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| Blue Holly |
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| Red Holly |
The approach of winter signals the end of the outdoor painting season (at least for those of us who don't like to freeze our patooties). Other years I've made the effort to get out to paint despite the weather, but after a particularly hard year, I'm not feeling motivated to endure the additional hardships of cold-weather plein air this year. I'm hard-pressed to find something new for the blog, and populating it with work from my botanical illustration classes seemed fitting, especially because holly is so symbolic of this season.
These are works from yesterday's class. We were tasked with painting a value study of a sprig with fruit or flowers (previously sketched in pencil) using only one pigment, either Permanent Rose or Windsor Blue. The idea was to use the darkest value for the leaves, the middle range for the berries with the stem being the lightest value. We were to practice various lifting techniques as well as flat and graduated washes.
I tried one sketch with each pigment, and found the Permanent Rose to be much harder to work with. The color was so bright that after a time my eyes were totally strained, and it was harder to get a really deep value even using several layers of washes.
This is a particular variety of holly planted at McCrillis Gardens that I like--the leaves have a variety of unusual shapes, some more rounded, others with three points, and pendulous branches.
