DAY 2: Here's the painting SUNFLOWER #1 before I started working on it yesterday. I had painted the blue sky background in November, and am just now finally getting back to this flower. This piece will be the last sunflower in my series of FIVE. So as you can imagine, I'm ready to start painting something that does not contain yellow petals!

Here's the paint I mixed up for painting the flower petals. The palette with shades of oranges is left-over from SUNFLOWER #5. I'm not sure if I'll need these colors or not, but just in case, I have them out if I need them. You can also see the photo I'm painting from in the upper left corner. Notice that there is not much variation in the shades of yellow petals in the photo.

This is as far as I got on DAY 2 of this project. I started on the petals, but it's always slow-going in the beginning of a botanical painting, because petals are tricky little things to paint. The last sunflower I painted was orange, so I had to re-figure-out how to paint yellow petals again. I want all five sunflowers to coordinate with each other, so that takes more work than if it were just a single painting that wasn't part of a series.

DAY 3: Here's a photo showing more petals I've created--at this point I've painted for about an hour today. (It's raining cats and dogs today, so my studio is dark this morning.)

More petals. The hard thing about painting these petals is the lack of shadows in my photo. If I were to copy the photo exactly, I'd be using about 2 shades of yellow. But then the painting would be really flat looking. So I'm having to figure out what colors to add into the shadows so that the flower looks dimensional. That is what is mind-taxing about painting.

Two hours later... more petals. Where did that time go? I definitely lose all sense of time when I'm engrossed in a painting. I cannot do any more yellow petals today! More tomorrow...