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Do you like flowers? The ones that I most love to paint are wildflowers, and the perennial almost-wild flowering plants that can survive our harsh Montréal winters.
My own rather wild flower gardens are a source of constant joy and inspiration, when they're not buried under 3 feet (1 metre) of snow as is the case today!
So when my sweetheart gave me a bouquet of cut flowers recently, for an anniversary, I took plenty of photos and practiced painting them from "live models".
The lovely thing about painting these was that they didn't move and sway, in the wind, the way the flowers do when I'm plein-air painting - painting outdoors.
And while I was taking these photos, I suddenly realized that I'd never before tried to paint a rose with my watercolours.
This is my first attempt at a rose, and I chose a very detailed or 'macro' view - with very little foliage - as I wanted to try to understand how the petals were organized and how some of their edges folded outwards.
I also loved how the baby's breath was cradling the edge of the rose, and had found its way between some petals.

Then I started to paint another view of the same rose, a bit later in the week, after the petals had fully opened and the bloom was starting to fade away. The purple flowers had already died off, leaving only the  greying baby's breath.
This time I painted the rose from above, and included much more of the foliage in my photo and my painting.
You can see how much the colour has paled in this one, although there is still that one darker petal off to the left - which will hopefully add to the feeling of the rose quietly fading away...

My first two paintings of roses, with two very different yet quite detailed perspectives.
I definitely prefer the second one, but the folks in my art groups mostly prefer the first one - possibly because it's not a common view of a rose.
Either way, thanks so much for stopping by!