No spare time today because I've been painting strawberries! but finally sat down at about 9pm to paint another of the bulbs from Amsterdam, well actually it's a corm. This time a South African, Chasmanthe. Not sure which one exactly but I think it's known as the 'African Flag'. A member of the iris family, it's a large corm, about 10cm at the widest point, looks like Crocosmia to me but larger and flatter. It's definitely not the easiest subject when you're in a rush with much painting of negative space required in between the strands but I like the colour and the look of it . It's good to paint really complicated things against the clock...right!?
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| Chasmanthe corm, size 14 x 17 0n Langton extra smooth HP. A tricky one to paint but at least the colours were pretty straight forward. Only 90 mins on this, so it's a bit rough around the edges! I do think it's good training to work quickly it speeds up thinking and prevents procrastination! |
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| Lots of bulbs, corms and tubers at the Amsterdam flower market. I came home with a bag full and glad I photographed the labels otherwise I'd have had no idea what most of them were. | |
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I like this corm, but in hindsight it could have done with a bit more time ( isn't that always the case though?). Again I made a rough sketch of the basic shape and got stuck in with a mix of raw sienna and burnt sienna with van dyke brown for the darker browns. I used cerulean blue on the shine on the right hand side ( light source side), and added some pyroll red to warm it up on the shade side and ultraviolet to cool it down in places and also for the shadows. I finished of with wash of gold ochre in places I started by putting int he basic form but painting between some of the fibrous strands. I added the cerulean afterwards establishing this first stage, normally I'd do this first but was ahead of myself and distracted by the television!
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| Establishing the form first but by painting between some of the strands to get the basic shape in first. |
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This little painting exercise provided some light relief from the very complicated strawberry painting I'm working on at present.... I really don't like painting strawberries! So it's back to them in the morning and find doing little works like this stops me from getting too bogged down ( or stuck) with more complicated work.
No idea what day 4 will bring but it's likely to be night shift work!
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