Hello, my lovely artists. How are you all doing? I am having a very good time busy gardening and enjoying beautiful summer blooms in my garden. Roses in particular are coming in plenty and adding fragrance to my mornings.
Today we will be painting a golden shrimp flower in watercolours. This flower does not belong in my garden but I captured it in a resort during our stay in Mahabaleshwar. They had such magnificent gardens that my inner artist could not resist picking up the camera. At first, I was not sure of the name of the flower since I had never seen it before. But then after hours and hours of internet research I finally nailed it down! What a thrill it was to finally find it.
This particular variety is also called “Justicia” and is a native of Mexico and India.
Painting these many long petals was a lot of work for sure but the sunlight filtering through them cast interesting shadows making each petal different from the other.
WATERCOLOURS USED
When I first started painting the petals I did not add any red to my palette since the flower was yellow and I thought I will need only orange in some parts to warm it up a bit. But as I reached the end, I felt the need to add red to slightly warm up some particular sections of the composition and it made all the difference!
1. Lemon Yellow
2. Cadmium Yellow
3. Cadmium Orange
4. Cadmium Red
5. Yellow Ochre
6. Burnt Umber
7. Indigo Blue
BRUSHES REQUIRED
#0 round brush for fine details
#2 for a majority of the painting
TECHNIQUE
Since the area to be painted is not that large I mostly painted using wet-on-dry technique.
As usual, the tutorial has been divided into two parts:
Part 1: Flower petals
Part 2: The leaves and stems
REFERENCE IMAGE
THE DRAWING
Some pointers to keep in mind:
1. Painting this flower might take some time but I suggest you not to do it in one sitting.
2. Keep the drawing light since the flower is yellow. Dark pencil lines might show through the colour.
3. Sometimes we lose the transparency of the petals because of layering way too much. Hence, take frequent breaks and evaluate the values by looking from far behind.
Keep me posted on your progress and feel free to email me your artwork. I would love to take a look. Sometimes I am astonished looking at the level of realism you guys are achieving!
Happy painting
Swati