I have been invited to paint tulips in oils at Art in Action in the charity tent this year. Whoopee!
This is the tent to raise awareness and funds for the cancer charity, Ucare. Ucare’s emblem is a tulip and the official tulip is Tulipa Caresse, a very pretty pink tulip. We can paint any colour and any variety of tulip.
So I started off buying 50 tulips from a flower wholesaler to:
a) Produce my large tulip painting as a donation to the UCare charity auction and
b) To start envisaging the four days of painting at Art in Action.
The auction is very exciting and tulips will be painted by professionals, amateurs and celebrites and auctioned – with the artist’s name kept secret. Perhaps you should try this when it happens – you might get something painted by the Duchess of Cambridge (if she’s in the loop!). But this means you won’t see my large painting until after the auction.
Envisaging the small paintings
This is tricky. My Daily painting square format won’t work because tulips are too tall and thin and I’d like to work more or less life-size. I had envisaged doing daily paintings of individual tulips or perhaps 2-3 tulips in a glass vase (with lots of reflections). These would be small – 30cm x 15cm, at saleable prices. But this is so boring!
Tulips spread themselves wide when there are quite a few and square 30cm format paintings are full-on works of art and will be rather complex. I love the way they droop them lift their heads again.
Then I found some photos I took a year ago and cropped them.
Now these, although still complex are at least exciting designs, and work within the format. How about a few horizontal formats as well, with just the tops of them in a vase?
Yes, I think this will work.
The next problem is that there won’t be too many tulips around in July, so I need to spend May painting furiously to build a portfolio and photographing furiously to be able to work from my own photos. The cool thing is that I will keep buying lovely tulips and that will be such a pleasure!
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