Tutorials > Outdoor Tutorial 1 › Spring Tulips

Paints required: Ultramarine, Sap Green, Cadmium Yellow, Lemon Yellow, Dioxazine Violet, Alizarin Crimson.

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	Stage 1 Flood the paper with water. As soon as a ‘sheen’ appears apply the key colours using a lot of paint and a wet brush. Don’t worry about the colours bleeding into each other – this will help create natural shadows.
	Stage 2 Once the paper has dried you can begin to use the previous wash to create the lighter tones and begin to paint the darker areas. This will appear to push the lighter tones forward, creating a 3D effect.
	This painting explores the concept of Complementary or ‘opposite’ colours and they ways that they interact when placed together on a sheet of watercolour paper. Different sets of Complementary colours can be employed for their particular effects (eg. Red tomatoes and green lettuce, oranges in crates lined with purple tissue) and compositions planned around these dynamic colour combinations. The main technique used for applying these colours in this painting was ‘wet into wet’ – this involves encouraging colours to bleed on damp paper. For this technique to succeed you will need to work ‘loosely’ to enable the colours to develop a life of their own.

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