Sorry for the not-so-great quality photo. I left my camera in Poland accidentally and all I have right now is my camera on my phone. I have a friend with a "real" camera (as opposed to my point-and-shoot) and I want to try to get some more professional pictures of my art soon. ANYwho...
So I painted (most of) this with a palette knife (the exception being the background because I wanted it smooth in contrast to the flower and also the stem because I got sick of the palette knife). My original vision for this painting was to have it a little more abstracted than it is, but I really do struggle with abstraction.
Also, I had to do a lot of experimentation with mixing reds. Red isn't a color I use a lot and I had a lot of trouble creating a very light value red. I liked my dark reds, but lights were trouble. In my reference photo, the rose was sitting in front of a window with light shining through the petals. I wanted to get that bright, vibrant light value but I don't think I did. I think I got a medium red and had to compensate by making the other values darker than they were. That is ok, but I still wanted that light value and I couldn't do it with out adding white and making it pink, totally wrong. If anyone has any suggestions for this, please leave me some comments! Thanks :)
My inspiration for this painting was a photo I had taken of a rose that was wilting. If you've seen some of my other flower art, you might notice I like to capture flowers when they start to droop. I sketched it and sort of scribbled it for shading in my sketchbook, and thought it would make a really cool painting. I wanted the painting to be more like the sketch, but oh well. I'm still pleased with the way it turned out.
