Some of my favourite flowers
1. Dandelions and Daisies 1990 to 2020
This one was watercolour and finished off with Derwent watercolour crayons. You can see that I enjoyed getting a real depth of colour. Some parts of the painting I loved. I was quite pleased with the dandelions, but the daisies are much too uniform in shape and very flat. I remember that the “rules” for water colour painting in those days was that you didn’t use white paint. You had to leave the white of the paper. I admit that this can be wonderful. White flowers surrounded by a contrasting colour can really shine out on the page, but I hadn’t mastered the technique in those days and as I kept trying to make a real contrast the white petals lost their shape and were not successful. I was fascinated by the shapes of the dandelion leaves and went a bit mad with those. I liked the pattern that they made.
Look at the daisies I did on here!
They are pretty but they don’t look like real daisies because they are much too regular in shape. It looks like I really enjoyed the variegation on the clover leaves and the shadows on the blue speedwell leaves.It’s already getting very busy. At this time I was beginning to want to make a whole picture and not just a study. I made an attempt at a background of soft flowers.
In 1994 whilst recovering from a mental health issue caused by stress which forced me to retire early from my teaching career, I had my first home computer. I began illustrating my mother’s beautiful poems, actually drawing on my new asus laptop. I created a little book full of her poems. Here is the one where I chose some dandelions and daisies to illustrate the poem.
The other little picture I showed earlier was another of her poems “Look and Feel and Listen”
This is when I began trying to loosen my style. The daisies are not so stiff, it’s quite pretty but it’s not me.
Click on the image to see the gallery.
