Art-Along Roses 02/07/2020

Here are the details for my online class this Thursday evening, 02 July.

This week we will be painting some creamy white roses, in a coloured glass vase on a wooden table with background textiles. It looks simple but is deceptively complicated and may run over two weeks!

As usual I have created a line drawing for this week, so that we use our watercolour paints to fill in the details.

Roses Line Drawing © Karen Smith, July 2020, you may download this line drawing for personal use only, this image may not be reproduced or copied in any form.

This will give quite a stylized effect as can be seen in my sample painting.
If you want to have a painting that doesn’t have such strong lines you may want to trace your print out onto some watercolour paper .
Print out the pdf file from the link below, with masking tape, attach it to a bright sunny window, tape your paper on top and trace through with light pencil marks.

This is quite a complex painting, I recommend you study my original photo and painting carefully, some of the key elements are:

• The way the roses are rarely pure white (in fact anything but!)
• Treatment of the leaf veins
• The treatment of the glass vase to give the illusion of a smooth reflective surface
• The table wood grain creating movement and dynamics within the image
• The contrasting background textures of blue seat back and cream curtains.
  

There is quite a variety of colours on this one, I have used blues, yellows, browns greens purples, red and grey.

I recommend taping your paper down to a surface with masking tape. I tape my copier paper down to thin foam card, plywood or even some stiff card will do just as well.
This will help to keep the paper flatter, you may also want to have a hairdryer to hand to dry the layers of paint as we go along.

For our session you will need:

• Your Roses printout, ordinary copy paper is fine for this exercise. Make the print image fill your A4 Portraitsheet of paper, so it can be as big as possible.
• A spare piece of paper to try out your paint mixes on before applying colour to your painting, you could even print off a second copy of the line drawing for this.
• Watercolour paints: warm blues, warm and cool yellows, browns cool and warm greens, purples, red and greys.
• A large round brush, size 8-12 smaller round brush 6-8, a fine detail brush.
• 2 pots of clean water
• Rag or kitchen roll (for wiping your brushes on)
• Hairdryer

Here are some of the watercolour paint name colours you may want to use.

Ultramarine Blue – (C33 swivel paints) Chair, Curtains, Vase, Table runner & Rose Leaves & Table Runner
Crimson (C13) Mixing with UM blue for Vase &Table Runner
Diox Purple (C19) Vase & Table Runner
Cadmium Yellow (C05 just a little) Roses
Lemon Yellow (C03) Roses & Leaves
Yellow Ochre (C38 swivel paints) Roses, Table top wood
Burnt Umber (this is a cooler brown) (C42 swivel paints) Table top wood
Burnt Sienna (this is a warm brown) – (mix C17 & C33 swivel paints) Table top wood
Black (C43 swivel paints) Shadows (minimal)
Paynes Grey – (mix C43 & C37 swivel paints) Shadows (minimal)
Sap Green ( C25 is perfect!) for mossy pavements Rose Leaves
Phthalo Green (C27) Table Runner
Cadmium Red ( C11) Rose Leaves