Pollen - Gold

Gold dust for the center of flowers

A golden yellow belongs to plants that flower in full. Yarrow forms flat umbels made up of dozens of small blossoms and a sunflower turns its whole head toward the light, and one thing joins the two: the color is richest in the middle. The powder in this shade therefore serves not only as a dot but often covers the whole upper surface of an inflorescence.

It is precisely with umbel-bearing plants that the advantage of a loose material over paint shows. A coat of varnish applied would fill the surface and the area would lose its fine texture, whereas the grains of the powder create texture instead. From the distance a model is looked at, the area then reads as a cluster of individual blossoms, not as a colored piece of material.

Small handwork

The procedure that proves itself is this: the top of an inflorescence is coated with glue with a thin brush, the whole part is turned over and dipped into a dose poured out, after a moment it is pulled out and the rest is knocked off by tapping on the edge of the container. Anyone building a whole bed saves time by preparing more inflorescences at once and dipping them one after another.

Inside the package there is 29.4 cm3 of material, that is 1.8 cubic inches. At the ordinary size of doses that means a supply for years. Only as much is poured out as is used up straight away, so that remains of glue or other shades do not get into the main package.

Finally a practical note on planning a bed. Plants of one kind never flower in one plane, so it is worth standing the stems at slightly different heights and giving only some of them a rich shade. The rest are left paler, so that a scene has depth even at the moment a viewer looks at it straight from above.