Blossom Time

Watercolor Painting by Dennis Pendleton. Flowers are blooming everywhere in Denver and I will soon be painting in Denver Botanic Gardens. This is a painting I did there last summer during one of my weekend workshops. The garden was in full bloom and everywhere I looked there was something to paint. I am always interested in different shapes and how they relate to each other and here I started with the big green leaf in the upper right corner. I used olive green, lemon yellow, and olive mixed with perylene green. The plant above it was painted with mineral violet, perylene green, and cerulean blue and I thought the shapes made a nice contrast with the green leaf. To enhance the green leaf even further I surrounded it with smaller flowers and dark background colors.

Massing the orange flowers together created a larger more intricate shape and they were mixed with different tones of lemon yellow and cadmium red. You can see some of the orange flowers are surround by their compliment, blue, as well as deep greens mixed with olive and perylene green. The smaller flowers in the upper left were painted with cerulean blue and cobalt violet and, again, I massed them together to make more interesting shapes. You can see I used spattering to give them texture and some of it ended up on other plants. I don't mind because this is just another way of relating one shape to another.

As I moved down the painting I continued overlapping shapes to create depth and I made sure different flowers and leaves were cropped by the borders. This gives the illusion that the garden continues beyond the four borders of the watercolor paper. Finally the dark background colors show off the flowers and some of the leaves, because they are middle values with soft edges, fading into the background.

I have scheduled 3 weekend watercolor workshops for this summer at Denver Botanic Gardens and the dates are June 2, 3, & 4, 2023.....July 14, 15 & 16, 2023.....August 18, 19 & 20, 2023. You can sign up for 1, 2 or all 3 days and the prices are $95 for 1 day, $170 for 2 days, and $225 for all three days. We meet in the gardens between 9am and 9:30am and paint until 3:30 or 4:00 with a break for lunch. I will demonstrate each morning and work with the students individually for the rest of the day. If you would like to sign up for any of the days or, if you have any questions, send me an email to pendletonstudio@gmail.com Happy Painting! Dennis Pendleton