Winter blooms

After a brief warmup yesterday, it reached 40 degrees here in southern Wisconsin, the forecast is for another cold front, snow and high winds. If I were a hardier Cheesehead I would have gotten outside, but instead I painted indoors. In my bedroom I have a small table loaded with potted plants. There is a bedraggled geranium that bloomed around Christmas but is now resting, a pot of golden pothos that is the hardiest plant on earth, and a new pot of delicate cyclamen. I'm used to the pink variety, but this is actually white with tips of magenta. It smells wonderful, spicy, but not sickly sweet like paperwhites or hyacinth can be.

I swore not to paint flowers this year, since nearly everyone I know is painting roses and irises in an attempt to recapture warmer and sunnier days. Delicate flowers are not my forte, and I like to be original, so I experimented. I made a pencil line drawing, then went over that with a dark violet watercolor. Then taking a cue from a Stephen Quiller book I have on color choices, I painted in the shapes, taking care to never have two identical colors or values touching. I used ultramarine, viridian, cad red, cad yellow, Winsor violet and magenta. My goal wasn't realism, but design. It's an interesting exercise, and I'm not sure this is the direction I'll go with my work. But I might try another version with a different set of colors, and maybe a less complicated line drawing. This is a cropped version of the original.