Orange Rose - October Challenge Painting

In one of my previous Posts I was talking about a Painting Challenge.
The October Challenge was to paint an orange botancial painting. I knew immediately that I would paint an Orange Rose and here is the painting.
It is painted on 95 Lb coldpressed Arches watercolor paper and size is around 10"x12".
You can buy it directly from my Etsy-shop, if you are interested in this painting.

Please visit the Artcolony.blog to see what the other artists have done. We are a group of very nice ladies from UK, Canada, USA and Germany (me!). It is great to know all these ladies, although it is through Internet. But who knows maybe one day we will meet each other........

Go to http://artcolony.blogspot.com and view all the October Challenge Paintings there. You will love them.

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.

Pink Rose Painting finished

I am so excited. My first Rose painting for this blog is finished.
It is only painted with transparent watercolors and I used all the colours which I mentioned in the previous post.
At first I was worried a bit about the composition and I had to cut some of the white area on the right side, it did not look good. But now as it is I really love it to have this painting in this way.
It worked also absolutely great on the unstretched hotpressed paper - it did not buckle in any way.
I am off to start a new Rose painting. It will be a yellow Rose and I have already worked on the composition.
I have hundreds of reference photos or better thousands and I could not get enough to view this Roses. But when I look through them I must get the "Kick" and then I immediately know which one I want to paint. Otherwise I am getting bored while painting and this is never good.

I do not have a Title for this Rose painting yet. I was thinking about giving names to the Roses, not the real Roses names, because I do not know all the names. But how would it be to have girls names for the Roses, like "Monika", "Irina", Julie or so. Hmmm ... I must think about it. Maybe I will get another idea.

See you soon!