Peonies - springtime in my garden

 

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.

My peonies, the flower buds

My garden has a lot of beautiful plants and I really love to see them grow bigger and bigger each year. One of my favourites is the bunch of peonies that grows each spring - and fades away with wonderful autumn colours.
Of course the flowers are great, but somehow I enjoy the flower buds even more. 
They are very colourful and invite me to make a painting or drawing each year.
This spring I have accepted that invitation and made some reference pictures of the most inspiring flower buds and combined these into one drawing.

The sun was shining when I made the pictures, but the colours were still visible.
When the flowers are 'out' they will be various shades of pink, but the buds have a lot of carmine.

Somehow I prefer drawing when it is about flowers, the budding leaves of my chestnut tree and other slightly botanical subjects. Maybe because of the control that pencils give me, and my wish to be a bit more accurate with these subjects than I am when painting a landscape.

I have used a lot of different colours on a study quality watercolour paper and I am really happy with the results. Unfortunately I still cannot make great pictures of my art, the paper I used is white and I have trouble to remove the blue haze . I have chosen for the best colours for my drawing as possible and accepted the blue haze on the paper.

More information (colours used, size, availability, etc) can be found at my website www.jannekesatelier.webs.com 

Peonies in autumn

We have peonies in our garden, so in springtime we enjoy the wonderful flowers and when autumn comes the leaves start colouring beautifully. 
Last autumn my daughter made some photos for me to paint. But this time I wanted to do something with the watercolour pencils I have. 
I made a simple composition from one of the photos and started colouring. I layered different colours, mixing them on my paper and after doing that I did not want to risk losing all this by brushing water over my drawing. 
So the drawing was not touched with water, only the outlines a bit so I could add a background with watercolour paint and salt for texture.
  
More information about this drawing can be found at www.jannekesatelier.co.nr