Watercolor Still Life: Process

After seeing this beautiful floral still life by Carrie Schmitt on Pinterest, I wanted to try a still life challenge. I wrote this down in my art experiment notebook:

The challenge is to do a still life (doesn't have to be flowers), but with patterns/prints/bolds: so pick a big bowl and put some stuff in it and have a wild background like a draped shirt with chevrons or something, then use your favorite colors, doesn't have to be true to life (the color scheme). make the whole thing fill the page (like an up close shot).

I want to emphasize a dark vs light contrast. I am going to make two focus colors, for one painting I want to do blue/orange and for the other yellow/purple. I'm going to buy some flowers to use and i'm going to use a piece of my fabric with a wild print for the background (so i can see how it drapes for my painting). 

So that is what I was THINKING about my still life challenge. I made a quick arrangement of a piece of fabric I like, and a blue glass cup with color markers in it, plus a small birdhouse and an apple.

Then I sketched out the arrangement and started to fill it with color.

This is the 'finished' piece before I added Sharpie marker.

I like the colors of the finished painting, especially how the birdhouse turned out with the subtle shadows on the left bottom side. But I couldn't stick to just two main colors. I wanted to put EVERY COLOR on the page... I will continue to explore adding textiles and patterns in my paintings as backdrops.