Painting 79, fine weather today but short on sleep

Stayed up too late yesterday, again, got to stop doing that, my Husband got me out of bed on 5-1/2 hours of sleep, not enough, good thing he got me up though, I had to finish this paper work, meet with the tax person Friday and have to have my figures together, I know, it's the same old, I wait til the last for everything, if you can figure out how I can change that, let me know, anyway, almost done with that, but late getting the painting done, had class in Sturgis tonight, started a couple but wasn't in any shape to paint the rest, when I got home, so, here is my back-up, the one I had done last week, I'll show you the one I started, maybe tomorrow, we'll see, if I get it done.

This painting is a collage, I start the collages wet in wet, in the shape I intend to put the papers (oriental papers), I rip them all up into medium small pieces (I make a bag of different papers and mix them all up, so I don't get the same papers all the time), then I glue the papers down with a mixture of 50% water and 50% matt medium (acrylic), that makes the glue thin enough to allow the watercolor to lay on top of, and not too thick so it repels water. When the papers are dry, I start with the flower color and paint it in the areas I want flowers (sometimes I use reference material and sometimes I don't, this time I didn't), then the green, I fine tune the flowers to suit and then negatively paint the leaves, if I get too dark or make the edges too messy, I like to go in with gesso and paint all the background white, this may look a little blueish, but it's really white, one of the troubles with using acrylic is that the camera sees the white as blue, very difficult to get accurate color. So these are my impression of iris, not photographic like some of my stuff, but surely look like iris. I like this little painting, and hope you do too.