Painting #93, I really am painting

Today's painting is kind of out of my head, originally I painted one similar to this a few years ago, I had to come up with a painting for my class, I don't know what I was thinking, I gave them a photo, but they have trouble painting the negative spaces, they want to paint the flowers and not worry about the background, so, I'm not sure they really got into this one, it started out wet in wet and I really laid in the red orange (actually it was cadmium red light), I had them draw the rose shapes but they couldn't see the lines very well through all that red, so they struggled, so, I may have to figure out something a bit easier for the next class, or at least an easier approach to this style of painting, hopefully I can come up with something that will work for them. I didn't have any trouble, but negative painting is what I do well, so, I had fun.

Ok, now the procedure, of course I wet the whole page, which was a 1/4 sheet of watercolor paper (I don't believe the girls could handle the slippery clayboard yet), then I made a really thick puddle of cadmium red light and floated it over 1/3 of the paper where the roses are. After that was dry, I made a puddle of veridian green, and a puddle of permanent violet and one of ceulean blue, these were the original colors of the background, I had them paint water around the rose shapes 1/4 of the paper (the top 1/4), and float those colors in right on top of some of the red orange (which makes a very dark background), when that was dry then we did the other top 1/4 and did the same thing, also thinking of the stick type things in the background (this was some of the negative painting they had trouble with), then the bottom 1/4's were much lighter so I had them do the same thing only water the paint down (I know this painting looks square, well now it is, I cropped it, I didn't care for the long stems that were originally part of the design, but that was a final decision not in the middle), so I'm getting ahead of myself, when that was done I started to define the roses. some were having trouble keeping the shapes of things (paint goes where ever there is water, if you know what I mean), so, I got out the watercolor crayons, some of this painting was done with those, now I forgot to tell you that I was doing all this with the transparent watercolors, when I got home, the opaque watercolors came out and I fine tuned it to my satisfaction, that was when I cropped the painting, I like this painting now and sure hope you do too.