Inspiration Journal: A passion for peonies

Inspiration Journal: A passion for peonies

I’ve recently been finding lots of inspiration from peonies. They’re one of my favourite flowers. Not only are they so bold and pretty, but they contain lots of frilly textures created by so many overlapping petals. I love the challenge of showing these textures whenever I paint a peony flower in watercolour.

Romantic and opulent, I just love to smell their sweetly scented fragrance as it transports me back to the walks I have taken around beautiful English country gardens. I find it so incredible the way they can do that.

Peony colours range from white, pink and red to coral, maroon and yellow and many peony flowers change colour as they open, so they are perfect for really experimenting with colour.

Peonies make beautiful cut flowers too. I was at the supermarket recently and found some really pretty pink peonies which I just had to buy to admire at home and use as painting inspiration!

I’ve really been enjoying painting them, and creating the look of their overlapping petals in my loose watercolour style. I loved dropping the gorgeous pink pigments onto the wash I’d laid down and seeing the paint travel across the paper. It really created lots of depth to my peony flower heads. Here’s how it turned out:

You can see the steps I followed to paint my peony flower in watercolour in this free step-by-step guide.

What have you been inspired by this month? Do you find peonies as mesmerising as I do? Let me know in the comments below…

Jennifer Rose x

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4 Comments

  1. Debra Doud on 13/08/2021 at 6:37 pm

    Love this and am happy to see that there will be more tutorials in your style of painting on Anna Mason. However I am having a hard time finding the ones specifically done by you, when I search through her Tutorials button. What is the easiest way to find YOUR tutorials on that website???

    • Jennifer on 14/08/2021 at 9:09 am

      Hi Debra, thank you for your kind comments. The facility to find my tutorials more easily is coming soon. Thank you for your feedback regarding this.

  2. Lydia Shemain on 13/08/2021 at 3:31 pm

    Excellent tutorial. Very pretty. Really liked your step by step. Thank you for including such detail Jennifer.

    • Jennifer on 13/08/2021 at 3:44 pm

      Thank you so kindly, Lydia. I’m so pleased you’ve enjoyed it.

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