We finally made our first trip to Holden Arboretum for this year last weekend, hoping to see a lot of butterflies.  In years past, the weekends around Labor Day seemed to be the peak time for Monarchs on their migration paths.  However due to the long hot summer, most of the flowers in the butterfly garden were past their prime, and we only saw one monarch total.  So we looked for different photographic subjects, and I found this lily pad scene and painted it with John’s Watercolors.  I also added a small amount of chalk for shading and detail.

This week’s image is a straight photo of a swallowtail butterfly taken in our garden.  This is the same guy as the watercolor I published a couple of weeks ago.  This has been a big year for butterflies at our bushes, especially the swallowtails.

A year ago I posted a photo of a “Spotted Tiger Lily” that I took at my Grandmother’s house.  You don’t normally see these plants anymore, but the ones Grandma owns have allegedly been in the family since the 1800’s.  Anyway I got a couple of plants to bloom this year from seeds, and using John’s watercolors I have digitally painted them.

For this week’s blog entry, we have another watercolor painting from our garden.    Once again I have used John Derry’s watercolor brushes to create this image.  I have also entered this painting into Corel’s “Quest for the Best” design contest.  You can find my image here, and register to enter a “like” it vote if you so choose to.  Thanks for looking…

This week I have another watercolor from our lily garden, painted with Johns Watercolor brushes.  These brushes make it easy to remove detail from a distracting background, letting you feature the focal point more dramatically.

Oh yeah, butterflies are also some of my favorite subjects.  This handsome guy was painted using Den’s funky chunky, Paulo’s good brush, and my own chalk variant in Painter 11.

Another one of my favorite subjects that I like to include in my paintings are empty benches.  I’ve always thought of them as an invitation for the viewer to join the scene, and to take a look at all the things that drew me to the composition in the first place.  This is Beyers Pond in the Cleveland Metroparks, and Rudy and I came upon this landscape early in the morning on our walk.  (With it being so hot, we’ve been going pretty early to beat the heat…)  I used my usual landscape brushes on this painting including the funky chunky, and my chalk and smeary oil variants.

If you have taken the time to look through the archives of this blog, it will be no secret to you that coneflowers are one my favorite garden subjects.  (Lilies being the other…)  That being said, we have planted quite a few coneflowers in our back flower bed, and this year these plants have become established and are now quite numerous.  This of course yields many good photo opportunities, which I can then paint in Corel Painter.  I used the Funky Chunky, Paulo’s good-brush and my sculpting chalk on this painting.

I’ve been continuing to experiment with Johns Watercolor brushes, and the more that I use them I find that I am better able to render finer detail.  As I like to photograph flowers from my garden and elsewhere, these brushes are perfect for making artistic flower “portraits”.  If you use any Painter version between 9 through 11, it is a worthwhile investment in these brushes.

We have several peony plants in our garden, and I caught this white one with some late-afternoon lighting.  I also did a slight soft focus effect on the outer parts of the flower and background to enhance the mood, leaving the center with sharper details.