Rose – Pierre De Ronsard (WIP)

This is my latest work in progress and my favourite rose in the garden at the moment.  It is a big call to name my favourite rose, but Pierre wins.  Old fashioned roses are my favourite, the abundance of petals and the heavenly scent are major points in their favour.  I love the way the colours move from cream with a hint of green on the outside, to cream with a flush of pink on the edges in the middle, to a beautiful subtle pink in the centre.  The combination of cream and pink with the hint of apple green is stunning in this rose.

This particular climber has been in my garden for over eight years and is well established and producing magnificent blooms.  I find that my roses produce better blooms the older they get.  This is especially true for the old fashioned roses who tend to ball (go brown at the bud stage and never open) when young.

I have drawn this rose in my usual style with a under wash of sennelier ink then coloured pencil over the top.  It has been a great deal of fun to get back into this work again after a bit of a break and I have really enjoyed working with the beautiful colours of this rose and the challenge of making shadows in the cream rose work.  There is nothing like drawing a flower to make you really understand and appreciate it.

 

It has been ages since I last posted and the past 12 months have been very difficult.  My Mum passed away this time last year and after caring for her for so long and other major life crisis following on, I haven’t had the energy to keep the blog going.  My final blow was being made redundant a couple of months ago, just when you think it couldn’t get worse it does.  But it was a blessing in disguise and it has given me time to re-evaluate and make some new choices on what I would like my life to be like.  One of the clearest decisions was to take the opportunity to follow my art more seriously.  So for the last month I have been preparing my website and deciding on some business strategies and am looking forward to telling you all about them in the next post.

Karen

 

High Spring in my Garden

Love-in-the-must, intense pencils and ink journal page

I know that I have been posting away on my walks in the bush and all the lovely wildflowers in bloom, during this time my garden has been blooming its little heart out, and is demanding some of the attention!

 

After much attention (not all of it mine)and a nice wet winter, the flowers are doing really well this year. (Warning, skip down to the next paragraph if you are not into gardens). The roses are blooming with abandon, I have roses galore, souvenir de la malmaision, which has finally made it above the grapevine and is romping over the garage roof, Pierre de Ronsard on the side of my house which hasn’t balled for once and the beautiful Peace rose for my mother, it was in her wedding bouquet. The yellow gold bunny rose is climbing up my verandah posts with some lovely clematis. My bearded irises grew beautiful leaves but totally failed to bloom, but I have cornflowers, pinks, love in the mist, aquilegia and the lavender is about to start. Oh yes the Dutch irises are making up for the other irisis.

Pierre de Ronsard Climbing Rose

Souvenir de la Malmaision gone feral through the grape vine. Not sure that is appropriate behaviour for such a french aristocratic rose, but things go wild in the colonies!

I have planted a lot of gardens but usually move before the become established or the one time I didn’t we had a 10 year drought of the century, hardley conducive to great gardening. But this time I have it right.

Clematis, this makes me wish I would keep the plant tags, as I have forgotten it’s name.

So here is the art work to go with the flowers. I am trying to use more design in how I lay out my journal pages and still grappling with the writing.

spring flower journal page. Ink tense pencils and ink

Here are some birds of paradise that I did last week, also from my garden. I tried a couple of different versions of them, to mix it up.

Bird of paradise. Gouache and ink journal page

Bird of paradise. Watercolour pencils and ink journal page

Hope this brings a bit of spring into your northern hemisphere falls.  This was done on my iPad, which I don’t usually use, but I forgot to bring my power cord for the laptop, and so needs must, hope it is ok.

Karen