Another Iris

I want to create a set of four iris cards and every year at this time I am too busy, This year because I’m not doing Art in Action. I’m determined to get some art done (even though I’m quite tired…)

I started with a very large loose painterly sketch, standing in the garden at my easel. Too mucky by far. Then I picked an iris – because it keeps raining and it’s too cold at the moment to work outside. And the painting was soo tight and didn’t work. So I thought I’d try to do something inbetween the loose painting and the ever-so-tight one.

Here is the final painting:

Perry’s Hardy Plant Farm, Enfield, Middlesex. New June Flowering Irises, 1924.
General Collection
Alcazar. One of the most magnificent of the older varieties, stout branching stems, bearing a profusion of well-built flowers; S, light bluish-violet overlaid bronze; F, deep purple with a bronze veined throat. 1/6 each.

I thought you may like to see the too tight, overworked one:

and the painterly sketch:

The sketch has its merits and if the background was better resolved I’d have been happier with it. It is a good reminder to do more sketching and then to work from the sketches. I now have three of the four cards with one more to do. The first iris I ever painted in watercolour was done about 12 years ago.