Tag: watercolour

Leaf of the Day: May Day, Flora and the Toog Tree

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“March winds and April showers soon give way to sweet May flowers”

The first of May, a day of celebrations redolent of pagan worship, of nature and of new growth. Songs, poems and rituals abound to welcome spring, and the return of growth, of love and of optimism. Flora is about to tread the earth scattering flowers as she goes.

“Now is the month of maying, When merry lads are playing, fa la,
Each with his bonny lass, Upon the greeny grass. Fa la.
The Spring, clad all in gladness, Doth laugh at Winter’s sadness, fa la,
And to the bagpipe’s sound, The nymphs tread out their ground. Fa la.”
Madrigal by Thomas Morley 1595.


Flora ..a detail from Botticelli’s Primavera.

If I were in the UK I would be drawing the hawthorn blossom as superstition allows it to be brought into the house only after the first of May, but not blackthorn blossom. I should definitely be getting up early to wash my face in the dew but should definitely not “cast a clout till May be out.”
I may look down into the waters of a well at noon to see my true love’s face and should I be young and pretty I might be the chosen “Queen of the May”, a symbol of fertility and regeneration but also a reminder that life is fleeting as in Tennyson’s beautiful poem “Queen of the May.” 1833 whose careless heroine is destined to live only till the New Year .
Here are just 3 verses..

“You must wake and call me early, call me early, mother dear;
To-morrow ’ill be the happiest time of all the glad New-year;
Of all the glad New-year, mother, the maddest merriest day,
For I’m to be Queen o’ the May, mother, I’m to be Queen o’ the May.
…….
The honeysuckle round the porch has woven its wavy bowers,
And by the meadow-trenches blow the faint sweet cuckoo-flowers;
And the wild marsh-marigold shines like fire in swamps and hollows gray, And I’m to be Queen o’ the May, mother, I’m to be Queen o’ the May.
……
All the valley, mother, ’ill be fresh and green and still,
And the cowslip and the crowfoot are over all the hill,
And the rivulet in the flowery dale ’ill merrily glance and play,
For I’m to be Queen o’ the May, mother, I’m to be Queen o’ the May. “

“Flora” Evelyn De Morgan 1894.

Compare this very Victorian maid ‘s coy attitude with the steady and knowing gaze of Botticelli’s Flora. One, a pretty ideal of Victorian feminine beauty, the other a reflection of the power of the old goddess and a force of nature to be reckoned with.
It is also interesting that in this painting the tree in the background is a loquat… ( id) a spring fruit.

Today I am celebrating the start of part three of the course which will involve more colour and more leaves, with a little sketch of the Toog tree leaf, bishofia javanica.
I can’t find out why it’s called a Toog tree but the fallen leaves had caught my eye. They are interesting because they seem to fold in half as they dry out and so make beautiful shapes, they also have a bright red interior which makes them stand out amongst the brown leaf mould. The toog is a big handsome tree with a dense canopy valued for its wood and the welcome shade it casts in hot climates. Apparently, according to Florida growers, it is somewhat unruly too as it is known to easily break up pavements and house foundations and cause a litter problem, but surely, better these pretty leaves than empty MacDonald’s cartons.
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Toog Tree Leaf

Leaf of the Day: Horned Melon and Hats

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The last day of April already. This means I have now reached the end of section two of the course and the fourth month of this blog. May’s posting will be erratic as I am in the UK for 3 weeks…it seems a long time stretching ahead away from my base and with no regular Internet access, but I will be making some interesting visits. Kew Gardens for one, to see the Gardens in May and particularly the new Shirley Sherwood collection of Botanical Art which, I feel, will inspire, awe and dismay in equal amounts. These artists are the “creme de la creme” of botanical art.
Shirley Sherwood’s book, Contemporary Botanical Artists” and meeting with a couple of the artists in my past life were contributing factors to me finding myself embarking on this course of study. See a good review here at Katherine Tyrrell’s excellent artblog “Making a Mark”
Another visit will be to the Queens Gallery at Buckingham Palace to see “The Amazing Things” exhibition which I briefly touched on here in “Upside Down Sloth “ post.

However now, the fridge needs clearing out of plants and other inedible bits of botanical stuff. It is just possible that Chris, undergoing a severe personality change in my absence, may reach for some healthy greens and find himself with an unusual and potentially lethal salad. He does need to be wary of my cooking these days.

I had nearly forgotten this almost inedible “fruit” languishing in the bottom salad tray. How could I forget it! I had fondly thought of making a coloured pencil study of it for the course but it would have taken far too long and after my experiences with coloured pencils I would not have been calm enough to do it justice. “Inedible” because, when I started researching this melon, the consensus of opinion seems to be that it is quite awful from a culinary point of view.
It is true it doesn’t taste of much and is more like a cucumber than an melon, however to an artist it is a joy … its colours, patterns and shapes are wonderful, inside and out. When cut in sections the translucency of the big seeds encased in the pale green jelly is beautiful. I could spend a week just exploring this. However for now this little watercolour sketch and pencil study will have to do for now.
So the Horned Melon cucumis metulifer from the order “curcubitales” is an native African fruit which has since been developed in New Zealand and marketed as Kiwano. An enterprising New Zealand couple had spotted this rather obscure but brilliantly coloured melon and seeing its novelty and decorative value learnt how to cultivate it. It was very successful in America but somewhat like pumpkins I would imagine more people buy it for decoration than to eat.
A Kiwano fruit “how to eat it” here from Wiki how

Coincidentally, the day I bought this little fruit was the day I went to the Orlando Art Museum (and was first introduced to the very edible Surinam Cherry). Amongst other things, I made some sketches of these very interesting Royal Bamileke Hats from the Cameroon..similar in many ways to the African Horned Melon.


They are very beautiful, in colour and design. I have not yet discovered the significance of the bumps but another visit next month will be to the British Museum so I may be able to find out some more information there.

Here is a photo from the Africa Direct website that has more hats, and beautiful beaded items too, another passion of mine.

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Half a Horned Melon

Leaf of the Day: Surinam Cherry

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There has been little time for drawing today as I have been out all day. On the way to Leu Gardens I stopped by the Orlando Art Museum and spent far too long there. Because I am thinking about the colour green I wanted to see how some other painters approach this tricky colour and its only really possible to understand if you see original paintings.
The Norman Rockwell exhibition is still showing and they have a good selection of classic and modern paintings. Rockwell actually uses very little “green” at all. Only viridian really which seems to be the main one and occurs in many of his works, subdued with ochres or with white added and then set against cream and brilliant red, two or three of the paintings there had this similar colour scheme. It was very interesting to look at an exhibition with just one colour in mind.
I also went to do a bit of quick sketching in the African and South American culture galleries where they have some great Pre-Columbian ceramics and beautiful African beadwork.

On to Leu gardens where things are now beginning to look familiar, now I know landmarks and some of the plants and instead of it all being a blur of green, I can spot individuals. Today I also met the head gardener and now have official permission to take a leaf or two here and there to draw. It’s marvellous as I am getting very jaded with the mall borders and the apartment block gardens. However I am now faced with so much choice I don’t know where to start.
I found my friend Pedro again and this time he took me to see another amazing edible that grows in the Gardens. The Surinam or Barbados Cherry eugenia uniflora is a large shrubby tree and at the moment it is covered with small berries that look like little Chinese lanterns. They are in different degrees of ripeness and you should really only eat the reddest ones which are the sweetest. They have a strange flavour which is difficult to describe, sweet but tangy. Apparently they are jam packed with vitamin C. Lots more things are now in bloom including huge magnolias, brilliant yellow trumpet trees and the stunning coral trees, amongst which is the interesting “naked coral tree” which is just begging to be in a post along with the Roxburg fig tree whose huge leaves would cover almost every inch of even the most modest Adam and Eve!

If all this wasn’t enough see and do today I called at the supermarket on the way home and have found some really cool fruit and veg to draw….
Here are a couple of sketches of the cherry.
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Surinam Cherry

Leaf of the Day: On Durer’s “Turf” and the problem of Greens

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Today I returned to sorting out my paints and thinking about the colour “green” for the next part of the course. Just one quick glance from the window shows so many different greens, from the olive/yellow of the palms right the way through to bluey greens of the hollies and everything else in between. At the moment many trees have new bright leaves, some brilliantly yellow-green and glowing against the blue Florida sky. It is very true that the light of a place has a huge effect on your perception of bright colours. You know how that colourful Caribbean throw you bring back from a holiday looked just lovely in its natural habitat, but now may somehow appear garish against the softer colours of a British climate.

Albrecht Durer. “A Piece of Turf” 1503

I went back to look at the the colours of one of my very favourite paintings, which to my mind is amongst the best of “botanical” paintings and one which still shapes my thinking about about the subject. Painted so long ago in 1503, Durer is considered to be one of the earliest watercolour painters. In this image it wouldn’t be Durer’s intention to paint botanic specimens for the sake of identification but to make a study of something he found interesting and beautiful. It’s a curious image in some ways. Unlike most contemporary botanical work the flowers and grasses with all their imperfections are presented intermingling in a natural way and have a relationship to each other, but then, like conventional botanical work it is set against a plain background. I am given the feeling this piece of land belongs to something else, has left a gap in a field, like a missing piece in a jigsaw.
It is a little slice of reality, without the plants being obviously arranged into a “design”, although I am sure Durer made many compositional and tonal decisions in the execution of this lovely painting.

In my original application to the course I remember writing that I particularly like work that gives a sense of place to the plants.. the artspeak word would be “context”.
Durer also gives each plant its identity (I have spoken of this before) rather than an averaged out version which smoothes out the wrinkles and takes away the character. While I can admire the execution of a beautiful individual unblemished specimen in celebration of the height of perfection of a species, for me, a more interesting piece is something that demonstrates that we do not see plants in isolation, but relating to earth, the interaction of animals and insects and the play of light. I suppose, being an illustrator I like the story!.

Thinking about colour, I also wondered about Durer´s paint. He would have had little choice of green pigments. There were very few natural green pigments and the bright strong greens, like gorgeous viridian, the much loved Pre Raphaelite green, are relatively recent. Green is a notoriously difficult colour for artists because most greens need to be mixed either by you or a paint manufacturer. However, with the continuing development of artist’s paints we do now have more choices for brilliant and lightfast colours. We need them!.. the colours of the natural world are often vibrant beyond belief!

So, green is to be my focus for the next few weeks and I am very happy about that. My own starting point was to draw some leaves from the little euonymus bush. which have an endless variety of pattern and shape. I painted them with the yellows I have and overlayed them with different blues and then ready mixed greens.. not very methodical or scientific but its a start.

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Euonymus Leaves

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….

Leaf of the Day: Experimental Grasses

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Some very nonspecific grass this time just to try out a couple of techniques from the course. This is done in liquid acrylics but using a wet in wet technique. Much of it, good and bad, is accidental. The scan has picked up the texture of the watercolour paper too much and has made it more grainy than it is in real life. Even with the amount of freedom these techniques give you, you need quite a bit of pre-planning.I am looking forward to more experiments on a larger scale.
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Experimental Grass