May Botanical Painting: Rose

Have you ever felt like painting, but you're not sure what subject to choose? You end up looking at your photo library, Pinterest, Instagram, etc. and before you know it, you've been sidetracked with browsing and have spent an hour dilly-dallying - a precious hour that you could have spent on your piece? Well, I have. Too many times. And I have limited art time as it is, so all the times this has happened, I've always ended up feeling extremely frustrated with myself.

So I decided to do something about it by listing down all the projects I wanted to do in a month, scheduled them, and specified the subjects and medium for each. I aim to do one original botanical painting per month, and one 'special project' - it could be a portrait, a painting in a medium other than watercolor, a craft project, something else apart from a botanical watercolor piece.

For May, my goals were: (1) this portrait, and (2) an original botanical painting of a rose photo by pics4cwolfe on Pixabay:

The drawing was made easy by going with Anna Mason's measurement method, plus my handy Accurasee proportional divider for checking.

I decided to just paint a few of the leaves, leaving out the background. Here is my finished piece:

Materials used:

10"x7" Arches hot-pressed block

Using these paints:

• Winsor&Newton Winsor Yellow
• Winsor&Newton Yellow Ochre
• Winsor&Newton Burnt Sienna
• Daniel Smith Permanent Alizarin Crimson
• Winsor&Newton Permanent Rose
• Daniel Smith Phthalo Green Yellow Shade
• Winsor&Newton Permanent Sap Green
• Winsor&Newton Payne's Gray