Southampton Sunflowers – classroom exercise Saturday 6th September 2014

What a nice exercise to complete, working from a photograph taken last week in Southampton. This is not one of my photographs but it was on an online daily newspaper site: I could not resist its fantastic colours and quality.

We had got quite a way into this but the finishing off was marrying up the foreground with the mid ground. A Good Way to do this is to use broken line. I used green to make my broken lines which lead the eye through the sea of sunflowers. A superb technique! That way there is a clear path (literally!) of colour that leads the eye nicely to the back of the sunflower field. I mentioned many times in class about using Negative Space to make the shapes of the sunflower petals. Another superb technique for a superb sunflower sunset. I also mentioned the importance of leaving some paper “white”. It does not have to be a big old chunk of space but it is one of the main ingredients of a successful professional watercolour painting. Hope you enjoyed this exercise, I certainly did, bringing two subjects together.