One Golden Moment

"One Golden Moment" 4x6 inch acrylic painting study for November.

Fall colors were on my mind when I chose this rose to practice painting acrylic on paper. I usually use acrylics like watercolor paints, thinning them down to make sheer washes of color, but I envisioned a painting inspired by a favorite photo of mine from Oregon that I thought might look good using acrylic paints in their thicker, more opaque state .

I love this photo. Just the right light, color, shadows and bloom!

Yellow flowers are sometimes challenging for me to paint. They often have shadows that are a mix of either purple, green or orange tones and getting those right without the shadow looking like mud can be tricky.
 

"One Golden Moment" The first layers of paint.

 
My first color choices made the shadows look very deep orange to burnt sienna. Eventually, they just didn't look right to me. Plus I made the shadow on the right so dark, the bud didn't look like it connected to the stem!
 

Compare the shadow change from sienna to green.

 After studying my photo, I repainted the bud shape and added either a yellow or green sheer paint layer over all the deep sienna shadows. Although, I did keep the vibrant orange center as it was. 

Being able to repaint over a mistake is one reason why acrylics are so great to work with. The sienna dot is the color the darkest shadow was before I gave it a healthier green glow make-over.

So my experiment in using just opaque colors resulted in needing to use the sheer layers too. Lesson learned. That is what keeps painting interesting to me, there is always a new problem to solve.

Happy creating!

>^-^<
Tina