Moving on to 'Lotus'

Never did I think this day wud come..literally. Took forever to finish 'Chrysanthemum' graduation painting.. I need to put up a picture to justify myself.

First was the outline which took more than one class....just because if you don't place the right markers then your layout will be messed up, and next thing you know there won't be place for that single leaf or that thorn branch (Ahem..ahem...which anyways happened after all that measuring...I even used a measuring tape for heaven's sake!!!)

Then comes the color ..You got to mix the right green for the lighter leaves, else your darker leaves are not going to stand out...The 'mother color' is the base color from which you mix all your greens off, which my itself is an art. It can be therapeutic or a stress level 5, based on how you mix the colors. Oh yea, another thing..if you don't soften the colors the previous day, you can kiss the part of mixing colors far far far away.. Actually you just can't do any mixing.  And the veins, if you are not careful, they can look bulky and that will take away the tenderness of the leaf. For some you need to go over twice the dark green and the black, for some it needs to be grey. Hmm..and the strokes have to have the smoothness....phew!!!

Ofcourse not to mention all this should be in addition to the basics, the lighter elements Vs darker elements, bleeding if brush is overloaded, flying-white when you don't need it, paper tearing, unwanted bumble bee spots and the list goes on and on.

Moving on, next came the flowers ..ahh the spider mums..used to love that flower on paper, past -tense because they literally made me cry. First the outline, you got to have the dimensions, the order of petals matter trust me on that, and ofcourse the way the flower folds or rather the grouping, and yes, the 'three point rule' else its going to look like a single file (that can be quite ugly). So we make templates, then trace the flowers using the 'correct' color. The petals need to be filled with color. The shading is essentially how you load the brush and how the brush is layed down on the paper. No mutiple strokes, no touchups. Hey! you can try to do that, and that'll stick out more so as a sore thumb ( you are better off not trying to correct things and end up making it worse) . By the time you are done with the spider-mums, you'll be thinking those simple mums shd be a breeze. right? No wrong! very wrong!. The yellow shading is not as simple as it looks, the way the brush needs to be loaded to prevent smudging at the same time to have the color variation was a killer.

By now, its time to put in the branches, the 'bone-stroke'. Normally speaking this is not a too difficult of a task. But knowing you can mess up your painting adds to the stress. The branches need to be a light grey, so as not to over-power the flowers. Then comes the beauty...the rocks!

Rocks - only one word to explain rocks for me. Pure torture. The outline has to be ragged and of the right color, so that the facets of the rocks are set correctly. Since the color is dark you really don't want to mess it up. The filing inside the rock should have texture, variation and color. Not to mention if you are not careful, its very easy to tear the soggy paper; and that would be game over.

By now, you can go and add the while lines on the flower, i.e ultr-fine lines on each petal. It sounds simple, but not so when there are more than 50 individual petals. The stamens for the simple mums are simple black dots. But they need to be random in arrangment, and should vary in size, else it'll look too uniform. the ink needs to be really thick for this. As for the spider mums, the 'comma' shaped stamens have a white background, then go over them with yellow tipped in red. This part was not too bad, except that I think I was a zombie, chantting to myself 'it is what it is'.

The last not the least is the moss underneath the rock. Simple dabbing. but the color needs to be correct, the spacing 'random' with adequeate white spaces. Guess what, I tore a piece of paper in this part (duh! its not enough if you are careful about the brush tearing the paper, apprently you should not even be moving the paper!).

I almost forgot the thorn stem in the middle. Good god, after all that measuring I still didn't have the correct spacing. Kinda stuffed it in. The bone stroke and the fine thorns need some TLC. Well at this point I just wanted to finish and move on. For heaven's sake...all I wanted to is to just move on to Lotus. and so I did :)..Finally yes finally I had completed my graduation painting.

YAY!!!!

PS: We always do more than one copy, becos as you can see there is more than one place you can mess up the painting. There are a brave few who do three copies. I started with three, but didn't have the energy. To be honest I don't know how I did two.