"Sunny Day" 8 x 8 oil on board

The Girls Just Wanna Paint theme for April is "festive". This is my interpretation.  Throughout the months, especially during winter, I will often bring a bundle of sunflowers home from the local grocery and put them in the window.  Each time I pass through the room, I get a little festive zing from their angles, the sun bouncing off the petals, and the reflected light inside and/or beneath them.  Each flower has its own personality.  

I used a photo reference of sunflowers on my porch for this painting; taking what I needed for the design.  Here are some process photos:

Reference photo: you can see how I adjusted the design for this square

Blocking in, laying down the lightest and darkest notes

Added in the background, a cooler, neutralized green; good time to carve out the edges of each sunflower; making sure nothing was too symmetrical

More modeling in the darks, the leaves.  I softened a bunch of edges, added dappled sunlight onto the flower below and the leaves, implying depth.  Looked for areas to push elements behind other elements to create depth, and vibrated color into the center of the top right flower.

As always, thanks for looking. You know I love your comments.  

Day 111 "Sunny Patch" pen&ink 5 x 9

When drawing this patch of flowers, I concentrated on a few distinctive shapes, then used the rest of the space to construct foreground and background within the patch, using the group of flowers as reference for basic shapes.  I like the combination of sunflowers, black-eyed susans, and another type of smaller daisy-like flowers within the one patch, all yellow.  I  could spend more time adding more and more detail and depth.  The drawing becomes a sort of doodle, where the lines and shapes I add are in keeping with the feeling of the flower patch, but I add them where they work best.  This is the same idea I use when drawing the brownstones on Newbury Street in Boston.  The buildings are initially drawn from life, then I add the architectural detail around windows and doorway referring to here at this link.  
 This is my hundred eleventh daily drawing.  Thank you for your continued interest. 

"Flower Power" watercolor & ink 9 x 12

Yesterday I painted at the Marshfield Fair with a few other artists.  We were each assigned a fireworks-themed flower arrangement to interpret as we wished.  I worked with my sketchbook, intending to create a page which represented the busyness of this area at the Fair, and the sense of fireworks.  I drew the scene in ink, then began adding watercolor.  When I got home, I added a little watercolor crayon  to tie together some of the darks... an explosion of color.
Here are a few photos showing my process.

As always, thanks for looking.

"Daisy Patch" oil 12 x 9

The theme for this month's Girls Just Wanna Paint challenge was "daisy".  I found a cool little patch of daisies nearby, and was just as interested in the depth of blue greens between and around the flowers themselves.  I decided to paint over an old still life study from years ago, thinking the underlying reds and oranges would work well with harmony of the daisies in the patch.

Here's the still life, to the left, placed vertically in my easel.  I began by blocking in the flowers in an arrangement that looked appealing, asymmetrical, yet balanced.  I added some stems, some stems to nowhere, and a few buds for balance.  After the stems and leaves were added, I completed the background with a variety of blues and greens, leaving some of the warmth of the original painting, which implies the warm dark spaces beneath the flowers where the sky can't reach.  

Check out the rest of the Girls Just Wanna Paint images for the month here.  Thanks for looking.

"Sunny Bunch" 11 x 14 oil

Unexpected four day weekend due to the blizzard of 2013.  I was surprised to see all the Nemo references, had somehow missed that we name blizzards now, not leaving the honor only to tropical storms and hurricanes.  We were fortunate, no big trees came down, house intact, though we did lose power on Friday night, and spent three cool days without.  We shoveled out, scraped snow from the roof, kept the wood stoves going to keep the house tolerable. It was cold, and quiet, and we played games and read by oil lamps.  Happy to have the power back. Didn't paint, but did a lot of drawing.  "Sunny Bunch" is from a while back, but is certainly the weather I've been thinking about.  Glad everyone is safe, and digging out.  Thanks to the crews of tree guys, and electric guys... long, long days.