Scabious

After having spent quite a lot of time on tight precise images.....the butterflies and my daughter's Christmas card (which I will show you in a later post)........ I had the urge to paint something bold and free. I have a bunch of artificial flowers in the conservatory which it has never occurred to me before to use as subject matter. I love the very dark blue in some of the flowers and decided they were worth a go. Sorry....the photo does not do them justice!

The point of this exercise was to loosen up, so I decided that there would be no drawing at all in this painting.Nor was I concerned about producing a recognisable type of flower.

I simply wet the paper and dropped colour onto the sheet where I thought the flowers might be, adding greens below to suggest the stems and leaf positions

Without any drawing I began to do the flowers, working around the central area of each, which I had blotted out with a bit of tissue, whilst the wash was still damp.

I am a little disappointed with the flower on the lower right edge, but as a quick and spontaneous exercise, I am quite pleased with it. I might not have posted it except for one part of the painting which I really love and I thought you might like to know how I achieved it, if you haven't happened on it by accident already.

I really love the way the paint has travelled across the paper in little zig-zaggy lines almost as if the paint is granulating. At first I was not sure what I had done. Then I realised that I had wet the paper by spraying the surface. Hence, the paper was covered in tiny droplets of water and the paint ran through the drops but failed to cover the dry areas. What a lovely textural passage....I will definitely use that trick again.