Hydrangea Blooms

Hydrangea Blooms   Watercolor   13 x 10

is a painting that equaled the preconceived image in my mind.  That rarely happens, as I usually don't have such a clear image of my goal....I am a wanderer, I'm afraid.  Each autumn, I clip a few of these papery spent blooms for my front door wreath....they are so very beautiful.....they make my heart sing.  I planned to oppose these light papery things with a hard glass jar....polar opposite textures.  Two sessions were spent in painting the image monochromatically with raw umber.  My new tube of this hue is by Daniel Smith.  I have found it to be more brown than the  more yellowy hue by Winsor and Newton that had been on my palette for years.  Whites were held for most of the progress....more than you see here.  The last session was spent in glazing and dropping color onto the forms....lightly, very very lightly.  On the blooms, the color was absorbed off after a few minutes with a paper towel.  The pattern of the darkest darks was laid in last of all, including the small pockets of dark within the blooms.  The painting was then fine-tuned to my liking.  I am pleased.

Hydrangea Bloom...the first fresh stroke

Hydrangea Bloom   oil/wood panel   9 x 9 x 1

I love the blooms that spring from hydrangea  plants!  This was my first time painting on a gessoed wood panel and found it to be much like painting with watercolor on hot press paper.  Strokes are much more hard-edged...crisper...not bad...not good...just different.  I had a difficult time finding a place to put the bloom for painting.  I settled on putting it in a water glass right beside the painting on the easel stand.  The first session revealed lots of negative space where the blooms had not yet reached maturity.  The following day the blooms had opened further...much more beautiful...but lacking the artistic aesthetic of having the background show through those spaces.  I chose to keep painting from my day #1 memory.  My goal was to load up the brush to mimic the direction and stroke of each petal and allowed myself very little diddling around.  For me, for flowers, the first fresh stroke is the best.  Ah....experience.