Weekend Workshop

Watercolor Painting by Dennis Pendleton. I just spent three days painting in Denver Botanic Gardens in my June Watercolor Workshop and this painting was done on the last day. One day we worked on vignette's and the second day I demonstrated how to add people walking among the flowers. Today I painted this closeup of some of the flowers to show how to simplify a composition. I talked about choosing one flower, drawing it on the watercolor paper then adding other flowers and leaves to make an interesting arrangement. With all the alluring flowers and colors it is easy to get overwhelmed so choosing one flower to start with can simplify the process.

With white flowers it is important to leave unpainted white paper and bring them out with the colors around them. You can see how I used cerulean blue and olive to bring out the white daisy's. Look how one white daisy is more defined and others are barely suggested. For a loose composition its important to have some flowers in more detail and others barely visible. This gives the viewers something to think about and keeps them interested. In the lower part of the painting I added some yellow flowers with lemon and transparent yellow and the olive green stems were allowed to bleed into the bottoms creating soft edges. As always, it is important to have a combination of hard and soft edges to create depth and keep the painting from getting to tight.

How much white paper to leave unpainted is always a question I think about while painting and it is different each time. In this painting I added soft pastel colors for the background while I painted the flowers. This resulted in the background and the flowers working well together. You can see how the flowers and background spread out and touch the borders. This results in more interesting negative shapes. Finally some spattering added another dimension and loosened the painting up even more.

I have two more Botanic Gardens Weekend Workshops scheduled, one in July and one in August. You can find more information on my website dennispendletonstudio.com. If you are interested in signing up or if you have any questions send me an email pendletonstudio@gmail.com. Happy Painting! Dennis Pendleton