Cabbage6" x 4" watercolor on paper
Stacy L. Rowan
Here is my submission for the August Virtual Sketch Date. I loved the purple and green combination found in this cabbage. Since I reacted first to the colors in the reference, I decided to use watercolors for my entry.
If you've been following my blog, you know that I have been out of the art habit recently. The virtual sketch date challenge was the perfect opportunity for me to get back to it. That being said, we all know that rusty feeling you get when you've been away from your paints. So I decided this month that my main goal was to finish my entry and submit it on time. As a reminder I wrote this on my printed reference page...
Success is in the doing, not the end result.
And I have to say, when I hit that "ugly phase", reading the above statement really helped!
Overall I am pleased with this little painting. I am happy with the colors I achieved and, by means of this post, was successful in my main goal of getting this done. However, I do feel I lost some of my initial freshness. I used masking fluid for the leaf veins. I have a love/hate relationship with masking fluid. I love that it lets me paint without being concerned about saving the light areas that are masked off. But I hate what happens when I remove the masking. The areas of masking are almost always bigger than I want them to be, and I hate dealing with softening the hard edges of paint that built up around the masked areas. I'm not sure if the painting actually looks less fresh, but the time I spent blending in the masked areas sure made it feel less fresh to me!
Please visit the Virtual Sketch Date blog tomorrow and use the links to look at the other entries.
