Waterlily Series No. 1

9 by 12 inches on 140# watercolor paper using various brands of watercolor paints. One thing I learned from this painting is to take your time and you will get a good end result.  I took a lot of breaks in between painting so I can’t say how long I took to do this painting. I started with the flower, then proceeded onto the buds; followed by the leaves and finally the background. Background gave me a lot of trouble since I was not sure how I should paint as. Finally decided to stick to a muddy dark background.

This time around I took a risk by not stretching the paper all around using a gummed tape. The paper buckled like crazy! Since I took break in between, most of the buckling would go away when the painting dried up. Lesson learned : always stretch the paper before you start painting especially if the paper is less than 300 lbs.

I used the reference image from WetCanvas Reference Image Library.