Abundance, 24″ x 18″, UART 320 8-ply board

Drawing

Underpainting stage 1

Underpainting stage 2

Painting in process

I’ve just completed my first Costa Rica painting. It wasn’t easy!  I’ve never thought I could paint complicated subject matter like this before and I never thought i’d have the patience. For some reason, I’m wanting to do more difficult work, more slowly and I’m really enjoying it.  For this one, I didn’t have to make any serious changes to the photo, which really helped. But I didn’t want it to look just like the photo either.  I knew that i wanted to do an underpainting of red under green, and green under red.  I purchased 18 x 24 UART 320 grit boards from Dakota, mounted on 8 ply mat board.  I did the drawing and left it in my studio for a few days.  When I came back it had warped pretty badly. I was very disappointed in this.  But after my initial work on it, I lay it face down on a piece of glassine and put a bunch of magazines on it. It flattened right out, thank goodness.

Anyway, I’m sharing the initial drawing done with a graphite stick and the stages of the underpainting before and after the alcohol.  I lost some of the drawing with the alcohol. I’ve included an image of the painting in process where you can see that I’ve used a hard pastel to redraw the painting as I went along.

I chose this photo because I really liked the large warm heart-shaped leaf facing the viewer and the procession of dainty pink blooms up the left side of the picture.  I also liked the fact that the leaves around the primary one were all of cooler greens, thus setting off the major leaf.  In the photo, I could see a lot of orangey-pinks in the warm leaf.  I left some underpainting showing through but also added oranges and pinks to the greens and highlight areas.

When painting the many (MANY) leaves I tried to use light applications of pastel so the reds would show through.  I primarily used Giraults, but also some Blue Earth and Schminckes in the flowers and major leaf.

Given the dark background, I thought about ordering black UART but decided against it. I prefer to add the darks and have a hard time when everything is black to begin with. I used my darkest Prussian blue NuPastel for the darks in the underpainting.  When I began the painting I used the Unison dark green, but quickly realized that using the darkest blue Girault was even better.  I wanted to be able to show various layers of greens within the darks and using the blue was better and really set everything off.

I was worried that I’d end up with too many hard edges and I did some finger softening of the whitish flower at far right and some of the leaves.  I used the large cool leaf in the upper right to point down to the center of interest, then carried the cool color down to the lower leaves.

As with my Great Falls Blues painting, I’ve never done anything like this before–not that I can remember anyways!  Finding out that I CAN do this sort of thing has been fun and rewarding and I plan to do several more and make prints of them.  But next week I’ll be doing two Caribbean sunset demos for my classes which will give me a nice break!