Yesterday a friend invited us over to pick blackberries. I ended up sketching some flowers and plants in her backyard. I was promptly loaded up with clippings from a variety of plants to take home with me. One flower (whose name I don’t know) had petals with a vibrant, nearly flourescent blue-purple. I boiled some of them to make a thin ink. I also made some 2 strengths of Blackberry ink and used some of my morning coffee to round out my pallete.
Sketching a quick composition of some leaves from a Bleeding Heart plant, I just began layering the drawing from light to dark with my natural pigments. I did add a little baking soda to the various mixtures since I don’t know what the pH values were and I didn’t want any acids eating into my sketchbook paper too soon (I have no idea if my logic is sound from an archival perspective, but I know that coffee is acidic so a base should neutralize it , right?).
I mixed linseed oil with the darker blackberry ink so it would stick to my chop.
I also scanned some negative washed paintings of the actual Bleeding Heart leaves that were my model as well as scanning the leaves themselves. I took those and messed around in Photoshop using various blending modes to get the final composition.
Below is the final composition followed by the 4 painting stages:
- Coffee
- Petals
- Blacberry thin
- Blackberry dark
June 11, 2009 at 4:06 am |
Wonderful paintings of the flowers. I like it very much.
July 26, 2009 at 1:42 pm |
I love the fact you have used natural inks as I make them too but have never tried blackberry.