Water Lily Oriental Style

清水出芙蓉，天然去雕饰。

This is Oil Pastel Monthly Challenge for October 2008 at Wetcanvas forum. I am trying to express oriental feel into this painting. I am using cray-pas expressionist, paint on A4 size drawing paper. The actual size of this painting is 16 x 21 cm.

First, I sketch the drawings using color pencil, I choose perl because it is not obvious and can be easily covered by OP. I paint a few scratches of blue to the water lily, and paint it with white to blend the blue and leave it just like that. I use my favorite green (green gray) on lower leaves, and yellow, a little bit of light green and again blends them with green gray for leaves at center.

Water surface is the most challenging part, because it consist of different colors. I start from bottom, fill them with dark blue, dark green and grey. Further up where I work on the reflection of trees, I paint them in dark green, dark brown and at final stage I apply black shades to express the movements of the water. The reflection of the cloud must be in light blue, grey and white, I apply dark blue lightly and blends them with white too. The upper side of water is in light blue, which that is the reflection of blue sky.

The shadows are mainly started with either dark blue or dark green. And applied another layer of dark brown and at last shaded with black.

I like this painting, I think I am going to try more oriental styles.