Watercolour (Done)

I didn't think I would finish this watercolour this quickly (I prepped the paper and did the tracing on Monday, then the moth on Tue, and the rest last night).

The flowers went fairly quickly, and initially they were done in just a single magenta colour. Later on, I went back and added darker shading to them in a darker pinkish-red.



The leaves also went fairly quickly. Oddly enough, one of the nicer shades of green I have is from that giant set of 6 "pucks" which we used to use in schools as kids. I also used the black from that same palette to shade/tint the green, and for the background.

I took some artistic liberties to stretch the image a bit, since I wanted to fill-in a bit more over the top flower, and under the tails. I also made some of the leaves just a tad brighter than the original photo (which you can see more clearly in my print-out that I used for the tracing.



Lastly, here is the finished piece. The only thing left to add is my signature, but since the background is a saturated black, I want to sign it with a gold pen. I can't find the one that I had several years back, so I'll have to get a new one.

I like how it somehow evokes the look of old fashioned wallpaper, as well as old European paintings where they always used a black (or very dark) background.