Summer Meadow

Time to have another go at the experimental stuff. Out came the doilies again and this time I wanted to try a more multicoloured composition. My intention was to work on the idea of a Summer Meadow. There would be lots more colour and the design would grow from the bottom up! That was the theory, anyway! I used a piece of watercolour paper, covered it with PVA glue and rollered a piece of crumpled tissue paper onto it and let it dry. I then added some streaks of Gesso to the surface to give me a bit more texture.

Whilst waiting for the support to dry, I used a couple of my precious stock of doilies and painted them in various shades of meadow flowers: the blues, the yellows and I still had the bits of pink left. Although its not in the picture, I also painted a bit of poppy red as well.

When the support was completely dry, I washed the entire surface with the colours to represent my field, starting with some dark greens and gradually becoming sky blue at the top. I left plenty of pale areas to give as great an impact as possible to the so called flowers.

Then, with lots of sticky cutting and pasting, I cut up the doilies, and positioned them on the support, trying to make them grow up through each other as they might do in a summer field.

When I was satisfied with the amount and variety of shapes and colours, I added dark watercolour to the base of the painting, ( sorry, not as evident as it should be in the photo) and added some all important red pieces to the painting.I added stems and greenery where needed, as well. Lots of splashing with the gouache and with some of the colours in the picture, and I thought maybe anything else would be a step too far

I an really quite pleased with the finished result, but am aware that the use of so many colours has resulted in a painting with much less impact than 'Blossom' or 'Cow Parsley, which rely heavily on the monochrome treatment. However, I do think that from time to time, something a little more restrained can have a certain appeal. I hope you think it has some merit!

PS   having looked at the published post, I am unhappy with the area of really dark brown on the left hand side, and during the mounting process, have cropped the painting to include very little of this part of the painting!

I have just started the drawing for a painting of Orange Day Lilies (Hemerocallis) and it is double my usual size, so it may be a little while before I have anything new to show you! Happy painting!!