Painting Sumptuous Green Leaves

Watercolor Painting by Dennis Pendleton. Here is another painting of two beautiful blooms surrounded by sumptuous green leaves from my Denver Botanic Gardens Watercolor Workshop. We talked about the effective use of white paper and a technique called cutting back both of which I will explain here. The two white flowers were drawn in first along with a few lines to indicate leaves. I wanted one flower to be the most important so I made the second one smaller and cropped it with the left border. I painted around the white flowers with different greens which I turned into leaves, making sure the larger flower was surrounded with rich darks. To keep the flowers from looking flat, I added light washes of cobalt violet and yellow ochre while being careful to leave plenty of unpainted white paper. In watercolor you must plan ahead where you want white paper because traditionally we don't use white paint. As your painting develops you may decide to add a little color into the white area and, if that is the case, be sure and use transparent colors. This allows the white paper to glow through and create that wonderful transparency that watercolor is known for.

Cutting back is a helpful technique for representing areas like the mass of leaves in this painting. First I laid down light and middle values of perylene green, olive, and cerulean blue while allowing these colors to soften into each other on the watercolor paper. When this was dry I mixed darker values of perylene and olive and used them to shape leaves in the lighter colors. Look at this painting again and you can see how the the lighter colors turned into leaves as I shaped them with the darker values. This technique takes practice but it is well worth the effort. When painting outside on location, where time is of the essence, it allows me to complete parts of the painting quickly and effectively.

For the centers of the white flowers, I used lemon yellow and Indian red and, for the green plant coming up from the bottom border, there is a mixture of lemon yellow and cerulean blue. If you practice working with unpainted white paper and the technique of cutting back you will enjoy the benefits in your paintings.

There is still room in my watercolor workshop this month on Sunday the 20th and some openings in my weekend workshop at the gardens in August. For more information Click Here. Happy Painting! Dennis Pendleton