Field of Dreams - 30/30 Challenge 2016

Field of Dreams, Watercolor on Arches #140 Cold Press Paper, 12"h x 12"w, 2016 #4

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I really want to play with the limited palette on this one, and try to see if I could get the soft, dreamy, wet-in-wet like background by painting in thin layers wet-on-dry. I had so much fun... Using a limited primary palette of Vermilion, Aurelion Yellow and Ultramarine Blue, the color harmony was achieved without much conscious effort, which is the largest advantage of using a limited palette... I was a bit worried about color monotony resulted from all the red in the poppies, and really played up the warm vs. cool, saturated vs. muted variation of different reds. In the end I am very pleased with the result -- and I really missed painting flowers!

Sun Dance (Take Two) Heading for the Filoli Exhibition!

Sun Dance II, Watercolor on Arches #140 Cold Press paper, 12"h x 12"w, 2013 #51

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So -- here is my main piece for the exhibition at Filoli Garden - "Nature’s Many Splendors: Farms, Gardens and Woodlands". I just took it down there today to be hung, and saw many splendid artwork by other artists in the show -- if you are in the bay area, this show is definitely worth going to! Lots of gorgeous floral, lovely landscape, and amazing photographs. As of "Sun Dance", I've painted it at a smaller size, and sold it during last year's Filoli show when I was still working on it as an on-site demo. I really love the different problems presented by this project, such as creating glowing shadow on a yellow flower -- yellow itself is too light for any shadow area, so the shadows on a yellow flower is never actually "yellow"; yet this flower is largely in shadow, so to maintain the impression of it being an "yellow" flower in this case is especially difficult. Also, I was practicing wet-on-dry thin glazes of limited color palette this year, and thought this could be an interesting one using such method. So I gave it a second take, and was quite happy with the results: I feel this time the yellow glaze applied in very thin coats really retained the color variation of the underpainting without deadening it, and the flower center painted wet in wet to made it appear much less rigid compared to last time. I would like to practice more mainly yellow paintings to try out a couple of other methods, such as one without purple underpainting, to compare the results. But for now, I will switch to some slightly less difficult projects for the next couple of days...

You can now buy high quality Giclee prints of many of my sold paintings, both on paper and canvas, as well as some note cards with my paintings here: