Enthousiast over Holland

Created for the art competition Kleurenpracht for 2023.

The competition organisers very kindly decided to upgrade my entry from the amateur section to the professional section.

Story

The tulip in the foreground is one that I grew in my own garden. I enjoyed being able to use it in this piece and try to capture it's shape and how the light interacts with it. I like how the composition came together to celebrate this humble tulip and give it a second life.

Technical

For this piece I enjoyed experimenting with strong vibrant colours. I tried to make use of complimentary colour relationships in places to exaggerate the colours. I found this to be particularly successful between the purple and yellow tulips in the top left.

I was pleased with how the clouds came out. I made a choice to go more stylised than I normally would with them, as I pushed them more towards a "Studio Ghibli" feel. I like the result of this, as I can often get too caught up with realism when actually a more stylised approach can result in a more pleasing result.

This was the first time I've created a piece on a deadline. This was a good learning experience for me as I always find it hard to know when to stop a painting. So with this work I made more of a conscious effort to keep all areas of the canvas to an acceptable level so that it was possible to enter it in to the competition if I ran out of time. While there are a few areas I would've liked more time on, overall I'm very happy with the end result, especially as this was a medium-large canvas where I was ambitious with the number of elements I tried to include.