This week’s challenge for 52Frames is Extreme Closeup. The suggestion is to create an image that occupies the whole frame. I did a real closeup of a leaf for an earlier challenge, so did not want to do the same thing. It would be fair to say I was not feeling very inspired this week, and I also had a small operartion on my right hand making it quite sore.

I looked round the garden and found several possible flowers to use. These included Tulips, Fritillary and Erythronium. I love the Fritillary but could not quite move away from the Rennie Mackintosh version. I settled on the Erythronium. I used watercolour for this image. I applied what I thought was a fairly dark wash on the background. However when I had almost completed the flower it was all the same tone so I applied darker paint and think the flower stands out much better.

Details and low lights have been applied with pencil and water soluble crayon. Highlights have been added with Gouache. I wasn’t sure about this but it really lifted the flower.

Watercolour and water soluble crayon