Farewell Chinese Summer Landscape… today we moved on to flowers in class and began painting a composition of lychees hanging on the tree. This is the first stage, the leaves and branches.
I think the group I paint with have all been taken by surprise a bit today… there are four of us in the Advanced group and we’ve been doing this for a while, but today was a real challenge for all of us!
We’re using the largest of our brushes for the coloured part of the leaves, which is made from very soft goat hair. This means they hold a lot of water/paint which is hard to manage on tissue paper, which is effectively what we’re painting on… they also don’t spring back into shape after a stroke, so you’re forever trying to understand the physical abilities of the brush. In order that the colour in the leaves didn’t just soak in cauliflower shapes across the paper they had to be applied very fast and confidently, one stroke, right first time.
I have three of these already just from today’s class, this is the best… and I suspect I’ll be doing quite a few more before next Monday 😉 .