Here’s my attempt at my square (5) of the poppies painting. As you can see the image I was working from had a great big yellow five in it, so I ignored that. On the original photo the colour balance is more muted, but somehow on the one I was coding from the grass is quite orange. I decided to draw with felt pens, permanent markers and coloured pencils. It’s obviously too green, but it’s hard to layer up colour with pencils, they go shiny and form a waxy surface. After I finished this I added a few streaks of orange ermanent marker but they are too defined, so I left it at this. Positioning of the figure and hill is difficult. Hope when it’s added to the rest it will be OK.
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six weeks ago I ordered our hanging baskets from a little nursery in the countryside. It’s actually based at a small farm near Silverdale in Newcastle-under-Lyme. It’s set back off a country road and is basically a little parking area surrounded by greenhouses and shaded concrete platforms, each of which is covered in garden plants. Most of the normal plants seem to have been sold but we took some clematis, begonia, a rose and other plants as well as the hanging baskets. We have been going there for about six years, and each year we get what we need for the garden. Now it’s a case of rearranging plants and hanging the baskets up. You can see we’ve gone a bit mad. But as we haven’t been spending much lately it did mean we could afford it.