Inspiration....a strange and elusive phenomenon.

My Hellebores watercolour 

What is inspiration?  It's a strangely elusive thing.  But feel that I caught sight of it the other day when I painted these hellebores from a photo I had taken in my garden against the low Winter sunlight.  

My drawing with some freshly picked hellebores from the garden

It helps if the flower that you're painting is resplendent in the garden as the hellebores are right now.  But the photo had a mood and atmosphere to it that I really wanted to try and capture.

Here are one or two of the stages of the painting.

First wash with masking in place.

Tentative filling in of negative spaces to test colours.

More washes in the background keeping light at top centre.

Masking removed, flowers painted carefully to leave light created by masking.

As the painting developed over a couple of days, I felt that the light effect had worked and that inspiration had visited the studio that day!