Lacecap hydrangeas

I went to this gorgeous garden with my mother-in-law recently and loved looking at these lacecap hydrangeas. They're just so delicate and unique! I hardly took any pictures of them though because I thought they'd be rather frustrating to paint. And they don't make for a good Georgia O'Keeffe style, like I prefer. Well, I wasn't wrong about either assumption, but I painted one nonetheless because as I said, they're just so unique! Roses I've painted and will paint again. Same with lilies and tulips and sunflowers. But never one of these. And they're cool. Can you tell I was almost equally drawn to the bright leaves? Hopefully they don't take over the painting entirely.

Yellow?

Hmmm...I didn't want to do another dark background so thought I'd try something different. Yellow seemed perfect to bring out the yellow in the bees and in the centers of the flowers, and might even help give the feel of the serious heat that was killing me when I took the picture.

Not at all sure I like it though. My husband told me to put it down and assured me I'd like it better in the morning. It's been nearly 24 hours now and I'm no more sure about it. We'll have to see how long it lasts or if I just end up painting over it!

Purple Flower time-lapse

I'd been waiting on some music from my talented brother to finish up this video, but decided to just go ahead and use his music on a later video. Gets a little crazy with my other hand spinning the aquabord around to give me a better angle for my painting hand. Ha! It's kind of a funny idea, but it's not always easiest to paint with your painting right side up!

Aquabord instruction Video - Tulips

After another go at the Ampersand Aquabord, I felt like I'd learned a couple of things so added my hints to the beginning of my time-lapse video in case they can help anybody else. I was a little worried - the painting went through a lot of stages of ugly along the way but pulled together at the end and now I kind of like it. Isn't it funny when that happens? That's why you can't give up early in the process, no matter how discouraging it may be! It's super helpful to have somebody nearby to remind you of this in case one of those "stages of ugly" make you forget. 

 Oh and another thing that is great about the Aquabord is how easy it it to lift color. It just comes right off! Hope you enjoy the video and please leave any suggestions if you have them!

Oh and they really are tulips as the title says, they're just super open with the petals about ready to fall off. Makes them look a lot less like tulips but also made the deep yellow a lot more visible. 

Lilies in the Park

Almost repeated the miracle of finishing a painting in a day! And honestly, I could force the issue and finish it now but I haven't decided what color the background should be and I don't want to do something I'll regret tomorrow.

 

I had planned on leaving it white but I started painting it at a park while my kids played and I was constantly distracted looking up to check on them and being bumped when my littlest finagled her way onto my lap and so I ended up with some splatters from my water cup. And once that same tiny girl accidentally grabbed a wet edge and smeared it so white is out. What to do instead...?

Rose-Needs-a-Name

Wahoo! I don't think I've ever completed a whole painting in one day. I'm trying to get a bunch of small (8x10) paintings done for a festival I'll be in at the end of August, and thought I'd see if I could complete one in a day. And I did! Not sure how many times I'll be able to repeat it but I did try to relax and just keep going instead of worrying about getting it perfect. I think sometimes we put this stress on ourselves to basically make every painting into a masterpiece and that's just silly. 

So it's not a masterpiece but it's done!

And I think that's enough sometimes too.

Once a night owl, always a night owl

You know how great it would be to be one of those people that only need four or five hours of sleep a night? Alas, I am not one of them. Not even close. But what are you going to do when you don't get to start painting until after 9 PM and then you're on a roll and if you can just keep going, there will be no more of that darn greenery to paint tomorrow?

You stay up until it's done. 

And then tomorrow, you get to look at the painting with fresh eyes. And with the help of some chocolate and a lot of peanut butter, you might just get lucky and get it finished. I know, I know I'll regret staying up late but when you're on a roll, you're on a roll and it's really hard to restart dead inspiration. How does it work for you? Can you just turn your motivation/inspiration on and off at will? Or do you have to build up that momentum like me? And does it get harder or easier the longer the project goes on? For me it's much harder. I'll go ahead and blame my attention span on the quick convenience of iPhones and Google searches but I frankly cannot fathom how the old masters used to spend years and years on a painting or sculpture. Although I suppose if you had deadlines that stretched on for years, you probably would get a little more sleep.

There's hope!

Less empty white space yet! Wahoo! 

I might actually finish this painting after all.

Now we're getting somewhere

You know sometimes what I need more than anything is just to fill in a lot of the white space. My inclination is to finish each little flower before moving on but even if I do, I look around at this big white page and feel like I've made no progress whatsoever. 

So after filling in a lot of the lower green spaces, I'm feeling a little better. I tried to keep it loose but I'm not sure I accomplished that. Hopefully the background doesn't take away from the flowers - I don't want to give everything equal attention or there's nowhere for your eye to rest. But my husband does assure me that it's only my eyes that go a little buggy looking at it, which by the way, is a good sign it is time for bed. And look at the time! My eyes are so right.

Day 2

Unfortunately my youngest two have decided sleeping is overrated. They're seriously messing with my sanity and my painting time, which are sometimes related come to think of it.

Why do I mention it? It's my excuse for not getting more done but I think the red flowers might end up being my favorite!

P.S. That picture didn't look nearly so awful on my phone! Darn lighting. Sorry for the lack of professionalism but I'm tired and going to bed instead of going back upstairs to get a better picture. Good night!

So Many Flowers

So my aunt commissioned me to do a painting for her! That's good news of course, but I've been super intimidated to give it a start. She showed me pictures she'd taken of a street artist's work and they were gorgeous but very unlike my style. I haven't really had a clue where to start. When I do florals, I do them a la Georgia O'Keeffe, up close and intense. It's what I'm drawn to do and it's honestly what makes them different. I don't really know how to do a large, zoomed out painting that incorporates many different flowers with different colors and things going on. It's a challenge. But after pumping myself up with some good podcasts ("The Unmistakeable Creative" is really inspiring), I had to give it a go. So it has started slow, but I have started. I'm combining images from three different photos that my aunt took at her cousin's flower farm so that I can get better balance of color than any one possessed on it's own. So add that challenge to the table and here we go:

It looks a little better now that I've stepped away from the paper. Isn't that so often the case? Why don't I remember that when I'm in the middle of feeling like it's not going well? Instead I kept painting and eating inordinate amounts of guacamole right before bedtime, which in retrospect, wasn't really the best idea after all. 

Sunbathing Tulips

FINISHED! I've got a kink in my neck and a severe need for catch-up sleep, but I am proud to say I finished on time! I'm pleased with the results. And so very tired.

Watercolor on paper

29x22

Background Time

I love painting the light shining through tulips, but I gotta admit, I also really love greenery. Guess I must be a true Oregonian after all. :) However, it is a bit of a jungle in there under this bunch of growing tulips and it's not the easiest thing to keep straight. Obviously it doesn't have to be exactly like it was in the photograph but it has to make sense and be varied and be colorful but not detract from the tulips too much. All at the same time. Luckily, that's not too much pressure. Ha! 

I love putting the super dark color behind the light tulips. While it doesn't make a ton of sense logically since they're back-lit, it makes for an awesome pop. One more day of painting, and I hope she'll be ready.

So many tulips

I made a goal to finish all the flowers in my painting tonight so that I had a chance of getting the rest done by my Monday deadline. Which is why I'm posting this at nearly 2 AM! In my defense, do you know what happens when you stare at one thing for too long? Ha! My eyes start to go a little crazy after searching for shapes in the same colors again and again and again. And the paper is so big, that to reach the petals at the top comfortably, I had to turn the paper sideways. Naturally then I turned my image sideways, which means my laptop was propped open on its side. My husband thinks it's hilarious when I do things like that. In theory it could really help me see the shapes instead of the tulips. That might work better when it's not so late and my eyes aren't blurring together!

But goal accomplished! And that's more important than sleep, right? I'll let you know tomorrow.

Winter Remedy

So we've been having a tad more than our fair share of colds this winter and it'd been making it rather hard to paint. I needed to get inspired. I needed spring. No sign of it (or the sun) outside lately so I decided the best medicine would be another translucent tulip painting. I have a store of photos from going to the Tulip Festival years ago (now that I'm back in Oregon, I can go get new photos this year!!). I wanted to do one again where the light shone through the flower petals, making them looking almost like tissue paper overlapping, but with silky smoothness instead of crumply fragility. It's slow going as there are so many layers to lay down, and I flip back and forth between stepping back and allowing the colors to blend together slowly on the paper, doing marvelous things on their own that are the reason I love watercolor, and then tightly controlling where it does or doesn't flow. So yeah, slow going.

And it's a big piece of paper, but one or two flowers per night, I'll get it done some day. Probably not before the Feb 1st deadline I was shooting for since I needed a new painting to submit by that day. Miracles do happen though, right? 

And if it doesn't this time, well, maybe I should've got going sooner. Like during those 4 bouts of strep throat I've had in the last few months. 

Nature's Spiral complete

Somehow I naively thought that I'd just take a few minutes tonight and finish this up! Why haven't I learned yet that finishing ALWAYS takes longer than expected. There are always a few more touches, a few more problems to fix, a few more patches to overdo. And before I knew it, my husband was snoring on the couch, where he'd fallen asleep waiting for me to finish so we could start our in-home date night. Oops! I'll have to make up for that tomorrow!  

Nature's spiral

I did it! Painted two nights in a row. Which doesn't sound like much, but these days it really is. 

So on with the sweetly-spiraled rose. My biggest challenge here is to not overdo it! These delicate roses seem to demand such finesse - a lot more than me and my clumsy big feet typically have. Fortunately, I don't have to paint with my gigantic feet. On the light parts of the rose, just the tiniest touch of color is needed. But it is needed. And then in the depths of the flower, I need that color to both deepen and glow. I got an early start tonight and thought I might be able to finish but that was me being totally overly optimistic. Maybe tomorrow? And maybe tomorrow morning when we're house hunting yet again, we'll finally find a house that works for us! 

Little rusty

Moving cross-country threw off my painting rhythm a bit, but every so often I've been making a little bit of progress on this landscape. It's from a photo I took while on a mountain bike ride in Bend, Oregon. The way the clouds were sweeping in majestically over the distant trees stopped me in my tracks, literally. Took me forever to catch back up to my group! I first did the blue sky, and loved it. Then one night I timidly approached the clouds - totally intimidated. I'd never attempted any significant cloud form before, especially not one that should be the focus point of the painting! After sleeping on it, I loved them too. But the trees and other greenery has been a struggle - ironic since that's usually my strong point. And the reflection has been a disaster. I can't seem to keep the style in with ripples. Here's what I have:

That's after a night solely focused on fixing the water. Not having any idea how to improve it (or hope really), what do you think of cropping the image to this:

Not only does it cut off the offending part, it brings the clouds back into the spotlight I think. Might need to slightly darken that row of shrubs too to help that. Maybe I shouldn't have tried such a difficult painting after so much time off :) but it was so inspiring to me. After being frustrated though, I went back to my sure-fire painting block fix: a flower. Somehow, making them shine always comes easy when nothing else does with a brush or without. After this decent start, I might actually be able to get some sleep now:

Now if I could get myself to paint two nights in a row, I might get somewhere!

Pink Cascade

So I went with the dark background. Not 100% sure about it. I've never done a background so dark but I was hoping it would help the flower pop even more. The background scenery in the photo would've just distracted and I wanted this prima donna to be the star of the show. But it changed the feel a bit so I'm not sure if it worked. Hmmm...

I have a confession to make. I LOVE the movie Notting Hill. Now I know that probably sounds totally random but there's this scene where he's asking his friends if he made a good decision when he rejected the famous actress. And they all support him with fabulous lines like "Absolutely. All actresses are mad as snakes." I feel like I need my group of friends hanging out in an empty restaurant to tell me if I've made a good decision or if I messed up finishing this one. My husband's snoring on the couch though so instead I'm just quoting the lines to a marginally relevant movie to myself when I really should be sleeping. I guess I'll have to wait until morning. 

Pretty, Pretty Pink

1st night:

I nearly stopped after the first four petals I hated it so much. I don't know how to work with pink having never really don't so before. I love oranges, reds, and yellows but pink kinda isn't me. Maybe it's because I have four daughters running around in pink tutus and tiaras everyday, but it just doesn't seem serious somehow. So I had no clue how to do shadows and depth with this new pink tube of paint. Intimidating. 

2nd night:

After glancing at it throughout the next day, I decided it wasn't so bad after all. I liked the cascade of colors, how they kinda drip into the next layer. Only problem was I didn't get around to painting until nearly 10 PM so I had to stop after less than an hour because I'm trying really hard to be better about getting enough sleep. However, then I lay in bed thinking because I'd left just as I really got going. Boo.

3rd night:

I couldn't make the same mistake so I kept pushing through way past when I should've gone to bed. And I really should've gone to bed. Not only am I exhausted, this was crazy difficult to paint! I'd been scared of the middle. There's so much tiny detail in there, and it's so different than the rest, and it's where the eye is going to go! And there's so much less color there yet there needs to be definition. I went back to hating it again. Reminded me of a student I had once that said her paintings go through like 10 different stages of ugly before she's done. Ha! This was a serious struggle. I was certain I was ruining it. There's more defining to do, while still walking that ever-constant battle of balance to not over-work it. My plan all along is just to have a deep, dark purplish background. I think that's still what I'll do. I wasn't sure if I was going to leave the white lines between the petals - I often blur those out but I think it adds to the stylistic feel. My husband really loves it. One more night of painting and it should be done. Fingers crossed that I don't ruin it! ;)