Flower Power

Had a good evening class last night. To be honest, I wasn’t really in the mood to paint after a long day at work but once I walk through the door everything changed. The class always has a very positive and creative atmosphere and once that paper is taped to my board any stresses from the day are forgotten.

My teacher, Ann, is on a bit of a flora bender at the moment and the room was full of the most vivid yellow Chrysanthemums. One of the students, Pete, wasn’t impressed though. 'I hate painting bloomin' flowers' he uttered. Bad luck mate 'cos that’s what we’ve got I thought.

We kicked off with painting a study of an individual flower head. Again, we worked wet-in-wet and I tried desperately hard not to use too much water which is currently my achilles heel. Using a range of yellow tones and adding purple to get shadow colours was the name of the game here.

 We followed this up with another study but this time taking the profile of the flower with an emphasis on the underside of the flower and taking note of how the yellow tones were different from the first study.

This was 20 minute study and I think that watercolours capture the delicate nature of the subject perfectly. Without creating an 'exact' copy, the effect of the colour mixing and luminosity of the paint produce a quality that I feel gets the true personality of the flower.

To end the class, we were given a quick exercise where we had to sketch a composition in a matter of minutes. This in my opinion produced a lively and energetic study and quite possibly, my favourite piece from the class last night.