Corn Field

Another lovely uninterupted 2 hours to try something a bit loose at Avon Valley Artists last Thursday. This time I wanted to create a field of corn and summer poppies. I have not done much of this so I knew it would only be experimental, but I was sure there would be some discoveries that I could use in the future.

The idea was to create a series of random lines to act as the grasses and then to over paint the ears of corn and drop in very loose red poppies. In the past I have had trouble blending red and green together so I tried to think of a way to keep the two colours from running into each other.

The background was created by wetting the paper and then dropping in small puddles of paint at the edges and blowing them across the paper with a drinking straw. This is a very good way of producing twiggy shapes! Whilst it was still wet, I used a tissue to remove small ares of paint which would be the clean spaces into which I would paint the poppies.
I then covered the sheet with crumpled cling film and left it to dry. During the whole of this process, I consciously tried to take the eye into the centre of the paper, making it look as if the viewer is lying on the ground.

When completely dry, I painted in ears of corn, sundry grasses and the red poppies with almost darker centres.

                                            Fabriano Artistico Extra White, Rough and a
                                               selection of borrowed paints as I forgot
                                                                my palette