New painting and new video!
A friend commissioned me to paint some pink roses to give as a gift later this year. Jeff and I were lucky enough to be in Portland, Oregon for his birthday last month, and the city has an amazing rose test garden.
It boasts a mind-boggling array of roses in every color and variety imaginable, and I was able to take dozens of photos--fodder for future paintings and for use the next time somebody wants me to paint them. And needless to say, this place smelled incredible.
Just row after row of roses like these!
I sent my client a selection of photos of pink roses, and she chose one for me to paint the one: a cluster of light peachy-pink English roses that I wanted to make slightly pinker. I set to work and completed about a third of the 11"x14" painting in that first day.
And it was nice to have the tough rose out of the way (or at least started). The next morning I worked on the other roses.
And in the afternoon and the next morning, I developed the background.
This left a gaping white hole in the picture that I was saving for last. This rose was just starting to open, and I thought it would be a good subject for a video. You can see me paint it here (sped up eight times, I believe):
I'm not appearing in the video this time around--I don't think I need to show my face in all of them--and to make life a little easier for Jeff (who edits these), I changed the way I do my narrations. For my other videos, I recorded about 25 little chunks of audio, each about two sentences long, and we painstakingly dropped them into the videos at just the right time. This process was tiresome, and I thought it would be a lot easier if I did maybe four long chunks. And it was. I hope people like this approach just as much, as it saves us from an hour or two of moving mini audio files around.
I'd like to thank my sister for collaborating with me and linking to my last video about a week ago, by the way, and her thousands of viewers who stopped by to take a look at it. That was truly amazing, and I hope they come back for this one! And thanks to my dozens of readers in this tiny corner of the Internet for your support over the years.
If you'd like to continue to support me, please consider buying a print of this or my other paintings, available here. Feel free to contact me via a comment, email, Tweet, or Facebook message if you'd like me to paint some roses or other flowers for you as well! Next time I'll put up a post about what kind of flowers are available.
Here are some of the roses I sent to my client--I have lots of other rose colors, too.
I also have a PayPal button on the right side of my blog for those of you who'd like to support the cause financially. Please know that it always makes my day whenever somebody notices that and sends me some money--I typically shriek and go bounding around the room, upsetting the cats, before I send a gushing email thanking you. And if you've got nothing better to do, go to my YouTube channel and watch some videos, give 'em a thumbs-up, and comment. Believe it or not, that helps!
Thanks again for watching. :)
Gorgeous painting, Kelly! I would love to go to a rose garden like that someday. I bet there were a lot of bees, though!
Posted by: Teiva | September 21, 2013 at 08:50 PM