A Stroll In The Garden

Watercolor Painting by Dennis Pendleton. This is another painting from my June Weekend Workshop in Denver Botanic Gardens. We talked about including people walking among the flowers and how to fit them into the composition. This is one of my favorite places to paint in the gardens because there are masses of flowers with trails running through them and big trees that provide a dark backdrop for all the color. We were sitting at a table under an umbrella watching people wander among the flowers when I painted this.

Starting with some of the flowers in the center, I used different greens mixed with cerulean blue , lemon yellow, along with cobalt violet and then surrounded them with a dark value of mineral violet. I have a set of three travel brushes in different sizes and I lay them out where they are handy. Using bigger brushes is a good way to loosen up your painting and I used the bigger one, a number 12 round, for most of this painting but there were a few times when a smaller brush was helpful,

Next, I added the three people walking behind the flowers on a trail in front of the big trees. I waited for them to appear on this trail because they were partly covered by the flowers. With their colored clothing they almost looked like larger flowers and that is what i wanted to capture in my painting. I was more interested in gestures than details because i didn't want the figures to look stiff. Also placing the figures against the dark trees showed them off just the way I wanted.

For the white flowers, I used more paint and less water for the dry brush technique which leaves bits of white paper. Then, I added small strokes of cerulean blue, cobalt violet and olive green while leaving the unpainted white paper for the flowers. Drybrush is a useful technique that works best in watercolor. For the tree trunks, I mixed different grays with cerulean blue and brilliant orange then used a darker value of the same mixture to indicate the bark. For the dark greens, I used perylene, olive and French ultramarine blue and allowed them to mix right on the paper. Finally, the dark tree trunks are a mixture of burnt sienna and French ultramarine blue.

I have two more Weekend Workshops in Denver Botanic Gardens and you can find out more information on my website by Clicking Here.

Happy Painting! Dennis Pendleton