June Roses (Cape Cod), 20″ x 16″, UART 320 board

Underpainting, stage 1

Drawing with 2B graphite

I’ve been having problems with my blog interface and have finished three paintings without being able to share them.  Fortunately, I was able to reinstall the old format, so now I’m ready to roll!

I have been doing paintings of roses.  Some larger, some smaller.  This first painting has the largest rose bush in it and is unquestionably my favorite. The picture is from Sandwich on Cape Cod.  I loved the house to begin with, and then there was this beautiful bush of pink roses in the foreground spilling over and under a lovely fence.  A new subject for me!  

While I did a drawing half scale, I had a terrible time getting it right on the board. The house was way too big and the fence just wasn’t right.  So I worked and worked, and finally got it.  I’ve learned to work until you are happy with the drawing, before beginning the underpainting! Speaking of which, it’s kind of wild!  A lot of orange and brown and blue.  But it worked. I got a nice dark for the violets that would go over the house.  And I got the composition the way I wanted it.

For the house, I used a blue violet Girault that was fairly bright. So I added the dark grayed red violet into it. That really helped tone it down, while retaining enough of the color.  The biggest challenge was the right side of the house in sunlight.  It’s always a trick to get a dark cool color to look like it’s in sunlight!  There must be some yellow. So I began with a light cool green, then added some light but brighter red violet (soft) into it.  It was perfect!  Kind of like magic!  (I keep looking at the house and I don’t think the lines are straight, but I’m going to leave it.)

The large bush in front of the house was a perfectly rounded bush (just one). I made it more irregular and by adding light on the right side in two places, I came up with two of them!  One seems to be right in front of the house and the larger one is  by the fence. Much more interesting and it just sort of happened!  

I’m very happy with the fence.  I used blue grays, grays, browns and it worked nicely.  I simplified the foreground post and was really happy with it.

Then came the roses.  I’ve never tried to do them before.  For the underpainting, as you can see, I decided to block out the overall shape with green–no odd color that would make it more difficult.  I used various pinks from my quinacridone red Blue Earth set and some warmer orangey pinks and yellow white.  I loved that some were in shadow under the fence, making them much more interesting.  It took patience and I had to keep stopping and coming back to it.

After getting the roses done, I realized that I needed to tone down the kousa dogwood blossoms by the house.  I did this by smudging them a bit and adding a slighter darker color over some of them.  It went back and had a lot less priminence and I was happy.

This is one of the happiest paintings I’ve ever done.  I took the picture on a beautifully perfect June day. And later that day I had dinner with my sister Marcia, who I hadn’t seen in three years!  So it was very special.  Unfortunately, my other rose pictures aren’t quite like this one, but I’ll definitely look for more like this in the future.