Here is a pic of what my working palate looks like. I mix my colors freely, utilizing the various tones that naturally combine on the palate as the paint is mixed. Color is very exciting and inspirational to artists. As young as age 15 I can remember being excited to put down the first blocks of color on my watercolor paper. Each new painting represented endless possibilities. Various shades of red in the form of alizarin crimson was usually my starting color of choice. These first brush strokes on white paper were always the most vibrant.

Today my go-to color will be a pale pink made from magenta and soft mixing white. Various shades of pink are laid onto the canvas, loosely, to for the background painting of the pink ginger flowers.

Shapes for the pink ginger leaves are painted. These leaves are important to my composition. They break and divide the vast white space of the canvas to make interesting shapes and lines. Painting is illusion.

I step back frequently to view the overall effects of this budding composition. This helps to ensure that my flowers and leaves are in proportion to one another. It’s important to make sure that your colors are also balanced.

The next step will be to begin filling the background color for the leaves. The pink ginger leaves will have a slightly different base of color from the bird of paradise leaves. I want these leaves to be a little more on the yellow side, I want them to be a little brighter in color and their veins will be smaller. These leaves will also be a little thinner.

I want to capture the movement and essence of each leaf. To do this, I vary the intensity of greens and yellows. I’ve also begun to blend the blocks of colors softly. This gives the leaves the right effect to make the leaves convincing.

The pink ginger flowers look flat at this point. I’m working a rather large section of this canvas all at once so I’m not yet adding detail to the flowers. This will come later, when this first base of paint is dry. I will then be able to layer colors of greater intensity to help create the illusion of depth in the flowers. Bright highlights will be the final touches.

What I can do at this point, after all of my pink ginger leaves have been painted, is add the veins that help to bring character to the leaves. You can see detail in the central leaves in the photo to the right.

My leaf detailing process usually begins while my leaves are still wet. My brush grabs contrasting colors from my palate, usually pure color of my sap green, and then my brush freely adds the line, capturing the gesture of the leaf. All of these tropical leaves that are featured in this scene have similarities. The differences lie within the colors and the detailing. It’s these differences that make a leaf look like it belongs to a pink ginger as opposed to a red heliconia or a bird of paradise.

The pink ginger leaves must appear lighter and more delicate next to the tougher, broader leaves of the birds of paradise. In the future I will return to these leaves and add extreme highlights, shadows and burn spots in the form of orange and brown sections that have been burn by the sun.  These marks will add a lovely dimension to the leaves of this section.

It’s important for me to finish painting this section of leaves so that this part of the painting dries at the same rate. At a glance, I’ve completed a big section of this painting. I’m off to a good start and will be well ahead of my completion deadline if I continue to work steadily through the next couple of weeks. You can see from this photo that I finished adding veins to the pink ginger leaves and I also went back in and layered transparent magenta to the ginger flowers go give them a boost in depth. These flowers and leaves will still receive detailing (described above) once this section is dry.