Waterlilies

I've received my new Golden Fluid Acrylics! Yummmm! With great effort, I restrained myself from opening each bottle and trying them out. Instead, I worked on the drawing of the waterlily and pads. It's almost done and I thought I'd post it here now.

I plan on doing at least three of these. One in traditional watercolour. One in watercolour over gesso'ed w/c paper. And one in fluid acrylics done in watercolour style.

I planned out and drew the line drawing, then placed a piece of tracing paper over top and started a value plan. This is where I work out a lot of little problems. If I didn't do this now, I'd come head to head with these problems while laying in the watercolour and that could easily end up in a disaster. With much frustration.

I keep the line drawing simple and clean so that I can transfer it easily to each of the three supports. It's also much less stress knowing that I have it there if I screw up while painting. The entire idea doesn't get tossed out this way.

Here's the drawing. It's not quite finished yet but I plan on working on that while watching those awards tonight. Oscars, Grammies, whichever. I just want to see Hugh Jackman.

Click on that pic and you'll see it bigger. I took a lot of shots of these at the Montreal Botanical Gardens a few years ago. I've taken two of them to create this. In the upper right area, I wanted the waterlily pads to be all pushed up and crowded. In the lower left area, there will be one flower and I want it to glow white. In that area, there will be flat pads in a much less crowded environment. Not shown here will be a few stems from the pads fading into the water.

In the value sketch, there's a lot of shading on the waterlily but that's just for my value info. I first drew it out with three flowers but decided to take the other two out and use one large glowing one.

On the way to Ottawa tonight, I decided to put a dragonfly in here. Have any ideas which pad to put him on? Not the flower because I don't want him there competing for attention. And besides, he'd get burned from the glow.

It's 11 x 14". Here's a very contrasty closeup of the lily.