Inspiration...

These roses grow right outside next to my apartment building and every time I walk past them, I notice just how beautiful they are. Some inspiration for future projects! 

These peach ones are actually in a park:

And this one is my favorite, I'm really excited to play with it:

Time to go get creative! 

Art Show!

Sorry to have been neglecting the blog again, this has been the most hectic month! First of all, my boyfriend and I got engaged! Yay! So I should say, my fiance... And then my fiance graduated from medical school 3 days later, YAY again! And family came, then we went on a crazy vacation. We were supposed to spend two weeks in Croatia. One week with his mom and sister and some friends, then a week just the two of us. Relaxing, unwinding, etc. Well the weather forecast for Croatia was nothing but rain for the whole time, so we decided to drive down to Greece where it would be sunny and hot. What an adventure driving through the Balkans. Then we came back to Krakow where all our friends were packing and leaving, then we went to Edinburgh to look for an apartment for ourselves, since that is where Fiance will be starting residency. Just got back last night. Whew! I have been working on some art and I honestly can't wait to have all of it done, as I'm pretty excited about all of it. I'm still working on that flower watercolor but I had to put it aside to work on the two other commissions. 

Anyway, I just realized I titled this post "Art Show" and haven't mentioned anything about an art show yet. So a co-worker of mine from NJ contacted me and said her theater company puts up kind of a gallery in June/July and said my artwork, florals in particular, were really fitting with what they were looking for and asked if I would like to be part of it. Sure! But since I am in Krakow, I had to call my mom and ask her to 1) Locate my artwork I wanted to enter (I knew exactly where it was, but still had to talk her through it) 2) Find out where I could do inexpensive framing, 3) Have my  mom take it to the framer and then pick it up when done and 4) Arrange my friend to pick up the work for me. So through a team effort, my work got framed and hung! It is for sale, so if I got a sale that would be so exciting! This is the artwork I entered:

So that's all for now, hopefully soon I can post a new painting! 

Palette Knife Painting

I've just completed a painting I've been thinking about for a while.  I actually drew my picture on the canvas in late June or early July and hadn't gotten around to painting it until this week. 

Sorry for the not-so-great quality photo. I left my camera in Poland accidentally and all I have right now is my camera on my phone.  I have a friend with a "real" camera (as opposed to my point-and-shoot) and I want to try to get some more professional pictures of my art soon. ANYwho...
So I painted (most of) this with a palette knife (the exception being the background because I wanted it smooth in contrast to the flower and also the stem because I got sick of the palette knife).  My original vision for this painting was to have it a little more abstracted than it is, but I really do struggle with abstraction.  
Also, I had to do a lot of experimentation with mixing reds.  Red isn't a color I use a lot and I had a lot of trouble creating a very light value red.  I liked my dark reds, but lights were trouble.  In my reference photo, the rose was sitting in front of a window with light shining through the petals.  I wanted to get that bright, vibrant light value but I don't think I did. I think I got a medium red and had to compensate by making the other values darker than they were.  That is ok, but I still wanted that light value and I couldn't do it with out adding white and making it pink, totally wrong. If anyone has any suggestions for this, please leave me some comments! Thanks :)
My inspiration for this painting was a photo I had taken of a rose that was wilting.  If you've seen some of my other flower art, you might notice I like to capture flowers when they start to droop.  I sketched it and sort of scribbled it for shading in my sketchbook, and thought it would make a really cool painting.  I wanted the painting to be more like the sketch, but oh well.  I'm still pleased with the way it turned out. 

I liked the idea of having more straight and sketchy edges.  Maybe some day I'll try it again, perhaps on a much larger scale.