New Painting: Cherry Blossoms

I mentioned in a previous post that I finished a second painting since getting back to the studio.  I started these cherry blossoms last March before the big mishap, and the canvas has been sitting in my studio ever since.  My first thought was to just leave it and finish it up next spring when the cherry blossoms are out again, and I also considered buying faux blossoms and trying to finish the painting that way.  But I never use faux flowers for painting and I really didn't want to leave it sitting around for another eight months.

Because the buds were so delicate, I painted the background and the ginger jar first.  This background has many coats of paint and I knew I would not be able to paint around the blooms, so as I did with my pussy willows, I let the background completely dry and then began doing the flowers.  I got two sessions in with them before I had to stop painting.

Fast forward to two weeks ago.  I finished the hydrangeas and needed another floral painting for a show I wanted to enter.  Since I am the slowest painter alive, I knew I could not crank out another painting in two days ( my time before the deadline).  On a whim I put the painting on the easel and just started painting.  I figured the worst that could happen was I would have to wipe it out.  No guts, no glory and all that.

This is where I left it the first night.  The flower buds went right in, and I faked the ones on the wood shelf, and they went in fine as well.  I also finished up the wood shelf without a problem.  I did all that with no reference material whatsoever, so what was the problem?  The ginger jar!  The one thing that was sitting right in front of me was the hardest part of this painting.

The problem was that I decided the jar needed a few more coats of paint.  That took some time, but was not too terrible.  The main problem was that I like to have my porcelains completely dry before I put the pattern on, but in this case that was not going to happen.  Now, I could have left well enough alone and just painted the pattern on the canvas the first day, but I have to have everything just right and the perfectionist in me could never just go with "good enough".  So the next day, deadline day, I got back to it.  I painted one more coat onto the jar and then got started putting in the pattern.  It was not as difficult as I had thought it would be.  The main difference is that it is not so easy to correct a mistake on a wet canvas.  On a dry canvas you simply wipe it down and start over.  With this situation, I still made plenty of mistakes, but had to be very delicate in removing them, as well as adding the paint back to the jar from the wipe out.  I also redid the highlight about a thousand times.  I was having a tough time getting it to look exactly like I wanted it to.  It either looked like a blob of white, or it took over the whole top quarter of the ginger jar.

Finally it all worked and I got my show submission in at 9:30 pm.  Two and a half hours before the deadline!  There are reasons my hubs refers to me as 'Last Minute Frances'  :)

This is the finished painting and I'm happy to say, it was accepted into the show!  I've already started a new painting, and it's very nice to just be painting without worrying about a deadline.  I'll have show info up soon.