During the four days we were in Florida, two weeks ago, my garden exploded. The entire spring had been cold and rainy here, so the plants had emerged very slowly, and I got used to that pace. Not so after a weekend of 95 degree heat: everything from poppies to peonies burst into bloom, and faded almost as rapidly. I haven't been able to keep up at all, plus there was the huge pleasure of having guests -- our dear friends from Iceland visited us last week! So, in this post I'll show you a few color studies I did earlier in June.
This is a clump of Pulsatilla in the alpine garden at Montreal's Jardin botanique. I'm crazy about plants with this sort of blooming habit - hellebores, hepatica, anemones. Pulsatilla is a genus of small plants with finely-divided foliage and fuzzy stems and buds. I found it devilishly hard to capture their delicate, hairy essence - this was the third attempt (detail at top of page.) (Watercolor and ink on paper.)
The pea-like, trailing flower clusters of a large blooming tree, the thorny locust. (Watercolor and ink on paper.)
And this is an acrylic on paper of an elderflower branch. I was curious to try using acrylic washes, thinned a great deal to resemble watercolor, over a pencil drawing. Because the acrylics are opaque, it was also possible to add a few lighter details later. I'm pretty happy with the result here, especially in the leaves on the right, and I'll probably do more experimentation. The acrylic dries extremely fast, so it's tricky and quite different from watercolor, which has a delicacy that can't be matched by any other medium. Every medium has its own advantages and disadvantages, and it's only by working with them a lot, fooling around, and refusing to get discouraged (!) that we find out what works for different situations, different desired results.
Clive Hicks-Jenkins was talking on Facebook recently about his use of acrylics, which I found fascinating. Like Clive, I use professional quality Golden Acrylics, made very near my home town in upstate New York; lesser-quality paints can become gummy or granular. Clive mentioned that using acrylics with just water, without adding a medium to extend the drying time, forced him to work fast and that it had been good for him -- "It made me a more confident painter and speeded my output" he wrote. I can see that this would be true. While watercolor also requires speed, it's for somewhat different reasons -- an overworked watercolor loses the spontaneity, delicacy and brilliance that are the medium's greatest strengths. It's a different process to create loose, transparent effects in acrylic, and you can't count on being able to go back and blend colors on the paper with your brush, or remove pigment to create highlights: the paints are plastic, and they don't dissolve! With watercolor, I'm often able to erase pencil marks right through the painting, but here, the pencil is embedded permanently beneath the acrylic coating. That can be used as an advantage, with pencil, ink, or many other types of media; acrylic lends itself to mixed-media work, but it requires planning and experience, just like watercolor.