Re-Painted the Lotus

I concluded that the problem with the lotus was that they looked transparent, and that was because of the way I painted them.  So I painted over them with white gesso and began again.

This time, my plan was to use a peachy pink on the petals that we see the outside of, and a cooler pink on the petals we see the inside of.  Furthermore, I wanted the flowers lit from below as though they are being lit from the yellow-orange glow behind the tiger.  The painting was pretty straight-forward - I used opaque colors and worked wet-in-wet.  I finished the bluish pink petals first and then worked on the peachy pink petals, which are the petals in front.

In the end, I painted turquoise accents around the tips of the petals and added small touches of yellow green at the base of the stems.

Another problem I had with the painting was the edge of the paper that I drew the tiger on.  When I originally tore-cut it from the sheet of drawing paper, I cut a straight edge along the bottom expecting that it would alight with the bottom edge of the board.  But it turned out that I placed it about 3/8" above the bottom edge of the board, and the edge of the paper was too obvious.  So, I painted a decorative strip across the bottom to obscure the edge.  I based the design of the strip on the dark brush strokes in the collage background at the lower right edge of the tiger.

Finally, I molded some paper clay pieces for around the edge.  I painted them with Six Seconds bronze and then applied their patina.  My intention was to suggest fragments of a long-since damaged bronze frame.