Laburnum Revisited

“Be Patient.

Respond to every call that excites your spirit.”

Rumi

Patience is an attribute that every botanical artist needs to have. Choosing to paint from life means that we are very much at the whims of nature, constantly marking the seasons and watching the weather. It’s not unusual for a botanical artist to set aside a painting for a year whilst they wait for a plant to bloom once more or a fruit to ripen.  

In my garden I have a beautiful laburnum tree (Laburnum anagyroides) that for a few weeks each year, fills my garden with cascades of glorious golden flowers and a wonderful perfume that sends bees into rapturous joy. Every year I promise myself that I will paint it but time has always been against me. 

Last year I managed to do a small study for the sketchbook exchange and I promised myself that this year, I would be ready!

So I have been patiently watching my garden with a growing sense of anticipation. I have a gorgeous piece of honey coloured natural calf vellum which will really set off those golden flowers. 

Whilst I waited, I decided to do a few small studies to hone my palette. Yellow is a tricky colour to paint. It can slip from glowing to drab in a few washes, which makes varying the tones quite difficult. Some artists achieve wonderful results by doing a monochromatic study first in greys and then painting a wash of yellow over it. Others mix their yellows with tiny bits of purple to create shadow tones.

 Personally I prefer to keep my colours as clean as possible and use the large range of yellows available to create the tones. That said, a few shadow colours, purple-grey or green will slip into the mix towards the end if I felt it is needed.

There is no right or wrong way. If it works, do it!

So first to make a huge yellow colour chart. Yes, I really do have all those colours, and yes, the Daniel Smith dot chart makes me want to whip out that credit card and invest in a few more. 

However I resist the urge and finally decide on my favourites of winsor lemon, winsor yellow and new gamboge as my basic yellows.

My biggest struggle is always with greens, especially on vellum where opaque paints can feel a bit like kicking a lead-filled football around a pitch. So I needed to find a good transparent green mix. Fortunately my good friend Sigrid Frensen mentioned how nice turquoise was with quinacridone gold, both wonderfully transparent. 

Winsor Blue Green with Quinacridone Gold ... a fabulous mix!

So having played around with several mixes, I settled on Winsor Blue-Green with quinacridone and a little transparent yellow. I have had Winsor Blue Green for years but always ignored it as it was just too bright for any of my mixes. The Quin gold tames it beautifully.

Playing with green mixes

Of course it is not just botanical artists who revisit favourite subjects to paint, artists have done this for centuries. Each time they paint their subject, they discover something new. It allows them to develop their techniques, their composition and their colour palette.

Inspiration stimulates creativity.

My imagination has been caught! Bring on the blossoms.

“The glow of inspiration warms us and it is a holy rapture”

Ovid

Orange Appeal

 The weather this week has been dark and dismal. Even as I write this, the rain is a relentless drumbeat against my window pane accompanied by a howling biting wind, and it's set to continue. However, I really don't mind. I've a delightful dwarf citrus tree, the Calamondin orange tree (× Citrofortunella microcarpa) sitting in my studio. It's sunshine in a pot.

As Frank Sinatra said  “Orange is the happiest colour.”

I knew as soon as I saw this plant that it would be perfect for my final SBA painting. I wanted something that would work well with the other paintings that I am submitting, and this lovely little shrub with  it’s dark glossy leaves and tiny orange fruit was just the right colour, subject and size. 

So on to that crucial "Getting to know you" stage. I cleaned off my palettes and pulled out all my pencils, paper, colour charts and paints and began my studies.

I soon realised that the light, or lack of it was going to be a problem. In order to show my fruit off to it’s best, I really needed strong lighting. The light also has to be constant- it’s impossible to start in natural light and then switch to an artificial one, as the colours and shadows change too much. So given the rather bleak weather forecast (rain, rain and yet more rain), I decided that artificial lighting was my safest option.

I found a fantastic little magnifying light in Argos (LightCraft Compact Craft Light) -  the magnifier is great and the light is extremely bright and gives off no heat (so no wilting plants). It has a flexible head and best of all, it’s great value for money!

The little oranges proved a little trickier than I thought. Those dimples were challenging but essential to the texture. I tried out different techniques to see which would work best- first carefully painting around the dimples, then applying masking fluid with a toothpick, and finally adding in tiny dots of white gouache at the end. I plan to paint this on vellum so will probably opt to just paint carefully around the dimples and pick out the highlights with the tip of a scalpel.

Different techniques give different results- the two at the top (left)  were done using masking fluid, the two beneath had white gouache added at the end, whilst the ones on the right were just painted carefully.

The colours that I mainly used were indian yellow, winsor orange, winsor orange-red, pink madder (Pebeo), quin red, scarlet lake, purple lake, and of course the wonderful cobalt violet… the ideal colour for reflected light on fruit.

So many greens, but which is the right one?

The leaves were a struggle. They are dark blue on the top and a yellowy green on underneath, but I still haven’t yet figured out the right colour mix!  I used Indigo and aureolin (with a little perylene green, cerulean and green gold) in the tiny study at the top, but Indigo is a staining colour, and so not very cooperative if you make a mistake or go to dark.  A weekend of colour mixing lies ahead and then the real fun can begin. 

Next week I'll paint to the music of the rain.

Getting to know you

The thing that makes a painting difficult is uncertainty. Whereas if you plan in advance, the uncertainty is removed.  Dianne Sutherland Ball

File image from Wikipedia

It was the flash of orange at the side of the road that first caught my eye. Every day as I drove my daughters to school I noticed it, but this was a busy road, so I couldn’t stop. However I couldn’t stop thinking about it either. So when I spotted that same beckoning orange in a friend’s garden, I was thrilled. She kindly gave me some cuttings and the name of the object of my desire … Iris foetidissima.

The orange that I had seen was not the flowers, which are apparently quite dull, but rather the gorgeous seed pods, which burst open each winter to reveal brilliant scarlet orange seeds. Iris foetidissima is native to this part of the world and is said to have the constitution of an ox, willing to grow just about anywhere. It’s also known as the Stinking Iris or Roast Beef plant because the leaves are supposed to smell like roast beef when crushed.

Nicholas Culpeper wrote about it in his 17^th century herbal of medicinal plants, The English Physitian, calling it `Stinking Gladwin', and described the leaves as having "a strong, ill scent". Even so, it was highly valued as a medicinal herb, especially for making poultices for drawing out splinters and the odd arrow head.

Pong or no pong, after all my practicing of washes and dry brushstrokes last week, I was eager to move onto the next stage of the painting, or the “Getting to know you” stage. The better you know your subject, the easier the painting will be, or at least, that’s the theory!

I usually work with two magnifying glasses to get up close and personal with my subject and it's portrait.

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature. Cicero (106 BC - 43 BC)

The first thing that I did was a quick line drawing in my sketchbook, just to get the feel of the plant. I couldn’t resist adding a seed, which I discovered is actually known in botany as an aril. It’s similar to a pomegranate seed in that the seed has a fleshy covering. 

Aril – fleshy and usually brightly coloured cover of some seeds that develops from the ovule stalk and partially or entirely envelopes the seed. Arils, such the red berry-like arils of the yew (Taxus baccata), are often brightly coloured to attract animals who eat them and disperse the seeds. 

After the first little section, I decided that I wasn’t too happy with the husk of the seedpod. The colours were a little too dull and that textured surface was a challenge! So I took one of the seed pods, pulled it apart, removed the arils and did some studies of the husks.

As I want to paint this on vellum, I thought carefully about the opacity of the pigments that I am using. The smoothness and translucency of vellum can bring a vibrancy and depth to colours, so transparent pigments really come into their own. Usually I don’t worry too much about how opaque a colour is, in fact I’ve quite a few opaque colours that I really couldn’t live without. However to get the best out of my vellum, it is worth taking time to reconsider your colour choices. So out went light red, to be replaced with burnt sienna + winsor orange and winsor orange-red (also used in the arils), and perylene violet came in to replace the caput mortuum. Gold ochre replaced yellow ochre.

 You can read more about the transparency of pigments here.

      

I continued to work on my seed pod study, experimenting as I went along, and was quite pleased with the potential of the subject. However I needed to work out the colour choices for the arils as I felt that some colour mixes were a little muddy.

The vellum is the creamy coloured section at the bottom... already the colours look smoother and the arils glossier.

I couldn’t resist trying out the tiny sample of vellum that I have. It’s such a lovely surface to work on, and to my great surprise, quite forgiving. You can literally wipe off what you have painted with a damp brush… but that is a double edged sword, because sometimes you might not want to wipe off what you have painted!!

The Iris foetidissima  seed pod study so far

So the practice continues. I’m onto the leaves now. I still haven’t quite worked out what colours to use… but transparent yellow is probably going to play a starring role. I have a small sheet of parchment, which is goatskin vellum (a slightly rougher surface) to play on.  It’s not quite the same thing but will help me test out colours and brush techniques.

My kelmscott vellum is ready, all powdered up and waiting for me to begin. My new sable brushes arrived yesterday and I have some fresh seed pods waiting to have their portrait painting. I am excited!

This suspense is terrible. I hope it will last. (Oscar Wilde)