My latest obsession has been with flowers. For the past week I have been focused on replicating the style of old Dutch floral paintings. I can easily say that this has been a very fun experiment.

In my own personal experience, I find that the hardest aspect of any still life is the backdrop. For some reason I always struggle finding a backdrop that I really like. Perhaps this is because I usually use a pre-made backdrop that I bought online, or simply a solid black or white background. I wanted this time to be different. This time I decided to focus on creating my own backdrop from scratch.

After looking around online I came up with the idea of dying a canvas painters tarp. The goal was to take two painters tarps and tie dye them between two colors (the color of the tarp itself and either blue or brown). I bought the tarps from my local Home Depot. For this project I decided to use two 5 ft by 5 ft tarps, although I now wish I used one size larger. It was a bit difficult to fit everything in on such a small area. The dye is from a company called Rit which can be found at your local arts and crafts store. I decided to use denim blue and dark brown for the colors. The instructions for dying the cloth can be a little confusing at first, especially since I went a little off script. After letting they dry I was quite surprised with the results.

I decided to tie the ends of the tarps while submerging them in the dye. This resulted in a sort of monochromatic tie dye effect that was almost exactly what I was looking for. In my opinion the blue tarp came out a lot nicer than the brown one. The brown dye had an interesting affect on the tarp, turning it a very interesting shade of red. It almost reminds me of the soil around the Gettysburg PA area.

With the backgrounds complete it was time to shoot. I tried a mixture of different flower arrangements and different backdrops. I can easily say I am happier with the images shot on the blue background, but the brown ones turned out pretty cool too. I especially like how the tie dye created a sort of circular pattern on the brown one. Regardless I am quite happy with the results.