Better late…

Better late than never, here’s a very Happy New Year to all the lovely fellow bloggers around the world! May your blogs be ever fresh and fulfilling to make.

The last six weeks or so have been a very busy time (and I’m sure I’m not alone in this), hence the lack of blogging from me – I’ve only managed to squeeze in a handful of little pictures, but here’s one I rustled up after Christmas in a rare quiet moment.

I’m always struggling with greens, and so I thought I’d try to create them from scratch this time using the colour grid I made in the Autumn as reference. It definitely helped when choosing which blues and yellows to mix. I couldn’t quite decide how to attack the foliage shapes (which were bay and holly from the garden) and so there’s a variety of approaches here, some more successful than others. I think this experiment will be useful in the future.

Once I had the foliage in, my problems moved to the reds; part of the joy of the arrangment was the contrast between the shiny reds of the ribbon, pot and candle, and the very dark greens of the leaves. When it came to it, I couldn’t decide how to mix the darkest and mid-toned areas of red ribbon and pot, and consequently ended up muddying what should have been quite a vibrant area of the picture. Almost all the lovely fresh bright reds disappeared. But  heigh ho, these things happen when you’re learning (which is all the time).

In case you’re wondering, the yellow areas next to the candle are gold-sprayed pine cones. Enough said.

On the plus side, I do like the shadow on this picture – it came without any bother at all!