I never tried this before. This image looks like watercolors but it’s actually colors from flowers and berries I collected in my garden yesterday and left to steep in water overnight.
Some of the colors came from carrots (the sun), redcurrant gave the very vibrant pink, which turned out to be so dominant, I could paint it on top of any other color, and it would take over. I also used lavenders that gave a rich brown and granny’s bonnet gave me a soft bright grassy green. It soon faded to more of a yellow though.
It was a challenge to find a blue color or at least blueish.
The revelation came when I mixed blackcurrant and dogwood on the paper, and to my huge surprise watched how the olive green dogwood and the deep purple blackcurrant shifted into the most amazing minty blue-green.
Experimenting a bit more I was able to get a range of blue and green colors with that mix.
Most colors were very soft and weak, since they were very diluted. A few of them I boiled to try strengthen them, but it came with a price of the color turning brownish. It worked fine with lavenders, less fine with the soft pink I got from rose petals.
I never thought I would be able to find a range of colors in my garden at this point with the drought and all, to actually be able to paint a decent rain-forest, which was today’s theme on SketchDaily.
But it turned out that dried out and very sad blackcurrant berries works just as fine as ripe and delicious ones for this purpose. I had cut down the very dried out lavender flowers, and tossed them in a garbage pile, still the petals worked fine extracting color from. And the rose petals were from roses way past their pretty bloom.
This picture took layers and layers to finish. In the end I added a bit of black and white ink to add details to it all.
