After interrupting myself with a few other projects, I got back to my fox, sparrow, and flowers this week, and it’s finished!
Those flowers were almost painful to paint! I began with the flowers on the left behind the fox. They were tedious, but went OK.
But then I started on the large pink flower in front of him on the left. I think I must have painted over it at least three times. I was having so much trouble getting colors I was happy with. By the way, it’s a ranunculus.
The blue flowers above and to the left of the ranunculus are scabiosa, and they come in several colors, including pink, white, and blue. I chose blue, then moved to the yellow flowers in the middle. They’re buttercups, so of course—if I’m using realistic colors—they would be yellow. And at that point, I was not happy with my color scheme.
I remembered that I’d originally thought I’d make all the flowers different colors of off-white, but I got off track almost immediately with the pink flower. I think it, and even the blue scabiosa, would have been OK. I could have done the rest off-white or maybe had one more pink one. But the yellow caused me a real problem.
Pink, blue, and yellow? Yikes! I was into a full spectrum color scheme, which to me, may as well be no color scheme! (But that's just me...)
The only thing I could think of at that point was to go all in and make the poppies orange. Oh, no! A riot of color. But at least the orange picks up the color of my dear fox. Besides which, what was done was done.
I started this piece while watching Suzanne Allard’s floral videos, and she used bright, riotous colors—such a beautiful part of her work. So, with that influence fresh in my mind, I suppose my wandering off my typical color path shouldn’t have been a surprise.
And, especially when I look at this detail, it turns out that I like it!
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