Your reference drawing for this demonstration.

Don’t wet the paper. Work as quickly as you can and paint appropriate colours on each flower, allowing colours to run together if they want. Allow different flower colours to touch and mingle, and keep the outlines broken and ragged. If you want white in the centre of one or two flowers, don’t forget to leave the middle unpainted.

As soon as the flowers are painted, use aureolin to paint in patches roughly where the foliage is going to go. Again, allow it to run into the flowers, but take care to preserve white paper for the vase.

With ultramarine paint a dark blue area to the right of the vase, again keeping the edges ragged and broken, or faded out with water.

Drop in dark green accents especially around a white flower and splash and splatter other colours into the background. Use a water spray if you want to soften them.

This stage takes quite a long time to complete. The more flowers you have the longer this is likely to take. The painting doesn’t need to be completely dry, but it does not matter if it is. Start building up the flowers and adding foliage, remembering all the time to keep outlines soft and unfinished for looseness. Use dark against light, and light against dark to create shape and volume. Use fine lines to indicate folds or veining that describe the curved shape of the petals. Allow some outlines to blur into other flowers and leaves, to keep everything unfinished and loose.

Add suggestions of other flowers softly to refine your composition.

Keep repeating this process, moving around the painting and slowly building up glazes to achieve intense hues where necessary and leaving other flowers paler.

For the white flower use a blueish mix of ultramarine and light red to paint shadows and shapes (see detail above).

Paint centres in neutral tint with perhaps a little diluted Winsor violet on the lighter side.

Lose any inappropriate hard edges by softening with a damp brush or spritzing with a little water spray. Illustrated here is a detail from the painting at the end of this stage, showing the build-up of paint layers.

Use the blueish mix of ultramarine and light red to paint the shadow on the vase, fading it across the shape and dropping in a little very dilute raw sienna for warmth. Leave to dry.

With a steady hand add the broad and fine stripes around the top of the vase with a strong mix of ultramarine. Then with a dancing stroke imply its pattern. Keep this sketchy. Dilute the colour as you reach the right-hand side.

Use neutral tint to add dots and fine lines for the stamens. You will need a very fine brush to paint the stamen stems.

Add more colour to the dark on the left of the vase and add more feathery foliage as you wish. Even at this stage you can build up more colour on any of the flowers.

The finished painting

Anemones in a Vase, watercolour on Saunders Waterford High White paper, (30x35cm)

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