Pink Dahlia
painting
My wife and I were walking in the neighborhood when we saw this neighbor’s beautiful pink Dahlia.
Well clearly this deserves painting..
No, I certainly wasn’t going to draw it freehand.
So I took the picture into Krita.
And did the edge recognition.
Not sure if this was really a necessary step or if it would have been just as easy to trace it from the original picture.
Transferred the tracing onto the prepared surface. PVA medium with a lot of French chalk, a good amount of titanium white, and a little bit of pinkest pink. So basically handmade gesso on watercolor paper.
The leaves are just a little bit pinker than the background. The outline is Van Dyke Brown. Now, everybody thinks Van Dyke Brown is a really difficult pigment to work with. Lots of particles doesn’t mix well. But maybe that’s because they don’t know the trick. Which is that you have to dissolve it in alcohol first. Once it becomes a slurry with the alcohol, it’s easy to put into your water based medium.
For each petal place gilding on one side. Then we have a fluid fade between pink and white on the other side. This is accomplished by first wetting the area with dilute watercolor medium. Then putting a generous amount of pink one edge. A small dot of white in the other corner. And then mixing and swirling delicately.
Here we see that I got tired of splashing on the background and so tried to cover it up a bit with some tissue paper.
After varnishing.