Paper picture - Snowdrops

I had the most inspiring book for Christmas - Cut Paper Pictures by Clover Robin.

Her method is very simple - paint the collage paper yourself in the colours and style to match the picture you want to create. Don't know why I didn't think if this before. A lot of the ideas in the book are flowers, foliage, birds and insects as well as landscapes so this inspired me to make some pictures of the flowers growing in my garden.

I tried out her technique by more or less copying her image of astrolamaria:

As I had some orange ones in a vase on the table I copied their colouring and used Inktense pencils to add the speckles:

I was quite pleased with it but the stamens and pollen specs were so fiddly. I realised that my tendency is to work small.

So onto my next piece - I choose snowdrops as they were looking lovely in the garden:

I chose to paint the papers on lining paper - a trick I picked up from my City and Guilds course as it absorbs paint easily without wrinkling. For snowdrops I only really had to paint a variety of greens as I used ordinary white card for the flowers. 

I took inspiration from another botanical artist I came across - Mary Delaney - and chose to collage onto a black background. Mary Delaney lived in the 18th Century and created nearly 1000 'paper mosaicks' using tissue paper layered up on a board coloured with india ink. Here is one of her lilies:

So here is the final picture, which I am very pleased with. It is A4 size to force myself to work bigger and hopefully it bears some resemblance to the photo from my garden.