Hyacinth

With the arrival of Spring and everything suddenly bursting into bloom, I've been lured from my drawing table out into the yard.  Living Things in every corner of the garden are screaming -- Prune me! Weed me! Mulch me! Dig me up!  Plant me! Water me!  And how about a little fertilizer over here?!  They always say to get the peas planted by St. Patrick's Day (almost made it) and put the crabgrass control down on the lawn before the forsythia blossoms fall (ha! nailed that one!)  The list goes on and on . . . As many of you know full well, this is a busy time of year for any gardener.  Let's see, it's been almost a week of working outside and the toll thus far is: two tick bites, two splinters from the old rake, poison ivy from cleaning up last year's dead vines, and a tiny puncture wound from turning the compost pile.  Not too bad . . .

I was at Lowe's two days ago and they had pots of hyacinths for $1.99.  Who can resist that?  The flower stalks were just coming up through the leathery leaves, like big, fat asparagus.  I thought to myself, aw man I should paint that!  I'll catch them right as they are starting to bloom - so pretty!  I set the pot on the back porch and promptly forgot about it.  Well, this evening when I came in from mowing the lawn, I happened to glance at the pot.  All three bulbs are in full bloom!  Just like that!

I'm still going to do a painting - or perhaps a colored pencil drawing, even though I missed my opportunity to capture that 'just about to bloom' phase. These are gorgeous, and can't you almost smell them?  Wow what a fragrance!!  If I can bring myself to stay indoors long enough to paint, and if I'm not overpowered by the scent, this should be quite lovely.  Stay tuned!

Three Bartlett Pears - final

I finished the third pear today - hooray! 

And so here is the full composition:

All that is missing is my signature!  And just so you know how grateful I am to have my drawings and color studies and photos of the original pears, here is my subject matter, slowly but surely collapsing into a puddle of pear mush on my drawing table:

Pear #2 - final

Moving right along, here is pear #2:

This one is more yellow (oh joy) but managed to behave itself despite that fact.  I kept the washes very light and declared victory before I blew it.  What do you think?

One question I get asked often is how do I paint all the teeny dots without going stir crazy.  Well, I'll let you in on another studio secret.  If you look at a typical Bartlett pear, for example, you'll notice its surface is covered with about 10,000 speckles.  When I first noticed this I panicked.  How can I possibly paint all those spots?  Or should I even try?  The question arises in botanical art how far do you take the detail.  Yes, I could sit for hours and painstakingly paint each and every speckle I see.  To achieve the goal of botanical accuracy, one could make the case that painting every single dot is important.  Or one could let the powers of perception help out a little.  Our brain does an amazing job of decoding and sorting out the visual puzzles of life.  From very limited visual information, it can make conclusions and inferences about the size and shape and color and pattern and texture and approximate weight and depth of a thing.  In this case, I want to give the viewer's brain just enough information so it will conclude "Aha! The speckled surface of a Bartlett pear!"  And that turns out to require only about 300 dots, as it happens.  The brain fills in the missing 9,700 dots.  Yes, 300 is a large number, but compared to 10,000, it is nothing!

Try this: sit back in your chair and look again at the image above.  Not up close in a "Geez how did she do that?" way, but in a  slightly unfocused, relaxed way.  Keep your eyes moving kind of quickly around the picture, not stopping to focus on any one thing.  After a few seconds, your brain will (hopefully) start signaling, This is strange but there's a pear sticking out of your computer, or something to that effect.  It fills in any missing information to make sense of the picture.  It 'sees' a three dimensional, speckled Bartlett pear.  Accurately and convincingly capturing the likeness of a three dimensional object on a two dimensional plane is one of the things I love about botanical art!

Pear #1 - final

We woke up this morning and it was snowing!  The weatherman was calling for possible flurries, so we paid no heed; but the storm front changed its course and we got four inches of fluffy beautiful snow!  The most we've had all winter.  Peter and I took a walk this morning with Ginger, who loves to roll around in fresh snow, even at her advanced age.  The neighborhood was so quiet and transformed -- it was magical!  Sometimes God gives us an unanticipated and undeserved Beautiful Thing and we better just stop and appreciate it when that happens!

So after that inspiration, I sat down for a luxuriously long painting session.  I am working this painting right to left, on account of me being left-handed.  And I'm treating each pear as its own little portrait, rather than working on all three simultaneously.  We'll see if that works.  At the end I might need to do a unifying wash over all three to make them relate to one another.  We'll just wait and see what happens.  So here is pear #1, almost completely finished:

I will have to do a titch more work on the edges, but this I can't do until the paper is bone dry. Which means tomorrow. So I'll sign off for now . . . Enjoy!

Three Pears

 

Happy me . . . another pretty thing to paint!  Let's begin: First I played around with the composition.  I've decided to set them all three in a row, and since I'm doing a traditional botanical illustration, they'll be 'floating' in space, rather than sitting on the table.  These pears are so squashy round I almost want to draw faces on them!  I made several pencil sketches and took photos for reference for later.  Then, I started messing around with colored pencils:

I want to make sure I can reproduce the colors acurately.  See all my notes to myself?  By the time I'm painting them, these pears will have all yellowed, and there's a decent chance I will have eaten them!  So I'm working out the beautiful yellows and greens and oranges, and also I have figured out my shaddows and contrasts.  The more work I do now, the easier it is when it comes time to paint!



Not pears

Turns out I did not paint or draw pears today.  I spent time, instead, installing cable boxes on our TVs.  I am not technologically gifted.  I am, in fact, a Luddite.  I would so much rather have been painting!  Alas, I did not have a choice in the matter.  If we don't install these boxes, our TVs will no longer be able to receive the cable signal, apparently.  Since this blog is supposed to be about botanical art, though, I will not bore you with the tale of Holly's Adventures with the Cable Company.  For that, you must go to my "Musings - around the house" page.

And I'll try again tomorrow to paint those pretty little pears!

February inspiration

Finally we have come to the end of February, to what I would consider the brownest time of year here in Central Virginia.  The soil in the growing beds looks worn out -- old mulch, old stray leaves, last year's growth I never completely cleared away, and a crust of decaying leaf litter that is working its magic at a microscopic level, but SO unattractive!  Above ground level, we do have the evergreens to be thankful for, but mostly the view is brownish green grass and endless silvery brown sticks and limbs and trunks and branches which for me have lost their charm.  I know new life is just about to burst out of this brown dreariness, but I'm getting impatient!

When I run out of inspiration at times like this I like to head to the greengrocer (that is to say, Whole Foods).  Nothing cheers my color-starved eyes more than the sight of all those vegetables, bursting with color, arranged artfully in heaps bin after bin.  We try to eat locally grown food in season, but who can resist the oranges and yellows of the citrus fruit, the deep reds of the Swiss chard and hothouse tomatoes, the purples of the eggplant and Bermuda onion, and vibrant greens of the cabbage and kale and all kinds of lettuce trucked in from who knows where??  I want to help the local agricultural economy as much as the next guy, but in February, all bets are off! I bought some adorable little Bosc pears which I will draw tomorrow.  In the meantime, check out this amazing cabbage --

By the way, they do know their stuff at Whole Foods, as far as merchandising goes.  Someone in the head office has studied color theory for sure.  You will often see vegetables arranged in stripes of complementary colors.  For example green cabbages next to the red and orange beets.  Red beets next to the green zucchini.  And next to the zucchini, the red peppers, then green, then orange and yellow peppers next to . . . eggplants!  See what I mean?  They do this because it makes the vegetable look even more vibrant and alive set next to something of a complementary color shade.  Sneaky, hmmm?  I don't care -- I think it is a beautiful feast for the eyes and as long as I stick to my shopping list, I'm OK!