Watercolor: Aquilegia canadensis

I have had the great honor again this year to create a botanical image for the Minnesota State Horticultural Society (MSHS) for its annual fundraiser. This year a native columbine was chosen.

This is the final painting of which prints will be made for those who participate in MSHS' annual appeal. I worked from photos of a columbine growing in a board members yard and from real columbines found on Mallard Island.  I painted the image while on Mallard Island for two weeks this summer. Fortunately, this summer was very late and some of these early summer flowers were still blooming on the Canadian border in late July - early August.

I love columbines and have tried painting them before, although I have not been happy with the results.  Columbine are a very lacy plant with a lot of interesting information spread over many stems.  I found the branching pattern very interesting with branches dividing into threes, with the middle branch blooming and ending at the bloom, while the two side branches would divide again and continue to create more blooms above the middle branch. There also are different shapes to the leaves when they are at different ages.  Young leaves  seem almost pointy while, the older the leaf gets, the more lobed it grows.

The blooms are also interesting because, unlike many flowers, the blooms are complete at a small size.  This means that you can see all the parts of the bloom even in its smallest bud.  Many other flowers unfold to reveal the parts of the bloom. The columbine is a very fascinating plant from its structure to its coloring.  It was fun to explore this plant and I thank the Minnesota State Horticultural Society for the opportunity.The image will appear in their November-December issue of the Northern Gardener Magazine, which will be in the mailbox and on stands soon.

Watercolor: Liatris Painting - Part 1

This is the sketch of the liatris plant I will be painting in watercolor the next two weeks.  The original plants are from my neighbors garden.  The sketch has been transferred to watercolor paper and is awaiting me.  Unfortunately, I am not always sure when I will get to things I have set up. My weekend is already filling up.

Liatris, like many flowers, are a difficult color to match unless you start out with the right colors.  I will be discussing that, as well as how to paint depth into a composition.  This is a complex composition in terms of all the overlapping leaves and the variety of textures.  The transition on the bloom stalk will be most interesting, as the blooms go from open to hardly being buds.

Watercolor: Wild Ginger, Stages 1 & 2

This is the first stage of a watercolor painting of wild ginger. What I mostly am doing at this stage is plotting out the internal structure of the leaf. Placing the veins and identifying edges. The veins are created as negative shapes as I fill in the between shapes of green. I varied color a bit to set-up the next stage of going stronger with color and making my tones and colors more accurate. There is an interesting play between a green with a strong mustardy yellow underneath and a green with a strong bluishness on the surface. I hopefully will be able to capture that contrast.

This is the next stage of the wild ginger plant that I am painting. In this stage I have defined the leaf veins better and, in the process, mottled the leaf and started to add contrast. The contrast is starting to create some depth to the plant. The stem is laid in simply at this point as it is very fuzzy and I will have to deal with that in the next stage. You can also see that the flower is more well defined. The flower is hairy also, so I have only defined things in a cursory manner and will leave it like this until it is time to do the fuzz/hair detail.

Watercolor: Wild Ginger Composition

I am currently creating a composition of a wild ginger plant to use for a watercolor painting. Wild ginger have two leaves that rise up on strong, fairly straight stems and a small flower that protrudes from the base and lays on the ground. They bloom in the spring, late April to early May, in Minnesota. They like shade and can be found in large quantities along the bluffs of the Mississippi River.

I created two drawing, one of each leaf, on tracing paper. Then, overlapping the two pieces of tracing paper, I moved the leaves around to determine what composition I wanted. Since there are just two leaves, I decided to have the leaves next to each other on the horizontal plane. I was going back and forth on whether I wanted the leaves to overlap or not. With an overlapping of these two shapes I could create a sense of depth rather easily. Since the plant is so simple, creating depth without the leaves overlapping would be harder.

I decided to have the leaves not overlap. Why? I just like the look of the leaves separated better. When the leaves overlapped it was abit confusing as to where one leaf began and the other ended.

I will share this painting as it progresses.

Video: Painting a Kalanchoe

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