Garden Club

Garden Club, 4x6.5 gouache, plein air, Diane Mannion

Lemon Bay Garden Club

Painted this yesterday morning with a few members of the (affectionately called) Englewood Plein Air Heads on the grounds of the Lemon Bay Garden Club.  Couldn't scare anyone to go along with me to paint at the cemetery later, wonder why.  (See Lemon Bay Cemetery in yesterdays post.)

Used my dried up pan of gouache for this, handy to have if I don't feel like setting up the easel for oils.  Simply painted with my sketchbook and palette balanced on my lap.  Gouache is actually opaque watercolor and takes awhile to understand the difference in technique.  Started with really dark areas for this one, leaving the sunlit spots lighter or white.  Wonderful thing about gouache is the ability to paint lights OVER darks.

The cemetery painting, Buried in Dinghy, was started with thinner washes, almost like painting with watercolor for the first layer, then added opaque areas later, leaving a lot of transparent spots, like the flag alone.

(To my horror, I just noticed I had spelled cemetery wrong yesterday!  Urgh.  Artists aren't good at spelling or numbers, at least I'm not.  Gosh... took forever to learn how to spell gouache!  Please forgive.)