{"id":578,"date":"2007-03-01T14:05:00","date_gmt":"2007-03-01T14:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/artstuff\/?p=578"},"modified":"2022-01-31T14:07:23","modified_gmt":"2022-01-31T14:07:23","slug":"the-colour-of-bluebells","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/artstuff\/2007\/03\/01\/the-colour-of-bluebells\/","title":{"rendered":"THE COLOUR OF BLUEBELLS<\/strong>"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Since Spring is around the corner (and Punxatwney Phil<\/a>, procrastinator of procrastinators, seer of seers, saw his shadow on Gobblers Knob on the 2nd of February, so decreed that an early Spring there would be), I thought it might be a good idea to raise the issue of Bluebells.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anyone who knows me will tell you that Bluebells are one of my ‘demons’, along with horses. I try to avoid them for all sorts of technical reasons, but often end up having to tackle them sooner or later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I always find bluebells tricky for one very big reason (amongst others); they never look the same colour twice. They seem (to me at least) to be of a colour difficult to pin down (are they purple? Bit more blue? No; too blue). I did a bit of research on this a year or so ago and discovered that other artists don’t seem to be able to agree on their colour either! Not only that – photographs from many different sources seemed to prove their illusiveness – very blue in some instance, very purple in others! People are very quick to criticise too, when they see pictures of bluebells (“No, they’re not right”, they’ll happily announce, “Never seen bluebells that colour”). Aaargh!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now, I pride myself on being able to reproduce pretty much any colour I need from the 8 I have in my palette, but when it comes to flowers, a different set of colours are needed. Flower painters know this, of course. The many delicate hues required to accurately portray our beautiful flora and fauna require a carefully chosen palette.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For the answer to the bluebells question, I turned to Wilfred Ball<\/strong>, who taught me at Spondon School and went on to publish many books on the subject of watercolour and achieve success as a professional painter. He sadly died in 2000, a great loss to the art world in my opinion – very much a ‘painters painter’, whose technical abilities were at times truly awesome. I had hoped to provide a link here to some of his work, but have failed to find a single online reference (other than to another Wilfred Ball 1853 – 1917, who I’ve never come across before). As a tribute to a great artist, here are a couple of fine examples of his work:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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So. The answer to the question? Cobalt Blue<\/strong> and Cobalt Violet<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Happy painting!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Since Spring is around the corner (and Punxatwney Phil, procrastinator of procrastinators, seer of seers, saw his shadow on Gobblers Knob on the 2nd of February, so decreed that an early Spring there would be), I thought it might be a good idea to raise the issue of Bluebells. Anyone who knows me will tell you that Bluebells are one...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":579,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,12,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-578","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-colours","category-tips","category-watercolour"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/artstuff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/578","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/artstuff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/artstuff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/artstuff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/artstuff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=578"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/artstuff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/578\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":580,"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/artstuff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/578\/revisions\/580"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/artstuff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/579"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/artstuff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=578"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/artstuff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=578"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/artstuff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=578"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}