Thank you for your patience: Clematis finally finished!!!

The Clematis painting is finally finished!!! I almost tore it up ten times before it got done. But, I like it!

I want to thank you all for your great patience and encouragement during this painting which gave me tons of worries:-)

I even  framed it  ( temporarily) even though I will still go back to it in the next few days for the finishing touches. Framed it looks very much the way I saw it in my head. The only part that is totally different is the top dark portion in the middle - that was supposed to be a green leaf....but it looked horrible, so I glazed all kinds of layers of purple on top.

And now, I promise that my next painting will be a nice, easy one:-)

New work started - Clematis WIP Part 1

I have started a new watercolor floral: a clematis. My reference photo is from WetCanvas, but I have cropped it and intend to modify the colors significantly.  It will be fairly small, 11" X 14" on Arches 140 lb CP paper.

I have started with the heart of the flower and not the background as I usually do: I was really scared of those filaments criss-crossing and did not want to waste my time painting the entire painting first to find out that the center was a failure. At this point, the heart of the flower is almost done - will come back later to fine tune everything - I think that it is ok enough for me to continue with the painting. I hope that you agree.

The darks spots that you see are areas masked to preserve some highlights.

Have  a great week-end. We are having our first real  snow storm of the  year - it is very pretty, but the roads look very slippery.