This is the finished product of my tomato plant watercolour. I deepened areas of colour in the background while pulling out colour in other areas to create soft, less focused shapes. I then applied a wash of Sap Green over those shapes to push them back slightly.

Here is my negative painting with a few more glazes of colour added. I'm trying to keep my washes light, and to keep the majority of the focus on the tomatoes themselves.

I thought I'd share with you a watercolour painting I'm working on. This piece is done in the negative painting style demonstrated by Brenda Swenson in the October 2011 issue of Watercolor Artist magazine. The idea behind negative painting is to focus on the shapes made between objects and to preserve the whites of the paper by painting around objects.
The first step is to make a clear line drawing of your subject matter, then apply a loose wash of three transparent colours; a red, a blue and a yellow of your choice. Allow the colours to mix freely on the paper and to dry thoroughly before the next step. The rest of the painting process involves numerous glazes of colour to define shapes, allowing the paper to dry between glazes.
My subject was the cherry tomatoes from my garden. I've included a shot of my painting after the sketch, first wash and initial glazing of colour was done:

At long last, here is Icarus, finally finished... All the fiddling with it was worth it – I'm very pleased with the final result!!

After a long weekend of turkey-eating and other non art-related activities, I put in a marathon day of painting today and finished Icarus!
I'll have to wait until tomorrow to photograph my painting in the daylight – the canvas surface is too glossy to photograph well with a flash.
Until tomorrow...

Well, it's coming down to the final finishing details on Icarus – yes, he's almost completely finished! Today I worked on the density of colour in some areas of the painting, mainly in the clouds and the land mass to the lower left of the piece. The sky needed a few tweaks in value, and Icarus got a wash of warm colour all over to make him a bit less corpse-y – he's been a little too grey and white up until today!
These last details won't be very apparent in a photo, so I'll wait until I'm completely done (early next week) to take a good shot of the entire piece.
Happy Thanksgiving!

My focus today was to lighten the values in the clouds and to try to fix the light source on Icarus. I also worked on defining the feathers a bit more on the right side of the piece, as well as adding warmth over the cool values I painted into the feathers yesterday. The nit-picky details always take the longest – much longer than laying in large areas of colour!

Today I worked more on the clouds around Icarus, mainly painting in some blue washes over the existing colour and defining the sun-lit top edges.
I noticed today that the direction of the light source on Icarus' body is rather confusing – at the moment it seems to be coming from top and bottom equally. Tomorrow I'll fix that error so that the light source is mainly on top, with ambient highlights below. It pays to have time to spend on a piece this complex. Sometimes you need periods of rest away from a piece in order to notice mistakes that have been made.

This weekend we went on a painting binge, but this time it was wall painting - in particular, our kitchen and living room. I'm fairly particular about what colour goes on the walls. I spend the majority of my time living and working in these two rooms, so choosing the right colour is essential. One of my requirements is that the colours be warm. Our winters here are long and cold, and the winter light is grey and cool in tone. I find that it helps brighten my mood to have a warm colour on the walls.
For the past ten years we've had a colour palette that looked something like this (living room and kitchen, respectively):

You could say we were in our "fruits and vegetables period"! Now the palette looks something like this (again, living room and kitchen, respectively):



...more of a "coffee and dessert period"! This is not a reflection on our physiques, by the way!
We're enjoying the change of colour, and the extra brightness in the house. Now, off to paint Icarus!

Today I've been working more fine detail into Icarus' wings - lots of work, but not much to show. It's a process of adding and subtracting dark and light to establish subtle light and shadow. I'll likely need the weekend to rest my eyes so that I can look at the painting fresh again on Monday!