Floral and Botanical Watermedia

Orange Poppies

5" x 7" W & N Watercolour Markers on Bockingford WC paper

Yesterday, despite ludicrous physical overexertion, I did some pretty good sketching with different water media. First, in the waiting room at my usual clinic visit, I used a photo I took last month to sketch some orange poppies that grew out in the SFGH Memory Garden. They were done blooming, replaced by some orange and yellow daisies in the same bed, but I'd gotten photos as I do almost every time. That helps when I need to find something interesting to sketch in a relatively dull waiting room.

Botanical sketches in pen and watercolor

Outside in the garden I got plenty of photos. Then went to the patient pickup and dropoff zone to sketch some interesting plants from the bed around the big fern. I've come to know that little patch intimately too. Didn't get the azalea bush, it was bloomed out, but an odd little bush with leaves that turn reddish at the tips of clusters and little sprays of waxy cream-colored small blooms, plus the copious plant that's dark red on the underside of its leaves, the tree or large shrub with gray green leaves with cream edges, one leaf of a big-leafed ornamental plant with reddish edges and a small bright green weed that appealed to me. I don't know the names of these plants, but I did want to sketch and remember them. 

I don't need to have a yard as long as I've got access to that beautiful a public garden. I like it even more for not having to keep it up.

Two Spring Irises in Pastel

Two Spring Irises

Pastel on sanded paper

It's taken me almost a week, maybe more than a week to do this painting in three sessions. I sketched it loosely in Holbein pastels, mostly with side strokes. Some spotting on the paper meant I did have to layer heavily or I might have added last details to the first loose light expressive rendering. I liked it a lot. But my second layer developing it became tight and dull, it lacked texture and the flowers lost their graceful shape.

Took me days of sketching other things and staring at it on the wall to figure out what to do next. That even involved erasing a bunch of leaves and a stem, working over what I had with softer pastels and adding both lighter and darker tones to the flowers because I had those tones in the larger Great American set of 60 half sticks. I had the right greens in the softer set including a dark olive. It worked once I used the right pastels.

I might have made it work with the Holbeins and their limited palette but only if I'd really erased out everything and been willing to settle for some hue substitutions I didn't like.