Loose Painting of Daisies

Watercolor Painting by Dennis Pendleton. I get a lot of questions about how to paint white flowers because in watercolor painting we do not use white paint but rather save the white paper. I painted this vignette as a demonstration in my "Introductory to Painting In Watercolor" Class at the Art Students League Of Denver to show the different steps.

First, I did a simple pencil drawing to establish the size and location of the flowers. I don't count the number of petals and I usually include fewer than what I see while making sure some are different sizes and some overlap each other. Next, I painted the centers with a brush full of yellow and burnt sienna. You can see that some of the paint dripped into the petals and I didn't try to correct this because it added to a looser painting style. Using rich darks like perylene green and mineral violet, I began outlining the flowers while allowing the colors to mix right on the paper rather than on the palette. It is important to use different colors here rather than just green. For more interest, I also added cerulean blue and mineral violet. You can see how all these colors mixing on the paper caused the white flowers to emerge.

Using the shape of my round number 12 brush I created a few shapes to represent leaves and stems. It is important not to fuss over this and try to create the leaves with a single stroke. French ultramarine blue and more violet were used to create a couple more flower shapes emerging out of the wet paint surrounding the daisies. If I leave the daisies completely white, they will look flat so I added a few strokes of light violet and you can see some of the surrounding colors have dripped into the petals as well. This helps tie the painting together.

Finally, I did a some spattering and held the painting at arms length to see how it looked. This helps me stop in time so the painting does not get over worked. I could have gone back and made adjustments but this is the time to be careful because you don't want to loose that fresh look that comes from stopping in time. One last piece of advice, if you want to have a loose spontaneous style, learn to live with mistakes while letting the water and paint do some of the work. Happy Painting! Dennis Pendleton