The Spring Rush

When you love native plants like I do, spring is hard…in a good way! It seems that everything blooms at once, and when you choose one plant to focus on, that means the rest must wait for another year. In order to crowd more plants into my spring agenda, I decided to make some quick sketchbook studies of beauties that I plan to paint eventually but can’t get to this spring. When they finally get their turn, I’ll have a lot of information gathered already.

One such plant is Trillium ovatum or Western Trillium. I did a graphite drawing of an emerging Trillium for my second assignment in the SBA course, so I’ve gathered some information already. I used this drawing as a basis for color studies by tracing the outlines of a blossom and some leaves into my sketchbook. Time is of the essence, so this sped up the process for me since I didn’t have to start from scratch. I left room on the sketchbook page for more studies as the plant goes through its life cycle. The blossoms of this trillium are pure white, but turn bright magenta as they age. I look forward to adding some seed pods and maybe some withering leaves to my sketchbook studies later in summer.

My next quick study was of the blossoms and emerging leaves of Acer circinatum, or Vine Maple. I’ve never noticed before how festive the bright burgundy/red flowers are against the lime green new leaves! I had to try to capture this. Again, I left room on the page for further studies. I can’t wait to paint the bright orange red autumn color of the leaves.

Finally, I’ll give you an update on the pansy flower that I mentioned in my last post. I started it in Jean Emmons workshop, about 2 months ago. The topic of the workshop was dry brush technique, but watching her paint inspired me to experiment with layering color rather than mixing colors first on my palette. Believe me, she has a party with color when she paints! The velvety black was achieved by layering Quinacrodone Magenta and Viridian, both transparent colors and opposite on the color wheel. It was fun to see the colors visually blend and deepen with each layer.

It’s been nice to have something to pull out and add a few layers to when I only had a short time to paint. Fortunately, my little pansy plant is still blooming like mad so I’ve had a supply of fresh blossoms to work from for over 2 months. I’ll tuck my pansy experiment away now. I can see some improvements I’d want to make if I paint one again but it was a good learning experience, and I am happy with the depth of color I achieved by layering instead of mixing.