Painting 30 Roses

I hope you like roses.

Mid the Roses

I spent mid June through mid July painting roses. I had in mind a looser simpler style like the flowers I had been painting recently and I also looked at other artists roses that I liked especially Martha Collins .

I must have done at least 30 roses in a period of a month. Everyday it was roses and more roses. When I first started painting watercolor and wanted to paint vegetables and food I spent at least that much time for hours each day painting peppers until I got it.

I painted roses every day

Dennis andI decided after looking them all over that the two pink roses above were really nice. They got moved from the reject pile to usable.  Different than what I wanted to get, but nice enough to use.

I was about to give up a number of times but that determination that helped me learn to watercolor in the first place kept me going. Those 30 roses it turns out were both practice and learning what I did and didn’t want to do. It became clear to me when I was beginning to overdo it and I would stop right there and start again.

These were beginning to look like the roses I had imagined

And these also

Time to celebrate-I did it!

By the time I painted the final roses (see above) it was delicious and went smoothly and simply. Though I was finished with the actual watercoloring I was by no means done. I scanned the roses and then compared the scan to my originals watercolors. Where   needed I heightened some of the darks and brightened the yellows then rescanned. At this stage it is a good idea to change the mode toCMYK since this is the mode used in actually printing the design by the manufacturer. When you change from RGB to CMYK the colors dull down a bit.

 Time to get together with Dennis and create the designs. We have a true partnership in many ways. He is such a wonderful designer with an eye for the beautiful and simple. I rely on him at this stage of the creative process as well as earlier at the painting stage. I am the kind of artist who needs feedback. I am always popping into his work space to say,”Whatta ya think? Is it working?”

Next……….Dennis and I sillouhetted the roses. Then I looked at them again on the computer screen and decided that more enhancement was still called for. This I did in photoshop using hard and soft brushes and the clone tool and the burn and dodge tool. These are great tools for any artist. And now we were ready to use the roses in a design.

Give a Rose
Win a Heart

Friends are the Roses
in my garden

Took a while to come up with the inspirational sayings. I didn’t want anything too sappy. That wouldn’t be me. But sentimental. Yes I am.

I thought about painting more roses, but think I I am ready for a break.

Stay tuned.