I saw this photo online and wanted to recreate it in watercolor. This will be a study and will not be sold as I will always protect the copyright privileges of the photographer.

What I found so appealing in the photo was the dark, yet luminescent quality of the background, as well as that adorable butterfly!

I have masked out the flower, butterfly and some of the stems and will remove the masking after achieving the darkness of the background...assuming I am successful in doing that, of course. I have two glazes of color on this and expect to add at least two more. I had planned on using Prussian blue but didn't have any, so I mixed a combination of blues with a little quin burnt orange added for the darker areas. I bought more Prussian blue so will use that for the next glaze.

This one will be a challenge to get the darkness without muddiness yet achieve that glow. Hopefully I am up to the challenge,,,remember Susan, its only paper!

 

I finished this yesterday, I'm hoping the way I'm seeing this while posting doesn't show up with such strong colors when it's posted; in person, it is very high key and soft. I'm liking this better than any I've done since restarting my painting journey again. Hope for more successes in the future. It is a half sheet painting. That upper left brown in the sky is the shadow of my hand, it's not in the painting.

Worked on this a bit this morning. While viewing this across the room I noticed that I had inadvertently made the desert trail looked like a manicured driveway, so that was the first thing I changed. I added all the foliage and started to define a few of the Palo Verde trees. Lots more to do with those. I added shading to the mountains. I will let this marinate over the weekend and start in again Monday.

I'm just getting the bones of this painting established and moving on to more detail.

I'm thinking I will continue in this soft color palette and see what I think as it progresses. I usually go  for more pops of color, but I'm not hating this slightly analogous look, either, The background mountains have just been outlined, they'll probably end up with bluish grays, who knows?

 

 I think I have played around this enough to call it finished, It was done mainly to expand my skill in painting on Yupo and have fun doing something different than painting on paper. Now onto my next experiment, haven't decided what that should be yet. I'll post the WIP once I get started,

I will post this work in progress today to keep track of the changes since I am making this one up as I go. I have no particular end result in mind; rather this is an exercise to try out a lot of different techniques and force myself to resurrect any remaining painting skills I might still have.

This is watercolor on Yupo, which is, essentially, a sheet of plastic. So, I can, for the most part, wipe it off and restart any of the shapes here if the technique doesn't work. I'll continue to post the WIPs as I work through this one. That keeps me committed to continuing to work on it.

My goal now is to experiment with paintings that excite me and cause me to try new things and learn. I just started a watercolor on Yupo that is allowing me to do just that. I have rejoined my painting sessions with a group of crazy (crazy and crazy-good!) artists at the Art Club here in SCG and am again enjoying the fellowship of friends who paint. 

 

I did the bottom two thirds of this painting about nine years ago and have had it framed and hanging in  my home. I kept thinking it was bothersome that I had left the sky just a plain, hazy yellow, so a few weeks ago I unframed it, put it back on a painting board and reworked the sky after conferring with some of my painting buddies, I like the atmospheric perspective in the sky now that it matches that of the canyon better.

 This was the first painting I have created in about two years. I am really trying to get back what I've lost through inactivity, and I like this first attempt. Hopefully this will just be the start of lots of paintings!