WHITE ROSE II - 40 Strokes - TRUE VALUE

TRUE VALUE by Sea Dean 8" x 8" Gallery Canvas

WHITE ROSE II in Progress

TRUE VALUE
"8 x 8" on gallery canvas
PROFESSIONAL ACRYLIC PAINTING BY SEA DEAN

To view my Gallery or purchase this painting please visit Daily Paintworks. Larger originals or prints may be available by contacting me.

A rose created with 40 Strokes of the brush, more or less. Ha ha!

Loosening up your brushwork - A tip from Nancy Medina
The challenge below sounded good to me so I decided to give it a go. Would you like to join me?

WHITE ROSE I by Sea Dean

Roses are one of the most difficult choices for an artist to paint, particularly in acrylics; that's probably why rose paintings are so admired and why most artists avoid them. With over 500 paintings under my belt, many of them roses, you would think that I was confident and I am with anything else, but roses are tough and I applaud any artist that attempts them.

When you are drawing you can be more precise and with smudging and fine point work you can catch both the softness and strength of a rose. With watercolour you can add delicate washes to capture the light in a petal and with oil paint you have time to move the paint around to create lost and found edges, but with acrylic you have to work fast and with accuracy and translucence is difficult to obtain.

Nevertheless, above is my second version of Nancy Medina's challenge. I was supposed to do only 40 strokes of the brush, but I actually lost count. On the first draft I did less strokes than yesterday, but I wasn't happy with the result (see image). I was painting late at night in halogen light and with bravado added yellow flourishes which I regretted in daylight, so this morning they had to be subdued.

I still didn't like it and decided it needed a different background, and then I needed to integrate the background to show reflected colour and I ended up with a completely different painting, hence the new name. I like this rose and I can see that it is looser and soften than yesterday's rose, so I am making progress. I think this is probably the best painting I've done so far this year and I believe that working with value and not colour has shaken loose some of my painting inhibitions.

What do you think?


Cat # 14067 True Value