I chose a spot which is a glorious tangle of vegetation. I know my limitations; no chance of precise botanical drawing. But I did want to capture the atmosphere of the spot, and have something which will remind me of it. I chose to try acrylic on "not pressed" watercolour paper. This was the set-up.
The first step was to put on some loose washes of pure red, blue and yellow. These constituted the beginnings of a composition, and they would be a background to all the detail that was to come. You will notice that green was not used. I knew there would be an overwhelming amount of green to come, so I wanted different colours in the background.
Then I took a little bottle of black acrylic ink and did some rough sketching. I was not aiming for precise lines, so I used a twig not a pen. The point was to give myself a composition and some shapes to work with indicating where the main plant stems would be. The twig was just picked up on the spot. It won't worry me at all if some of the marks are visible in the final painting.
The next step was to paint in some dark. There's a wall covered in ivy in the background and soil in the foreground, all heavily shaded.
In retrospect I think I could have put in more dark blue and brown at this stage, but more could be added later.
Now for the hard work,painting a myriad leaves in many different greens. On my palette I put Cadmium Yellow Light, Lemon Yellow, Ultramarine Blue and Cerulean Blue. These gave a lot of different combinations.
Painting the mass of leaves took about an hour. I did not try and draw the outline of individual leaves, but I did look closely at the size of marks and at the amount of yellow or of blue in the greens. I also put.in more shade.
And finally what I had had in mind from the start. I took a smaller brush and used mixtures of pure red and white for the foxglove flowers. I tried to observe them closely. The same went for the meadowsweet; I found the subtle off-white of these flowers, the frothy look, and the variations of light and shade almost impossibly difficult.
I tidied up a few details here and there, but the fact that I was too tired after two intense hours to do much more at least prevented me making it worse by overworking.
