Floating on Air – an Acrylic Painting

Hello everyone. I finished this acrylic painting quite recently. But I had started it a few weeks ago . And I had begun seeing pictures in my mind a little while before that. Pictures of things floating on air – first of all fluffy, cold snowflakes drifting down from a peaceful , warm sky . Then I visualized white flowers or petals slowly sinking on to a dry, dark landscape. To be honest, the inspiration for this idea was easy to see. Because every time I look out of my kitchen window, I see glorious, blooming begonia flowers in the windowbox. Actually I was inspired earlier by my flowers in another planting arrangement here – a painting in a very different mood.

Blooming Begonias

As you can see, these beautiful flowers with their delicate layers of petals are very appealing. However, when I picked up my paintbrush, I had decided on the main idea of something white , drifting down. Also, I was clear that that I wanted a subtle pink sky above a grey expanse – perhaps landscape or rolling waves ? After all, that’s the image that came to me. But, I kept seeing snowflakes or clouds, balloons or parachutes. And that’s what took me so much time to plan this painting. Well, a long time for me anyway.

The Close Ups

I hope that I managed to capture the light, drifting quality of these white objects. In effect, I was thinking of all of the ideas I had at first. For example, clouds, snowflakes and petals, and so on. Although, obviously, the actual form they took was the shape of flowers.

A Flower Floating on Air

As it happens, the actual painting of the white flower shape was quite difficult. In order to give it some idea of form, I had to introduce other colours to suggest the layers of ‘ petals ‘. Hopefully, you can see this in the detail above. Well, I tried ! But , I don’t think this particular inspiration has finished with me yet. And, I might have to work with it again !