Chinese Lanterns

Having spent most of this week making a 'Ball Gown' for an over excited 7 year old, I really missed putting paint on paper.
With just an hour and a half to spare, I was determined to paint something, maybe only a sketch, but none-the-less I wanted it finished within the time frame, as tomorrow all would need to be stored away again until the dress is finished.
A quick look around the studio and |I found a couple of twigs of Chinese Lanterns in a pot of dried flowers. I thought they would do nicely, and as they were already well dried, there were no leaves, so I had a quick look on the internet to see the type of leaves, no real detail required and I was ready to go.

I did my usual thing of flooding the paper with colour, this time using Transluscent Orange and Apatite Green as the two main colours, which I left to dry  before doing a quick drawing.

Because I had not given myself a lot of thinking time, I did a reasonably accurate drawing so that the painting could be swift and effective ( I hope! ).

Then I simply painted the seed heads with a bit of care to begin with, but with less and less so as time was running out. I am quite pleased with the result and maybe I will give myself more time trials as it seemed to be a lot of fun.

 A useful exercise , although I am not sure why the photo shows white speckles on the lower RH Lantern, as, for once, I did no splattering at all!

PS I am not sure why the blog site has changed its format. I really liked it when all enlarged images could be accessed from the same page by means of a row of thumb nails. Now we have to keep going back to the post page for each enlarged image. If anyone out there can get it changed back, please do so!