Project 4 - Themes and series - Painting 2 - Hibiscus Bloom

Hibiscus plant - rescued from a garden centre....and flowering beautifully

Withering hibiscus blooms - such amazing shapes and form

Ink and aquamarker study of withering hibiscus blooms - A5 sketchbook

Tissue paper base, watercolour wash and soluble graphite  - withered hibiscus bloom A4

Ink and Aquamarker

The key painting - I loved the way my lazy experimental painting led me to discover the amazing bleeding of red into white to perfectly replicate the way this appears on the flower. (Brusho, chinese white, watercolour)

Hibiscus Bloom - A3 - Brusho wash, Chinese white and Alizarin crimson watercolour.

Hibiscus bloom - detail

Hibiscus bloom - detail

Following the successful experimentation in my A4 sketchbook I really felt this was a painting I would enjoy. I had to paint each petal individually so that I could allow the alizarin crimson to bleed into the wet chinese white, I love the resultant feathered effect and am very happy with how this painting has turned out. I had used a very vibrant lemon yellow brusho as a wash and had found in the sketchbook painting that this approach gave a background that did not actually seep into the white as I painted this over it, although I had kept the white fairly thick to make the most of its opaque quality. I was thrilled with the pure crisp bleeding of the alizairin crimson and was equally pleased when I was able to recreate it for the Hibiscus Bloom painting. the composition of this painting was about making sure i didn't just have the centre of a hibiscus flower in the centre of my page - and the offset approach has allowed some of the vibrant yellow to stand alone. It was quite a challenge to achieve the twisted effect of the stamen in the centre but I achieved this by drying the painting thoroughly then painting over that section again with a very heavily saturated mix of alizairin crimson. As I reflect back at this painting I think it is probably one of my freer paintings and one which I didn't agonise over for a long time, however through the process of sketching I had already discounted other interpretations of the hibiscus, I really did want it to look like what it is!