Ashley's Custom Watercolor Bouquet Painting

I have a listing on my Etsy shop for a custom 8"x10" watercolor painting of a bouquet. Typically, this means a bride or someone having a gift made for a bride will send me a photograph of their wedding bouquet, and then I translate this photograph into a watercolor painting. These pictures are the step-by-step process of an order that came in at the end of December - creating the watercolor painting for a bride named Ashely.

First, I printed out the photograph she sent me scaled to 8"x10" size. Then, I cut out the bouquet itself to get rid of the background of the photograph (so the darker background wouldn't distract me when working on the painting on a white background) and so that I could trace the cut-out onto the watercolor paper and make sure I got the scale right. Once I had the outline traced, I filled in the rest of the details of the bouquet lightly with graphite pencil. Then I erased these lines gently so they would be even lighter and wouldn't show through the final painting.

I put down a first wash of light blue, since there were a few blue/green flowers, a blue ribbon around the stems, and some of the shadows on the lighter colored flowers also had tints of blue.

Then I started lightly marking where the yellow, pink, and green parts of the bouquet would be. I used a lot of water and very little pigment so that it would stay light. Most of this part was done wet-on-wet, meaning that the paper is wet and the brush is wet. This makes the lines "fuzzy" as the colors blend into each other.

Then I started going in with more details. I marked where the darker greens would go, and started adding in darks with brown (a mix of orange and green).

I started adding dimensionality to the roses by making the edges of the petals darker. This used a combination of wet-on-wet and wet-on-dry techniques (the later being the technique that gives a sharper edge).

Some of the parts of this bouquet were actually quite dark - especially the dark teal flowers and some of the dark teal/black/green shadows toward the bottom of the bouquet. So at this point, I went through and started making the darks darker. I also made the yellow darker (more saturated) by adding a layer of yellow on top of the bright sunflowers. The less water used, the more saturated the pigment is.

I then added in some of the leafy green details, where the bouquet greenery spills out of the main flower bunch. I also added in some details for the lighter/white colored flowers - very light colored lines with only a bit of pigment, so that the edges wouldn't get too cartoonish. From a distance, the small white petals all blend together into a single mass of white, and I wanted that to still happen in this painting as it did in the photograph.

My final step was to add in a bit more white, using white acrylic paint instead of watercolor. Watercolor is more translucent, so adding a light color on top to make something whiter does not work (you can still see the darker layers underneath). But white acrylic paint is more opaque, so you can cover up dark areas you want to lighten up again.

I added the white acrylic sparingly, since I wanted this painting to retain its watercolor look. I added just a couple white acrylic highlights to the roses, some of the green leaves in front of the sunflower, the teal ribbon, and the green stems at the bottom.

Here is the final painting:

I had taped the painting down to the table to keep it as flat as possible, but it still ended up a little warped at the top. Once it was dry, I pulled the tape off, trimmed it down to size, and ironed it to flatten in more. Then I packaged it up between sheets of cardboard and sent it out to Ashely.

If you would like to order your own custom watercolor bouquet, visiting this Etsy listing here. It usually takes me one week to complete the painting, and then another few days to ship it out.