Saturday, November 13, 2010

What Else Can I Do With this Wildflower Pattern?

This is one of my very favorite patterns, I spent a great deal of time developing my techniques to paint this piece.  I have to say that hours went into using a variety of brushes in a variety of ways to try to come up with something that looked very much like the original wildflowers.  Needless to say I've done a careful study of these wildflowers to try to be as scientifically acurate as possible.  These are two of my favorite wildflowers, the Lupine and the Scarlet Paintbrush and they are fairly prolific during the summer months. They can even last into August if we have a decent amount of moisture.  Not only do we see these in the mountains but they are also found in the prairie regions of the US from Montana all the way down into Texas. 

I began to wonder what else could I do with this project to make it more versatile, which we all know that painters and crafters are so good at doing.  My daughter, who loves hiking and camping in the back country, wanted a photo album painted with wild flowers for her birthday.  I used the flowers in this piece as the border and painted a young lady with her backpack holding a map as the centerpiece.  It was truly lovely and unfortunately didn't have a chance to get a photo of it prior to giving it to her.  I just used a larger sized album that I purchased from Creative Memories, I think that it was 12"X15", and this size gave me a nice sized canvas area to paint on.  Now my daughter can save all of her backpacking memories in this album. 

I also thought that maybe it would be nice to have summer even in the cold winter months and painted these flowers on glass ornaments to give for Christmas gifts.  I personally love nontraditional ornaments on my tree and thought that these were a great idea.  I sat down one afternoon and within 2 hours had painted 2 dozen ornaments.  I've also painted these on my old standby of cards that I've given to friends on their birthdays. 

So often we look at a design and are put off by it because we don't own the brush that the artist used to paint it.  I used two of the Dynasty Butterfly brushes to paint these but have found that you can easily substitute the Dagger brush to paint the Scarlet Paintbrush with outstanding results and a small flat brush to paint the Lupine.  I've painted both of these flowers with a variety of brushes and had a great deal of success in fact I used a 1/8" Lettering brush to paint the Lupine recently and loved the result.

When I was demonstrating this project at the Hoot Show in Ohio this year I had a number of ladies mention that "of course I could do these wildflowers I designed them" which made me laugh because they are truly so simple to do if you follow my instructions and look at the color worksheet which I am posting for your information here. 

Let me know your thoughts on this project?  Does it scare you off because you feel it is too scary or do you feel comfortable giving it a try? 

4 comments:

  1. Beautiful! That's just lovely. Love your cute monsters too!

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  2. Thank you Gale. I've been enjoying your blog as well.

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  3. As an avid outdoors enthusiast, I adore the wildflowers! I believe you have truly captured their essence. Not only that but they look super fun and easy! Just a stroke here, a stroke there and voila, you have a masterpiece! Keep up the great work!

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  4. What a wonderful comment! My intention was to portray the wildflowers in a fairly realistic manner. I'm so pleased that they come across that way.

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