Glow

18 x 24" original oil painting

sold

I had a lot of friends helping me with title ideas. Some of my favorites were Carnival and Lollipop. I am going to save Carnival for one that is much bigger and I'm going to save Lollipop for one with lit stems showing. My sister also suggested Blush and Bashful, a nod to one of my favorite movies of all time (Steel Magnolias). It will get used. I love it. I am saving Blush and Bashful for a painting with some play in the blossoms between open and closed petals, and of course, pink. Brilliant! 

The day I shot this photograph I was at the Children's Discovery Gardens next to the Thanksgiving Point's main gardens. I waited for about half an hour on a bench under a tree for the sun to come out. I wasn't leaving until I had a shot of this group of flowers in the sunlight. While waiting on the bench under a tree, something happened that was a total first in my life, and hopefully a last! A bird in a branch above me totally tagged me and it landed smack down the front of my face, in my sunglasses, down my cheek. Nasty. I was the only one there. I looked around like "Did you see that? Help me!" but no one was there. Ew. It still gives me the shivers to think about. I was close to a restroom and after washing my face and sunglasses, I decided to wait for the sun to come out on the grass, not under a tree. 

 

It's time to buy more translucent magenta. This color is unstoppable. (It is also uber expensive.) If you are mixing any kind of magenta and it's too brown or too blue, you need this color. I scraped my palette knife into the tube to get what I needed for this painting. I wish Utrecht sold it, but I will have to order it online through Dick Blick. I hate making orders for one thing. I spend as much on shipping as I do the product. Maybe I can sell a painting to pay for this tube of paint plus shipping. ;)

 

I've said this before, but I love my palettes when I finish a painting. I can look at a pile of colors and remember where on the painting I was working when I mixed them. 

This painting just glows. It's like there's light coming from behind the painting, but there's not. It's just paint. This is one thing I love about being a painter: I can take a flat surface and transform it into a view of something three-dimensional and full of light, and all with a pile of paint and some brushes. It's magic. 

Here is a close-up of the bottom corner. Off the top of my head, the colors I used in these tulips are (in no particular order): cadmium yellow medium, yellow ochre, hansa yellow orange, titanium white, mars black, brilliant green, ultramarine blue, cadmium green, radiant lemon yellow, quinacridone red, translucent magenta, napthol red, radiant turqouise, and I think that's it. I spend as much time mixing my paint as I do applying the paint to the panel, but I wouldn't have it any other way because I want to be able to paint with the colors I see, and custom mixing is the only way I can do that.