Painting #205 - another 2 for today

I had a very busy day, but, I did get my painting started early, of course the reason is that I had someone coming over to look at some paintings, so I had to get right after things, the carpet needed swept, and I decided that I should get my painting started because I wanted to look industrious when they came, well, I wasn't painting when they came, but I did get it started, I was waiting for it to dry a bit, I also got to painting on it after they left (with one of my paintings, ah, maybe a sale, they are going to look at it on the wall, pretty sure I will sell one or the other one that they liked), so that's good, then I went back to work on the painting before I left for Blue Moon, oh yes, a call from my friend Susan, we will not be going to Ireland, they didn't choose us, oh well, we already have something else in the works, maybe we'll be going to South Dakota instead for a couple weeks next summer, Bev has a place out there and graciously invited us to go there as a group and paint for a couple weeks, won't that be fun!

Well, I had the painting well underway when I got to Blue Moon, so I finished it and started a 4" one for something to do while the others were working on their stuff. I will confess, this isn't my own photo reference, I hope I don't offend anyone by using it. I was intrigued with the fuzzy background, so I chose to work on this because of that, I think I should have worked on regular paper for this, it would have come across much better, but now that it's finished, I'll think about doing that on the next one.

I really started out with yellow and then floated in some violet for the sunflower heads, then the green at the bottom, this was so wet that I had to let it rest for about 3/4 of an hour, then I just started to fine tune it, I wiped out the petals on the main flower, and the highlights on the leaves, then I went in with darker background color to make the flower stand out. I added a dark green for the leaves and decided to put little dots for the sunflower head, then I went in with some dark green and made some lines, I wanted to show the direction of the seeds on the seed head.

Now, when that painting was done, I got out my photo of the parot picture, that my sister took in Florida, quite some time ago, she didn't have the fancy camera then that she has since acquired, so it isn't a great photo, but it's good enough to get this from. I just started out painting the bird's head, then the yellow breast and finally the blue body and tail, then I laid in some green foliage, and I inferred it was sitting on a branch instead of a metal post, so the background is invented, I liked the violet and pink for the sky, since it was up against the yellow breast, I didn't spend much more than 45 min. on this one, so it's fairly simple, I like both of these little paintings and I hope you do too.