Happy Father’s Day! plus something from the rose garden ...

Happy Father’s Day, all you dads out there (and especially mine)!

Rosy Path ©2011 Karen Mathison Schmidt
6 x 6 inches • oil on museum-quality, archival Gessobord
gloss varnish for UV protection

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Something loose and fun to shake myself out of getting too tight with the brushstrokes! After the last several paintings which were a little larger and more detail-oriented, I wanted to do something really loose and almost abstract. Plus I had a faint headache this afternoon, so I wanted something I could really relax with, and this sunny garden sidewalk at the American Rose Center here in northwest Louisiana was just the thing.

Here are the work-in-progress photos:

I dived right in blocking in the main areas with purple, yellow and burnt sienna.

I wanted to position the roses before I started filling in the foliage. I wanted the flowers to be random and since it’s really hard for a human being to position objects randomly (our brains automatically want them to be evenly spaced, or symmetrical, or with a pattern of some kind) I used my reference photo and placed the roses pretty much how they were in the garden that day.

Then I started filling in foliage and the shadow of the roses on the sidewalk.

The white concrete sidewalks at the Rose Center really make the roses themselves pop with color.

Here in the final painting you can see that I softened the edges of the shadows just a bit by adding a lighter gray. Also, I added some confetti specks of light, bright color (but not too much) here and there to add a little more of a sunny feel of the composition.