Half-sheet florals
Posted: September 3, 2025 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: bouquet, flower painting, sunflowers, watercolour flowers 28 CommentsDuring this summer’s hottest days, I worked on some large florals in my studio. Both of these bouquets come from Ferme Tournesol where I pick up my CSA baskets every week. If you are a subscriber to the basket program, you have the added bonus of being able to cut flowers from their large cutting garden.
The first bouquet I picked was mostly smaller flowers like zinnias and rudbeckias with some tiny stuff mixed in. Instead of painting this in my sketchbook, I took out a half sheet (22″ x 15″) of Arches CP 140 lb paper so that I could really have some room to draw all the details of the flowers. This one took most of a day, but we had our computer tech here installing software updates that day and I couldn’t work in my office anyway. It seemed like a real luxury to spend a full day on a painting.
This week I worked on another half-sheet one of some sunflowers I picked at the farm last Thursday. I did the drawing one day and two days later when I went back to paint it, the flowers had shrivelled considerably. I also noticed an unwanted guest. A large green caterpillar was chewing its way through the leaf on the far right of the painting. That was my incentive to finish this quickly.
Montreal workshops coming!
I’m excited to announce that I’ve finally found a bright and beautiful studio, located in Hudson, Quebec, where I can give watercolour workshops closer to home. So if you live nearby and want to be notified when there’s an opportunity to learn and paint with me, please fill in this form. Also note that these are one-day studio workshops and intended for people who live within driving distance of Montreal.
From Alison’s garden
Posted: July 1, 2025 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: bouquet, coloured pencil, flowers, neocolor 12 CommentsHappy Canada Day! I usually choose some red flowers to paint on July 1, but this bouquet from Alison’s garden was just too beautiful to pass up. I can’t name everything that’s in here but it’s exactly the kind of arrangement I love — a little wild looking and different from every angle. Thank you for thinking of me, Alison.
Since I haven’t even unpacked my watercolours yet (lots of garden projects to catch up on at my house), I decided to work in water-soluble pencils. I drew on a sheet of HP paper with a green pencil and then filled in with both coloured pencils and NeoColor sticks from Caran D’Ache. At the end I touched the wet brush to a few areas but mostly it’s just pencil scribbles. And if I have time before the bouquet fades, I may just unpack my palette and try it in watercolour.
Yellow plus grey makes green
Posted: March 6, 2025 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: bouquet, flowers 30 CommentsThis is the Valentine’s Day bouquet that keeps on giving. I received it on February 14th and it’s still beautiful three weeks later. A little shrivelled, I’ll admit, but highly sketchable. The flowers come from a florist — unlike my usual grocery store blooms — which has no doubt contributed to their longevity.
The drooping and curling shapes of this bouquet are still so beautiful. I felt that I couldn’t do them justice with a loose painting. Instead I chose to draw their complex forms on hot press paper using a water-soluble orange marker and then painted with watercolour, using a mix of Payne’s Grey and Lemon Yellow for the fading foliage. I like this mix for grey/greens, and you can get some great darks with it too.
Yesterday’s bouquet, today’s ink
Posted: February 15, 2025 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: bouquet, flowers, ink drawing 25 CommentsLast month, one of my students let me try her Lamy pen that had been filled with De Atramentis Pipe Tobacco brown ink. I couldn’t detect the fragrance of the ink, but I did love the way the ink lines dissolved when you hit them with a little clear water. I tried to find the ink from my local suppliers but no luck. So today I headed downtown to the pen shop and I bought some Diamine Ancient Copper ink. It’s not quite as brown as the tobacco ink, but besides having a beautiful name, it has other qualities that are quite wonderful.
It has a deep orange/pink tone that is perfect for the pale pink amaryllis that are the stars of this bouquet. And what I like about it is that the more you go over the lines with your brush, the more they dissolve until you have lost them altogether. Not all water-soluble inks do that. The final sketch looks like part painting, part ink drawing. Tomorrow I’ll experiment further with this. I’ll draw with copper ink and paint on top of that with watercolour. If the results are decent, I’ll post that drawing too.
Sad little bouquet
Posted: August 25, 2024 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: bouquet, flowers, sketchbook, watercolour sketch 26 CommentsThis started off as a sad big bouquet. Too many uninteresting leaves and too few flowers. Then it flopped and shrivelled and I trimmed it down to a sad little bouquet. But sometimes these arrangements are more fun to sketch. For example, the drooping flowers provide movement, the single red zinnia gives it a focus, and the preponderance of leaves gives it a unity of colour — all importance design elements in a sketch. Despite the sad character of this grouping, I will miss the wildness of summer flowers when autumn rolls around and I have to resort to grocery store bouquets again.
Start with the greens
Posted: July 14, 2024 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: bouquet, flower painting, summer, watercolour painting 44 CommentsOnce again this year, along with my CSA basket subscription from Ferme Tournesol, I’ve subscribed to their flower bouquets. I think I get four throughout the summer and it’s always a wonderful surprise to see what’s under the paper wrapper when I get home from the farm. I can’t always identify everything but the flowers always look a bit wild, like something you might pick if you were walking along a country road. Definitely not what I bring home from the grocery store in the middle of winter. I added a few of my own white daisies to this bunch before I sketched them.
This particular bouquet has a lot of smaller flowers in it (except for the big sunflower) with lots of greenery in between each bloom. I decided to start the painting by tackling the greens first, since they are the connective tissue between the flowers. On my Holbein palette, I have Olive Green and Phthalo Green, so that was my starter mix. To that I added various yellows (Hansa and Lemon) and occasionally Alizarin Crimson when the mix was too bright. Once I painted the greens, I filled in the oranges, yellows and purples for the flowers.
