Rosebud

"Rosebud", 4"x7", watercolor

With looking through my reference photos I found this beautiful bud and I had to paint it. Usually I paint full roses in bloom but I think that often buds are so beautiful, especially when there are different colours. When we paint roses often the buds own at the second place and the rose in full bloom is the center of interest, so I wanted to have now the bud as the star of a painting.

The Bud is from the Rose "Sangerhauser Jubiläumsrose". I used the colours: Indian Yellow, Permanent Rose, Alizarin Crimson, Sap Green and Helio Turquoise. Oh and Aureolin (the cool yellow).
In one of my previous posts I mentioned that I tend often to overwork areas, especially in the leaves. When having a white background then this is okay to go darker but when adding a dark background the effect is then gone. So this time I only applied a tiny little wash of Helio Turquoise on the leaves and then I added the background. This was a good decision for me!
When the background was added then I added a bit more of a mix of Aureolin and Helio Turquoise, so that it just was enough, because I wanted to have the leaves very light against the dark background.
The dark background was painted at first with a Indian Yellow underwash, then I used a mix of Phthalo Green, Alizarin Crimson and Phthalo Blue to get the darks.
For dark backgrounds I like the coldpressed paper much better, for the smooth look of the Rose I like the hotpressed paper better.