Watercolor Orchid

A short post for today.  With the Holiday season coming around I needed to start getting some Christmas presents gathered and I'm terrible at getting gifts, so I decided to make one at least for my mom since she typically likes my art.

The project was simple enough and took around 5 hours total to produce.  I began by first drawing out my guidelines in pencil for the Orchid I had selected to draw.  Once drawn in, I went through and carefully started to paint with watercolors.  It's been many years since I've touched watercolors, typically I've preferred Oil or Acrylic, but I decided I wanted to give it another shot.  The paint worked wonderfully so long as I remained patient for it to dry.  I didn't want the entire drawing to be painted however, I purposefully left open negative space to contrast the bold colors.  All in all, I still think I put too much paint on the paper, but there's really nothing I can do about that.  With that dry, I then turned to an old technique I learned way back in Junior High School - outlining the watercolors in a fine black ink line.  In this technique, I look very closely at each individual shade of color, whether intentional or not, and then draw a line to separate each color from the others.  The cool part about this, is that due to the nature of watercolor, some of the shades don't quite blend perfectly, you find little areas where the water pooled and changed the way the paint dried, leaving very intricate and delicate designs within the paint.  I added a few extra "random" drops of paint just to add to the aesthetic and then I was done.

I'm really quite happy with the color palette I chose.  Typically I tend to go overboard on the color and then the whole thing just turns to a muddy color.  But here I stuck to just a few colors: Green, Violet, Magenta, Pink, and Orange.  I'm really quite happy with the way the flowers themselves turned out, though the picture I took here doesn't do them justice.

Any questions regarding, just ask.