botanical class and a camellia

camellias were the flower of choice for class this week. i brought a branch from my house, but the frost had pretty much killed any of the blooms, so i swiped one from a class mate. her camellia had the most amazing soft pink blooms that were unaffected from the cold.

i am working on blending my colors more and really looking at the shapes of the flower and trying to draw from what i see instead of what i think i see. this is always the tricky part for an artist. your brain is wired to overlook certain shapes. kind of how we can look at a misspelled word, but still know exactly what the word is. i tend to sketch the flower in pencil and then not refer back to it when i am adding color. tsk! tsk!

once i scanned this one in, i applied a photoshop filter to make it look more like a painting. i love the look of digitally altering my images slightly. i have thoughts of a 12 month floral calender swimming around in my head. a modern reference to the old flower prints that you find at yard sales. the ones where the month is in a plaque at the bottom of the print with a list of all the flowers included.