Watercolor hosta flowers

I bought a box of 24 half-pan Yarka watercolors a while back but it took me till this weekend to sit down and unwrap each of those little pans and try 'em out. I wanted to try something different than my Winsor & Newton field kit (cool as it is), and the colors seemed particularly brilliant. I should have just bought more tube paints, but there's something about standing in front of those racks of individually sold colors that paralyzes me. I like the idea of the pre-determined palette.

Anyway, I unwrapped them and did a test page of every color. I found them to be much wetter than the W&N's - a small dab of water can make them pretty thin pretty fast. But the color really is clean and brilliant. Then I clipped a stalk from what I think is a variety of hosta in my garden and determined, once again, to try to paint a flower. It's a silly thing, really, how inept I feel at the task. The problem seems to be that the flower starts out so perfect it hardly makes sense to try to replicate it. But there's also a way I'm much more comfortable with a pen than a brush. Put a brush in my hand and I tend to try to "draw" with it. I know how to get loose with a pen. I don't know how to get loose with a brush full of color. Subtleties of shading elude me.