Confusing goals

I started out this painting of her neighbor's sweet peas in Cynthia's bud vase as a precise, wet-on-dry, realistic rendering. My first obstacle was the vase, which is one of those made out of heavy, nearly opaque cobalt blue glass that, when you put it in the sun, glows a beautiful transparent blue in places and looks almost black in others. I just couldn't capture the effects, no matter how hard I tried.

I gave up on that for the moment and started putting in the sweet peas. Something happened that I haven't yet been able to get a handle on: I was using my Paul Jackson watercolors, which are beautiful jewel-like tones that move from the paintbrush onto the paper like butter, but which take a lot longer to dry than lesser paints. Soon, shapes I thought were dry started bleeding and blending into other, newer shapes, and everything began to blur.

I tried to slow it down and make it work, but soon concluded that I should just go with the blur, so I pulled colors into other colors, and pulled a faint halo of color out all around the vase and flowers to give them a watery look over all.

There are parts here and there that I love, and others that have just turned into an ill-defined mess. No matter what I did to that vase, it just didn't have the quality for which I was moved to paint it. And of course, I realized halfway through that this was no subject to be accomplished on sketchbook paper, but needed the weight and absorbency of 140-lb. rough to hold it together. Perhaps I will try this same painting another day on the real stuff and see what happens. But for now, I have other things to accomplish and will allow this to represent today's foray into #30x30DirectWatercolor2020.

Paul Jackson watercolors, Bee sketchbook