Forget me not

They should have reached their destination by now, in Sydney, Australia, so I think it's safe to post this little commission I was working on earlier this week. Forget-me-nots and honeysuckle to remind a friend's daughter of her gran, and her mum, when she's so far away. Hope you like them Sally, if you're reading this! Such lovely associations of weddings and family, scents, places and most of all people...
I found myself getting almost botanically illustrative with the forget-me-nots (although I could never reach that sort of perfection), which I had 'live' to work from. I think because they're so tiny, I couldn't splash them off loosely - but the honeysuckle was from a variety of photographs, as I couldn't hunt down any live models in a hurry (they had a plane to catch). They're one of my favourites too - that heavenly scent takes me straight back to childhood summers - and I think I must plant another one, after the last one we had outside our back door was destroyed by some plumbing excavations some time ago.

Honeysuckle Struggles

We've had an unexpected and very welcome flurry of lovely family visiting so I haven't managed to keep up with posting, not being a great multi-tasker. But I had started trying to paint the Golden Shower honeysuckle creeper that pours over our ramshackle old pergola and makes it look splendiferous in spring and autumn. I was really struggling with portraying the myriad sprays of blossoms, and really wanted to show my best bit of how they drop off their bracts and hang from thin little threads like teardrop earrings, and was getting so caught up in those intricacies that I forgot about the big blank wall below. I have really done a big 'cheat' and Photopainted out a badly-drawn chair that I plonked in the middle, and actually think I'll have to start this all over again and paint the dog before I paint the fleas, a post I very timeously found on Jana Bouc's blog just when I was starting to
gnaw my knuckles in frustration.

I thought it would be simpler to just paint one flower-bract, but still managed to run out of room at the bottom to fit in the teardrops, so will have to do this one all over again too. I think I'll have to go shopping for some pure orange watercolour paint too as my mixtures of Yellow Gamboge, Cadmium Red Light and Winsor Red just aren't quite capturing the radiance. I really want to get this corner of sunshine down to my satisfaction, as I have been thinking about doing it for so very long!
(I wouldn't have posted these until they were better, but it's been a while since my last post, and I thought I'd better put something on in case anyone was wondering where I'd got to.)