My wife had a photograph of a vase with red and white flowers. She wanted my rendition of it in watercolor. Since the photo was hazy and, for some reason I could not transfer it to a larger screen, I looked for a similar picture.

Last week at the graduation party, I took some pictures of red trumpet-like flowers. I don’t know what they’re called, but they’re gorgeous. The hummingbirds love them too. I watched one of them sticking its beak into  one particular flower. It was a little breezy, so the hummingbird timed its jabs into the flower as it came bobbing up from each puff of wind. It was fun to watch.

Today’s experiment:

My previous experiments have been concerned with geometric shapes (Back to Doodling, No Respect, Still Waiting), use of color to present depth – which largely failed (Trying to Understand Cézanne) , and other non-representational, abstract renderings (Emotion in Art).  In today’s study, I chose to render the flowers as realistically as I could. However, I did not choose to include all the flowers in the photograph. The grouping of flora included different stages of flowering, from buds, to pre-blooming pods, to a flower in bloom to crispy, decayed, spent flowers.

My main concern in this study was composition. The trumpet-like flower seems to emerge from a spiral arrangement of buds and other flower forms.  I glazed different areas of the composition to make use of the properties of the transparent colors. I used different pigments for the different underpainting colors: quinacridone red, permanent mauve, lemon yellow, sap green and hooker’s green.  I also chose not to detail the foliage in between the green buds, but rather to wash the area with sap green. This accentuated the spiral organization and prevented me from ruining the interstitial spaces with too much detail.

My first commission!