20130912 - Water Lily (A Happy Accident)

Today's painting is not any sort of masterpiece. In fact, I might normally have trashed it due to problems I had when painting it. But I decided to "stick with it" and try to rescue the painting. The result was a bit of a "happy accident".

This started as an attempt to render the photograph of the water lily I had taken at the JC Raulston Arboretum. Unfortunately, when I went to add a little pink into the water lilly, it exploded out of the brush and filled the water lilly. No smooth transitions.

As I noted, normally this would qualify as an unmitigated disaster. Time to take the paper off the pad of watercolor paper, crumple it, and throw it away. But for some reason, I decided to see what I could do with the painting anyway. I figured that I could still continue to hone techniques, even if I didn't want to hang the painting.

Of course, being careful about the amount of paint on the paint brush was my first lesson in this painting. If you take the time, you learn as much or more from your mistakes. Lesson one .. Brilliantly demonstrated!

Part of the problem with this painting is that I have a ceiling fan right over where I paint. If it is running, the flow of air tends to dry the paper too quickly. As a result, "washes" (or large areas of paint that should appear uniform) tend to dry way too quickly. The result is that you can see the brush marks in the painting. Notice the blue water to the left of the lily? See how uniform it appears? The other areas of water show the brush marks. Yuck! Lesson Two .. Sigh! I should have known better!!

So, I finished the painting, but the water lily was a blob of color. What could I do to "rescue it". I decided to add pen & ink to the mix. While it helped, it seemed to make it appear a little "cartoonish". Compare the water lily to a cartoon (such as the Red and Rover cartoon). So, I decided to try to play up that sense of cartoon and added more pen & ink lines to the drawing. And suddenly the painting went from disaster to whimsical. Ta-da! Lesson Three .. By adding lines to a painting with vibrant colors, you and end up with a whimsical painting.

It's still not a painting I would give as a gift. But instead of a failure, I ended up with a painting that taught me more than I knew before I painted it. A "happy accident". Though like all things in life, such "happy accidents" occur to those who are prepared to learn from mistakes and take advantage of those "opportunities".

From failure to "happy accident". Is it all just our perspective? The answer is, of course, a resounding "Yes!!".