This took a lot of twists, turns and learning! Thank you, Kate!!!

To start with, I absolutely love Kate and her teaching style. She gets me thinking and experimenting and in a way that I get challenged. I’m submitting part of my project before I’m done because I’m having trouble. I think I can see patterns in greenery but I am having a really hard time breaking down a flower into patterns while still maintaining the essence of the flower. 

I started with the greenery…

I thought I was on a roll. 

Then I broke out the color and attempted to make some small flowers, filler flowers. I personally preferred the more realistic ones, but kept trying to make them out of pattern, those were imagined. I figured I better try and find patterns in real flowers. I thought the Passion flower would be easy because there were so many built in patterns.Yes, there was pattern, but was I going too realistic? I tried again. Thinking I was getting somewhere I tried working on a composition in the square format for a card.I thought color might help, and changed a few things around.Believe me, there were other attempts…

Now I think I’m going to try and do what I should have done long ago and limit my palette (very hard for me) and get rid of the Passion flower! Ugh! I need help!!!

i took another class with Kate and remembered she said if I was having difficulty breaking away from the realism to find the pattern, to use a color palette that’s foreign to what I’m doing. That’s it….but it’s going to be a long night!!!!

 

 

There wasn’t much improvement last night! I painted an iris. Too realistic. I tried to break it down more…I think I broke down the shapes more than found the patterns. Got frustrated and went to bed.

 
…oh, and I got rid of the Passion flower. ( I knew I did more before I went to bed!)

In the morning I re-watched Kate’s lessons and I got re-inspired! I tried to simplify my thinking, made a 6 color limited palette and then in order to not get caught up in the realism of the particular flowers I looked at silhouettes ONLY! Breakthrough!  Certainly I wanted to add colors but made up the colors in an old pill sorter and put the rest of the paints away…yeah, I didn’t trust myself!
Not my typical colors, at all! (Where’s the turquoise?????)

 

The first thing I did was attack the Iris!!! I was much happier where I was headed. I remembered my big pot of amaryllises that were dying off and I wanted to give one a final tribute. I’m getting happier! 

I pulled it all together and made a whole new composition and just finished the painting. I’m going to work on it digitally as soon as I get a chance! But I AM much CALMER!!!

The background is calling for help!