Number 81 of my 100 Starts project

I had a small branch from the camellia bush that I painted for Number 80 and thought it would be fun to paint a much more toned-down take on it. The branch is sitting in a small jam jar, so it was interesting to paint the color shapes of the top rim of the jar.

I started by mixing the basic colors and tried to go more quickly than on previous days — not overanalyzing things — and painted the highlights on the leaves first, since they’re the lightest light. Then shifted to the darkest dark. But with that premixed set of leaf colors I forgot what I was doing and went right into painting all of the leaves instead of just the shadow shapes. Guess I got rusty after a few days off!

Once I finished blocking in all of the color shapes, I was really disliking the way the highlights looked. So I painted over them with the greens and added the highlights on top. Soooo much better. I like the results better when I do the highlights last, so I’ll stop considering those the “lightest light” and see what happens if I start with the lightest non-highlight/accent area.

Overall I’m pretty happy with this one. I really like the colors compared to the intensely-colored pink camellia and yellow background from the last one.

Now that I’m in the home stretch I wanted to start posting these daily. The previous studies can be found here.