Food for the Eye

Watercolor Painting by Dennis Pendleton. My Sunday emails are back. The last two weeks the internet was not connected in my new house but now it finally is. This is a painting from my August weekend workshop at the Denver Botanic Gardens. It was another gorgeous sunny day where we all painted, talked about art, and discussed each other's paintings. I have had a lot of questions about my palette so I included it in this photo. It is a handmade palette by Craig Young out of England and you can find his website by looking up Craig Young watercolor palettes on google search.

I talked about different ways to paint vignettes and then painted this with three borders that showed lots of unpainted white paper. Typically vignettes fade into the background without regard for the borders but sometimes I like to touch some of the borders with paint to make interesting negative shapes so maybe this is a partial vignette. I started in the center with a few flowers, surrounded them with rich colors and dark values and then continued painting in all four directions so that I didn't spend to much time in any one area.

As I moved around, I kept thinking about colors, values, shapes, and edges and how different flowers could be suggested without to much detail. A more detailed flower here and there will make bits of color seem like more flowers. I believe that if every flower and leaf are carefully detailed the painting will be boring. I would rather have the viewer decide some of the painting. Each viewer may see something different and I find that exciting.

The tall vertical flowers at the top of the painting were painted with cerulean blue, French ultramarine blue, cobalt violet, mineral violet, and perylene green. Transparent yellow, yellow ochre, lemon yellow, and burnt sienna were used for the gold flowers while cobalt violet and cerulean blue were used for the others. Combinations of olive green, perylene green, cerulean blue and lemon yellow were used for the leaves.

When confronted with all the excitement of a beautiful flower garden, focus in on one small area, choose one flower to start with, continue in different directions without spending too much time in one area, define flowers here and there, none as important as the one you started with, and suggest others with bits of color. Trust your intuition, it is stronger than you think, and then fade some colors into the background. Vignettes are fun and there is no pressure to complete the painting to all four borders. Happy Painting! Dennis Pendleton