Painted Squash

I painted one of my designs that I drew a couple weeks ago. It is about 10 1/2 inches square. This is textile paint on cotton fabric.For the squash you can see I am painting with a transparent base textile paint and building up the color with transparent glazes to create the shading. I used water instead of a textile medium to make the paint more transparent for the glaze. As I added more color the fabric got too wet and the paint began to bleed on the right side. I quickly grabbed a blow dryer to dry the paint before it bled too much. (Using a clear textile medium would prevent the bleeding, but if you are careful with the amount of water you use you can often do without.)
A blow dryer can be a great tool to have on hand when you are painting. When you are glazing paint you want to build up the color gradually, the paint needs to dry between layers. This is really important if you are glazing several colors on the same area, if the layers are not dry the colors will mix and get muddy and you will not have depth in the color.

Next I painted the dark green on the squash and glazed a darker shade of green at the top and bottom of the squash to increase the illusion of it being dimensional.
The blossom is painted a similar golden yellow with a tiny bit of red added to the yellow to deepen the color.
I painted the background with Jaquard brown (not neopaque) straight from the jar.
I liked this initially but after a couple days when I came back and looked at it, the splotchiness bothered me and I felt like the flower did not have enough range in value, it looked a little flat. I think it is always good to set work aside and come back and look at it with a fresh eye. You will often see things that were not apparent before.

Using only violet paint, I glazed light washes on the flower in the center and in the shadows where the petal curls to give it more depth and I glazed light washes on areas of the leaves where there is some overlap to give them a little more definition and in a few places on the stems to give more dimension. Then I painted the whole brown back ground with medium to dark glazes of violet multiple times, this evened out the background and warmed it up to an aubergine tinted brown. Purple is the compliment of yellow, adding it to the background creates more contrast with the the colors of the plant making it pop and come forward from the background.

As I have thought about teaching painting workshops, it has brought to mind how useful a class in color theory could be for people who are interested in learning more about the role of color in their work. It would really help in learning to mix color for painting and to understand what happens to one color when you put another color next to it. I am wondering if it would be worthwhile to create a workshop for this that could coincide with fabric painting, any thoughts? It would need to be 6 hours to cover the basics of color theory, would this be something you would consider taking the day before a painting workshop?