Emerging Flowers Again

Had to share these again as they are opening more. I love these cannas and will have to plant more. I also love the fact that the rabbits appear to not like eating cannas, a big plus around here!

The prickly pear cactus got more than the normal amount of rain this Winter so they are producing more flowers and the pads are fatter this year.

Emerging Flowers

 This is an emerging canna flower. It is the first bloom of the season. We had a hard freeze once this Winter that caused me to cut back half the plant so I was worried that it may not bloom again. But, it is going to! I'll take more photos as this opens more.

These are just a few of the prickly pear blooms this year. I love how artistic Mother Nature is in providing yellow flowers on purple-tinged pads...complementary colors!

Anasazi Fantsy on Yupo - Final

I finished this WIP this afternoon while at the Art Club. I just let it speak to me until I decided enough! I have scrubbed it out in places, lifted in places, highlighted in places and air brushed it in places...all in watercolor. Enough! I do like the look of it and, especially, that it was done without reference photo and drawing beforehand.

So, without further ado, here it is.....

Dreadful Drake - One Last Time

Thanks to good suggestions for finishing this from my local group and the online WcW group, I have finished this painting. I added more color to the drake so it would be more obvious that the goose/girlfriend was in front of him and it wasn't just one oddly-shaped bird. I like it better now, too.

Yupo Fantasy - WIP

Inspired by some of the latest paintings by Barbara Sailor, I decided that yesterday afternoon was the time to play with Yupo again. I had such a good time playing with this stuff, as usual. I started with a vague idea to create the upper landscape with buttes and then using strata format to create whatever was below. When I say whatever, I really mean whatever since I had no idea what it was going to do and just went in with splashing paint and let 'er rip. I began to see something different emerge, so went with cliff dwellings in the mid ground and a stylized landscape in the foreground. I still have quite a bit I want to do with this, including setting back some of the dwellings and changing their sizes to be less uniform (right now they remind me of a mouthful of teeth!). I also have to resolve that unfortunate shape in the upper right quadrant and make it into something more believable than it is now. I have in mind what I will do up there but we will see if the paint and brush really wants me to do what I am thinking. That's the beauty and the curse of Yupo!

Dreadful Drake - Final

Here is what I hope will be the final WIP of this. I am pleased with everything but the trees and wish I had not put so much detail in them with the underpainting. I suppose a lesson learned is a good way to look at it, but it still isn't great to feel I should have known better.

I like the water and foreground, though, much better than the rendition I did last year of this scene. Now, on to my next painting adventure/victim.

Desert Jaunt

We have been threatening to go out for a day of enjoying the wildflowers and the desert for about a month now, but with my healing broken leg, and the fact that we both have had bad colds have forced us to remain home. It would have been more "convenient" for both of us to be sick at the same time, but I was sick for an entire week and then Tom caught my cold and that put us another week and a half into feeling like we couldn't make plans to do this. Yesterday, we decided to just go and get out for just an hour or so and get out of the house together for that long at least.

Since we live on the desert, it doesn't take that long to get out among the Saguaros, and we enjoyed it. Alas, we had missed whatever wildflowers were there earlier, but the cholla were certainly abundant and very plump at this time. Their soft fuzziness is extremely deceptive, I have come into contact with this soft fuzziness twice in my life and regretted it mightily both times!