Watercolor romantic soft rose, plenty of lost and found lines and line softening

Hello my friends here visiting my blog, how are you doing? I hope you had a very fun time with Olympic. Utah just relaxed the face masks restrictions and I don’t really know what that means. I actually have not seen a lot of people wearing masks around. I hope we will have less and less cases and people are getting or maintaining their health, and shops are getting people visiting them and the economy is good. My husband works at a University, and he can not wear a mask, and I am sure the students are happy too. He said he is going to require students to come to class or have a very good excuse before they can have access to online materials. He said he had observed that they really do learn better in person. I hope you guys are all well and healthy and your families too. My two brothers in Los Angeles are holding out extremely well, my sister too in San Diego.

We have a fun romantic rose today. I love practicing and just really enjoy painting these kind of roses. I wished I had it ready for Valentine’s Day, but everyday is rose day for me. I love all flowers though, but rose is quite nice we can actually buy them all time of the year. I particular enjoy having rose bushes in the garden. However I am not very good at tending them, their thorns and my arms don’t get along very well, and I got one too many serious cut I have to look to planting peonies instead. A much milder and friendlier flower I might say. But I missed the rose, I had a very pretty yellow one and have to give it away to a friend. Problem is that I really like to add compose to the base of my plants and climbing under a rose bush can be very dangerous, however a rose can grow to maturity and open beautifully like the painting today, those you can get from the store never really open fully. But I am one who love a good walk and I enjoyed going around the neighborhood looking at flowers, do you guys like looking at flowers? We are at the time of the year where flowers are hard to come by. But where I grew up in Hong Kong, we have the yearly clearance market and flower market, where we can get all kind of flowers and little trees in pots, even cherry blossom or peach blossom in pots, I always considered that my highlight of the year it was very very fun. We never buy a lot of flowers, but just going and be in the midst is fun. As I grew older somehow my father had lost that drive to celebrate and we don’t buy many flowers, but at least we have paper whites. And now that my parents are gone I actually have the original paper whites pot from Hong Kong, and I used it a while back for holding watercolor water, but then I decided maybe I should be careful with it, since it carries such sentimental value coming all the way from Hong Kong. This next coming year maybe I will try paper white again, my husband does not like the smell of it, but I do. Unless I get too close, but usually I just stand far away and the smell is actually quite good. So a whole lot of rambling about flowers. I would like to think these are common roses, I love the mixing of magenta with Payne’s gray color, the slight mauve color is very pleasing to me. And I use some Cadmium Red medium to brighten the color and add just a little bit of a contrast. My background is a little bit more Payne’s gray and indigo, this time I did not add sap green and yellow nor any kind of green. Like to keep it soft and consistent with the painting. I know I kept changing and accessing the whole composition throughout the whole process, I hope you enjoy this kind of painting, it is very spontaneous and throughoutly enjoyable for an artist like me. Reminds me of the days I draw with my brush in Chinese watercolor. I hope you enjoy the journal of doing this with me.

We prayed and fasted for rain, we hardly rain here in Utah county for the whole winter, and last summer was not too good. And two days after our fast we got a big snowstorm. And now I am happy my peonies out there must be getting the moisture they need badly. I hope they have a good spring blooms and I really love them. I take quite good care of them and hope to show you some flowers this spring. The snow pack on the mountain seems very good to me, we have a very big rocky mountain range, and we looked at mount timpanogos daily. The water is stored in the mountain and released to us through the year, it is a very good system and I am grateful for our God who developed that system to sustain us. And more snow in the near future, I am sure the skiing crowd will be happy. I am a snow shoeing person, I enjoyed the quiteness while walking through the woods. Utah is very fun that way, in the winter time we have a great long road opened for snow shoeing and cross country skiing, we all loved it. Can’t wait to go now that my foot is almost better. I hope to take some pictures to show you guys.

I hope you have a very good week. I am working on a violet coming up next. For now take care and keep painting.

And the drawing is just a guide as you follow along with me you will know what I mean. I will upload down here. Thank you. Kathy