In my Etsy store, I have a listing for a 15"x22" watercolor titled "L'eau de Parfum." I gave this a French name because I've always loved the sound and look of French - so much so that I studied the language for five years in middle school and high school. I particularly associate French with all things beautiful, decorative, and stylish, and thought that this pairing of abstracted flowers with one of my Adobe Illustrator designed patterns would make a very "French" composition.
L'eau de parfum is the name that the French give to perfumes, to describe a strong concentration of fragrance. L'eau de toilette is perfume with a weaker concentration of fragrance. The word l'eau in these phrases means "water" - another reason I was drawn to this phrase for this painting, given the watery blue color palette I used.
"L'eau de Parfum" is available for purchase through my Etsy store.
Here are some details of the painting:
As you can see in some of the detail shots, though this painting is mostly watercolor, there are also some places where I used colored pencils to add highlights and shadows, particularly around the yellow centers of the pink flowers, and on the pink petals.
I also "splattered" some pink and purple pigment onto the blue background to add to the "watery" texture of the painting.
This painting is more abstract than many of my works of art. The flowers blend into each other in translucent layers in an almost unfinished way, and are not completely defined or rendered with great dimensionality. The colored pencil details only manage to flatten the flowers further, so that the petals look more like pieces of tissue paper collaged together than actual flowers. This, coupled with their disembodied nature (they are not on stems, but merely "floating" in the abstract patterned blue background) gives them a kind of "fake" or ephemeral quality.
Like perfumes meant to imitate the smell of flowers, this painting is only a screen, a 2D image, of what a true bouquet or garden might produce with its three dimensions of vivid color and fragrance.
"L'eau de Parfum" is available for purchase through my Etsy store.
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