Saturday, February 25, 2017

The Sea House Painting- Finale!



I use drafting tape a lot to keep my lines straight. It works on clean white paper okay, but not on painted paper. If you use it on painted paper it leaks (sometimes it leaks on clean paper too unfortunately). It's important to pull it off right after you paint the line in case it has leaked. Not that you can fix it, but you can see the damage sooner. ; )
The pink heliconia on the upper right is now in. That big white area in the upper left is full of green leaves and an orange blob that isn't really identifiable. I've decided to add one more flower there to break up all the pinks. The new flower will be orange and yellow.
This is the new photo reference.

At this point I'm filling in the white spaces.




The protea down in the bottom right corner does not have shading on one side consistent with the rest of the flowers (I added it from another photo) so I will need to fix that.

The new heliconia on the left side is the one I added. I've been covering the painting with clear cellophane bags (you can see them above) to protect it from splashes. It's funny to see-- I feel like it's a surgical operation, with only the area I'm going to paint exposed. The cellophane bags work well because you can still see the rest of the painting. I set my water bucket and palettes right on top of the protected painting so that I don't have to reach several feet away.

This is the finished painting. I painted on 300 lb. Fabriano Artistico cold press paper which came on a roll. I used mainly Daniel Smith watercolors, a few Winsor Newton watercolors, and Escoda kolinsky brushes. I purchased the flowers at the Kahului Swap Meet. 
I also put grommets in the top of the paper so that I could hang it on a curtain rod in my studio when I needed it out of the way. This was very helpful, as the painting is 42.5x70", plus a few inches on all sides!
The painting will be hanging at the lovely Sea House Restaurant in Napili, Maui by the end of March. If there is a reception, I will post the information!





Tuesday, February 21, 2017

Sunday, February 12, 2017

Sea House Painting



Underpainting of monstera leaf in indigo and prussian green. Glazed over with phalo green and sap green. I use drafting tape a lot to help control my lines and edges. It only works on clean white paper though. If you put drafting tape on painted paper, it leaks.

Thursday, February 9, 2017

Sea House Restaurant Painting





Here are some new "in-progress" photos of the painting. 

Wednesday, February 8, 2017

Sea House Restaurant Painting

Thanks to Lynn Shue at the Village Gallery in Lahaina, I've been working on a very large, 42.5x70", watercolor for the Sea House Restaurant in Napili, Maui. I started with a trip to the Kahului Swap Meet where I just about bought out one of the flower growers! I took dozens of reference photos and ended up with this as a starting point:
From there, I copied and pasted a banana flower with tiny bananas on the stem, and a new protea to the bottom right over the existing protea so that it would show more. This is the result:
This photo has a little bit of everything as far as color and flower variety. Perfect!

Here are the first few photos I took of the painting in progress:





More to come!