"Poppy Beauty" (watercolor on paper; 5" x 7")

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I don't know about you, but just looking at these two beautiful red oriental poppies makes my heart beat a little faster!

"Washington National Cathedral Summer Day" (oil on linen; 14" x 11") sold

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Looking up from the summer flowers of the Bishop's Garden, the beautiful Gothic architecture of the Washington National Cathedral with its flying buttresses and pointed arches appear almost immaterial in the glorious light.

"Foxgloves" (watercolor; 6" x 4")

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"Foxgloves" is another "sketch" that turned out well.  I started out by drawing the florets with aquarelle pencils, then applied watercolor paints.  If there are any errant lines, I just brush over them with clear water, which blurs and softens them.  I am in love with the method which allows me to draw and paint small watercolors loosely without pressure to produce.

"Smell the Roses" (oil on stretched canvas; 8" x 10") nfs

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 The New Year's resolutions: paint often, paint better and smell the roses!

"Red Poppy Love" (watercolor; 5" x 7") sold

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Here is the last of the red Oriental poppy triptych.  It look like this together. Fabulous, if I may say so!

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"Red Poppy Glory" (watercolor; 5" x 7") sold

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An old collector of mine who bought "Oriental Red Poppy" commissioned me to paint two more of these poppy paintings so that she could display them together.  What an awesome idea!  And I get to paint a mini series!  Thank you, Kierstyn.  This is the second of the series.

"Red Oriental Poppies" (watercolor; 6" x 8") sold

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These are Oriental poppies, not the regular poppies.  Papaver orientale is a perennial flowering plant native to the Caucasus, northeastern Turkey, and northern Iran.  Having quoted from Wikipedia, all I care about is how huge and bold these babies are!  There is a batch growing in the nearby Green Spring Gardens Park, which I make a point of checking out during the season.

"Pink Rosebud" (oil on linen; 7" x 5")

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Ever since I took Danni Dawson's workshop in June, I am wild about roses.  I feel like I finally learned to paint the queen of all flowers.  Petal by petal, leaf by leaf, a rose emerges against the dark ground.  The promise of the fully-open flower makes this pink rosebud even more enchanting!

"Goldfinch on Coneflower" (oil on linen; 7" x 7") sold

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My summer garden of wildflowers is often visited by a goldfinch or two.  The tiny yellow bird looks even more exquisite on a purple coneflower!

"Summer Roses" (oil on stretched canvas; 10" x 8")

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During the week of June 8th, I took a workshop of my teacher, Danni Dawson, at her house in Arlington, VA.  What a workshop it was!  Six of us painted in her rose garden, then when the weather became oppressively hot, we went inside to paint still lives in her spacious studio.  Danni, a gourmet cook, also prepared every lunch of an Italian dish made fresh with vegetables from her garden!

"Summer Roses" was the first painting of the workshop, which I didn't quite get to finish. Yesterday I worked on the leaves to make the painting more lush.  How do you like it?

I started the painting on the canvas toned with an ultramarine blue, which became part of the background. Cool, don't you think?

This is how far I got on Monday. After a heavy thunderstorm that night, the flowers were all gone!

"Pink Rose Magic" (watercolor on paper; 8" x 8")

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Pink roses in the sun. Ah, they are pure bliss!

"Stargazer in the Sun" (oil on linen; 7" x 7")

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I am used to seeing the spectacularly beautiful and fragrant oriental lily, "Stargazer", at the florist shop.  So I was delighted to come across a lone stargazer blooming in a garden park.  The sun was in the perfect angle to enhance its sinuous form.  I think I made the right decision to leave the rich dark green transparent background untouched.  The flower pops out, don't you think?

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The transparent underpainting.

I decided to leave the dark green background more or less untouched in this painting.

Here I am mostly done with the opaque layers; I started adding some dark dots on petals.

"Goldfinch in Summer Garden" (oil on linen; 8" x 10")

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I am what you call a lazy gardener.  I don't have the patience or time to trim all the deadheads. As it turns out, that is what good environmentally-minded gardeners do.  Look at the goldfinch in the reference photo below.  It is eating the seeds of the spent coneflower in my tired summer garden!

In case you are wondering why the colors are so different between the picture above and the step-by-step photos below, here is the answer.  I took the final image of the finished painting in natural light and Photoshopped it, whereas the step-by-step photos were taken with my smart phone in my studio under artificial lighting.  The painting looks very close to what you see above.

Reference photo

I just laid down the transparent underpainting.  No opaque colors or whites are used at this stage.

The second step is done.

I edited out the coneflower right below the bird.  It looks better.

I like the circular movement of the flowers.  Time to firm up stems, some flowers, and the goldfinch.  Then I will be done!

"Passionate Lilies" (oil on stretched canvas; 8" x 8" x 3")

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"Passionate Lilies" viewed from the left side

"Passionate Lilies" viewed from the right side

"Passionate Lilies" viewed from the top side

Have you ever seen more passionate lilies than mine before?  Very tropical!  Doesn't the painting remind you of Paul Gauguin's Tahiti paintings!  These days I am having so much fun with deep stretched canvases.  This small painting continues to the 3-inch-wide edges, so its impact literally goes beyond its 8" x 8" size.

The painting pulsates with heat and passion.  The jewel-like colors made a friend of mine call the painting a jewelry box.  What I am particularly proud about the painting is that I had the photo reference for the front part only.  So I had to make up the sides!

"Summer Roses" (oil on linen; 5" x 4") sold

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I h
ad trouble titling this small gem.  "Rosy Glow"?  "Rose Brilliant"?  "Rose Shadow Play"?  In the end, I settled with "Summer Roses" although I took the reference photo for the painting in early fall.  Do you know why?  The painting just feels hot!  The sun casts colorful shadows on the petals; the background is shrouded in cool darks, from which a few sunlit leaves emerge. How would you title the painting instead?

"Pink Rose of Sharon" (oil on linen; 5" x 4") sold

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I painted flowers that looked just like the rose of sharon back in July and boldly titled the painting as such.  Guess what?  I was wrong.  A Faccbook friend corrected me; another friend confirmed my error.  Isn't that great?  By the way, the rose of sharon is the Korean national flower.  I don't know why my countrymen picked the flower, but there it is.

"Pink Hollyhocks" (watercolor on Yupo, 10" x 8"; 150)
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On a personal note, I have been absent from my studio for the past three days on account of my daughter's marching band activities.  As my husband and I volunteer as the pit crew and in other capacities, we were busy helping the band for most of the weekend.  I am glad that the marching season is almost over, so that I can get back to my daily painting routine!

"Sunny Hydrangea Garden" (oil on linen; 8" x 8") sold

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I have a soft spot for hydrangeas.  Their huge heads of pastel florets that grace gardens in late spring tug at my heartstrings as few other flowers do.  Now the weather has turned chilly, the image of a sunny garden with hydrangeas abloom is perfect to lift my spirit.

"Coneflowers and Daisies" (oil on linen; 8" x 12") sold

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A few years ago, I bought a packet of wildflower seeds and spread it in a small sunny garden patch right next to the sidewalk.  Who knew that coneflowers, daisies, and black-eyed susans, etc. will come back year after year?  My husband thought they were too tall, wild, and out of control.  So I tried to get rid of them.  A word of advice.  Be careful with wildflowers.  They are HARD to get rid of.

I kind of like the cottage-garden look of my "warm-palette" wildflower patch.  It doesn't look as pretty as the painting now, with lots of spent flower heads that need to be trimmed.  But who has the time!

"Sunflowers on Hot Summer Day" (oil on linen; 8" x 10") sold

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No other flowers say "summer" as loudly as sunflowers.  In the depth of winter, or on a cool summer day like today, if I want to feel the hot summer sun in my heart, I just have to think of these big, bold, in-your-face, flowers.

By the way, I am back to painting oils.  You wouldn't believe how exciting it is to switch back and forth between mediums.  Watercolors do something oils cannot do; there are things one can do only with oils.  As I told a friend of mine, by renewing my watercolor ways, which were my first love, I doubled the fun!  I am sharing the collage of the paintings I created during my explorations on Yupo painting last month.  Enjoy!

Collage of my Yupo Paintings created in July 2013!

"Summer Garden with Hydrangea" (oil on stretched canvas; 12" x 12") sold

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Before

Something about "Summer Garden with Hydrangea" bothered me.  It felt like a faded old picture.  I decided to rescue a painting nobody seemed to care for.  I punched up the darks, got rid of the dominant sap greens, and played up the violet-yellow green complementary color scheme.  My new summer garden painting looks kissed by the sun, don't you think?