Holiday Paint Out Week 3: Joy

Here's my final image for this week's Holiday Paint Out with Creative Catalyst Productions. This week's prompt was "Joy," and for me there is something incredibly joyful about a fresh bouquet of flowers. Especially at this time of year in Oregon.

I have mixed feelings about the piece's outcome. I have to remind myself that I'm still struggling with basic things like color mixing, design, and composition. It's easy to get critical at a point in the learning process where really I should keep my criticisms quiet and just keep creating. The thing between me now and where I want to be is probably a couple hundred hours of practice so that is what I will keep doing.

Here is where I started. I gathered the papers that I felt were the brightest and found a piece of foam core I'd created textures on a few weeks ago. I then drew my flowers (each flower on a different color keeping it in the warm family) and arranged them before laying them down.

When I put them on the blue I knew very quickly that the background was way too intense (left image) so I made a pile of white, titan buff and matte medium and glazed it back (right image). Then I glued everything down.

Once I had everything down I liked it but I was at the place where I always stop. The piece feels too spacious. But not in the roomy wonderful sense. In the "Hmmm.... something is missing sense."

I decided to try and push myself, and so I cut out more flowers and glued them down. The image on the left was a test of where things should go. The final laying down (right) looked a bit different. Sorry about the darkness of the left image. I had a really hard time color matching things in Photoshop.

What I like: I think I'm begging to get the bulk I want.
What I don't like: I find the lines very distracting. I have a layer of gel matte between the two flower layers and I think that's what those lines are. I need to get some self leveling gel!