Initial thoughts
These two waterlily paintings were originally planed as my “End of the year relaxing project in 2023“. But it turned out to be the “Beginning of the year warming up project in 2024“. The goal is to practice loose brush stroke, lost details and color swapping.
I try to paint enough light and dark with relative accurate shapes without needle point tiny details. At this size 20″×24″, you wouldn’t notice a 1mm long, hair thin detail unless you put your face directly into the canvas. People observe the actually painting in distance. So I would rather put the color and mood in place than overwork too much details. Besides, I am not going for realistic for these two.
The color swapping is something similar to my previous post, PAINTING TIPS (4) COLOR PALETTE PAINTING METHOD. Because all the images I can find about waterlily paintings are green/blue, sometimes pink. I want to see how it would look like if I completely change the green/blue theme into something else. In this case I choose the yellow/orange in contrast to green/blue.
Digital sketches
As you can see in above pictures, I changed a lot in actual oil paintings. When I did the digital sketch, I was thinking about gold pigment outline. But it didn’t work well on canvas. I had to pick up a different outline color for each of them. On the first one, the water is blue, the waterlily is green so the outline is deep pinkish mauve. On the second one, the water is yellow, the waterlily is orange so the outline is dusty king’s blue.
Summary
Well, again, yellowish colors are so transparent and they are hard to cover each other unless you have a base layer with titanium white underneath. In other words, the yellow one takes longer time to build up layers. The blue one is more straightforward.
I do like the loose brush stroke and lost details. It allows me to enjoy the painting process more. It also gives me the opportunity to accept imperfection (details). Therefore the whole picture looks more organic.
I am looking forward to apply these techniques into my further paintings.