Geraniums and Leaves

This is my pick for today. Geraniums and Leaves. These plants are hardy and will grow all year.  It was hard to bring them in for the winter.  With fall in the air, snow is on the way, so it was time to give them a new home in my art studio. At the moment I have about thirty pots of Geraniums. This winter when everything is under snow, there will be geraniums to paint.

I am not particular excited about their smell. Geraniums are not know for their exquisite fragrance but for their big beautiful scalloped  leaves and big beautiful clusters of little flowers.

Petal Tips! This watercolor is a great lesson for painting masses of leaves. The trick is to build the leaves on each other, and you do this with lights and dark.

With a large brush, mix yellow paint and lots of water. Do not use paint directly from well, add water to it on the palette with just a tint of yellow.  An under painting is color put down, dried or dried with a hair dryer. An under painting and "wet on wet" is totally different. A wet on wet is when the under color is wet and is mixed with the added color.  

Geraniums and Leaves  (Full Sheet WaterColor)

Then I separated each leaf by painting each one with a different color, adding blue green or dark green or yellow green or reddish green. I leave some of the yellow underpainting to show the light. I add a lot of different colors to the leaves, green is boring without a couple of reddish dead, dried up ones. " I made sure that the light leaves were in front of the dark ones, making them come forward and pushing the dark ones into the background. (It is a paradox, the yellow leaves are actually painted first with the under painting, but they will come forward when the greens are applied to them. Besure to leave some of the yellow on the leaves.)

Make sure the dark leaves are down around the pot and in the center where the light can not filter through. Leaves are not that easy, but once you learn how to build them one on one, you can paint any grouping of leaves or foliage. It's all about darks and lights.

Also under the light leaves add a shadow which will pop them out and make them fool the eye and look three dimensional.

Look at a geranium leaf, the vein starts at the bottom and all the veins come from that place where the stem connects. It will look like a fan of lines. Not like a typical leaf that has a center vein and the others comes off the veins. You can apply the green to the leaf, take a credit card of sharp edge and pull the veins through. If you do it just right, the yellow underpainting will become the vein. Also add veins with a dark color, I'll use green with burnt sienna, it becomes a rich dark brown.

I use the word green without any fancy names.  I make my own greens with cobalt blue, ultramarine blue, or cerelliam blue or prussian. I add different yellows to them. Even black and yellow makes an army green. Play around with the greens, don't count on the perfect green from the tube. .

Meanderings~~~~ The leaves are as important to this flower as the flower itself. Isn't that the way with the people around us. In our youth we think we are the bloom and it is all about us. As we grow and mature, we realize so much that has been put inside of us is from others who have supported us along the way.

This painting has other things around it to make it a complete composition. I selected just odds and ends to bring out the design, color and balance. When we think about our lives, it takes all the odds and ends to support the complete painting  in us.

God has done a marvelous thing when He created each one of us in His image, then He takes all that comes along to humble our flesh, so the beauty of who He is comes through. He uses all of creation, the lights and the darks, the supporting people and the odds and ends of life to give us an unique look, which we call Jesus. His Spirit in us gives us Life.

Maybe we could say, it is the yellow under painting which comes through this dark flesh of ours. Just a few thoughts as to how He has orchestraed my life with all the odds and ends.