Playing Catch-up with my Paintings

This is my first watercolor painting, White Hollyhocks, completed around June, 2010. It was painted on Strathmore cold press watercolor paper, 11.5" x 9".  I painted it from a photograph from the website WetCanvas.com, a community of artists where photographs are shared by members to use as artistic reference.

I spent a lot of time on this painting learning about the properties of different colors, like the deep intensity and staining qualities of phthalo blue, the subtle opaque granulating qualities of cerulean blue, and the warm but chalky qualities of manganese violet. I really should take a better photograph of this one, because in real life the shadows are deeper and the greens are significantly warmer.