Day 3 Chasmanthe

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!?

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!

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.

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!

Establishing the form first but by painting between some of the strands to get the basic shape in first.

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!