Enough is as good as a feast

Sunflower ©2009 Karen Mathison Schmidt
6 x 6 • acrylic on Gessobord

SOLD • private collection, Arroyo Grande, California

Last Thursday I drove with my friends Sandra and Ramona to Gilliam, Louisiana (north of Shreveport ... if you get to Arkansas, you’ve gone too far), where the Sunflower Festival was to be held on that weekend. We were anticipating seeing acres and acres of sunflowers, as Sandra had remembered from a couple of years ago when driving through that area, so I had made sure to charge up my camera battery and pack some extra memory cards, and Sandra had even brought her laptop along in case we needed to download photos to make more room in our cameras.

Well, there must be more income in corn than sunflowers these days, because what we found was acres and acres of corn, with a few smallish patches of sunflowers tucked here and there. Oh, well, it was fun anyway, just spending the afternoon with good friends. Sandra and I spent almost an hour taking photos of one little patch of sunflowers, while Ramona just tried to stay cool in the shade and enjoy the view.

It’s probably just as well that there weren’t acres and acres of these sunny beauties, or else we might still be there!

Here are my work in progress photos:

The first sketch, in purple and vermilion:



Blocking in some shadow areas with purple, then a fuschia glaze over the entire painting:



Starting to add opaque color to the petals:




Filling in the sky with a mixture of cobalt and pthalo blues with some white, painting with energy, but loosely so that the fuschia underpainting shows through in places:



And here are some close-up details: