LILIES, LILIES, LILIES.

 

In the spring I bought a bag of oriental lily bulbs and planted them in a few pots to put on the patio for the summer.

 

The first ones to open were the pinky red ones which grew very tall and gave a wonderful display for a fortnight till they started to change colour.

 

The white ones were a couple of weeks behind but they did give me a succession of gorgeous blooms to draw in my sketchbooks.

 

As you can see I've used several different media to depict these fragrant flowers.

 

I found out this week that the local Mr Bricolage store stocks the Derwent line painters and took the opportunity to buy a white one which works quite well on this tinted paper.

 

The museum watercolour pencils were good too in this, one of the first drawings I did.

 

As I got used to the shapes and curves of the petals the pictures began to give me an idea for my mother-in-law's 90th birthday card.

 

This final sketch was drawn on one of the end papers in my maps sketchbook no 37 as I had run out of pages!

 

 

This week when the doors were finished I finally found the time to get started on my new picture.  I found a pretty piece of lacy fabric to use as a background and then built up the image using scraps of different colours for the leaves and flower petals.

 

It took three afternoons to machine embroider my lily for the birthday card.  I mounted it on a piece of green card and folded the edges over and then stuck it onto a bright pink folded card ready to be finished with a message on the inside. 

 

 

After a couple of days of looking at the picture on my desk I realised that it needed a little something extra in the bottom left corner so I made a drawing of a Red Admiral I have in my nature stash.  I traced the image onto a piece of stiffened fabric and coloured it with inktense pencils and acrylic paints, then sewed a body in black wool to give three dimensions.  I stuck the butterfly in place using fabric glue and stitched the feelers to complete the picture.  I think it looks pretty realistic, don't you?

Fortunately mum has no access to the internet so hopefully she won't see this till her birthday party in September and if any of my readers know her please don't show it! 

We're off for a couple of weeks camping at the weekend so I'll see you later with hopefully another batch of new drawings from our travels.