Botanical Garden, Glasgow, Scotland

Another scene from Glasgow, this one was to the north side of the city, in the botanical gardens. They had two large complexes filled with tropical plant and flowers. This one had a desert theme inside, some of the trees reached the very top of the structure which was about five stories tall. From the outside the glass was fogged and frosted, so you could just see a blur of green and yellow. The glass panels were surrounded in very delicate white rod iron which I attempted to capture using negative space. In terms of difficulty level, this scene was easily a ten on a scale of ten, where ten is the most difficult. The reason is that painting white means that you leave the paper showing, and then paint around the shape you want. Considering the amount of thin white shapes and the complex geometry, not to mention the reflections on the glass, well, it was a real struggle. I felt like this painting was a bit of a disaster but when I saw it dry afterwards it seemed to work pretty well, at least I get the same feeling looking at this painting as I got looking at the original scene.
 I did another painting of the other structure in the botanical gardens, this one had quite a different construction it was a lot of glass, with a dark brown steel structure with more angular designs. It was a lot easier than the other one, lets say a seven out of ten on our difficulty scale because I could paint all the complex reflections and blurry plants behind the glass, and then apply the steel structure over top at the end. In fact, I started with a thin outline just to get the shape right. The final touches were the pigeons hanging out on the edge of the roof!

Watercolour hot press 5.5 x 7.5" Sept. 2018