Poppies Collage

After the attempts with the smaller flower parts of the delphiniums ( see earlier post ) I thought I would have a go at some big blousy blooms, to see if the process worked just as well. With big flowers, there is less scope for such a loose piece of work, as you cannot cut around the small component parts and scatter them in places on the finished painting, nor can you leave out part flowers so easily as you can when a flower spike consists of lots of smaller elements.
The process was exactly the same as before, Paint the background, paint a second piece of paper for the flowers and put the two together. This time I was more specific with the background and masked out a row of birch-like trees in the upper part of the paper and then painted greens towards the top and red/yellow mixes in the lower half.. Again, I used Apatite green mixed with some Pthalo Blue at the top, and Pyroll Red and Indian Yellow and Pthalo Blue lower down. I let it all thoroughly dry whilst painting the random red/oranges on the second sheet for the poppies.

I painted the trees in quite traditional colors, gave some attention to the foliage of the trees, and then using the second piece of paper, as before, drew and cut out the poppy shapes. I attached these to the background, taking care that no glue oozed out the sides, as this gives a shiny patch on the painting.

If you look closely at the poppies you might notice that whilst the paper was wet, I covered it with clingfilm to give the petals some texture. It seemed a good idea at the time, but when the poppies were over painted the texture tended to disappear. However, it is something I will try again.I deliberately stuck the poppy shapes across the division between trees and field, as I was not sure how I could deal with the dividing line without spoiling some of the painting. At this point, it seemed to work ok.
Then it was just a case of painting the poppies and adding the foreground detail. Half way through this part of the process, I thought that the two top poppies were in too much of a straight line, so I painted and cut out a seed head ( one of the joys of collage is that you can add as you go along ) and stuck it between the two poppies to give a variation in height.

                                                        Watercolour on Fabriano Extra
                                                        White 300g.43cm x 28cm
Hope you enjoy looking!