This gal left Xander's Coffee in new hands recently. Hope she's found a good home! (Does anyone else talk about their art like this?!)

Well, its finished! I am finally posting some pics of the orchid I painted for Jessie's salon called Twisted Orchid Studio. Here's a close up in-progress shot that I Instagrammed on my art account. The filters in Instagram help bring out the colour and contrast that my phone camera diminishes.

    When applied with a small paint brush, the latex paint can be very thin and require many coats to cover an area. It also gets tacky fast, and therefore is hard to blend well to create gradual tonal changes. Next time I think I will lay down a midtone layer or two over all the petals before going in with the shadows and highlights. I tried to do it all at once, but the surface was too large, even for each individual petal sometimes, and it required two coats of paint for each section. 

      Here's the whole thing. Hopefully you can see the scale by comparing with the chair, stool, and outlets in the wall. It's taller than I am! I learned a lot about how to put the colour down because I was using interior latex paint rather than acrylic, which I am more used to working with. 
   We decided not to add leaves at the bottom because some shelving was going there anyways. In the end I added a fresh light green to the tips of the petals to brighten and saturate the image. It was lots of fun!

Thanks to some deadlines, determination, and a great group of artists and organizers, I will finally be exhibiting some newly completed paintings at the Terrace Art Gallery for the month of June. Once again, Matthew Daratha has organized a fantastic group art show with many of Terrace's talented artists. Come out Friday May 31st at 7pm for an opening night with music, food, and artists on site. The set up is looking really good already and there are paintings, sculptures, drawings, poetry and more. Check out the show poster at the Exhibition Record page.

I will write more about my ideas behind these two paintings later, but I had fun incorporating gold acrylic paint and gold spray paint into each of these works. An old lace shirt was sacrificed for the making of these paintings, but I have a feeling it will be used again as I really like the effect it creates when used as a spray stencil.