Clematis tangutica 'Aureolin'

This is my submission for Assign. 5 in the SBA course I am taking. Golden Clematis is one of my favorite vines so I was pleased to see that it had so many blossoms during September and October while I was working on this assignment.

I spent more time on composition and a tonal study than I did on the actual painting, and I am glad that I did because it is such a complex subject (at least for me as a beginner at botanical painting). The odd angles and twisting stems made it difficult to establish where everything was in relation to everything else.

I wanted to see if I could mix all of the colors from three primary pigments, in hopes that it would unify the overall painting.  I spent one whole day just mixing colors, trying to match the actual plant as closely as possible!

I started with W&N Transparent Yellow, because that matched the flowers best of all of my yellows.  Then I went to the color charts that I made earlier in the course and looked for greens that were close to the leaf color.  Fortunately there was one in the Transparent Yellow column that was pretty close. So that led me to use W&N Winsor Blue (Green Shade).  Next I decided on Permanent Rose for the red since the burgundy stem color seemed to lean in that direction.  So all the colors in the painting are mixed from those three pigments.

Working on the composition in graphite.