From experience I know the only way to develop new work is to make a start, get the ideas out of my head and onto paper, fabric, or wherever, accept that much of this early work may not be be brilliant and keep going.
At last, after colour sampling trials this week (huge sigh of relief!), I'm finally getting somewhere.
First samples: I printed the colours I'd sampled from the real Chrysanthemum flower back into the printed flower - as in my original notebook page, with interesting results...
Then I printed colour squares behind the flower as on my notebook pages. The white seriously mis-printed but you get the idea. To give an idea of scale the squares are 25cms...
Now a change of line colour. Here the flower outline is leaf green, the infill is dusky petal orange. Subtle, and reminiscent of Art Nouveau?
I decided to simplify. Do I have to fit every colour in just because nature manages to!
Here I've printed only one colour in the petals and the leaf green. I also introduced a shadow. Inspired (as I often am) by the work of Patrick Caulfield, I thought a hard edge shadow would be achievable and dramatic.
I nearly always use unbleached linen (partly as a positive environmental choice and partly because I really love it) therefore in all the above samples I'd adjusted the colours to take into account this underlying base colour and keep as near as possible to the colours in the plant. However I did (lastly) trial print this sample onto bleached linen in Chrysanthemum bud dusky pink.
...from my seasonal colour sample notebook.
