Author: Val Littlewood

Leaf of the Day: Three Colour Seeds

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I have spent all day sorting out colours and laboriously painting samples of my watercolour paints which are a motley bunch in every way. It takes hours. Having done that I consulted the afore mentioned excellent site for all things watercolour http://www.handprint.com/ to check on the names of the colours and the pigments in order to eliminate once and for all some very bad and fugitive pigments.. so its goodbye alizarin crimson, and aureolin, and a few that are so old they don’t list any pigments on the labels at all. Does in matter? Well yes, if you are selling originals it is important that the colours don’t fade, it doesn’t really add to your artistic mystery to have your works slowly disappearing from the walls. Also for really accurate colour mixing or for some experimental colour mixing, to avoid mud it is absolutely necessary to know how pigments work with each other. The Handprint site is a mine of information and you will find ideas for different colour palettes and all the technical information your heart could desire. Here is a photo of my progress so far.

I was also thinking about some coloured pencil and have a couple of small seeds on my desk, however having gone to all the trouble of getting the paints out I decided to try one of the exercises for colour mixing using just 3 colours. We just get so lazy and use premixed pigments for convenience. So here are 4 different little seed painting. The first one is the (almost)natural colours and the other 3 below are playing with different colour ways.. still just with the 3 colours red blue and yellow.
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Three Colour Seeds

Leaves and Pears

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Just 4 experiments from last weeks course. They are about colour, about handling wet paint and about light. None are entirely successful but were very useful exercises. The pears were our first exercise and pears are very much Sue’s fruit. She has painted them everywhich way to demonstrate many different colour combinations textures and approaches. My images are on different papers and I just wish I could have got two good pears on one piece. To the russet coloured leaves I added some pastel as I had really overworked the watercolour but I quite liked the colours working together.
This coming week I am going to devote myself to colour experiments and I guess I will have to continue a bit with the coloured pencil…

Leaf of the day: Endive and Less Endive..eat your model.

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Endive is such a pleasing smooth sleek shape. It is amazingly from the daisy family. However, this Belgian endive is forced in a complicated way and is a shoot from the root and a long way from its relative, the pretty wild chicory which does have a blue daisy-like flower. Excellent with soft cheese, thyme and olives and nuts.

These little paintings, I think the first watercolours on this blog, were done after a couple of days with Sue Archer. I have always found dark coloured backgrounds in watercolour very tricky and although these are small paintings, 8 x 4″ and 6 x 2.5″, they represents a modest breakthrough for me.

In the room at La Quinta hotel in Sarasota you have a fridge and a microwave so in the evening I would go back and assemble some food and also try to digest some of what Sue had told us. The endive, with additions was Tuesday and Wednesday’s dinner.. ..eating your models is to be recommended as it avoids critical comparisons.
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Belgian Endive

Learning from the Experts:Two Watercolour Tutors

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You can read all the books and spend years at college but sometimes a few days with the right person and a door will be unlocked …hopefully. There have been just two tutors who have really helped my watercolour practice.

Sue Archer
I have nothing but good things to say about Sue Archer’s course this week in Sarasota. She is such a good tutor. My head is now completely full of ideas and information. Her course is so well structured and no matter how good an artist you are, you would learn something, revise something, look at your own work in a different way and, as in my case, return to the much needed discipline of planning a piece of work.
Her large scale, deceptively simple images are full of luminous colour, elegant design and careful composition and on the course she explains every aspect of how this is achieved. ..trying to do it is another matter.
Visit her website http://www.archerville.com/ which she shares with her photographer husband and see this beautiful painting amongst many others.

Life is Just A…
29 x 41″

Sue Rubira
I had seen Sue Archer’s work on the internet and so had some idea of what her work was like but my first door opener was a completely lucky chance.
Sue was the tutor on a last minute decision holiday to Portugal some years ago now. With this Sue I discovered how to work with ‘wet’ transparent watercolour, having been very much a controlled dry brush painter. After a day of making mud, I gradually understood how to leave white paper for whites and how, ideally, to keep colours clean!..I still have my first tentative watercolours from that holiday.
Her work is very different from Sue Archer’s, her portraits are breathtaking in their handling, viewpoint and scale. She was the second prize winner in the prestigious Singer Friedlander watercolour competition in 2006 with this large 72cm wide x 91cm painting of her brother Geoff. This is from the Sunday Times September 3, 2006:
“I need to paint people who interest me in some way, otherwise it’s difficult to begin to understand them. This one’s of my brother, Geoff. I obviously know him very well and to that helps with the painting no end.” “I prefer to paint on a large scale, larger than life, and I like using very large brushes.” Find her work and step by step for some paintings here http://www.suerubira.co.uk/

Geoff 2006
21 x 30″

I continue with my leaves….

Synchronicity in Sarasota and Fangs & Flippers

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Day two in Sarasota and the course is going very well. We are learning so much about colour and the chemical constituents of paint which in the past I have never really got to grips with. Sue is an excellent teacher and sets a cracking pace. I may be able to post a couple of photographs later this week.

Back at the hotel I have my two books ( Jung and Bartram) and Internet access. I tuned into BBC Radio 4 and lo and behold Book of the Week is readings from :
“The Brother Gardeners: Botany, Empire and the Birth of Obsession” By Andrea Wulf,
Her book ‘traces the history of the gardening revolution of the 18th century, led by a group of explorers, botanists, collectors, and plant dealers:
Philip Miller, head gardener of the Chelsea Physic Garden and the author of The Gardeners’ Dictionary
Peter Collinson, collector and merchant, who together with American farmer John Bartram ( father of William) brought American plants to England
Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist who classified the natural world and invented a standardized botanical nomenclature
Daniel Solander, who joined Joseph Banks on Captain Cook’s Endeavour.
Joseph Banks, who exchanged his life as a rich gentlemen for that of an explorer, becoming in turn one of the most influential men in Georgian England. ‘

All these wonderful people I have been reading about… How very nice.
Jung coined the word syncronicity to describe what he called “temporally coincident occurrences of acausal events.” ..well it’s certainly a coincidence.

William Bartram illustrated his writings with delightful drawings ..here is one, nature red in fang and flipper. A lotus pod and unfortunate frog from “Travels and other Writings” William Bartram.

Leaf of the Day: Easter Calamondin Orange

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It’s Easter already and I hear from my father in the UK they are expecting snow. Dan the avuncular weather man here has promised us a fair weekend.
I am going to Sarasota this week to do some watercolour painting and to visit the Marie Selby Gardens there, so may not be posting any drawing here for a few days.

I have some reading matter to take with me…one is William Bartram’s “Travels and Other Writings”. I quote from the fly leaf;
‘Artist, writer, botanist, gardener, naturalist, intrepid wilderness explorer, and self styled philosophical pilgrim’.
Son of the renowned botanist, John Bartram, William travelled extensively in South Carolina, Georgia and Florida from 1773 to 1776 and wrote about all that he saw and heard, presenting a ” moving detailed vision of man living in harmony with nature”.
I shall be pondering this as we make the monotonous 2 hour drive to Sarasota tomorrow on highways lined with identical concrete malls and fast food outlets.. but I am looking forward to seeing the comical pelicans again in Sarasota Bay.

My other book is Jung’s “Memories Dreams and Reflections” My interest is more to do with my research into Africa in the 1920’s for my other blog My Darling Popsy than analytical psychology. He records in this book the journey to Africa during which he crystallised many of his most important ideas on psychology. My grandfather, being on the same ship to Mombassa and then, I have discovered, working in the areas that Jung travelled to, will have seen many of the same things. It will be very intereting and I may learn something about my psyche as well!
I hope to be able to add a couple of “Popsy” posts this week.

This is the tiny Calamondin orange. I added a seasonal egg and a blueberry really to show how tiny they are. They are very tart but if you eat the whole thing the sweetness of rind compensates for the bitterness of the flesh. It’s almost true..but I think that Pedro’s recipe to use the juice mixed with soy sauce as a marinade is probably a better idea.

This will be my last coloured pencil drawing for March…I say with some relief…
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Calamondin Orange

Leaf of the Day: Killarney Trees and a Little Blue Heron

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At least once a week I try to go and sketch outside and the weather is lovely at the moment so this afternoon I went to the lake to do a larger sketch of a clump of trees by the shore. I love working in charcoal, it is responsive and messy, a real welcome change from the waxy hard coloured pencils. This is 20 x 25 inches, charcoal and white chalk on a warm grey Ingres paper. I´m not very keen on Ingres paper and started working on the textured side by mistake which I like even less because of its mechanical looking surface but it was nice to work on a larger scale today.

I had the usual accompaniment of critics, jeering from the trees around me, mostly grackles which I wrote about before, perching sometimes just a foot way, all glossy and smart. When not screeching they have a disconcerting “uh oh” noise like some insufferable know-all’s ” I wouldn’t do that” comment, looking over your shoulder just as you are about to make a huge mistake. They sat by me, above me and below me squawking, “I wouldn’t put that mark there if I were you”, noises for about an hour. A pair of mallards was pottering about in the water at the foot of the trees, so happy and so sweet together.

The little ghostly blue heron was also silently patrolling up and down, quietly stalking its prey of dragonflies and little fish. Also known as the ‘levee walker’ it is the Italian greyhound of the bird world, delicate and fragile with twig thin legs, looking as though it has been carefully crafted from the finest and softest dusty blue suede. When you sit for long enough the birds come very close and I was able to do some more sketches of the heron.
This little bird is not so difficult to draw from life as it moves quite slowly and hesitantly and covers the same patch of floating marsh grass, up and down, delicately picking up its huge feet and gently placing them down again, almost walking on the water.
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Trees by Lake Killarney

Leaf of the Day: Sky Flower and Snakes

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As if little pieces of a deep blue summer sky had fallen to earth, that is how the beautiful Sky Flower gets its name. The blues range from deep violet to the pale blue of a spring morning sky, its throat a pale creamy yellow. This lovely twining vine is also known as the ‘Bengal clock flower’ from its habit of twisting clockwise around any available support.

This is the thunbergia grandiflora, one of the acanthus family. It was named by the great Swedish botanist and taxonomist Carl Linneaus for Carl Peter Thunberg who was one of Linneaus’ last pupils. These 18th Century scientists made extraordinary journeys, travelling round the world in search of new and exotic plant species usually connected with medical studies. Thunberg trained as a medical doctor and part of the training, naturally, was botany as plants would be the main raw materials of his medicines. In August 1775 he travelled as a ship’s doctor to Japan where he lived and worked as a surgeon on at a Dutch trading post on a tiny island in the Bay of Nagasaki. He was seldom allowed to leave the island but through exchanging ideas and knowledge with Japanese doctors he eventually managed to get permission to make a trip to Edo ( Tokyo) which resulted in the first recorded survey of Japanese flora. Reading about any of the lives of these great explorers is humbling.

This is my second attempt to draw this flower. It is so delicate that it is easily crushed and dies very quickly when picked. It grows in a hedge by Leu Gardens and I had taken a little piece yesterday but, consigned to my back pack and a 40 minute bike ride in 87 degrees, the flower on the stem had completely shrivelled up by the time I arrived home. Luckily there was also a bud, which today unfolded obligingly but just a quickly withered.

It is a problem, trying to get delicate specimens back to the house in good condition. When I was young, my sister and I would go out collecting flowers to be lovingly pressed and named. I remember advice, (no doubt from “Girl” magazine or one of my favourite books “Rambles with Uncle Nat “), to paint a cocoa tin black which would provide a cool and rigid container. This we duly did, and attached string for easy transportation. I somehow think that serious botanists may have moved on.

I have tried to save one or two of the leaves I have drawn by drying them. I am not generally a fan of dried flowers ..they conjure up visions of cheap and dismal bed and breakfast establishments which always seemed to have a grey dusty dried flower arrangement in the lobby, usually artfully and visibly glued to a log or bedecked with a faded ribbon …but I love to find a single little pressed flower in an old book, some treasured keepsake. My leaves are now tucked away in the few books I have here.

I have now seen two snakes at Leu Gardens.

A little green snake, I think the Rough Green Snake, yesterday and my first snake sighting was the beautiful big Southern Black Racer which, true to its name, zipped across the path in front of me. Neither of these snakes are venomous but they do still stop you in your tracks.
Luckily Orlando has a snake removal service should you find one cosying up in the bathroom.
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Sky Flower

Leaf of the Day: Pretty Coleus or Flame Nettle

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Looking like a nettle leaf, a member of the mint family and brilliant in a thousand different colourways this is such a charming little plant. Here it grows happily in a shady garden spot. They are so forgiving to even the worst of neglectful owners and as I remember, respond willingly to even the most ham fisted attempts at propagation. Pop a piece in a glass of water and soon you will have a new little plant.

The coleus was introduced to the UK in the mid 1800s and became the must-have plant. Brought over from Indonesia they were easy to grow and the colours were fascinating as you were never quite sure what you would get from the seeds. The colour variations are many and beautiful. Here is a lovely old print from 1880 of some popular varieties, from Coleusfinder.org here.

There is a renewed interest in coleus now and somehow its perky friendly aspect has won it some very strange variety names. I imagine that enthusiasts chat to each other in a sort of lingua-coleus.
From ‘Mr Wonderful’ and ‘Prissy Primrose’ through ‘Tickle Me’ ‘Flirtin’skirts’ ‘October Wedding’ ‘Saucy Tart’ ‘Heavy Breathing’ ‘Dead Drunk’ ‘Careless Love’ ‘Sin’ to ‘Dark secret’ ‘Stormy Weather’ ‘September Divorce’ and ‘Brighter Day’ they read like the plot of a brief modern marriage…. ‘Mama Mia’ !

Mine, I guess, would be “Sloppy Painter”, I think I am going to order one today.

If you have an interest see the amazing variety here at Glasshouse Works There are 282 colourways recorded.
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Coleus, Flame Nettle

Leaf of the Day: Tea Leaf and Seed Pod

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A small, new, tea leaf and a seed pod, just splitting open to reveal a fat round seed inside. A drawing for Pedro who took me to see the tea plants at Leu Gardens the other day. I have to admit I didn’t really know what a tea plant looked like, despite years of seeing the PG tips lady picking tea on the box, and I had no idea it was one of the camellia family, camellia sinensis. Shame on me, the amount of tea I drink. This leaf is new and bright green with a reddish stem and smooth edges whereas the older leaves are slightly toothed and much darker green.
This pod has two seed chambers where others have three. I will be making a few more drawings as they are delightful shapes. The young leaves (top 2 and the bud) are harvested, rolled and fermented (oxidised) before they find their way to the teapot as black tea. Green tea is made with unfermented leaves. Amazing! The regular supermarket tea is not very good here. It’s very weak and each bag is individually wrapped with an annoying tag, but at least we have not had it served to us with salt water yet.

This funny little drawing started as I was trying to balance the pod and leaf on the top of a couple of pieces of paper torn out of a sketchbook which were propped up on my drawing board. I thought they looked nice just as they were so that’s how I drew them.
I have just had a memory of tea chests, weren’t they wonderful?
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Tea leaf and Seed Pod