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Sunday, May 20, 2012

How You Can Paint With Flowers

'Into the Meadow'              8x10          oil on canvas         ©Karen Margulis purchase HERE $150
Yes you read that right.  This weekend I was painting with flowers and not painting them with pastels or oils. I spent all weekend playing in the dirt and planting all kinds of things in my yard. A friend and student who is also a landscape designer told me how she paints with flowers and it made so much sense and fun to do.  She has no formal training in landscape but just has an eye for creating wonderful gardens. She has been very successful.  Her clients would give her a budget and free reign to create the garden.  She would go buy as many plants the budget would allow and then when they were delivered she would 'paint' with them.

How do you paint with the plants?  Just as you would paint a painting. You would block in the big simple shapes...make sure you had those anchor plants that would form the backbone to the garden. You would make sure your backbone plantings weren't spotty....connecting them when possible. You would want to have color harmony so picking your color palette in advance would help but if you didn't do that you would want to arrange the plants so the colors would flow and work well together. Bright colors would look best surrounded by duller or grayer colors.  You would want to have a variety of textures. You would make sure your garden wasn't too busy or fussy everywhere and that your garden had a 'quiet place' to rest.  These are just some of the things my friend told me she does with her garden designs.

A small section of my garden. Birdhouse will be mounted on a post

So this weekend I tried to paint with flowers. I had a tiny budget so it was challenging. Oh what I could do with an unlimited budget!!  The photo above shows just a tiny part of the work I did. If you can imagine this area was covered with weeds so this is progress. It is a painting/garden in progress and I look forward to the time when I will be able to go out and paint the flowers in my own garden!
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7 comments:

  1. Maria Bennett Hock10:56 PM

    Brilliant...love the concept and love the painting!

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  2. Karen1:53 PM

    Thanks Maria! If only I had an unlimited budget to but all the flowers I want!

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  3. wwloveslife3:46 PM

    Wow! Your friend/student thinks you did a great job. :)

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  4. robertsloan2art8:05 AM

    What a great concept! I like your start, it looks really good. I know how much work it must have taken de-weeding before you put in those plants.

    LOL your mentioning the budget. There are ways to cut costs on gardening. One tip my daughter picked up online and used effectively is to look for tomato plants that are tall and weedy, when they're discounted cheap. Then plant them but bury half the tall weedy stem so that it turns into more roots. They grow into lush, stronger plants than if you'd used normal tomato seedlings.

    It's not flowers but then, I remember in my grandmother's garden, the vegetable patch was laid out as beautifully as the flower patches.

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  5. Karen9:55 AM

    Thanks Wendy. I have a long way to go but I'll do the best I can with my tiny budget! It is fun to get into the dirt!

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  6. Karen9:56 AM

    Thanks for the tips Robert! I'll have to try that with the tomatoes. I have a big area that I want to naturalize with a wildflower meadow but it needs de-weeding first! I need more hours in the day to do it all!

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  7. wwloveslife3:32 PM

    It is a great start, that's the hard part! You are so creative that it will come naturally. Just paint with the flowers, every color, texture, value, or tone is another brush stroke!

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