Meadow Flowers

Meadow Flowers
Watercolor on paper, 7x10.5

This morning was cool and very cloudy - the perfect day to get back to cleaning my flower beds!  Expecting rain, I worked quickly - and didn't get rained out for 5 hours!  Now inside, waiting for the rain to stop so I may return to my work, I am doing a little watercolor painting.  The pastures have not been cut yet, and there is the most wonderful assortment of grasses and lazy susans.  This is my landscape choice of the day, although my first purple garden phlox just started blooming!  After applying the Pebeo drawing gum (which I am quickly going through this first bottle), allowing it to dry, I washed on some background color.  When that was also dry, I rubbed off the gum, revealing the white of the paper beneath it.  I started laying in the colors, flowers first.  I wanted their color to be rather true to life.  The other grasses - I pushed them any way I felt like, dropping in happy colors that simply popped next to the colors already painted in the first layer.  It is so freeing to not be restricted by life, I know.....it sounds crazy.  But as a born perfectionist, it is a very unnatural thing for me to do.  It is almost like I have this other self, one who wants to paint with reckless abandon and wild colors, and who cares not if people think I have lost my mind!  Well, back to the real world of cleaning and gardening and preparing for company, and this is painting number 544 in 544 days.  Maybe I'll go crazy again tomorrow!