Watercolor Painting by Dennis Pendleton. On the last day of my sketchbook workshop here in Denver we painted in Washington Park. Denver is known for its city parks and this is one of my favorites. We walked along the trail by the south lake and stopped at an informal garden full of wildflowers. It was a beautiful spot with trails weaving through the garden and plenty of shade. After opening my sketchbook I decided to try something a little different. I planned to paint across the two pages and leave an open space at the left for a single flower. With this long horizontal format, I only did a pencil sketch on part of the paper so that I would be painting some of the flowers freehand.
Next, I moved back to a stone wall, where I could sit comfortably in the shade, and began painting. My idea was to capture an impression of the garden rather than a photographic representation so I spent most of my time looking at my painting rather than the flowers. During this time I concentrated on how to weave the white flowers in and out of the composition, suggesting some flowers with simple marks of color while painting others with more detail, and how to fade the colors into the background without painting all the way to the borders. The pencil line that saved the white paper on the left is the only place where I painted right up to the border. Also, I chose where to add rich darks that would make certain flowers more important while developing a design that would lead the viewers eye in and around the painting. A combination of hard and soft edges also helped with this.
During this time, it was important to keep the mixing areas of my palette clean so that I would get rich clean mixtures and bright colors. When I moved to the blank space on the left I had been painting wildflowers for about forty minutes and I was primed to paint a single sunflower in a larger size with more detail. There were plenty in the garden to choose from and I liked this one in profile that pointed back to the rest of the painting. I used transparent yellow, burnt sienna, and lemon yellow while making sure that each petal was a little different. The green leaves and stem that softened into one of the petals were painted with olive and perylene green. Lemon yellow, cobalt violet, rose dore, cerulean blue, mineral violet, alizarin crimson, cadmium yellow light, and cadmium red, were used for the wild flowers. When we were done painting we talked about each painting and about the joy of plein air painting while relaxing in the park and enjoying a sunny afternoon. Happy Painting! Dennis Pendleton
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