Flowers
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Wild Flowers – Wisley
The Royal Horticultural Society Garden at Wisley seems to have gone big on wild flowers this year. Of course there are still lots of formal gardens, exotic plants, hard-to-keep-alive plants in rude health and immaculate lawns, but here and there a riot of multicoloured mayhem has been encouraged to happen, kept in order only by…
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Post Pruning
On one level, this is simply a painting of the consequences of a common horticultural procedure – a fresh bud squeezing out from a severely trimmed stump. At a more metaphorical level however, this image seems a bit too personal to spell out in more detail … As regards the artwork – the pen did…
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“Isometric” Rose
An isometric drawing is a type of 3D drawing that uses a 3D representation where the angles between the axes are always 120 degrees. My drawing app has an isometric setting which forces all the pen strokes to be either vertical or at 60 degrees to the vertical, in order to simplify the creation of…
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Gorse
This plant puts on a magnificent floral display in the most unlikely of places. Of course, gorse flowers are uncompromisingly yellow, so if you prefer blue or pink flowers they are not the plant for you. Luckily I’m happy enough with yellow, so I appreciate gorse wherever I see it. When I first considered how…
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Red Ginger
The Botanic Gardens in Singapore have many dazzling flowers on display. This particular Red Ginger (apparently also called Alpina purpurata, Ostrich Plume and Pink Cone Ginger) caught my eye, and I have only slightly exaggerated the colour of the petals in this painting. I used the Procreate app running on an iPad to “paint” this…
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Reigate Heath – Grass & Cow Parsley
I don’t normally see these plants at eye level, but that is the view I wanted so a certain amount of crouching down was necessary to take the photo from which this scene was drawn. Worth it though – the contrast between the foreground and the background in particular is very pleasing, to me at…
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Gozo Coastline – Dandelions
Normally I consider dandelions to be weeds, and if they appear in my lawn I try to get rid of them. When these plants grow elsewhere I tend to ignore them, but in this view along the Gozo coastline they were so abundant and colourful that I had make an exception and pay those dandelions…
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Rambling Rose
We bought this rose at a local garden fete, with a warning from the stall holder that this plant was “a bit of a thug”! I think it is a “Rambling Rector” – a variety more formally described as having “very vigorous growth” and as being “very thorny”. At the moment I drew this rose…
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Daffodil
Anyone remember the Spring of 2020? There were daffodils around of course, but there was also a deadly new disease apparently running rampant around the world. This particular flower was drawn a few days before we were all “locked down”, but at a time when we were already becoming wary of getting too close to…
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Lilies
This was the first drawing that I did after I joined a local art group, pretending that I knew what I was doing with a drawing pen and a nice blank sheet of white paper! The pressure of that moment must have helped as in the end the flowers seem quite easily recognisable.









