ROSES SAGA

Part 1 

We've had a lovely Christmas with my brother to help us celebrate although quietly chilling as we call it. Now it’s back to paint along with Pete. We decided to start the New Year at a steady pace with roses. I have painted them before but they took me a few sessions to complete. I might add that they turned our really well and sold those I did complete. I've been looking at lots of u tube videos to see how other people paint their roses. Some were very simple and basic, some more elaborate, with oils, acrylics and other mediums no drawings just painting them on.

Well it all looked easy enough with just a bit of practice we'll be fine. 

Firstly we used some grease proof paper to practice some of the strokes I’d seen on the videos. I like my flowers to look realistic and after picking up a few different ideas on shapes and colours we made a start using black gesso to prime the canvas and make the roses stand out as i'd seen demonstrated on one of the videos. We messed about trying to paint roses, mine red and Pete used yellow. For some reason the paint wasn't doing what we expected and not applying to the canvas. By this time it was our lunch break. We wiped the boards back to the black and left them to dry off till we came back.

OK plan B after lunch:

We’ll leave the roses for now and use the boards for a night scene. Good Plan?  We used dark purple to cover our boards then used white part way down to give us a lighter area for our horizon to show up. Using all the dark colours we already had on our pallet from this morning, we put in some trees on the horizon and used up what was left on the foreground. White finished off the water, highlight on our foreground tree, moon, stars and a shooting star for a bit of fun. All was not lost as we had a simple but effective completed painting and a couple of happy painters.