Yesterday I posted a collection of the pencils sketches I drew around May 23-24, as I prepared to include these flowers in my painting "Midsummer's Flowers." Today I am posting a second set of flower sketches for the painting, this time done in color with Sharpie pens on paper May 25-27. The painting is for show in a July with the theme of Shakespeare's play "Midsummer Night's Dream." I am basing my painting on a short poem from the play: "I know a bank where the wild thyme blows / Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows, Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine, With musk-roses and with eglantine." In my painting, the text of the poem is written around all four sides of the image, on a border painted to look like a picture frame. Within that frame, I will paint each of the six flowers in the style of botanical illustration. To do these sketches, I had to figure what Shakespeare understood by these names, which aren't all in contemporary use. (There is a whole little industry on botany in Shakespeare.) And then I looked at a lot of photos to figure out leaf shape, petal number, etc. and then made these sketches. Sometimes the photos didn't agree, especially on leaf shape, so I had to choose.
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