Start with the greens

Once 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.