Daffodils

OK, I admit it, I’m on a daffodil kick. First tulips and cats and now daffodils. What can I say?  After finishing my last daffodil painting, I found a picture of a single large daffodil in a blue and white pitcher and I just fell in love with it. I have to really like a picture to want to paint it, for painting or drawing has to express a certain passion.
Following what my fellow students are doing, I first did a black and white sketch of the picture. What is the purpose of that? To work out issues in the design and also learn to see the “values”, which means the lightness and darkness of the design. So I did a sketch in (where else?) my sketch book. I worked on it while waiting for the dentist and also as I watched a video last night. Since it was basically a “throw away” project (that means it was only a “study” and not a complete work), I decided to try out some carbon pencils I bought a while back. They are slightly unforgiving, in that they are hard to erase, so that was good practice for preparing for a watercolor (you can’t really erase watercolors either, so a mistake is forever with them). I like how quickly they apply and yet are much less messy than charcoal (that I decidedly do not like).
I am not going to show you the colored picture I worked from. You will just have to wait until I start the water color at my next class on Tuesday. But it is such a gorgeous contrast between a very “dead” or muted blue and the lemony yellow that the whole picture just pops with life. I can’t wait to get started.  My teacher says blue is the hardest color to work with to get the transparency right, so this will be a big challenge. That’s part of the reason why I wanted to work about the design and value issues before starting the painting. I just constantly have to learn that you cannot skip steps, skip the hard parts in order to get to the good parts. You cannot hurry success. So let’s just wait and see what happens with this picture okay?