This is my second-to-last project of my Principles of Deisgn class. For this project, we watercolored a bouquet of flowers with a hand, moon, and textured background on a watercolor canvas.

We began by briefly studying hands and shading of hands, leraning a little bit about how a hand looks at different angles, how the shadows are cast, and how to use simple shapes to make a more complex hand shape. After that, we worked a little bit on flowers, but we didn’t spend as much time on those.

We started to choose the flowers that we wanted to use in our final watercolor project, and decided how we wanted to hold our hands to pose them for holding the flower bouquet. We each did practice sketches on a piece of sketch paper before replicating the design on watercolor canvas.

I chose to use an orchid, peony, anemone, and freesia. Originally, I had wanted to use paler colors for the flowers and darker colors for the background, but when I had mixed the colors I wanted to use I decided to switch it, using darker colors for the flowers and hand with lighter colors for the moon and background.

Once the bouquet and hand had been drawing in pencil on the watercolor canvas, we went in with a fine point sharpie to define the edges a bit. After, it was time to begin painting in the watercolors.

The canvas was a lot more difficult to paint on than watercolor paper, as it had a coat on top of it that you had to break through with the brush before the water and color would stick to the canvas, but it turned out looking really nice once it was on the canvas.

We also were instructed to make a sun or moon in the background behind the flowers so that they would stick out more from the background.

The final thing we did was paint in the background, which required the use of more pigment that had been used for the flowers or hand, followed by quickly sprinkling salt on top before the water dried to give the color a texture.

My favorite part of this project was painting the flowers. I enjoy watercoloring, and it’s probably my favorite form of art, so getting to use it was enjoyable.

I think my least favorite part of the project was painting the hand, because whenever I would finish one shade of blue, it was already too dry for it to blend well into the next blue. I had to go over it four or five times, and it still never got blended as well as I would have liked it to.