Still Life 1-3 - Three Works in Progress

When we were painting in Buckhorn on Tuesday, the Church had a number of vases with dried flower arrangements in them.

I had taken photographs and did sketches of them and thought that they could be developed into some interesting paintings.

I sketched out the vase that had Chinese Lanterns and dried Queen Anne's Lace.

Still Life 1

I transferred the small sketch down onto three pieces of watercolour paper.

I wasn't sure what colour I wanted to use for the background and decided to experiment with a couple of different backgrounds.

In the first one I used French ultramarine blue and burnt sienna, making the colour a lot darker to the left side.

Still Life 2

On the second one I used a loose mixture of burnt sienna, raw sienna and French ultramarine blue and ran it down the paper in streaks to create interest.

For the third one I used a mixture of French ultramarine blue and alizarin crimson and worked wet on wet into the background. The mauve it made would be a good contrast to the orange of the Chinese Lanterns.

Still Life 3

I set these paintings aside to allow them to dry completely before I start to paint in the flowers and vase.

I will post them at a later date once I work on them again.