Mohamed  Hirji

While the weather was decent, I traded the treadmill for my daily walks outdoors. I notice flowers starting to bloom in my neighbours gardens.

I think I am going to try and paint it.

Jun 13, 2018

Initially, I thought of painting the iris in acrylic. But acrylic although much easier to handle and paint with is not as luminous as watercolor, moreover I realized there is a lot of colour blending and therefore settled on watercolors.

I have an Arches watercolour block with the paper size of 11inX14in. So I chose to paint it on the block (No stretching of paper required)

In the progression of the watercolor painting of the Iris, after the faint pencil drawing, I went ahead with the "block in" of the shadows on the flower. It is a little tricky, I did not want to go too dark too fast in values but

Jul 17, 2018

The Iris - Watercolour 4 - Conclusion

These are the final stages of the painting of the Iris In Watercolor:

All the shadows of the petals were blocked in and let to dry.

For the Acrylic version, I need to prepare my birch panels (5 ply birch) anything less than 0.5in thick has a tendency to warp, so I use 0.5" thick panels.

Subsequently, I painted the rest of the petals, added the the red-orange "beards" and refined the stem and the background. The whites of the flowers have also been painted with warm and cool variegated colours.

One of the cornerstone of a painting is a shape. A shape is any object which has two dimensions e.g. a height or length and width. There is also a negative shape that surrounds the object but we will discuss that another time.

Let us take a simple example of my painting of the water bottle. Here the silver steel water bottle is the positive shape. The shadow on the table is also a shape. The brown background is also a shape, however since it does not represent an object, it is termed a negative shape.

 On one of my previous blogs, I discussed shapes that tend to be boring. One of them was a square shaped building seen below. Here I discuss some tips to change this shape to a more interesting shape or select one that is more captivating.

 On one of my previous blogs, I discussed shapes that tend to be boring. One of them was a square shaped building seen below. Here I discuss some tips to change this shape to a more interesting shape or select one that is more captivating.

 On one of my previous blogs, I discussed shapes that tend to be boring. One of them was a square shaped building seen below. Here I discuss some tips to change this shape to a more interesting shape or select one that is more captivating.