower and I had to dab it with a moist paper towel to keep it from destroying the flower shape. This is where the super powerful initial yellow wash comes into play. It's still intense enough to not be diluted by that paper towel action, and it's still moist enough to not start drying out yet.
Now we're getting down to business! Some of the yellow has dried enough so that crisp edges can be applied to indicate edges of individual petals.
And now it really starts taking shape with additional darks being put in.
Some tiny darks put in to and around the vase edges and it's done.
Here's the setup at Gardenview.
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