Bearded Iris Garden Almost Complete

 I'm almost finished with my bearded iris garden painting .  This week I managed to complete all the flowers and leaves, today I will start on the background for this piece.  First though, I wanted to get a great photo with no background to possibly use for licensing work.  I hope to put both to use, with background and without.  The new technique I've been working on for years now, that I've finally perfected for backgrounds, I've begun to use for the main focal elements in this painting, the iris blooms themselves.  I like the results so much that I will probably continue along this line with every new painting I create.  It is a time consuming process but I like the results.

 I do enjoy my iris garden each year, they bring me a lot of happiness when they bloom.  I love the purple but my favorites are the pinks.  These irises have traveled with with and moved with me for the last 17 years or so. 

 This will be the last year I will get to enjoy them as chris and I will be moving next summer of 2013 to a different area of the country, where these beauties I'm afriad, will not flower for me.  It is time though, onto another adventure and a new life.  We're ready for the change, something we're very much looking forward too.
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My irises though, will not be left to fend for themselves here in NY, they will go on a move themselves, via USPS this fall, to live with a friend of mine in VA.  I will enjoy the photos I have taken of them over the years and the artwork I plan to keep creating to celebrate their beauty.

Painting Some Bearded Irises.......

I started a new painting last week that celebrates the beauty of my bearded iris garden that blooms so faithfully for me each May.

This is a large painting, 20" x 20" with lots of detail so it is not a quick work. Good things come to those who wait though, or so they say anyway and I think the finished painting will be worth waiting for.

Right now you can see snippets of some of the individual irises and leaves in some of my favorite colors, purple and pink. I hope to show more of my progress on this painting next week. I hope lovely irises are blooming this spring for you, in your garden.

A Garden Dragonfly That Sparked An Idea

I took this dragonfly photo 3 years ago when I came outside one day to find this little guy waiting for me in my garden. He was kind enough to sit still while I took this photo of him resting on one of my Iris leaves. I didn't think much of it at the time but last year in 2010, I became very inspired by this photo as I looked at it over the course of months. He didn't know it at the time but this dragonfly inspired me to create 3 paintings based on my sighting that day. The paintings really do not look at all like him, he just planted the seed that created the spark in my mind and my imagination did the rest.

This small dragonfly painting is called "Floating", featuring a large and small dragonfly team.

This piece is my favorite of the bunch for sure...."Kaleidoscope Dragonflies". With this diptych I wanted to create a painting that reminded me of looking through a kaleidoscope with all the changing colors and shapes. The dragonflies also wrap around the sides on this piece.

"Dancing Dragonflies" was the first painting to be created after I saw my garden visitor. What is the inspiration for your favorite creations, how did a spark of an idea take hold in your mind? I would love to hear how everyone else gets inspired to create what they love. www.artfulcreations.etsy.com

Butterfly Photos, Inspirations & Nature Scape Paintings

I was just speaking with someone recently about how ideas and inspirations for paintings come along. The kind of ideas that take seed in your mind, even through the course of years and end up being something you feel, as an artist, you have to paint, you cannot help yourself. That got me focused on butterflies and this lead me to think of the different inspirations for some of my favorite butterfly paintings that I've done.

I started getting fascinated by butterflies, I think, when I first took this series of photos back in the fall of 2009. We were at Mohonk Mountain House for our anniversary and these gorgeous Monarchs (I admit, they are my favorite butterfly) were drawn to the Verbena patch and I in turn, was drawn to them.

I took so many photos of these beauties over the course of the couple of days that we were there and then, like so many other photos, I filed them away for possible use in the future.

Fast forward to the summer of 2010 (at least, that is about when I think it was) that patch chuck full of butterflies from the year before , became the painting above "Monarch".

Believe it or not, those photos inspired these paintings as well. True, for these I left the Verbena behind and instead wanted to incorporate my favorite butterflies into my new obsession, trees. I was particularly fascinated with Apple Blossoms at the time and so, I created "Monarchy" above.

When Monarchy left my house, believe it or not, I was a bit sad, as it cheered me up each day that I looked at it. I had hung it in my studio and so, I could see it while I was working and really enjoyed it's happy presence . Because I missed that painting, I wanted another one with my favorite butterflies and Apples Blossoms but this time, with a bit of a different background and I wanted a multi-canvas piece and ended so up creating "Monarchs Emerging". This one hung in my dining room until it flew away so at least I did get to see it for a while.

Back in 2007, I spent quite a lot of time photographing this Swallowtail that was hanging around the front of my house to be near my Impatiens. I was out there constantly because pretty much every afternoon that I walked the dogs, there he was, back again, waiting for me to photograph him.

Actually, this particular butterfly was not very cooperative and did lead me on a merry chase throughout the yard. For this reason, I ended up with lots of blurry photos but, I did get some that came out well, the few times I could get him to sit still that is.

In 2008 I took photos of one of my spring time favorites....Lilacs. They grow on the side of my house and I love cutting them to bring inside each year.

A couple of months ago, I was on the phone with someone and for whatever reason, the idea came to me like a light bulb going on, I wanted to paint lilacs and a Swallowtail butterfly together. I'm not sure why this idea occured to me at the time it did but I immediately wanted to get started on "Awakening" below.

With 3 new paintings that I've just finished, now is the hard tiime for me, deciding what to do next. Last night I was awake for some time trying to think of the next subject for the next painting. I think I know what I"ll do but I'm never totally sure until I start work on the next piece. I'm wondering, what inspires you?? What kind of thought process goes into creating some beauty in your life? www.artfulcreations.etsy.com