Masts and tarps

I love painting in my car studio but this winter has been so cold and so grey. This week there’s finally some sign of a light at the end of the winter tunnel. The days are longer (Alice’s second walk of the day can now be at 5 instead of at 3:30!) and it’s warm enough to paint from my car.

Painting in winter in my car has its challenges, but I have my routine. As always, I wear warm boots because my feet get cold quickly. The car interior has time to warm up as I drive to my location, so that helps too. And surprisingly, even very wet washes (sky and the snow shadows) dry quickly when the sun is shining on my paper. Painted on a pad of Arches CP, 10″ x 14″.

Start with the greens

Posted: July 14, 2024 | Author: Shari Blaukopf | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: bouquet, flower painting, summer, watercolour painting | 44 Comments

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.