Echinacea

 I haven't made art for ages, basically because the sun has been shining for so long and I've been living in my garden. In the south east of England, which is where I live we haven't had rain for 2 months, its turned our gardens a straw like colour and I've definitely had enough of watering my flowers for a lifetime! Some of the plants have thrived though, especially it seems the roses, their blooms haven't been drenched and so they seem to have lasted for longer.

I love Echinacea's, although I'm not able to grow them in my garden, they don't seem to like heavy, wet clay soil! But I decided to have a go at painting them.

One of my favourite blog sites to look at is the Paperartsy blog - it is always so informative and full of new ideas. At the moment they have a competition with a colour scheme - mint, sage, claret and gold - I thought those colours would tie in perfectly with the flowers.

 I used a variety of watercolours and acrylics and even mixed some Paperartsy red acrylic paint with a tiny bit of black to make variety of claret colours.

I added a heavy amount of crackle glaze mixture to the heads of the 3 flowers and seem to have got a good crackle - I think my problem usually is that I don't lay down a thick enough layer.
The background has been stamped using some sage paint dabbed onto one of my favourite Ellen Vargo stamp sets.

Competitions entered:
paperartsy2018-topic-13-colour-mint-sage-claret
thatscraftychallenges2018/close-to-nature-challenge
countryviewchallenges2018/july-in-summer-garden

Thanks for visiting, Rachel