Struggling with Passion

Pastel-Passiflora7websize

 

This is color seduction. This plant is positively erotic, passionate, complex and entirely wild.

I bought two.  Each of the Passiflora pace my garden by the east fence. Before I even put the second plant in the ground, orange colored butterflies were already congregating around my shoulders. They laid eggs immediately.  The tiny “Sith” catepillars grew large within a week! That’s passion of the butterfly.

The Passiflora is a vine plant. In time, I expect this plant to cover the brown reed fence with their heavy green leaves and pop passion flowers.  Study of the flower was a visually exciting experience. It has three levels of color and line explosions: the lower are the base purple leaves; the tendrils which are like purple orgasmics and the mid center. The center have large lobal pistils. Everything in this plant is sexual. The lobes are succulent juicy looking; the tendrils are the wild hair of a gorgeous wanton woman; the base leaves are the steady gentlemen and ladies holding the rest in security.

Fear was my first response. My reaction would be the same if I met a man that was too gorgeous, too sexy, too passionate…oh my…I was not sure I was all that capable to meet this passion’s demands. It took me at least three days to complete this piece. Instead of meeting its perfection with precision, I chose to jump on top of it.

The top position enabled me to see the three layers and simplify the wrangled lovely locks.  I kept to the steady image development by drawing shapes with Nupastels on Bienfang Charcoal paper. When I sufficiently laid in the base colors, the edges of the Nupastels brightened up the center in strokes.

I sprayed it with Krylon fixative only twice. When the paper is saturated with actual pigment build-up, I spray. The spray settles the dust and pigment. The Krylon is my favorite fixative because it has a low color-change effect. It helped me build more color.

The next layers I built up with Sennelier but this wasn’t the format for those lovely pastels. Instead, I turned to the Pan Pastels using the applicator. Ah…that had the right effect…soft pastels put where I wanted them to go. Finally, I finished it with the Nupastels: my favorite workhorse pastels.

I had to quit when I was out of breath looking for more areas to pastel. This lovely passion flower will be revisited another day. I yet have to learn how to comb the lion locks with color pastel.

 

1 thought on “Struggling with Passion”

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

three × 1 =