Things I Love - No. 2

Today, I am sharing my love of flowers.  I love to paint them, but I also love to take photos of them.  Flowers seem like such an awesome extravagance of creation, something that is there simply as a gift of beauty for anyone who takes the time to just drink it in.

Monday as we drove into Breckenridge, Colorado, to go to the Art Festival there, suddenly we happened on an incredible field of poppies of many colors with some other flowers mixed in.  They hadn't been there too long, and had apparently been planted by a developer to attract people in to look at property.  What a brilliant idea, and such a treat for us as we had to stop and take some pictures to help keep the memory fresh. It was an amazing sight and a great present for Labor Day!

Beautiful Field of Flowers

Smashing Flowers

OK, I've heard of smashing pumpkins and Smashing Pumpkins. But, have you ever thought about smashing flowers as an art form? A fellow artist sent me an email about Betsy Dillard Stroud's article which you can find by clicking here. Look for Printing with a Hammer, August 07, 2008, by Betsy Dillard Stroud. It looked interesting, so yesterday I gathered some flowers and leaves of different kinds including stems. Then I prepared my watercolor paper, padded it, laid wax paper over it, and proceeded to beat the living daylights out of some innocent plant life. (I'm still not feeling good about this.) Anyway, this first photo on the left is what my initial effort looked like.



Still feeling sorry for the flowers, this morning I thought I needed to make as much as I could out of it, so I grabbed a Tomball pen and my watercolors and went to work. First, I outlined to find the flowers and leaves that were obvious and invented a few more . Then I began to do some negative painting with the watercolors, and by now I'm not feeling so bad about the flowers, now that I've made something that I like a lot more. I hope you will like it too!

It's something different. It really doesn't matter if you use some kind of dillapidated flowers though, so if you get a chance you might try it with some past-their-prime poseys. I guess you could also try it with some blooming weeds you want to clear away anyway or on that bouquet you get from someone you now dislike with a passion (to relieve stress).

Click here for more information about this painting.

Midsummer Amaryllis

Behold the lovely Amaryllis. I can't forget the first time I saw one of these plants, because it had that, "This just can't be real," appearance. The stems were very, very long and coming from a much smaller pot, but atop the stems were these great, big, enormous, exquisite and showy red blooms. It was only a few years ago, and I had no idea such a beautiful plant even existed.

The blossoms fit my concept perfectly for what I was trying to paint today which was a vignette. I painted two of them, which are quite similar, and I still have another idea for a third which is not a vignette but a gradated background. This first one I took from a photo that I had photoshopped with a special effect that had a lot of exaggerated shadowing on the right sides. The second one is more or less a loosey, goosey watercolor with no special effects.

Hopefully tomorrow I will do the third one.

Anyway I have placed the first one up for adoption on my Etsy site, DreamON. You can find out more about it there including how you may purchase it by clicking here.