Waterlilies Painting

12x12" Oil on Canvas

Finally a waterlilies study I'm not completely disgusted with! It's tough going because it's not my usual subject and I've been studying Monet's techniques which is a whole new ball game PLUS I'm working with new water mixable oil paints which don't behave like my normal paints. I've been studying a book about Sergei Bongart, an influential Russian painter and also reading up on the impressionist techniques of the American Impressionists Hawthorne, Hensche and Lois Griffel, as well as a few other sources who are concerned with portraying light as colour. This study combines ideas from a number of these, but it's still far away from the final painterly look I want to achieve. Here I was more concerned with getting the colour and values working to support the center of interest.

Some things I like about it are the subtle yin-yang composition and the way I tried to subdue the value and colour contrasts everywhere except the center of interest.

Here's the photograph I was working from so you can see where I made some decisions. Note that I have already fiddled with this photograph in photoshop to get it to this point, adding the cloud reflection, moving the flower and the foreground plants, and changing values here and there.