Making tone work for you in a painting (continued)

Continuing with the clematis painting...

Here I have laid in the first wash wet in wet.  At this stage it's just a case of dropping colours wet in wet in the right areas.  I've dabbed off with a tissue some of the colour from the petals in order to preserve the light.  I've already dropped in some quite dark colours away from the flowers to begin creating a sense of depth.

Now it was time to add some darker tones to the left hand side of the painting which depicts a tangle of stalks and leaves.  Some of the stalks have been masked out and I have painted negatively around others.  I dropped in colours in quite an intuitive way ( that's another way of saying I hadn't a clue what I was doing!)

using pinks, greens and the dark mix in the palette to give an impression of more flowers and leaves in the background.  I've left some leaves unpainted to make one or two stand out.  I'll be brining more leaves out with negative painting later.  You see that the flowers are starting to emerge from the background.

Here I've started painting the flowers, bringing one petal out against another and leaving plenty of areas white  because these flowers are sunlit and the colour will be bleached out in the lightest areas.  Already at this stage the painting has a good variety of different tones from white to dark green/blue.