Primroses Colour Palette for Springtime

What colour comes to mind when you hear the word 'primrose'?

I'm sure most of us associate primroses with the colour yellow - the particularly delicate, pale yellow of the wild primroses of springtime. I remember, as a child, travelling on the old steam trains in the Isle of Wight, you could look out of the window and see a 'carpet' of pale yellow! 

The wild primroses almost completely covered the grassy banks of the cuttings we passed through just before we went into a tunnel. Anywhere else, they would have been picked or even dug up for someone's garden. But it was probably too dangerous for anyone to venture down the steep slopes of the railway cuttings to pick them. So they were left in peace, to grow and multiply - a lovely sight in spring!

But cultivated primroses come in a wide range of colours!

Years ago I grew them from seed. But nowadays my lack of wide enough window sills for the seedlings, sends me off to the supermarket to buy the plants. (That's my excuse, anyway!)

I particularly like the pink-ish orange ones  - 

Sometimes I can't get enough of them all the same colour for the shelf in my front porch, so then I go for as many different colours as I can:

To me the different coloured flowers look fine - splendidly bright and cheerful! 

But when you look at all the colours together, I can't help feeling that there are too many colours, that some need to be eliminated to make a cohesive colour scheme.

So from this group of eight colours, we could pick out lots of different schemes.

I have chosen 2, 3, 4 and 6 for this traditional Islamic pattern:

But there are lots of other possibilities!

Which four would you choose?

You can save this pattern tile and experiment with it if you wish -

Doodling Hedgehogs!

I'm very fond of hedgehogs!

I think that may be something to do with the fact that one of my earliest memories is of being woken up, late one evening, and carried downstairs and outside, wrapped in a blanket, to see a hedgehog my parents had discovered in the back garden. 

That was so unlike my mother! She was normally pretty strict, having been born while Queen Victoria was still alive - just! She was most definitely all for children sleeping at the proper time, no matter what, so maybe that's why this lapse in my usually highly disciplined upbringing has stuck in my memory.

The 'hedgehog' doodle above is waiting to be tidied up and painted and turned into a greeting card. And I'm thinking maybe these jolly little fellows could even feature on a  repeating pattern for Nursery curtains or something like that.

As ever, I have plenty of doodles but never enough time to make something of them. The Six Nations (rugby) season doesn't help as weekend afternoons are usually my painting time. But these are now on my list of ideas to pursue so they will get done - eventually!

In the meantime, here's a hedgehog scenario that seemed to come out of nowhere - as do most of my doodles!

What is it about Poppies?

It’s hardly surprising that poppies are such popular flowers, especially among artists. They come in such a wide selection of varieties and somehow they seem to combine brilliant, bold colours with an air of fragility, both in their paper-thin petals and their delicate-looking stems!

A far cry from the rather dull, red paper poppies that we buy to wear on November 11,  Poppy Day or Remembrance Sunday, here in the UK and in some of the Commonwealth countries.


I don’t know whether it’s seeing that politicians and TV presenters seem to wear their poppies earlier and earlier each year, but last weekend, I had a sudden yen to make a poppy collage! 

This was unfortunate as it was the last weekend before the start of Module 2 of the ‘Art and Business of Surface Pattern’ course and I had so much to do, not least finishing the illustration for the book of Welsh Nursery Rhymes I’ve been invited to contribute to. Time is running out!

But on Saturday, when I was scanning the illustration at high resolution, I could see that it was going to take a long time. So I seized the opportunity and started to cut out poppy petals, based loosely on a doodle I’d done one evening while watching TV, trying out my new blendable coloured pencils!

On Sunday I made some changes to the illustration so I needed to scan it again and I used the time to make a different kind of ‘stripe’, consisting of diamond shapes in the bright pink, orange and green that I used for the poppies.

Sadly, the pink and the orange have both come out looking fairly uniformly red on my computer and I couldn’t find a way around that. Even so, I’m quite pleased with my collection of 'Poppies' patterns – and, as a bonus, they reminds of me of the ‘Poppyland’ area of my beloved Norfolk!

You can read my earlier blog post about 'Poppyland', illustrated by my soft pastel painting of it, HERE
 

Poppies seem to be very popular as greeting cards and I’ll probably make another ‘poppy’ card from my collage, alongside my watercolour, oil pastel, watersoluble crayons and photographic versions of Poppy greeting cards – when I find time! 

In the meantime, you can find more information about the varieties of poppies and see 'Poppy' gifts and cards that I've already created, on my other blog -

Mugs, Mousepads & More