The joy of green

I'm working on a lovely commission for animation company room60 at the moment, who specialise in animations for landscaping and the environment amongst other things. 

The project is headed for TV broadcast eventually, but for now, the work for me is all about greens and more greens, seeing as my end of the bargain is supplying the plants for use in animation. Simple.

So fun, to have a list of plants and paint them, one by one -  a meditation in the possibilities of watercolour within a limited scope. I love that I can say today I got paid for painting...moss.


As for the greens, here's a list of hardworking ones, in case you feel the urge to illustrate a garden sometime soon. I must say I can recommend it.

Hooker's green
Sap Green
Olive green
Oxide of Chromium
and plain ole' blue and yellow mixes with a teeny smidge of red or orange thrown in. 

Which of the illustrations are your favourites? I think for me the page with the lilies below and the grasses. Love the grass action in the second photo. Let me know what you think, and please tweet or share on facebook if you enjoyed reading this.

nasturtiums snaking through the garden

I'm so happy with all the surprise seedlings that came up in our garden this year. Nasturtiums, feverfew, lemon balm and poppies all germinated from the lovely compost we got from St Mary's Secret Garden.

There's definitely something to be said for buying compost from an organic garden tended with love - if wildness and weeds are your thing. 

Plenty inspiring to draw, for one thing. I couldn't not draw these guys, I so love the leaf shape and the snaky thing they do.

There were huge drifts of nasturtiums in the garden of my childhood in Cape Town, and I loved hunting for the special ones - the dark reds or wildly flame patterned oranges - to add to the bunches my mum would pick and arrange in a tangle in a glass vase.  

Funny that we never thought to save the seeds, but I guess to us they were just weeds growing on the edge of our sprawling garden, not so much ornamental flowers in specific colours. 

Marker pen on paper plus digital drawing.

happy easter

 

It's been a lovely, quiet Easter with plenty of time to tinker around the house, as my friend Barbs would say. 

This was a warm up painting to get back into watercolour drawing mode after such a long break. Bit ambitious really, the white flower and the sunlight through the petals and then also the shards of glass that I found back in CT on a tiny beach. Which look more like petals at this stage.

I was tempted by the frilly yellow centre of the daffodil, and the poppy motif on the cup (a wedding gift from the lovely ladies at St Mary's Secret Garden)and didn't give the medium much thought. That's the point of a warm up though right?