Beltane Flowers

Beltane comes and you can feel the season changing. I needed a week off. (Burnout persists!) I tried to clear the decks. I ordered a soft peachy floral display with sage colored leaves for the soothing soft vibes. (The order promised peach roses, white Asiatic lilies, peach miniature carnations, and white stock, accented with pitta negra, dusty miller, and a soft green echeveria succulent.)

I printed my Coloring Book of Shadows Beltane images and the start of May as well, and distributed them through the remaining 12 pages (six spreads) of sketchbook volume 28. So close to the end I can taste it! I’m eager! I’m ready to move out of this year plus long series of landscape sketchbooks, testing the various Stillman and Birns papers. It’s been great, and I learned a lot about the papers. I am ready for a bigger page! I left room for sketches and hoped the spread-out collage pieces would create harmony on the pages. (The jury is still out on that.)

My flowers arrived, and I received vibrant orange and dark green instead. “Flowers may be substituted.” (Tropicana roses, white Asiatic lilies, orange carnations, and white stock with leatherleaf fern and salal, and a dark green echeveria succulent.)

Well, I guess we’re doing Transparent Pyrrol Orange today!

These are the flowers I received, so I’ll paint them as they came. I tried to capture the white Asiatic lilies and the white stock flowers. White flowers are hard to paint! The Transparent Pyrrol Orange was the perfect shade for the orange flowers, with no mixing needed. I did not paint it as bright as those Tropicana roses, though. I carried that color palette over to the Beltane collage sticker, as the new color story of the day.

Naturally, the weather threatened a crazy heat wave coming, and working in a hot garage is a bad idea, so I pushed to finish the garage declutter while the cooler temperature held one last weekend. 

I love doing these Robert Oster Graphite inky chromatography garbage bags to document the decluttering. They are so expressive, and that color separation is delicious. Another big day of decluttering, and that settles the garage for the next eight months. 

The Start Your Sketchbook Journal course by Danny Gregory is exactly what I want to be doing with my sketchbook practice, but I keep putting off the course. Maybe because I’m terrible at taking time off, and when I need a break, I end up decluttering garages, so the self-paced courses get put off so easily? Yeah. That.

But I sketched the new delivery of composition books and Aries Journal from Coloring Book of Shadows. I even sketched one of the corner designs by hand! I really need to practice illustration-style sketching!