There are poppies everywhere now, the reference photo for this watercolour was made by my husband during our short stay in a vacation home in Kortgene, but it could also have been made more recently, close to our home.
My husband made pictures for me and I have combined two pictures to make one watercolour.
This poppy had a visitor, probably a bee but I do not know what kind of bee - there are many bees and I can't tell them apart.
Behind the poppy with the bee there I placed another flower and I have taken care to give that poppy more muted colours.
There was a lot of sunshine that day so there was a lot of shadow in the flower, only the outer petals were bright red. The inner petals were curving inward and had shadows cast on them by the other petals. It was not easy to paint all those curves and folds.
For this painting I have mixed a shadow colour first and painted the shadow areas on the white paper. After that had dried, I applied several layers of red, in different mixtures to obtain the fiery red colour of the poppy. The background flower got only two layers of red so the shadow colours are more dominant in the final result.
The flower stems are quite light green and I made them stand out a bit in a darker green background.
The bee is painted with a small brush to get the stripes right.
The information about the materials I have used, the size of this watercolour painting, its price and availability can all be found in my Tumblr blog.
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