Using Yellow In a Watercolor Painting is Tricky

Floral Friday

Spring has sprung and my first blooms have popped out!

Definitely floral inspiration for my watercolor painting! Here is just an overview of the process and not meant to be a full tutorial! I will start having full tutorials on watercolor and pastels on Tuesdays of each week starting in April. Well... as full as I can make them.

Spring Pops, Watercolor, 12 x 7, ©VivianCooper 2014

Yellow is a tricky color to work with. The shadows are hard to create using just layers of yellow. And adding blue or Violet can create an unpleasant green or muddy cast to the shadows. I have started experimenting with using a very watery mixture of neutral tint for the shadows to see if this works better. So far it is ok but I plan to experiment more and try to push the envelope on yellow. I am not going to let it get the best of me!

Shadows painted with a watery neutral tint

I let the shadows dry completely and then I decide which flowers will be "warm" and which will be "cool" The warm flowers I will paint with a yellow more toward red and the cool ones will be a yellow more toward blue. In this case my warm yellow is Cadmium yellow and my cool yellow will be Lemon yellow. Now that is decided I begin glazing.

Begining glazes

The top, right and bottom flowers are painted with warm yellow (Cadmium). The flowers to the very left and the one directly beneath it are painted with cool yellow (Lemon). Can you see the difference in the yellows?

The trick to glazing is to let each layer dry COMPLETELY before adding the next layer or you will end up with mud.

I then start adding oranges mixed from Cadmium Red and Cad. Yellow (warm) along with some oranges mixed from Alizarin Crimson and Lemon yellow (cool). I also paint the rim of the flower cups with these mixtures. Add in the stems, some purple accent flowers and background. There ya go! Hope you like it.