today’s picture shows you work in progress, an illustration of a gardenia flower, still missing some details on the flower side, and most of the leaves and background. The scene of the “making of” you find below. Gardenia in pot, Cintiq on the side. The scent, when sitting there, watching close and moving with the electronic paint brush forth and back, is intoxicating.

When publishing this picture, I used the header gardenia deep immersion.

Gardenia flower and cintiq: deep immersion

Thus, this is what I did yesterday, more or less. Today, I want to continue and I want to think a bit more about the fragrance counterpart. I was told the other day that my gardenia base, created with the goal to capture the flower’s head space scent, is pretty close to the real thing.

But this is only the first part of the story, and maybe it is the easier part. The trials so far to integrate this base in to a nice fragrance that leaves room for the gardenia, and lasts and blooms were quite a failure.  Thus, I need to continue there, playing and more importantly: Thinking.

Creating perfumes, for me, is a creative process that start primarily in my mind.

The same is true, by the way for painting the gardenia. Before drawing one line, I start by thinking about what I see. Then I start painting, until I come up with a base . This is the state where I am roughly right now. Then I look at the motive again, thinking what I really see. Or how I could see it. And then I start moving on.

Now, this is the ultimate nice feature of painting digitally. I can simply add another layer and try and play. I wish there was the same thing in perfumery.