Inspire Me Thursday - Five Senses

This is my piece for this weeks Inspire Me Thursday

The challenge was to create a piece using all five senses, see, touch, smell, hear and taste, a tricky one to say the least, especially as I have been suffering with a bad cold so two of them are out of action anyway!

After much deliberation I decided to use the photo posted last month as a starting point; I was originally going to turn it into an abstract cadence painting but I thought it might be more interesting to use these same collage techniques in a more traditional painting instead.

See - I kept the photo at a distance to prevent myself seeing the detail, just as a general memory aid as I wanted the painting to be about the feel of the place and the moment in time as I remembered it rather than just being a faithfull reproduction of the photo.

I started with a pale blue background and filled in the main colour areas ready for the collage sections. Touch - The paint was applied with a dry brush and stippled and dragged across the canvas, giving a texture feel. Once dry the collaged tree areas were glued on and these are smooth and glossy in contrast.

Smell - as I said before my senses are not at their best at the mo and I certainly can't smell anything around me whilst painting but at this point in the painting I can already remember what it was like to stand at that spot the other week, to smell the mustyness of the leaves and decay of the winter and then to feel the warmth of the sun and know that spring is on it's way.

After adding more collaged strips of paper to give the impression of branches and to adhere the trees to the painted 'leaves' I added dried black tea leaves to the verge areas to suggest fallen leaves. Hear - they even made a similar scrunching noise as I crushed them between my fingers.

Taste - I would like to say here that I enjoyed a nice cup of tea made from the same tea leaves but it might as well been a cup of hot water. Oh well! Once dried I finished the painting by going over the tea leaves with a dab of burnt orange and developed the tops of the trees, the final result is at the start of this post.

I really enjoyed this challenge; I've never combined techniques before and I can see this being used again in future pieces. Check out how others have been inspired this week here.