White lotuses at Carnegie center, Princeton NJ

It’s a hot sunny afternoon in August. I and a painter friend headed out to a small pond nested in a corporate campus called Carnegie center.

It took some discovery to locate the pond. When we finally started lugging our supplies toward the pond, it was already 2pm. Right after we turned the corner of a huge office building, we were greeted by a full pond of greens.

It’s already late in the blooming season so we could only find a dozen white lotuses scattered among a sea of leaves. Most flowers had turned to seed pods, heavy and immature, waving with the breeze.

I circled the pond a few times and eventually settled with my choice of objects. It’s a scene with one lotus at its prime and another one half blooming. They made a perfect pair for my composition. The sun came in and out of clouds, creating ever-shifting lighting on my subjects. I snapped a picture of them for my reference then started working on it.

A quick pencil sketch was done in about 20 minutes to study the composition and values. The afternoon sun was soft. It cast a tiny bit orange on the white lotuses. Shadows would be a warmer cool bluish purple, with a touch of green.

Satisfied with my pencil sketch, I started working on watercolor, hoping I would have enough time to finish it before mosquitoes came out to bite. I managed to do a layer of wash to set values and tones, carefully cutting around the flowers and pods. By the time I finished first wash, I was already tired and hungry.

My friend’s painting was coming along well though her choice of subject was a small bridge at the far end of the pond.

It was good to have a friend painting alongside with you. I was lucky in that sense.

3 hours had passed and our painting session came to the end. I had a half finished watercolor, which I was quite happy at the stage it was at. It needed another 1 or 2 layers of stronger colors and some details. Then I should be done.

I finished this painting a few days later in my studio. I decided to make the background leaves very blur so the main objects were emphasized. This also created depth and dimension in the painting.

I was happy with the end result. I was even happier that I had found this lotus pond. It reminds me similar ponds in a park next to my mother’s home in Beijing, where I grew up. Lotuses are a good fortune flower in eastern culture. They are also symbols used in Buddhism for peace and serenity.

Lotuses and water lilies are one of my favorite subjects to paint. I have studied Monet’s waterlilies hundreds of times. His paintings were in oils. It would be hard to achieve similar results with watercolor.

But you never know until you try.