Midnight flowers

All the illustrations I am working on at the moment are very dark – not necessarily dark in nature, but scenes set in the dead of night so everything is murky and lamp-lit. Mostly I am picking up where my christmas card designs left off and, although I really like them and feel like I could quite happily keep doing them this way for ever, I realise that when they are hanging all together they are going to start to look extremely “samey” — like a big browny-black mass. But my problem is that my theme is “A Midnight Picnic” and are all woodland or forest settings; black, murky backgrounds with fairy lights and japanese lanterns, fire-flies and camp-fires.
So this morning I was staring off into space wondering what on earth I should do to brighten up the show a bit when my eye fell on my old note book that I used to take along to textile design classes last year. The scribble would have originated as an idea for a piece of repeat pattern fabric (such as the one I did finally finish) but it occurred to me that a wild woodland floor covered in some kind of creeping mass or weird flowers would be quite bright and colourful- even lit by moon or lamp, and the more I thought about it the more I liked the idea of a huge piece covered in these flowers with picnickers nestled amongst them.

So there you go. A note about nothing except what is occupying my head today. I will start it tonight after Amelia goes to bed, if we are not watching Blade Runner which we never did get to last night.