Gala Basket - Step Three

I almost forgot to say that I added the background in my previous post!

I often have beginning students ask when do I paint my background. When I first started painting in watercolor I always did my backgrounds first. Then I moved on to decide whether to do it first or last. The background works best if your doing a landscape or a painting with a light background and a busy foreground. But I started doing many of my backgrounds at the end of a painting. This way I was able to use colors from the foreground in the background to have my paintings more "color coordinated!" Now I often get to a point in my painting when I want to see the background or at least the first layer of the background. So my answer to this question is that I paint my background whenever I feel it will work best for me based on what I'm painting.

With this painting I got to a point where I felt the need to have paint on the whole painting. I knew I was going to do the background dark so I wanted to get the feel for the darkness around the apples.

I mixed up some of my red and green mixture but used alot of paint and only a little water and added paynes grey to it. The paint was wet enough to flow a little bit on the paper and not so dry that you have difficulty pulling the paint where it needs to go. But still had a dark value.

Try mixing up paint with different amounts of water and see how they look and what they feel like when painting. And DON'T BE AFRAID OF THE DARK!!!