Primrose - 50 Watercolor Flowers Project (8)

Primroses are one of my favorite spring flowers. This is painting number 8 of 50 in the series. I have avoided painting one for a while because the leaves can be quite intimidating to paint.  So I wanted to figure out a way to paint the leaves wihtout them being too detailed yet still show the texture of all the little bumps and bubbles. 

Here is the very first washes of paint on the drawing. Primroses can be daunting to draw too, so my secret is to take a picture I really like and then use tracing paper to trace it. Once it is traced I transfer it to my watercolor paper, it takes all the stress out of drawing!

Before I started the good copy painting I tested out my approach on a practice sketch. I drew this very quickily onto some watercolor paper and tested out how my colors looked and if my washes and texture marks would create the effect I wanted.

I continued on with my good copy painting using my 3-step painting method to guide the way. Below you can see I have added all my first washes in on the flowers and made sure the color was very rich but still had paper shining through to create highlights.

In the picture below I pretty much have the flowers complete and then have started the leaves. The first washes have been added in and then I started to create texture and lines in step 2 by wetting the paper and then letting it dry just a little before I start to use my brush to draw in veins. This gives a subtle soft look to the lines rather than hard dry-brushed lines.  This is a very handy tecnique to know and I use it very often in my bird paintings. It's a good one to practice on a scrap piece of paper first.

Now I have added more of the final texture to the leaves with dry brushing.

Here is the finished painting below.

I really enjoyed this painting and I look forward to painting more primroses since there are so many different colours of primrose flowers.

Here is the reference picutre I used for the painting, I bought a potted primrose at the store and took a picture of it with my phone outside.