Watercolor roses

Roses... Oh dear..

What's in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet

 In 2010 and 2011 I visited the little town Lottum (in the Netherlands, near the German boarder). In the area of Lottum many rose farmers have their farms. You can walk through the rose fields and see (and smell) many different kinds of roses. Great whites, but also purple almost blue, sweet pink ones.

These roses offer great inspiration for paintings. Roses look beautiful but are definitely not easy to paint. All those petals! Sometimes I just don't know where to start.

Here you see the watercolor roses I painted. The one above is a small one and was really fun to paint. The painting with the two pink roses was painted in Sweden, when I was enjoying my summer holidays. And the one below, is a bit less realistic and looks more abstract.

That's enough roses for now. I think I will paint more orchids and other flowers in 2013.

Heart of an orchid

I made this painting a couple of years ago. It is a close-up of a phalaenopsis orchid. I had a orchid like this for many years, but it didn't survive moving to a new home.
In the heart of phalaenopsis orchids you find many different colors. I used many different kinds of pink, red and purple for this painting.
The purple petals are painted in pink first, but I thought it was too pink. I used a second layer of more blue/purple paint. You can still see the pink trough the blue  paint, which gives it a different texture than the heart of the orchid. I like it now, but I'm not sure if I can do it again like this. I was correcting a mistake and now I think it wasn't really a mistake to start with bright pink. I guess this is the way we learn from our mistakes.

It is a small painting on canvas (30x30 cm's).