Painting Large Flowers in Watercolour

Of all the subjects I love to paint in watercolours, my favourite is flowers. I started painting them in 2015 and one of the reasons I love to paint them is that it's easy for me to gather reference material. I can go to a park or out in my garden and take photographs. I can also buy them from a florist and isolate them and take photos in different light. It's much more difficult to capture good reference material of birds and animals.

Until recently I've always painted the entire flower ....................................................

............................................. but late last year I started cropping them for a more contemporary look.

This year I thought I'd zoom in even further and paint a close up of the flower. So the other day I went through my flower photos and I chose a photograph of a Peony that I took a few years ago. I opened it in Photoshop and I played around with different cropped versions of it until my eye was drawn to the cropped photo below.

I transferred my drawing onto some Arches watercolour board (my new favourite painting surface) and off I went with fingers crossed.

I chose Daniel Smith's Quinacridone Pink as the main colour and I added a few areas of Winsor and Newton's Opera Pink for a bit of a boost. For the areas that were more purple in hue I dropped in some Phthalo Blue onto the wet pink and I let the colours merge on the paper.

I'm so happy with the way the painting has turned out that I now plan to do a whole series of 'up close and personal' flowers and foliage.

I played around with some interior mock ups in Photoshop just to see what it would look like on the wall enlarged as a print.

Below is a quick video of a small section of the painting.