The next skill specific to watercolor I call Reductive Painting. It is a powerful way to build depth into the picture plane and to make an object come forward. It is going in and painting around an object. If you want to paint a trunk of a tree which is lighter than the foliage behind it, then you paint darkening that negative space around the trunk. This is how I painted these whit flowers. Even though the eye goes to the white flower that is not what gets painted or painted heavily.
First
What this technique also allows one to do is darken areas that will make an object ‘pop’. Under the two center white flowers I went back in and painted the edge paying very careful attention to making that edge as interesting as possible. Again I was focusing on painting underneath the flowers not the flowers themselves.
Note the light and dark patterns. The lights while being the focus were not the painted areas. ( This is an old painting…. can you see the composition error? If you can email me the answer!)