"Peonies in Crystal Vase" Kathy Cranmer (C) 2013 Happy to post a completed painting. I picked a rather complicated subject for this still life and have been traveling a lot. I was pleased to have five days in the studio last week which allowed me to finish Peonies in a Crystal Vase and plan my next project. This painting is !5" X 12" on 300 lbs. Arches cold press paper. With both a complicated background and a complicated foreground the challenge is to bring the flowers and vase forward and keep the picture from being too busy. I feel I succeeded by pushing the darks in the background. I under painted the background with varying shades and values of purple before painting the design in the quilt or the flowers. That is a technique I adapted from Judy Treman's book "Building Brilliant Watercolors". After I completed the flowers and vase I adjusted some of the darks in the background with light washes of Carbazole Violet and Ultramarine Blue. I used photographs I took of peonies from my garden and a quilt from my husband's great-grandmother as a reference for the painting.
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