Tuesday, June 7, 2011

botanical illustrations are not my forte

I found it a little funny that a couple days ago I stumbled across a blog in the "Blogs of Note" that linked me to the author's gallery website. Take a look at her floral prints, they are beautifully rendered. The reason that this is slightly humorous to me because this week in my watercolor class we are focusing on plants - mainly close ups of different kinds.

Yesterday we worked from flowers in the arboretum, and there were those beautiful western irises we all love so dearly. Today Mr. Teacher Man told us to go outside and pick a flower that we would like to paint. There is a beautiful bleeding heart plant outside the building that I knew is the one I wanted to paint because it looks like this:


I have grown up being told not to pick the flowers. If everybody just wanted to take 'one flower' then there would be no flowers at all! So you better just leave those alone Natalie Dawn, lest you be in major trouble. So, it kind of hurt my soul a little to break off a stem of these pretty flowers to paint. And it hurt even worse when after I was done the pretty little pink blooms got tossed in the trash can.


(Sorry for the poor quality photo. The lighting in our classroom is really not that great and my camera was just my cell phone. It didn't really want to cooperate because it was up too late last night and didn't sleep very well at all. It always gets grumpy when that happens...)

But you can see what we were trying to do. Nothing like Miss Margarethe can do, but it's really my beginning attempt at this type of painting. The idea is to be very detailed, and well really, that's just not my strong suit. Have you seen my artwork? Detailed it is not!

On the flip side, I think I have a new favorite flower - calla lilies, poppies, and now bleeding hearts. I bet that would make a pretty bouquet though, don't you think?

No comments:

Post a Comment