Japanese Magnolia

I am back in my painting mode. I have started working on paintings for the upcoming Art Shows and not my learning mode of painting portraits.

Here is my Japanese Magnolia. When looking at the photo I used a magnifying glass and it looked so three dimensional. It was like putting on those glasses to watch a 3-D movie. I tried to capture that in the painting and even though it looks 3-D it does not pop off the paper as much as I would like it too.

I have so many paintings to do and such little time to do them in. My mind is painting faster then the time I have left.

This weekend I have wonderful plans to go to Corolla, NC with three painting friends for three days. The Outer Banks of NC is a beautiful, breathtaking beach community with wonderful places to look at and paint and photo. We are also bringing some DVD's to watch indoors during our downtime or (knock wood) bad weather. It is going to be so much fun and I can hardly wait.

Japanese Magnolias

I love to paint Magnolias. This is the first painting of Japanese Magnolias that I have done. In front of my mother's home she had a Japanese Magnolia tree. Every year it was a question of how they would bloom. My parent's lived in New York and often there was a frost in the spring which would effect the bloom in a negative way. One year there was even the question as to whether the tree would survive. But more often than not it would bloom and it was magnificent. The gentle, delicate flowers would grace the arms of the tree.

I painted this painting on Masa paper. I first layed in multiple pale colors. I then drew the outline of the flowers in. Then I negative painted the painting. I put my colors in surrounding the shapes of the flowers to be. After that I went into the flowers and added values to make them more three dimensional. Then I looked at the painting and saw that the background was not dark enough so I layed in another layer of color.

This is a fun way to paint. When you do negative painting your subject(s) jump right out at you. It is fascinating to see it happening before your eyes.