Watercoloring a gumtree bloom

 This week Suz is sharing this video seen here on YouTube to do a gumtree flower in watercolor. I have never in my wildest dreams imagined such an unusual bloom. At first glance my first thought was sea anemone. So I sketched a kinda top to the bloom with some hanging leaves.

 On a piece of cold press arches cotton watercolor paper. 

I added a first layer of paints and walked away.

 

At work today I printed off a screen shot of the video bloom/pod/leaves and 3 different pins This one 

And this one 

and this one as well. 

I seen on Pinterest with these flowers. I could not make up my mind when I googled them last weekend which colors to choose and finally today decided on the pinkish ones. (they also come in a white and a red) The things that interested me most about the photos besides the color idea was how the leaves drape, shape type thing. I did skip the pod in this painting as it did not interest me much. 

 I spent a bunch of time mixing that color for the ends of the pink petals? its 3 or 4 colors and it dried flat and invisible.

So I mixed up a yellow tinted one and went right over the top of the dried light color. thinking it could be a shadow under it all.

 

And I continued to add more to where I thought there should be shadows and ultimately ended up doing just plain white dots two more times in those spaces.

 At this point I decided it was starting to look kinda muddy and over worked so, I let that dry and then added some shadows under things thinking that maybe the whites would pop later when dry because of that.

 So this is where I stopped with this. I am not sure I would do anything with this so, I like the colors of it and it was an interesting thing to try. If you'd like to play along with us you can find this challenge here at SCS. Thanks for stopping by.