Summer Vibes July Update
Well summer has certainly arrived as a force of nature, literally. We have had more rain and hail than I have ever seen in Colorado during late spring and to kick off the summer season. We even had a tornado! Despite life ramping up in terms of summer camp craziness, parents visiting, and generally being pulled in a million directions, I still managed to paint, and the encouragement from my community has been a lifesaver.
I introduced the concept of a Summer Vibes project in late spring. You can read the full story here, but the gist is that I was looking for some external motivation to help me stay motivated to paint through my busy season. I have been really thankful for the encouragement and the reference photos that I have gotten so far.
I do not have quite as many completed paintings as I seemed to be cranking out at the start of the year, but I am trying to embrace the different seasons of 2023 and celebrate all the wins. Here is a review of my latest projects.
Thistle | 5.5 x 7
The purple thistles here in Colorado are really starting to pop. They are an interesting plant. Their spiky leaves give the impression that they are a plant that wants to be left alone, but then they have these really beautiful flowers. The most challenging part of this painting was making sure the leaves on the bottom of the flower were differentiated from each other. For the primary flower section, I used my tiniest brush and started with the lightest values of pink working my way to the darker colors to give the flower dimension. At the end, I used some bleedproof white (an opaque watercolor paint) to add some highlights. My favorite part of the painting is how the background came out; I think it makes the flower really pop.
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Bay Outside Homer, Alaska | 5.5 x 7
This painting is based on another photograph from our 2018 trip to Alaska. Homer is a tiny town on Kachemak Bay on Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula. It’s a tiny town where the halibut is on point and views are vast. I snapped this picture while we were on our water taxi ride to Kachemak Bay State Park, which was directly opposite Homer and where we had a hike planned to Grewingk Glacier. This spot is Gull Island as we learned from our water taxi driver, which can be the home for 20,000 birds in the summer months! I removed the birds for simplicity’s sake.
Succulent and Elephant | 5.5 x 7
This reference photo was submitted by a newsletter reader and I loved the simplicity of it. I picture this as something that could go on a tea towel or sticker with some quirky saying about how you can never have enough plants, a sentiment that I fully support as the proud plant mom to dozens in my tiny apartment. The challenges of this painting included slowly building up the layers on the leaves to add enough depth and shadow and adding just enough color to the elephant to define its shape.
Orange Flower along Clear Creek | 11 x 14
I already shared about this painting at length in my post Painting Large (for me), but it is probably one of my favorite paintings so far of the summer and I didn’t want to miss another chance to share it. I enjoyed the image so much that I even decided to do a smaller 9x12 version in just pen and ink.
We still have a couple months left of the Summer Vibes project for 2023. I’m curious how many more paintings I will be able to get through.