Botanic Gardens Watercolor Painting

This is a painting that I did as a demonstration for my weekend workshop at Botanic Gardens in Denver. It took a little over an hour and I worried that the students were getting anxious too start on their own paintings. Spectators stopped by a few times to see what I was doing but they were respectful and thankfully they were only complementary. Painting in front of a group of people is always interesting and there is no guarantee that the painting will work. Explaining what I am doing while I am painting is a challenge because it engages both sides of your brain but I have gotten better with practice. I was attracted to this composition because the hollyhocks overlapped the fore ground, middle ground, and background and I decided to include the two figures to give the painting life and scale.