This started basically as a joke: can one paint something small enough to be a postcard? I painted this, and my friend Davide decided to put this as a cover of one of his CDs. Here's the painting and its story.
So, it started as you can see with a raw drawing and with no toned canvas, just primed as always. The initial additional bud has then been removed as it was distracting me from the main subject.
Rather than completing the blocking in, I started to work on the modelling of the few petals that I had blocked in - I wanted to see how it could work:
Then I wanted to remove the budding flower, and to do that I decided to go heavy with impasto on the background - you will see I eventually removed all the yellow streaks, but for a while I thought they added interest (they don't!).
I then progressed completing the first layer through the full lily:
The background improved somewhat, although the yellow continued to distract from the lily and the green pistil and leaves. The lily at this point presented a problem as the colour of the petals was not consistent since I introduced quinacridone violet to the mix, and it really didn't work well... So I reworked it all a good bit, fixed the background, finished the leaves and reached this:
At this point I only needed to give a more uniform texture to the background, add some of that quinacridone violet to the petals to the right and add details to all the greens - so here's the finished layer:
