Birdbath Sculpture Work in Progress Continues

This is a continuation of the birdbath sculpture work in progress. Here I added yellow and orange to the two lower tiers. The sculpture sat atop a skid on two workhorses so that I could paint with ease. I really didn't feel like doing a Michelangelo, laying on my back to paint the underside of the bottom petals. I did have to paint at elevated heights, however. Because my arms aren't expandable, I had to stand on a step ladder to paint the center stamen and the inside parts of the middle petal.

Here I started on the top tier. This is the point that I brought in scaffolding. Perching the sculpture on a hydraulic lift so I could adjust the height would have been ideal, but it wasn't in the budget and I don't have a lift just sitting around in the garage gathering dust.

Initially, I wanted to incorporate my personal painting style of blending colors as I had with the light blue and magenta in the above picture. I found that the technique didn't work well with the grooves in between each petal and it was difficult to continue the strokes around the edges. 

I painted out all the blended colors and decided to add purple in addition to magenta. Because I found it was easier painting larger leaves than the ones I had drawn, I altered my design somewhat from the original Sharpie outline. Then I painted over any visible lines with white.

I painted over the white lines with colors. Though it was an opaque paint, the ultramarine paint for dark blue I chose wasn't covering the way I wanted. Paints react differently depending on the individual pigment. I remedied this by covering all the dark blue areas with a closely matched cobalt blue.