Concrete roses, with paints from The Stoneground Paint Company

Keeping up with the blogging I will stick with talking art this time. As I have written about many times, floral paintings are a great place to start as a painter because the forms and colours can be anything you want, and you can practice a whole bunch of skills. In this example I used new paints I just bought from The Stoneground Paint Company (Regina, Canada), which are incredible, Canadian made paints that come in a wide variety of colours. Previously I tested their earth colour range in the Armenia, World Inspired Landscape, and  was very pleased with their performance. In fact I even ordered more of the grey ochre in a larger format since I can tell already it will be an important paint to use in abstracts and landscapes. The other new colours were ultramarine blue (PB29), ultramarine pink (PR259), victoria green (PG51), and manganese violet (PR16). The grey was used in the background, the outline, and some shadow areas, the pink was used to make the body colour of the rose, the violet in the smaller flowers bottom left, the blue and green in the foliage, and various combinations in the wet-in-wet background. Lemon yellow ochre (from the same company, that I had from before) was used in the flower centers. 7 x 10" cold press B side, watercolour, 2020

 Lately I have worked on the 'The 27 stations of the green line metro Montreal' series using watercolours and pencil sketches done on location. The sketchbook is the same one I had from high school 30 years ago which had about 50 pages unused. The first page contained a surprisingly familiar scene, and on the back is written 'nice rose' by my art teacher who graded the work. It might have been Mr. Clarke, there was also Mr. Philips as I remember. I included a scan here, it looks an awful lot like the one I just finished! 8 x 10" sketchbook, watercolour, 1991