Queen Bee

Queen Bee

Watercolors
7x10 inches
Prints and original available -here-
Detail closeup -here-

Another fun little piece. It seems that summer is finally making (delayed) way for autumn. The sweltering days have passed, as it started raining here last week. But during one of the brief intermissions in the precipitation, when the sun had warmed my terrace, the bumblebees were out in force. They were quite busy amongst my lavender. Taking advantage of those last sunny gaps in the days.

On a more technical note, I was playing around a bit more with fixative on this one. It wasn't the main purpose for the piece, as for the previous, but I did want to try some more.

I mainly used the fixative for helping to build up the background color's intensity, much quicker than it normally would take me to do such seamless graded washes. Usually it requires many more layers to achieve the full darkness of a color, but by doing a very light spray (I just did a quick pass of the fixative over the page) I managed to get the cerulean blue to it's full intensity with only two washes, while still being able to blend smoothly.