Flowers
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Lily in the Valley
A doodle in the proper sense of the word, which started out in my head as another art deco panel, but which has turned out to be rather more of a cartoon. Still fun to draw though! Of course, this flower is not to be confused with “Lily of the valley”, which is another plant…
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Sakura (桜)
Cherry blossom is appearing all over Japan at the moment, and I’m lucky enough to be seeing it happen. Admittedly most of the blossom I have seen so far has been set against leaden grey skys, so this picture is something of a concept piece – how I imagine the trees would look in front…
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Backlit Crocuses
… or should it be “backlit croci”? The interweb seems to be divided on the correct plural of crocus. However, such grammatical issues are a mere side show to the main event here – which is that last week during seemingly continuous rainfall the sun actually made a brief appearance to light up the spring…
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Tall & Slender
I saw this handsome plant sitting in a corner of the greenhouse in the RHS Garden at Wisley. At the time I didn’t note the name of the plant – however the self-proclaimed AI on my phone seems sure that it is an Agave plant, which would be more at home in the arid regions…
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Blooming Tiles
Or perhaps “Blue Ming Tiles” – except of course these are not Ming tiles! This ceramic floral pattern is to be found on a courtyard wall in the Toshhovli Palace (or Tach Khaouli Palace) in Khiva, Uzbekistan. The palace was built in the 1830s, so I can only suppose that these tiles are also about 190 years…
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Surviving a Drought?
This image is a nonsense of course, not only because waterlilies would never survive these conditions nor “float” on the dried lakebed, but also because the composition was conceived during a long period of hot and dry weather (yes – even in England we have at times too much sun!) but drawn and painted as…
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Tiles
I have always been rather taken with these symmetrical patterned tiles. I first became aware of them in Morocco, so initially thought of them as “Moroccan” tiles, but then I saw them in Spain as well, so switched to the adjective “Moorish”. More recently I have seen similar tiles in many other countries bordering the…
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Flowers at Wisley – Again
There really are an awful lot of flowers at Wisley, so I don’t feel too bad about having another go at painting some of them. The Royal Horticultural Society have some stunning formal flowerbeds in their garden at the moment, but just like last time I have chosen to paint some of their “wild” flowers…
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Lily
I saw this rather handsome plant in a local garden centre whilst looking for something else entirely, so naturally I bought the specimen and it is now trying to survive (and I hope thrive!) in my garden. It is a rather different shape to the lilies that I drew many years ago when I first…
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Mayflower
More properly known as hawthorn, but if you use the proper name it is just that bit more difficult to remember exactly when this plant flowers! This picture was intended to look rather like one of those very arty photos where the object in the foreground is in sharp focus and the background is just…
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Primroses
The plants which grow best in my garden are those that are often labelled as weeds! I’m not sure whether primroses are normally classified by others in this way, but given how vigorously they self-seed and then grow in my lawn they seem to fit the bill. However, they have the advantage of being colourful…
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Wet Flowers
Having been advised to try watercolour paints on posh proper cotton watercolour paper, I decided to have another go at the “wet on wet” approach, where the paper is dampened before the paint is applied. It turns out that the amount of water is quite critical! My first go at what I thought would be…
Doodling ... 