Creating In The Studio

Watercolor Painting by Dennis Pendleton. This painting, which is 22x30 inches, resulted from a lot of smaller paintings that I did in Denver Botanic Gardens. I do a lot of plein air painting there in the Spring, Summer, and Fall and then work up larger paintings in my Studio. I also like to create my own borders on the larger paintings because it gives the feeling that you are actually looking into a garden.

Working in my studio, I was more concerned with how the colors and shapes worked together and related to each other rather than representing a certain spot in the Gardens. Because my plein air paintings spanned several months, some of these flowers were not actually blooming at the same time. I started with the big green leaves because I wanted to get the larger shapes in first. This helped me decide on the size of all the flowers. The leaves are different combinations of olive, lemon yellow, cerulean blue and perylene green. For the depth that I wanted, it was important to have them overlap with each one being a different shape.

The orange flowers came next and they were painted with different yellows, reds, and violets. I made sure that there were different sizes and some were overlapped with other flowers. Blue flowers were added to complement the oranges and I used cerulean blue, French ultramarine blue, cobalt blue, cobalt violet and mineral violet. I added more flowers from my original smaller paintings while using all the different colors on my palette. As the painting developed, I added darks with perylene green, indigo, and mineral violet, to create a sense of depth and show off different flowers while others faded into the background.

The rim for the border is cerulean blue and the dark band is indigo. Both of these colors were used throughout so the border complimented the painting. Allowing a few of the flowers and leaves into the border was another way of tying everything together.

My weekend summer workshops at Denver Botanic Gardens are filling up. The one in June is full and there are still spaces available for July and August. Click Here for more information. Happy Painting! Dennis Pendleton