So I ended up starting the full sized Nasturtium painting today. I spent an hour or so earlier this week on the porch painting these lovely orange and red flowers. I took Sara's new sleeping bag, a pillow from the couch and made a lounge spot to lie on. Mainly I was painting out of a need for an excuse to sit in the sun.

(My painting/tanning lounge)

From that exercise, I've been bit by the painting bug. I decided to do a full sized (for me) painting of that orange and crimson nasturtium. Did the sketch yesterday, and just finished the background painting tonight. I took shots of each step in the process.

Disclaimer: I'm no Michelangelo...

First step was to take my smaller pencil sketch and enlarge it on the stretched watercolour paper. The yellow stuff is masking fluid for the flower itself. Supposedly it's cheating to use masking fluid... personally I'd rather cheat and skip the "oh crap! I wasn't supposed to paint that green!" part completely.

After the masking fluid dried I did 3 washes. Lemon yellow, then Hooker's green then lemon yellow again. I'm trying out a method that I read about. Instead of mixing the colours on the palatte, I 'mix' them by glazing one over the other until the final shade is reached.

Next step was to underpaint the leaves. I wanted them to have a more yellow green tone than the distant background so I did several glazes of the lemon yellow on them.

Several more glazes of green and yellow later, I'm ready to give more tone to the leaves. Blue for the tops of the leaves, and some payne's grey for the distant background.

Now that I have the basic background painted, I continue to glaze with grey, green and light yellow to make it more shadowy. I also tried "lifting out" the veins on a couple leaves, which looks horrible. There's a streak from one of the green glazes. I need to practice washes again, I think.

To finish up today's work, I did a final glaze of green and then grey, then touched up the distant background with a layer of grey. Now I'm going to let this dry properly overnight and in the morning I'll remove the masking fluid and start on the flower.

Bed for me then. :)