Day 20 of 30 in 30 – Roses

Roses (from pixabay.com reference). Michele Clamp. Watercolor. 11″x14″

I couldn’t decide what to paint today. I started on an eagle but the drawing wasn’t inspiring me so I switched to some roses. I wanted to paint pretty loosely but this didn’t quite work out. Part of the problem was the soft press paper which dries quite quickly and I kept getting hard edges. But the other part was me and I had to work quite hard to pull things together. The end result turned out well – another one in the bag!

An intermediate:

Intermediate rose – day 20 of 30 in 30

Oil study – Lime Wedges and Backgrounds

Oil study for Threads

Well this was fun. I learned a lot here. The subject was a lime wedge against different colored backgrounds. In the end I used pretty much the same colors for the wedge itself but the background (obviously) and the foreground and reflection changed color. In particular that reflection, even though it looks yellow/orange is in real life a pure grey. Who’d have thought? In hindsight I should have known as a yellow reflection on a gray background will result in a neutral gray!

Here’s a closeup of the result

Lime wedge oil study

Rose Watercolor with Paul Foxton

Roses from Paul Foxton’s Reference Image. Michele Clamp. Watercolor.

It’s been a while since Paul Foxton has done a streaming demo but I was extremely pleased that today was today. Now Paul is a wonderful teacher and paints exclusively in oils. I usually do oils in his sessions too but today I thought as it was mid 30 in 30 I would break out the watercolors.

This was very tough and tricky as you have to continually modify what you’re doing to fit with watercolor. You have to leave the light areas for instance so block ins have to be modified and putting in large areas of darks take forever and need multiple layers. But, although this isn’t going to win any awards I was quite pleased with this.