Daisies for Elizabeth

Yesterday we held a workshop at my studio titled 'Daisies - Masking for Texture' which was fully booked but sadly a lovely lady had to pull out at the last minute. Not able to fill her place, I resolved that I would put a blog post together, especially for her so that she wouldn't have to miss out on what we covered.
So Elizabeth, here is the step-by-step of what we covered on the workshop with pictures...
1. Using good quality, cotton rich watercolour paper, draw out your subject with just enough to map out where you would like the flower heads to sit.
2. Using a wax resist stick, choose which of the daisy heads you would like to have a soft mask in the background and pressing fairly hard, mask out the petals (not the centres)
3. Using liquid Cold Wax and the bent end of a bamboo skewer, coat the skewer in wax and press in a few lines at random to represent grasses. These lines and the was resist lines will stay on the paper.
4. Using making fluid, choose the final daisy heads to have crisp and sharp in the foreground, you should be able to see from the image below the blue flowers on which I used the masking fluid.

5. Wet the paper thoroughly with a spray bottle and drop in a couple of colours for your background. I chose to use Cadmium Yellow for the centres and then Green Gold and Perylene Green for the background. Quickly apply clingfilm and pull in to interesting shapes to simulate background foliage. Allow to dry completely.

6. When fully dry, remove the cling film and work back in to the surface (which will probably be considerably lighter now), adding darks where you think the piece needs it.

7. When you think that you have done everything you can to the background, remove the masking fluid.

8. To complete the piece you may want to consider the following:
    Spattering dilute white gouache in to the background.
    Adding the yellow in to the centres and making sure the centres have a shadow a the base so that it shows the direction that the flower is facing.
    Re-entering your painting with a graphite pencil for shading on the petals or to define the shapes.
    Adding darks back to the stems.

I hope very much that you are inspired to have a go at this project and Elizabeth, if you are reading this, I hope you feel better soon, Alison