Completed succulents

Okay so I learned a lot about painting in this one demonstration.  First, rushing really won't work.  Second, don't put your thumb on a wet part of the painting - it will leave a print.  Third, if you start out too dark, good luck saving the painting.  Now this last one is really ironic because I am normally terrified of putting too much paint and end up with weak and "insipid" colours.  So I'm finding it somewhat amusing to see that you can actually put in too much paint.

Usually in a drawing if you add too much value the best way to correct isn't to remove with an eraser, but to darken the darks more.  You need to create contrast and if you can get the darks far enough, the lights will still pop.  Then you can go over with your kneaded eraser and gently lift some of the sparkle back into the picture.

This doesn't work so well in watercolour painting.  If we're only talking small areas it isn't so bad and you can get away with quite a bit.  But in this demo the shapes are quite large.  I tried darkening the darkest areas - which admittedly got quite dark.  But some of the leaves ended up losing their dimension and texture which I found disappointing.  Also, the background leaves were supposed to be in bright light so shouldn't be so colour intense.

I decided to try to lift some of the colour off the highlighted leaves.  It worked better than I expected, though I did loose texture again.  So another lesson learned - try to get it right the first time!

While I was able to lighten the bright areas, I was also able to correct a few oopsies, like the blossom that was in the top right leaf.  But I think the painting looks more lifeless now, even though there's lots of dimension and intensity.  There's just no realism to it.  There's too many lines and not enough edges.  And there's a blurriness to everything that screams badly done.  All-in-all, I think I preferred it before i lightened it.  Aw well, I'm learning so many lessons I think my head might explode!  I'm going to move on to another video with Birgit next time.  She has a demonstration on how to paint white flowers that will come in handy with my crocus so I think we'll move on to that.