Expressive Hydrangeas

Capturing the blues

I've spent most of the afternoon painting the beautiful blue hydrangeas at the french gîte we are currently staying at. Hydrangeas are a firm favourite of mine, I love the variety of colours that they come in and the colour combinations that you can get in a single plant.

Hydrangea (/haɪˈdreɪndʒiə/; common names hydrangea or hortensia) is a genus of 70–75 species of flowering plants native to southern and eastern Asia (China, Japan, Korea, the Himalayas, and Indonesia) and the Americas. By far the greatest species diversity is in eastern Asia, notably China, Japan, and Korea. Most are shrubs 1 to 3 meters tall, but some are small trees, and others lianas reaching up to 30 m (98 ft) by climbing up trees.
Source Wikipedia

For this piece I lay my watercolours out on the grass and sat underneath the hydrangea plants painting.

I wet the paper and allowed watercolours to bleed into each other. I then left this to dry before working over the top in white pen.


I then built up layers of white, green, blue and light blue paint in expressive lines to suggest tone and movement.

'Expressive Hydrangeas' -2017