After some success yesterday with rendering the grass in my Rabbit painting I was still unsure about the brightness of the green – it seemed to be battling with the grey/blue of the rabbit. So my first task today was to try and tone it down a bit.
Here you can see I’ve added a wash mixed with Alizarin Crimson and Ultramarine which has helped a bit, but it’s also lost some of the detail that I was so pleased with. Unfortunately, I think this piece is becoming more of an exercise in damage control than a pleasure – I’m learning with every single brush stroke, but I’m not happy with the overall style that’s emerging.
While that was drying I moved back to the Bromeliads that I’d started last week and began to add some colour for the flowers. This is just a first wash and will need additional shading – it’s all looking a bit flat so far, and very stylised. It was quite interesting trying to get an impression of the tops of the flowers without painting every individual part. I think as a beginning it’s looking promising, and some deeper red in places will hopefully give them some depth.
Looking at both these pieces together it feels like I’ve been regressing somewhat, I seem to have reverted back to using very tight and fiddly brush work again as before I learnt anything about using watercolour. I wonder what happened to the loose and confident style that I was trying to develop…
It’s good to have this heads up, maybe having two demanding exercises in a row was just what I needed to make me realise. It’s been frustrating to face the issues that they’ve both thrown up, but even more so when the solutions I’ve applied have led me in directions that I didn’t want to go 🙂 It’s all a learning process!