Berries and Leaves

Berries and Leaves add to the garden.

Berries and Leaves

Petal Tips! This watercolor 20 X 30 on 300# watercolor paper is a negative painting. What I mean by negative, everything is painted around the subject, which are the leaves and berries.

I started with an underpainting. I wet the paper, dropped in yellow, purple and green. Be careful not to mix the yellow and purple, they will go muddy. So know where you want this underpainting. On this one I had already drawn a design and I knew where the leaves would go and also the berries. Sometimes, I just drop the paint and let the painting create itself, then I draw in the design.

Next let it dry. If it is not dry, then the underpainting will become part of the added colors. Once it is dry, start carving out around the berries. If you notice the value around the berries is  dark purple. I also painted around the yellow leaves with the purple and green.

I wanted a feeling of movement so I placed the stems and leaves in  a circular motion. It has to have a connection to each other and they do this by the way it is designed. There is a focal point, can you guess where it is?   I'll give you a clue on this one, it is the lightest leaf, with the darkest purple framing it. Sometimes I use the values (light to the darkest) to show the focal point, especially with this one, when all the colors are the same. I'll talk more about focal point in other paintings.

Happy painting to you my friends.  If you are not a painter, just enjoy the beautiful of this garden.

Meanderings~~~~~ We must have the thorns among the roses, those berries hid in the thorns, but come harvesting time, blackberry. blueberry or raspberry pie and homemade jam, we will forfeit the pain to gather them.

Each year, my daughter Cricket gathers blackberries which grows wild along their road. She would take the kids when they were young, now she goes alone, but she makes blackberry jam for us every Christmas. Every year, we would say, all we want for Christmas is homemade jam. She would send each of us a quart. It took hundreds of berries to make one quart. She would sigh and say, "You don't have any idea what it takes to gather enough berries for just one quart of jam."

We would just laugh and tell her how good it was. Oh me, what others do so that we can taste the sweet savor of their garden. We have no idea.