Preliminaries & Preparations
A project I am really excited about is a fanciful painted rug for an in-home library. This is an interesting space: it used to be an open floor plan with the living room and hall connected. Its floors had been a very dark blue color so the homeowner, in order to brighten the area, quickly painted a pale yellow 'rug' with green leaves over most of the floor. In the intervening years a wall was built to make the living room into a more private space which has bisected its original yellow painting. Now the room is being converted into a library. The plan originally was to paint the entire floor white for a fresh clean look. But as I got underway I was lamenting covering the interesting yellow area. I had a new idea to paint over all of the blue areas, and make a white border against the new wall to create the appearance of a smaller rug for the library space alone.
I love the interesting finish this floor has, so for all of my paintings I lay a base coat of deep blue and roughly brushed on a pale yellow so I could truly create a realistic rendering of the finished project. Above is a practice and idea page.
Design on left would be humongous when scaled up to full size. Paintings above and below are not to scale; I just wanted to have examples of different variations on the same theme before creating my final sketch.
Roses in the middle surrounded by lilac, pansy, forget-me-not, foxglove, wild strawberry, dandelion, queen Anne's lace, morning glory, and daisies. Also included are a salamander, a snake, bees, blue moths and a couple of little frogs. My previous paintings had me creating white flowers with hints of color; in this third piece I experimented with painting flowers in full color and then washing over the entire piece with watered down paint. It ended up too green, but this was my favorite method.
After my paintings were reviewed, the final design is a combination of sketch 2-b with the border of flowers growing toward the center, and large roses free-floating in the middle from sketch 3, but without branches. This is also to scale, so I can draw a grid over this piece and transfer it to the actual floor. However... it is still difficult to envision what this is going to look like full size, so I am going into this with the understanding that my design might have to change on the fly, and I'm okay with that.