The best place in our house isn’t actually IN our house… it’s the old couch we have on the porch that’s bathed in sun for three quarters of the day. This is something I neglected to mention in my last post – it must have seemed odd that I could paint roses on the couch ‘en plein air’ (except for those of you who’ve sat on it).
Today I spent another hour sitting in the sun trying to capture the last rose of the three that I painted on Monday. They don’t last long as you can see (I hope!), this one is also fading fast and the petals are only just hanging on. One good gust of wind, or a light shower, and they’ll be on the ground with the rest.
Firstly with this practise study I tried to make the bloom larger, it was very difficult painting so small last time. I also wanted to be more delicate and capture the sun shining through the petals. Not an easy thing to do… I think I was just about getting somewhere when I had to stop. I’m still starting off too dark, and I think my brush was a little large – but I’ve heard you should paint with as big a brush as possible to stop you focusing on detail and fiddling.
And I fell off the page – you can just see the ring bindings on the left… it’s quite pretty though for all it’s faults 🙂