Water Lillies

This painting took me almost 3 months at Anastasia Art to do. It's acrylic with texture paste on 36"x26" stretched canvas.

I first put texture paste in the shapes of the leaves using a palette knife. It felt like I was spreading icing on a cake! Then I used even more texture paste to make flower petals. Oxana came up with the idea of mixing the texture paste with glue, and made it into a more fluid consistency, and put droplets of the mixture on the leaves to give it the round bumps for the water droplets. This whole process took me over 8 hours to do.

Then it was acrylic paint. I first tried a thicker consistency of the acrylic paint for the upper right hand leaf. It looked ok, wasn't great. So Oxana suggested to mix the acrylic paint with water, so it looks more like water color. So each leaf got a few layers of this watered-down acrylic paint to deepen the green.

The flowers took forever. Since the acrylic paint dried quickly, it was hard to correct mistakes. I also used a lot of tissues to blot away the paint on each petal in order to give some highlight. Then there were different shades of purple for the shadow. The flower petals were really tedious work!

Finally it was the under water scene. There were branches, young leaves, and flower buds under water. I had to make sure they didn't stick out like sore thumbs and yet visible.

So after 3 months of slaving away, I was glad it was finally done! I was ready to move onto something else.