In Cape May last month, I stopped into one of the boutique stores on the mall and spotted black and white floral silhouettes on stretched canvas. I loved the look, but the paintings were $25 each, and I didn’t have any of the plants in my own garden.
So I went to the crafts store and picked up a 2-pack of canvases for about $7. I used inexpensive acrylic craft paint (under $2 a bottle) to create a washed-out cream background on each canvas, which I let completely dry. On the next sunny afternoon, I traced silhouettes cast by a red salvia and a peony in my garden in pencil. Then I mixed a custom gray with hints of turquoise, which I used to fill in the silhouettes. It took a few layers to fill in the silhouettes completely, about two hours per painting. The result? Inexpensive art featuring real plants in my own garden – definitely not something I’m going to find in a store!
