Books for native wildflower seeds

Fall in the native wildflower garden is time to gather seeds to share with others.  I had many seeds to share.  I divided them up into small bags and labeled them.  

I made several accordion books to house the seed packets.  I found images of old seed packets to use for the front and back covers.  

I decorated the backs of the accordion with images of native wildflowers.

The pockets on the inside can hold the seed packets

Online wattercolor class

I hadn’t done much painting this year, since all the art classes had been canceled due to the pandemic.  No trips to John C. Campbell Folk School or weekend workshops at Spruill, or classes at OCAF or Lyndon House.   I really needed the push to paint that a class provides.  We meet once a week for four weeks online, and uploaded our finished work to a shared space were we could comment and discuss the paintings.  

The class focus was on using water to controlling how the paint moves on the paper.  We practiced adding very wet paint to dry and wet paper.  Adding dry paint to wet paper.  Using a dry brush to remove water and paint from the paper.

Then we painted a landscape from a photo.  I roughly sketched in the buildings and edges of the field.  I wet the sky and painted a morning sky with red and yellow.  I painted in the field where the light was reflecting off the wet grass.  I painted the buildings where the rising sun was casting long shadows.

I painted the dark tree line and used a dry brush to pick up pigment from the tree tops.  

I painted the grasses in the foreground, leaving  some areas white for the flowers.  Finally, I added more shadows.

Next we painted a white dogwood flower.  The only thing defining the white flower are the shadows.  They are soft, but need to be dark enough to give the petals shape.  

For the center we practiced negative painting.  Painting the dark spaces between the yellow pistils.  

Finally we used dark paint for the background letting the colors mix.  The darker the background the more the flower shows up.  Too dark or the wrong mix of colors creates a muddy background.

For the third painting we painted a humming bird.    These birds have distinctive color patterns and shape.  The position of the head, placement of the bill and eye all need to be correct.

The tips of the wings are indistinct and a trail follows the wings to suggest movement. The pose of the bird suggests reaching up, so I added an orange trumpet vine flower.

The background was painted wet on wet, allowing the colors to mix.  The darker shades around the flower and bird help define their shapes.

For my final painting I selected a photo of a pink azalea.  I used one red and one blue pigment for the flower.  

The lighter pink shades are made by mixing more water with the red paint.  

The shadows are made by mixing blue into the red paint. 

The background was painted wet on wet and has indistinct green leaves and additional pinkish flowers.  

Sketching in Maine

In the Spring we made plans for a fishing trip to Montana.  We would be staying in a National Forest Service cabin in the back woods near a favorite creek.  Then the fires came.  We watched the fire and weather reports as the wildfires drew nearer and nearer to the area we were planning to stay.  People were evacuated and roads were closing as the wild fires raged.  Fire fighters were fighting fires all throughout the west.  Smoke from the fires we effecting the air quality throughout the west.  We would not be going to Montana.

Instead we went to Maine.  We stayed at a lovely cottage on Little Deer Isl.  We could see the water from the cottage, and ate several dinners on the porch watching fiery sunsets.

Sunrises and sunsets like these call out to be painted.  Capturing the constantly changing colors and deep shadows before they vanish is a challenge.  Luckily I was given several opportunities to try.

Maine's rocky coast is filled with bays, inlets and small islands.  It was a perfect place to spend time exploring and hunting for lighthouses.  We visited Stonington on nearby Deer Island several times, enjoying local good seafood.  We also took a cruise from Stonington out to the Isle au Haut to see the unique Robinson Point Light house.  We spent a day at Acadia National Park; hiking Cadillac mountain, driving along the park loop road and eating seafood in Bar Harbor.  We traveled along the coast north to West Quoddy Head Lighthouse.  This is the easternmost point of land in the continental United States, and around the equinoxes it is the first place sunlight touches.

I have many photos from this trip that someday will be used as references for paintings.  I did finish three watercolor sketches while we were in Maine.  Besides the sunset above, I sketched some garden flowers and a also a beach scene.

Fish live in beautiful places

I carry a small moleskin sketch book and pencil in a pocket of my Fish Pond chest pack, just in case I feel the urge to sketch while I am out on the river.  When I take a break to drink some water, change a fly or unravel a knot, I will stop to do a quick sketch of a falls, riffle, river bank or other angler.

After spending the afternoon fishing the Gibbon River where it twists through grassy meadows in Yellowstone NP (photo to the right), I did a quick pencil sketch of the bright purple wild flowers along the trail.  I included some notes to help me identify the plant at a later time.  It matches the description of the Thick Stemmed Aster, Eurybia integrifolia.

Volunteer Sunflowers, part 3

The tale of the Sunflowers didn't end with my painting.  After the flowers were pollenated, the ray flowers shriveled and fell off and the flower heads drooped.  It would take several weeks for the seeds to finish maturing and be ready to harvest.  My plan was to harvest and dry the flower heads with the seeds intact, to later user to feed the birds.  Every few days I checked to see if they were ready to be harvested.

One day I found cracked sunflower seeds on the backs of the flower heads.  Birds had discovered the seeds and were beginning to eat them.  Over the next week I watched Gold Finches, Cardinals and Crows come to the garden and wrestle individual seeds from the flower heads.  The flowers that had fed the bees, and provided me with beautiful subjects to paint were now feeding the birds too.

Seeds were pulled from the edges first, then further towards the middle as they too matured.  The birds had to be quite acrobatic to remove the seeds, hanging over the edge of the flower, or even upside down.  Their struggles would make the flowers shake violently.

Volunteer Sunflowers, part 2

I spent a lot of time studying the sunflowers before deciding what to paint and how to approach the painting.  In the end I decided on an off center close up of the flower with a single Bumble bee feeding.

The disc florets spiral out from the center in Fibonacci sequence.  This pattern provides the optimal number of flowers and seeds for the given space.  The pattern can be easily seen in the un-opened disc flowers at the center.  My pencil sketch included the placement of the ray flower petals and the spiral lines in the center's unopened florets.

The palette I worked with included warm and cool yellows and blues; as well as Yellow Ochre, Burnt Siena and Burnt Umber.  The whole central part of the flower would involve a lot of negative painting.  Using the cool yellow I painted the whole center of the disk.  A wash of blue and warm yellow was added the center.  Warm yellow was used for the ray floret petals around the disk.  Then working from the outer edge of the disk inwards, Burnt Sienna was add to define the spent disk flowers.  Yellow was mixed in to the Burnt Siena to lighten the color as I moved toward the center and began to define the open disk florets.  Additional colors were added to darken the spirals in the center and define the unopened florets.

 

Background color was added between the petals and additional shades of yellow were used to continue to define the open disk flowers.  The bee was painted.  Many additional layers of color were added to develop the background, flower and bee.

Volunteer Sunflowers, part 1

This year I have several volunteer sunflowers growing up in the herb garden.  Some have large single flowers and others have multiple smaller flowers.  One thing they all have in common is they tower over the much shorter herbs, gently nodding in the breeze.  The herbs have small flowers that generally attract small insect pollinators.  The sunflowers, however, attract larger pollinators.  Large carpenter bees and bumble bees, in addition to the smaller honey bees and native bees are all attracted to the sunflowers.

Sunflowers (Helianthus spp.) are annuals native to North America.  Their flowers have large centers composed of many small five-petaled florets (disk flowers) that spiral toward the center.  The outer most florets resemble petals (ray flowers).  The disk flowers on the outer edge mature first, then the next row of florets, and the next, until all the florets have opened and been pollinated.   Each composite flower is a food source for days or even weeks.

The two large bees I see most often are the Impatient Bumble bee (Bombus impatiens) and the Eastern Carpenter bee (Xylocopa virginica).  Bumble bees are smaller then Carpenter bees and have a fuzzy appearance due to numerous small hairs on their abdomen and thorax.  The larger Carpenter bees have a shiny black abdomen that is hairless.  The Impatient Bumble bees yellow hair is so pale it seems white.

Carpenter Bees are considered pests because they drill into wooden fences and buildings causing structural damage.  Bumble bees, like honey bees, are beneficial insects, and are responsible for pollinating many plants including food crops.

Colorful Orchids

My last visit to Asheville started on a warm day, perfect weather for plein air sketching.  Overnight the temperature dropped and the light rain turned to snow!  My ambition to walk around outside sketching also dropped.  As it turned out I was in luck.  The North Carolina Arboretum just happened to be hosting the 2015 Western North Carolina Orchid Society annual show.  Thousands of orchids filled the downstairs of their Education Building, providing me with numerous subjects to paint.  There were a lot of people viewing and photographing the orchids, including me.

The Orchid family is one of the largest families of flowering plants, with roughly 25,000 species.  They exhibit a dizzying variety of sizes, shapes and colors.  After taking many photos of different orchids I headed over to the cafe for an early lunch.  While in the cafe I did a watercolor of one of the orchids I had photographed.  I had brought my small watercolor journal kit that has a Van Gogh watercolor Pocket Box.  I used a palette of warm and cold shades: yellow (254, 269), red (311, 370), blue (506, 535) and burnt sienna (411).

As noon approached and the number of people looking for lunch increased, I decided to relocate to the other building.  There I found a comfortable chair near the fireplace, which had a lovely fire going, and did four more little watercolors.  I say little because I was using a Strathmore spiral bound 3" x 5" book.

 

Joyce's Clematis

Clematis are popular flowering garden vines.  You see them climbing along fences, up trellises and among the branches of other plants.  There are over 200 cultivars, which makes it easy to pick a flower color that is perfect for any garden.  Well, any garden but mine.  Clematis never are happy in my garden, and after several years of trying different spots in the garden and numerous cultivars I have given up on this vine.

Joyce can grow beautiful Clematis.  She has several well established plants that each year are covered in masses of foliage and blooms.  Their vibrant colors just scream to be painted.

I masked the central part of the flower so I could use a lot of water and not worry about the white parts of the anthers.  I wet each petal, then used separate brushes to add Quinacridone Rose and touches of Phthalocyanine Blue.  Once the petals were dry I painted the background leaves using a mix of Phthalocyanine Blue and Chrome Yellow.  Once the paint was dry I removed the masking.

I painted the filaments of the stamen using dilute Quinacridone Rose.  Additional touches of Quinacridone Rose, Phthalocyanine Blue, the color mix I learned about in Margaret Walsh Best's class, Burnt Siena, and Raw Umber were add to create shadows throughout the painting.

Daffodil still life

One of the delights of having a garden is to be able to pick flowers and bring them inside and continue to enjoy them throughout the week.  This is especially true in Spring when the weather jumps back and forth between warm and cold.

One of my favorite group of spring flowers are Daffodils.  They are bright and cheerful flowers that burst out of the slowly warming ground and bounce back from late winter snows.  They remind us winter will end and spring will return.  Picked flowers will last for days in a vase; long enough for me to find the time to sketch and paint them.

Daffodil is a common name used for bulbs in the Narcissus genus.  They are not native to the US, but have been a popular plant in gardens and parks for generations.  The common large flowered variety are often found along roads and in meadows.  They continue to thrive long after the gardens they were planted in are gone. 

The flowers have a central bowl-shaped corona, three sepals and three petals.  The flower color ranges from white through shades of yellow and orange, pink and red.  The corona and perianth can be the same color, or different colors.   There are single flowered and multi-flowered forms.  The multi-flowered forms often have small delicate flowers.  Some flowers are fragrant.

Of whelks and snowflakes from Sapelo Island

I recently took a weekend trip to Sapelo Island, one of my favorite places in Georgia.  I was busy most of the trip working on a Friends of the Marine Institute project, but since I had taken my watercolor traveling kit with me, I did find time to sketch some Knobbed whelks (Busycon carica) that were on the window sill at the cottage we stayed in.  Outside the window in the background is a row of Snowflakes.

Snowflakes (Leucojum aestivum) are a bulb in the amaryllis family.  Their arching sprays of five to seven blooms appear in mid to late spring.  The dangling white flowers resemble small white bells with small green spots at the end of each of the six tepals.  In the south, Snowflakes are considered an heirloom plants and passed down from generation to the next.  It was introduced to Gardens in the Eastern United States by the first European settlers.  The bulbs are tough, surviving late frost and snow as well as deer and chipmunks.  The Snowflakes in my garden always remind me of spring on Sapelo Island.  This sketch to the right is a close up of Snowflake flowers blooming in my garden.

More floral cards

Once I got started sketching, I ended up with four 5" x 7" florals to do as watercolors cards.  They are clockwise from top left: Blue Flag Iris, Eastern Purple Coneflower, Cherokee Rose, and Swamp Sunflower.

Each of the sketched flowers is different color, and so the palettes for each painting were adjusted to provide the correct mix of colors.  I used Lemon Yellow, Phthalocyanine Blue, Quinacridone Rose and a touch of Quinacridone Gold for the Iris.  The Eastern Coneflower included Quinacridone Rose, Cadmium Yellow, Lemon Yellow, Phthalocyanine Blue and Phthalocyanine Green.  Lemon Yellow, Phthalocyanine Blue, and Quinacridone Gold was used for the Cherokee Rose.  The Swamp sunflowers required a mix of Chrome Yellow, Aureolin Yellow, Quinacridone Gold, Burnt Siena, Raw Umber, Cadmium Red and Cobalt Blue.

The fourth card is of a Swamp Sunflower.  I had previously painted a version of the flower, and used the photo, sketches and finished watercolor as resources for the card.  For this version I zoomed in on the flower, letting it fill 3/4 of the card's space.  Swamp Sunflowers, like the previously painted Eastern Coneflower, are composite flowers.  I love the small red disk floret surrounded by the bright yellow ray florets.  It was why I had taken the original photograph.  

Coneflower card

Instead of a single Eastern Coneflower I sketched a group of these flowers.  The way they are leaning toward the sun as their petals bend backwards makes them seem very dynamic.  Coneflowers are composite flowers.  Each 'flower' is a collective of many tiny flowers that together resemble a single flower.  The tiny flowers around the edge are called 'ray florets' and form large fused petals.  The central disk contains numerous tiny 'disk florets' that radiate out from the center of the disk.  Each composite flower is at the end of a long stalk, sitting well above the leaves of the plant.

From my watercolor sketches I learned two important things:

1. My initial background choice of Cadmium Yellow and Ultramarine Blue (left most closeup) just didn't work as well with the Quinacridone Rose as I had expected.  I tried a mix of Phthalocyanine Green and Phthalocyanine Blue (right most closeup) turned out to be a better foil for the rose color, but a bit too blue for the whole background.  
2. It was difficult painting an even background around the intricate flower shapes.  Masking the flowers would allow me to create a more uniform background.

I applied masking to the flowers and upper stems.  After adding water to the surface of the card, I added  Phthalocyanine Blue to the top of the card, Phthalocyanine Green to the bottom of the card, and streaks of Cadmium Yellow to the middle part of the card.  Then let the pigments mix.  Once that dried a added a second wash to darken the bottom of the card and added more streaks of Cadmium Yellow.

Once the background was dry, I removed the masking and painted the flowers wet-in-wet.  The wetness let the Quinacridone Rose ran down the petals creating a pattern similar to what the flowers have.  I used a mixture of Quinacridone Rose and Cadmium Yellow for the flower's disk, with spots of Lemon Yellow.  The very center is a yellow-green made from a mixture of Lemon Yellow and Phthalocyanine Blue.

Painting a white flower with water droplets

I found painting the white Cherokee Rose particularly challenging.  The flower itself is very simple, five flat white petals surround a central ring of yellow stamens with yellow to brown anthers.  The simple beauty of the flower hid the challenges of painting it: delicate soft shadows, busy background, and several small water droplets.  Making a draft painting helped me find my way through these challenges.

As with the Iris I chose to crop the background close, letting some of the petals continue off the page.  The shadows that define the shape of the petals is very subtle and had a hint of green, which didn't translate well in the watercolor sketch.  Two of the five petals of the draft painting have yellow-green added to their shadows.  I used several light glazes on the petals, which over darkened the shadows.  The background was painted last, some areas show more definition then other areas and distract from the flower.

I used a three color palette of Lemon Yellow, Quinacridone Gold and Phthalocyanine Blue (upper color swatches).  To achieve the shadows I added a small amount of a color mix I learned about in Margaret Walsh Best's class.  Small amounts of this purplish mix can be added to any color to create nice shadows (lower mixed colors).

The other challenge were the water droplets on the petals.  Creating realistic water droplets can be difficult.  The white highlight and dark shadow need to match the direction light is coming from.  The darkest part is just below the water droplet.  The next darkest part is along the top of the droplet above the white highlight that marks the location where the light is reflecting back off of the droplet.  Using a wet mid-range value I painted a crescent.  Then I carefully pulled the paint around the white highlight allowing the color to fade towards the bottom of the droplet.  The dark line along the bottom of the droplet is pulled to forming a shadow.  Finally the top of the droplet and the bottom of the droplet are darkened to give it a three dimensional appearance.  Water droplets come in many shapes, and can have more then one highlight.

For the final painting I started with a wet-in-wet background, with less definition.  The center of the flower was painted next.  Then each petal was painted using the wet-in-wet technique to let the shadows blend evenly.  The water droplets were added to the petals after they were dry.  Finally the shadows were touched up to match the water droplets.  

Watercolor cards

A while ago I purchased a pack of Strathmore watercolor cards.  I used two of them to create Easter cards.  This year I decided to use a few more to send out post Christmas thank you notes.  Flowers always seem like good candidates for cards, and I have numerous photos of flowers I can use as resources.  I reviewed several photos, and finally selected a purple-blue iris as the resource for the first card.  

Since the size of the finished watercolor will be small, I wanted a closeup of the iris that would fit fill the 5 x 7 card.  I developed a close cropped pencil sketch of the Iris, which I copied to my sketch pad.  I decided on a color palette of Quinacridone Rose and Lemon Yellow and Phthalocyanine Blue.  These pigments provided both the greens and purples I was looking for. 

Before painting the card I did a painting in my sketchbook to test colors and work out what I wanted for the background.  I painted the iris first, one petal at a time.  I wet the parts of the petal that would be purple then dropped in colors to let them mix.  As the petals dried I added darker lines.  Depending on how wet the paper was the new applications of color mixed with the previous colors.  I moved from petal to petal adding darker and darker purples and blues.  Finally added yellow and green to the Iris.  When the petals were dry I came back and added the background.  I used a wet wash and added impressions of leaves.  

I used both the photo and the painting from my sketchbook as references for painting the card.  The Iris on the card is a bluer purple, and the background has a more even wash of yellow-green.  I also was careful to leave white edges on the Iris petals (they got lost in the first painting).  The white edges are important elements that help shape the petals and provide depth.  By leaving the background lighter the Iris stands out more.  

Post painting, I decided to add the logo I use on my business cards (at the right) to the back of the watercolor card.  It didn't take long to put together the draft document to print the logo on the cards.  It did take a while to get the Cannon Pro9000 printer to actually print the logo.  It is a very good printer, but it can be picky about settings.  Once I had it working I went ahead and printed the logo on all the remaining blank cards.