We had snow again yesterday, but I’ve had spring flowers indoors for a couple of weeks now! If you buy a bag of spring bulbs while they’re on clearance at the end of the season and stash them in a shed for a few months, you can get them to bloom by just bringing them inside and giving them water. I’ve put mine in an assortment of containers, many of which aren’t even pots, and everything has gown up amazingly.
My real flowers have inspired a couple of sketchbook illustrations, one of them being these mixed-media daffodils. On the left is sketch as it looks in my sketchbook. It was a pretty short, timed exercise where I did the watercolor underpainting on the first morning, and a sketch overtop the next day. Next to it on the right, I have the same sketch after I scanned it and polished it up a bit in Photoshop. I drew in another layer of dark blue digitally, because I thought it needed it.
There is a similar mixed media illustration with hyacinths that I made at the same time, a which I’m planning on posting soon. I didn’t have any extra hyacinth bulbs to start indoors this year, but maybe by that time, there will be some in the yard!