Growing Poppies

One season I tossed a packet of poppy flowers into my garden.  By springtime, a sea of red field poppies bloomed in great gestural sweeps across my front yard.  It was very eye-catching and since our unpaved town road was well-traveled by neighbors out for a walk, I had many passersby stopping to marvel at the display.

Tips for growing poppies

• Sow seeds in the fall. Annual poppies are better sown from seed then trying to plant start, as their roots are very delicate and hard to transplant.
• Pick a bed with good drainage and sun. Poppies grow well in gravel or other seed bed that has good drainage.
• Plant plenty of seeds. Poppies will sprout as soon as the ground warms, but they may not survive a hard late frost, and depending on rainfall you may lose a few, so plant plenty.
• Don't overwater. Annual poppies are fairly drought tolerant, I have found.  It is usually after a really good rain that they tend to all flop over, so don't go crazy with the overhead watering.

Painting Poppies

Planting poppies is one of the easier garden tasks on my growing to-do list, now they mostly reseed themselves. It is also a flower that has become one of my favorite subjects to paint.  Watching a sea of poppies swaying in the early gentle summer breeze reminds me of a corp de ballet. Like a tightly coordinated group of dancers, they sway to the same music. Capturing the delicate nature of the petals and the seemingly impossible combination of such large, floppy flower heads on top of the slenderest of stems is a captivating painting endeavor.  Acrylic paint is the ideal medium for this subject as I try to replicate the overall movement of the flowers, down to the intricate details of how the petals layer over one another and bend and crinkle.

Tips for painting poppies

• Start with the general masses. With a bed of poppies, concentrate on the groups of poppies as one shape. Count the space without poppies, or negative shapes, as another shape.
• Take note of the direction the flowers are leaning and let your brushstrokes mimic that motion.
• For a strong composition, ensure a good balance of light and dark areas. Plan this in a thumbnail sketch or work it out in layers. Acrylics dry fast, allowing for evaluation and adjustments to achieve the desired contrast.
• The overall design of the painting is more important than the detail of the flowers themselves. Getting good details of your poppies is rewarding, but in the end, a strong design where your eye stays captivated by the composition ends up a better painting.
• Use hard molding paste mixed into paint color to capture the details of the flowers. I use a painting knife to scoop up the paint and, with as few motions as possible, I try to capture the directions in which the petals are laying. Any excess paint can be swiped away from the painted flower to correct the overall shape.