Spring, Where are You?

In an attempt to combat the Lockdown Kilos, I've attempted to go out for a walk of an evening, unfortunately still wrapped up in thick jackets, scarves, gloves and a very unflattering hat which makes my face look like a huge round pasty pancake. Spring, where are you? Where is the cherry blossom? The chirping birds, verdant life bursting out all over? The only thing that’s bursting here are the seams to my overstretched leggings! 

I want to be submersed in pink petals, yellow blooms and bushels of violent green leaves ...... you're late spring, and I'm desperate. To be honest I discovered with this painting how tricky working with pinks is. In painting we talk about values, pink doesn’t give you much of a range, they are very mid-range with the pales soon turning to white and dark is basically magenta, I personally find pinks, especially on blossom tricky in comparison to purples for example ... the spectrum  from white over lilac, to violet (both warm and cold) and then into deep purple is fabulous but pink is pink is pink.

 Love it as a colour, probably because my mum hated it, I was always dressed in blue as a baby, which meant everyone thought I was a boy. It is interesting that blue for boys and pink for girls wasn’t always the case! Gender specific colours didn’t exist in the past and if you look at historical paintings you will find many in which boys are dressed resplendently in pink and girls in blue, in the early 1900's most etiquette guides suggested dressing boys in pink because it’s a strong colour and blues for girls because it's softer. So maybe mum was right after all! 

The first mini signs of approaching spring, I did manage to see on my fat-reducing walk ( to reduce the amount of podge that I've got I'd have to walk to Australia and back) ........ nope not pink but yellow! Teeny, tiny daffodils, looking rather apologetic and not bursting enthusiastically into bloom, can’t blame them it’s still baltic here (as they say in Scotland).