A Carpet of Purple Kangaroos

A Carpet of Purple Kangaroos

There's a magical place not far from me.  Like most people with magical places nearby, it tends to be neglected from my schedule for long stretches of time.  When I do go, I always find something amazing.  Flocks of tiny little green frogs clinging to wetland grasses.  Dragonflies perched on thin twigs.  This time it was wild-flower laden fields turned purple with tiny, fuzzy flower heads.  In the midst of the purpleness, there were kangaroos so prolific that their little ears sticking out of the mass of purple looked like little brown leaves twitching in the breeze. 

What is that beautiful purple flower, you might ask?  I'm not 100% sure about what type of flower it is, other than the fact it is classified as "unwanted weed"!

"You would think I would be used to seeing kangaroos," an acquaintance remarked recently, as we discussed the kangaroos that frequented their yard and neighborhood round-about on a dawn and dusk basis, "but every time I see them I still get excited!"  I feel the same way.  In Australia, it's always exciting for me to spot a kangaroo...or a cockatoo, a kookaburra, or even one of those notoriously unwanted rabbits that hang out at the end of my own street.  In the U.S., it's like spotting a deer or a turkey. 

I'll start you off easy. How many kangaroos can you spot?

Ready for the challenge round?  When resting, the 'roos blend in superbly well!

 

 

The first time I saw them amidst the purple flowers I knew it was going to be painted...even though that visit was in the rain and camera-less.  

I did some planning in my sketchbook.  

First just a messy layout and color-scheme plan.

Then a more detailed version (accompanied by notes to myself).

I'd just finished a painting with an insect and flower blossoms in a fairly realistic style, so I was ready to do something different.  I wanted the painting to have a child-like feel to it, to go with the child-like excitement that comes with seeing massive fields of purple full of kangaroos (given how many I could see and count, I wouldn't be surprised if the total number of kangaroos present was between eighty and one hundred...we are talking about a BIG open space and a LOT of marsupials).  So I channeled my inner cartoonist and my inner Heather Brown (a surf-art artist from Hawaii--see the link at the bottom).  

Base-layer, pencil sketch, and sky started!  This painting is progressing!

I chose yellow as a base-layer for a couple reasons.  One, yellow plus blue equals green and there's a lot of green hiding around those purple flowers and in the trees in the background.  Two, there are a lot of yellow flowers in the field.  I know, I was tempted to ignore them in the face of all that delicious purpleness, but that yellow adds a lot of life to the end painting.  After the base-layer was dry, I penciled in my over-all image.  

I really liked the picture at this point.  Something about all that yellow and yellow-green together.

Have you ever painted one of those "do it yourself stain-glass light-catchers"?  The kind you hang in your window that is shaped like a butterfly or a lighthouse with a sunrise beside it?  That's what painting this felt like.  That, and perhaps quilting, because all the objects in the scene were so simplified that I could have cut them out of fabric and pieced them together. 

Yes, I do have a studio space...but the table is just so much nicer to work at...especially during the day with all the morning and afternoon light from the window. 

Almost done.  The painting had a nice softness to it at this point...but I kept going. 

Outlining everything was a slow and tedious job that required a steady hand, a couple breaks, and making sure I had just the right about of paint on my brush.  The painting lost its softness...but the black outlines solidified the stained glass feeling and created great contrast between all the different objects.  

And there she is!  All done and ready to hang on my studio wall.

It's a painting that makes me smile to see it, because my photos might capture the details of the place better, but my painting captures the emotion of the moment more accurately. 

LINKS:

• Heather Brown's website (Click through one or more of the galleries on it...you'll want to take a tropical vacation straight away!)
• I'm not necessarily good about being able to identify my local plants.  In this case there are a couple of lookalikes (all of which are considered invasive weeds) but my best guess identification is that of blue billy goat weed.  The Lucid Central website had the best variety of useful-for-identification photos on their fact-sheets, including a photo showing two of the lookalikes side-by-side.