12" x 12" oil on board
Once peonies start to go bad, they go bad quickly. So of course, I decided to paint these on the last day of shelf life after cutting them from my back yard. Maybe they could have used another sitting, but at least it's not overdone!
5" x 7" oil on board
The peony plant in front of our house is usually loaded with blooms but for some reason it only had one this year - here it is!
11" x 14" oil on board
These flowers were a Valentine's gift for my wife, Sarah, but I'll admit that I had this painting in mind when I bought them. I bought a nice bottle of wine and made a lobster dinner, too, so it wasn't totally selfish. I may still make some changes to this because the background colors distract a bit from the flowers.
One more thing: It seems I did not know how to spell bouquet before this post. In addition to making a dumb grammatical mistake on Instagram when I posted this involving duel vs. dual, I just realized that I spelled bouquet incorrectly.
9" x 12" oil on board
I had scraped this one and was ready to wipe it, but I decided to daub in some of the values with my fingers. I liked the effect, so I kept going. You can see evidence of the scraping over the left shoulder of the watering can - evidence of the daubing in the circular shadow marks and highlights - those are from my fingertips.
Scraping caused the background to be really greyed down and loose which made the color of the watering can pop. Mental note to remember that for future paintings. I also used a modified Anders Zorn Palette with only four colors" alzirian crimson, Venetian red, yellow ochre, and ivory black, plus white.
