As much as I hate the heat of summer I love the spring and summer flowers. (I am a notorious winter, cold weather lover and find myself energised by low, dark skies, pouring rain, and freezing cold).  The nice thing about living in Zululand is our summers, though hot and humid have a high rainfall, so at least I get the rain with the heat, which makes the awful summer humidity somewhat bearable.

This crazy cascade of spring flowers is inspired by those bright new greens, limes and yellows of spring in new bloom, and that fresh summer colour that makes a bright sunny day even brighter and happier.

I used a variety of techniques to create the above effect.

Thick impasto paint applied with a palette knife.  For this type of paint application I always use thick body artist quality paints, because they hold their shape well when daubed on with a palette knife.

A marine sponge that had either a light dusting of paint on to create a soft stippled effect for Queen Annes lace, or a thicker application of paint on the sponge to create a more dense chunky look like one might see with a hydrangea.

Acrylic paint that is not artist quality, but rather student quality acrylic does not have a thick body to the paint.  This means it doesn’t always hold its shape when applied thickly and can drool in uncontrolled directions. This effect may or may not be something you want to use on your canvas. The student quality paint does not hold its shape quite as well, and while I don’t usually use student quality paints for palette knife work, I deliberately used it in certain areas of this canvas so it would drool with the idea that an organic flower shape would develop accidentally through the behaviour of the paint.