Monday, September 26, 2011

Red Hibiscus - Limited Strokes


This is for Daily Paintworks, limited strokes challenge. It's oil on 6x8 canvas panel.

This challenge really pushed me out of my comfort zone - limited strokes. Since painting in oil is so forgiving, it's very easy to go over the same stroke over and over again try to, for example, correct color. With this challenge, we were supposed to use a bigger brush, size 8 or above, load it up with color, and one stroke per shape.

I chose a picture of a red hibiscus I took from our backyard a few years ago. It certainly was very tempting to go over the strokes trying to fix things, but here I had to learn to let it go and let it be - so hard to do! The flower itself took about 12 strokes, plus 9 highlights here and there. The dark purple background took 6 very large strokes, and the abstract leaves took 6 strokes, bringing the total of 33. This challenge makes me realize that I need to need to do more of these kind of limited strokes exercise and there are certainly not easy to do!

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