If I cheated a bit yesterday by reusing the same painting in its fully dry state, I’ve made up for it today by trying two side-by-side approaches to the same subject. It is a flower of Nigella damascena (Love in the Mist) from my garden:

On the left, I used a wet in wet approach, painting the page with water before beginning to build up colour. For this one, I think the right hand side, which was wet paint on dry paper works better as the flower has sharp details that get lost in wet on wet. There might be a compromise point too – if I came back to the left one now, I could add some sharper details over the top, although the ‘mist’ of green fronds would probably be best left entirely to the dry stage.

The other thing I did was to splash a watery mix of the blue lightly over the surface and to run wet strips along the top and bottom, dropping in a more intense blue at the very edge and then (with a clean brush) encouraging it to make gentle gradients. Although it still looks like more could be done, it looks a lot more finished with these touches than it did with the two flowers just floating on the white surface.