It’s Earth Day – and I always celebrate by making some art honoring our beautiful planet! Today it’s a tulipscape – like a landscape, but with tulips as the focus, not just ‘land’! I went up to the Tulip Festival in Skagit Valley last week, and had such a lovely time painting there. I took my gouache kit and a bunch of different papers and went a little wild. And even sold one painting right off the easel!

Tutorial: Happy Earth Day! 14 Tips for painting a Tulipscape

Watch the video below and scroll to the end to leave comments or questions — or click HERE to watch it on YouTube and leave comments over there. I read both dutifully!

Tulipscapes

After many many years of visiting the tulip festival for one of my first plein air outings without a jacket (YAY!), I’ve decided my favorite medium to paint them is gouache – the brightest color, as well as a nice limited setup given the vast crowds. Both carrying it all out to the fields and making my setup so that a small child won’t just wander into an easel can be a problem. (And yes, you’d be surprised how many kids get away from their photo-op parents when tulips are involved!?) I do try to engage the kiddos in conversation to get them to just open their eyes and see me and my stuff.

So many tulips

I think one problem I’ve struggled with is that there are just SO many tulips. In this particular bed it was such a mix of types and colors that I needed to somehow simplify it. I’m not at all sure how I’d tackle this in watercolor – I’ve tried in past years but had huge messes! So this was one of the first years when I felt like I’d wrangled the tulips. The public commentary endorsed that, though more comments were made about my tree than my flowers, so there’s that 🙂 

This painting in the video is a version of the one on my easel above – that one was square, and I didn’t have time to fuss around with some large and more detailed tulips in the foreground. So this was fun getting to sit down in the studio and spend hours playing with the things I wished I’d had time for while outside.

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More tulips

The rest of these are either paintings created out in the field or at home…or a combo, as I started several and brought them home to finish. Each of these is available for purchase – by clicking HERE.