In my garden, very close to our house is a group of peonies. I have made drawings of the flower buds and the leaves in autumn, but I never used them for a springtime painting. When they come above the ground, the stems and first leaves are red, with a hint of the green that will emerge later, after they had a lot of sunshine. Over the years the patch of peonies has expanded so now we have a lot of red in the garden. They do not all come at the same time, so there are beginning ones, stems with the beginning of leaves and stems with some leaves folded out.
For this painting I made some reference pictures and did not paint exactly what was in the pictures. I decided to make my own composition using the pictures to look at the actual shapes of the peonies.
The background is made using browns and greens and a lot of water, with some help from gravity to let the colours flow. After that had dried I started painting the peonies, placing them on the paper without a preliminary drawing. While I was doing this, I added smaller and larger stems to make a nice looking composition, in harmony with the background.
Creating the colour that is somewhat between red and a dark green was a challenge, but using multiple layers of paint I have achieved the best result possible. After the peonies were completed and dry I added the suggestion of the ground, the garden they are in.
Making a good picture of the finished painting was not as easy as I thought, looking at it on the laptop the light green seemed to fade away, so I adjusted the picture a bit.
The information about the materials I have used, the size of this watercolour painting and its availability can all be found in my Tumblr blog.
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