“Happiness is to hold flowers in both hands”. – Japanese proverb

Happiness is to hold a camera to take photos of beautiful flowers!

Happiness is is to hold a brush to paint those beautiful flowers!

If you have flowers, you have no lack of inspiration for creativity. I love taking photos of flowers in my garden and trying to create a painting of what I see. Daisies have always been a favorite flower of mine- I even had them in my winter wedding! Where I live the daisies grow wild on the sides of many roads sometime in early May. Just driving past them makes my heart sing. I do have a few growing in my garden now, but in May, I stopped to pick some at the side of a country road.

These became my inspiration for doing some negative painting. I started out wetting the whole paper and laying down some splotches of light blue watercolor, leaving some areas for the white daisies (left). After that dried, I began painting darker blue around the flowers (right). It’s much easier to think in terms of painting the flowers themselves than it is to “not” paint the flowers but paint the space that is around them. I need to practice more negative painting! I also did not want to draw the flowers in beforehand because I did not want pencil marks.

I added in lots more color and some splatters and this is what I finished with:

The kids gave me a calla lily for Mother’s Day. While getting ready to transplant it, I decided it was a candidate for a painting.

I zoomed in on a small portion of the flowers and made that the focus of a large painting.

For several years I have planted lantana flowers in my yard because the deer do not seem to like eating them! I have to be careful what I plant. These plants fascinate me with the variety of flower arrangements on a single plant! Each flower is only about an inch across with lots of tiny little parts. I focused in close on this one for inspiration of a recent painting.

And this was my painting:

Painting a vase of flowers is nice, but sometimes it’s more fun to focus on a small part of a plant and let that be the inspiration for a painting much larger than the original plant. I have SO many photos of flowers in my camera I won’t run out of possibilities! Do you like to paint flowers? What draws your eye the most- the whole plant or the intricate details?