Dancing Ginger, 24″ x 18″, UART 320

Photo reference

Drawing with graphite stick

Underpainting step 1

Underpainting step 2

Step 1, beginning sky and background and red flower

Adding green to leaves

Developing the bottom

Further progression

Now for my second 24″ x 18″ from the tropics of Costa Rica.  For this one I’m showing you the photo reference so you can see how I changed it. There were two challenges with this painting:  there was a building and roof in the background that I wanted to omit. and I had competing reds!  Both the ginger flowers and the lipstick palms had reds.  I really wanted to paint the palms as I’d never seen anything like them before. However, I quickly realized that this had to be about the ginger flowers and their movement and not about the palms.

I began with a light drawing using a graphite stick, which I’m finding very handy as it doesn’t require sharpening.  I then laid in the underpainting with red under green and vice versa.  It’s very pink!  After the alcohol, I went to the upper right corner where I’d decided to put in sky with pale green and some very pale orange (this was the easy part!).  I used slightly darker green and cool pink to add in background that looks like fog (but there wasn’t any there).  I lightly added some trees in the distance trying to give the sense of a forest.  My major problem with the background was the progression from very light at the top to very dark at the bottom and how to deal with the middle.  I think i resolved some of it by adding more big leaves.

I put in the red on the upper ginger flower and then painted the palms.  I realized that I had a conflict, as I noted above.  So I put some light greens and greenish browns over the reds to soften them (not sure what stage this was).  Then I worked my way down the painting, working in areas to complete them before going on.  It was pains-taking but I liked the overall flow of the picture and the way the leaves lead the eye up to the majore flower and the sky.

Unlike the last painting, where the title came to me, I wasn’t sure what to call this one. One of my students noted that what I was painting was ginger and I decided that it was about movement and came up with “Dancing Ginger”, which I really liked.

I’m now almost done with the third and most difficult painting of the trio.  Stay tuned!