Paint Party Friday!

I can't believe that it's Friday, again.  This week has flown by.  I've managed to fit a lot into this week and I've managed to paint almost every day.  I can't tell you how good that feels.  First I worked with acrylics, painting backgrounds.

There's something so calming about painting backgrounds.  I turn up the music and paint, paint, paint.

Those paintings are still works in progress.  I'm not really sure what to do next with this one:

I might go over the blossoms with some white so they don't blend into the background so much.  But I think it needs something else, too.

On this one I experimented using oil pastels to draw in the moon and the birds.

I also drew some flowers, but didn't like how they turned out (that blur in the bottom right corner).  I rubbed them away and am trying to figure out what should go there.

Finally, I am attempting my first collage:

It will be another tree.  The leaves were cut from a seed catalog.

Yesterday I brought out my watercolors again.  I wanted to paint my Sharry Baby Oncidium, even though it's not yet blooming.  There was something about the leaves that I wanted to try to capture.  It's a funny thing, I've been looking at all the plants around here (and believe me, there are a lot of them), thinking about how I'd paint them.

The sketch itself was a challenge for me.  You know that I'm not very confident in my drawing ability.  I wondered if I'd bitten off more than I could chew.  But I didn't give up.

There were two things that I tried to focus on while working on my watercolors yesterday.  The first was that I would work carefully in sections so that the paint would not bleed from one area to another.  The second was that I would not overwork any of the sections.  I tried to let things be as much as possible.

I moved from one project to another as I let areas of paint dry.  When I brought home my purple oxalis, I knew I wanted to paint it, so that was the second painting I worked on yesterday.

I'm very happy with how both of them turned out.  Of course, there are things that I don't like about them and things that I would do differently next time, but I am not going to dwell much on that, other than learning from this experience as I've learned from each painting that I've done. 

I put the finishing touches on them this morning and they really do make me happy.

It was a joy to paint them and it's a joy to see them finished, flaws and all.

Now I'm off to join the party and see what everyone else has been up to!