Rose Hips

Well Fall is finally here and the roses are packing on their fruit, I love to cut bouquets of these hips and decorate with them as well as make jam.

Watercolour Hips ~ Sigrid Frensen

I finally managed to finish something again. And it was about time too. For the first time I painted rose hips with my watercolours. I already did hips in graphite, coloured pencils and even with pen & ink. But never watercolour. The Botanical Artists forum on Facebook has a bunch of very active and motivating members and when one starts to paint apples, we all start to paint apples. When one mentions she wants to paint hips I too want to paint hips.... It's fun though, to see all the different approaches to the same subject.

For the first time. And it was nice work. I really enjoyed doing it. I chose the tiny hips of Rosa 'Francis E. Lester'. This rose blooms with many clouds of small flowers during the summer and gets an enormous amount of orange hips in Autumn.

This is on Lanaquarelle HP, paper size 4"x 6".

The Bounties of the Season - Linda C. Miller

Photo Trumpet Creeper

While “calendar” fall begins next month, many of our blooming beauties are already bearing the fruits of their labor. With the help of their pollinators and even on their own, many of the spring and summer flowering flora are growing fruits of many shapes and many colors. Looking up, tree branches that flowered this spring are beaming with their “green” fruits such as the oaks, pomegranates, and persimmons. Why the beeches have already dropped their brown nuts. Today while on my walk, I spied the long green fruit of the Trumpet Creeper almost five inches long!

Over the last two years, I have painted a number of fruits and nuts but it was while I was taking a workshop last fall that I realized how “unnoticed” these subjects can be. It was when Lucy, a dear fellow student of 87 years said, “Now Linda, why are you going to paint those weeds?” looking upon the Horse Nettle fruits on my table. I don’t remember saying anything but when I brought back my work the next week, she then saw what I had seen in those two decaying stems.
Horse Nettle Fruit, Watercolor on HP Paper

I now realize that it’s the naturalist in me that shows up in my work. Whether I am painting from a garden specimen such as the rose hips and including the remains of a spider’s web or the decaying fruit of a mettlesome native wildflower, I so enjoy showing others the intricacies of this amazing world.

Rose Hips, Watercolor on HP Paper

Have a great day with nature!  Linda

Artist, Naturalist and Instructor

Williamsburg, Virginia

Choices - Sigrid Frensen

I love Autumn. But then again, I suppose all botanical artists love autumn. So much going on, so many beautiful colours, not to mention all the fruits and seeds...
In my previous post you could read I'm working a bit more with watercolours now. Also trying out some things to combine the coloured pencils and watercolours. Valerie Oxley told us that it shouldn't matter how we come to a good result, as long as we get a good result. I got to experiment with that when I made a watercolour of the rose hips of one of my roses, Rosa moyesii 'Geranium'.

I started to make a watercolour of it. But in the end I wasn't totally happy with the way it looked. I worked a bit too much in the red and it got a bit grainy and muddy. I remembered what Valerie told us and thought 'why not'.
I got some coloured pencils out and saved the painting. It looks much better now and I'm glad I did what I did.

Next I tried to make a painting of a rose hip I picked from my Rosa glauca. That didn't work. AT ALL. It was hopeless, even my pencils couldn't make that one better. So this time I made the rose hip again, now using only coloured pencils. Sometimes things just don't go as you plan it I guess. But it doesn't matter... as long as you get a nice result in the end.

Now I need to think about what to make next... it's autumn and there's so much choice...