Improving Daffodil Watercolor Painting

This is a picture that we created at AC Moore's watercolor class during 2 hour period. It is good and you can leave it like this but also you can go farther and add some more details. Below I'll show what I've done with it later at home. I hope it will help you to improve your paintings. 

I decided to darken the background and make it richer. You can see that I sketched leaves and a flower bud at the top left corner. With such helpful pencil marks I was ready to start to paint around. I used in turns Phalo blue, yellow ochre and sap green colors.

When the paint dried off I added some more leaves with positive painting this time. I used deep green and darkened it with Phalo blue. 

Next step - shadows.

Here is a finished version. Darker shadows made this picture more three dimensional. To create my gray for the shadow I used a mixture of Ultramarine blue and Burnt Umber. You can also use Paynes gray.

Summer in the Garden

Clouds

Angry Lose Happiness

First Wild Daffodils in Bloom

ACEO White Flowers

Blooming Summer

When I was a kid I used to spend my Sumner vacation with my relatives at villages near Krakow in Poland. To get there I had to take a train and then a bus. After jumping out of the bus, the first thing I always noticed were the wild flowers in the meadows. With their various colors they welcomed me to the back country paradise. 

For a long time I didn't know why farmers didn't like poppy flowers blooming on their fields and why called them weeds.  I recently learnt why. If poppy seeds mixed up with corn seeds, the flour would have yellowish tint and it gets rotten faster. Lately I haven't seen any weeds in the crops. I guess now we have herbicides that completely eliminate all wild plants. Well, I miss them a lot.

Last year my neighbor gave me a small poppy plant and this year I had my first poppy flower in my garden. I was so happy to watch it develop its bud and finally bloom. I took a few pictures, sketched, and painted it with watercolors. The original painting was sent to Poland to my dear cousin who has the same admiration for these wild flowers as I do.

The painting process is on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84uHkM_EBUA 

If you'd like to paint it too you can copy my sketch. Happy painting