To those of you who liked my ‘Flower‘ yesterday, thank you.  After looking at that watercolor sketch for a bit, I like it a little more. I do agree with THGg, that I did not use the qualities of watercolors to blend and bleed colors together.

Today’s experiment

I tried another sketch of this same flower in today’s experiment. I’m glad I did, because I noticed a lot more. The yellow color splitting the middle of each petal is a very light greenish yellow – a lemon yellow color. Surrounding this yellow color is a band of pink. The pink then darkens to a velvety deep red, almost purple in hue.  The veins that I spoke about last time, seem to radiate from the central hub of the flower. I drew them in with pen and ink, as I did the split in the middle of the central yellow of the petal.

I did not get a dark enough red for the outer parts of each petal, although in terms of overall effect, this study represents the visual qualities of the actual flower better than yesterday’s sketch.

Since the scale of this sketch is small (5″x7″), I don’t believe that a watercolor blending technique was warranted. This plus the fact that blending the yellow with the red gives an orange color that is not seen in the flower. I suppose I could have used this technique with the dark red fading to a pink band, but the band had such definite boundaries, that I also didn’t think this would work.

I included a few sample leaves in the same spatial relation to the flower as seen in the photograph. Perhaps this will enable THGg to identify this mystery flower.