Gala Basket - Step Four

Here's the next phase of the Gala Basket. I've added the beginning stage of the cloth. I very carefully put the stripes in with mixtures of Alizron Crimson and Paynes Grey and Hookers Green and Paynes Grey. On the left side I painted around the stitches to leave the lighter color showing through. That is so much fun to see the "stitches" appear. It is one of the major differences in watercolors than in oils or acrylics. You leave your lights (at least most of the time) rather than painting them in on top of other values.

At this phase of the painting you can see it developing and you can see where it needs to go. I see that the apples are calling out for more color so that is where I'm going next.

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!!!