Yellow Water Lily, 3 / 22 / 2010

Details
The first two times I did this painting they were both disasters. I was trying to paint each petal individually and there was just not an overall harmony of color. One of these disaster was still tacked to the drawing board and leaning up against a nearby bookcase. Our tomcat Simba wandered up and looked at the painting and then backed up to it and gave it a great big squirt. I have to agree with his opinion, I felt the same way about how it looked. 
 
After sleeping on the problem for several nights, I woke up with the idea to first paint the whole painting a light yellow which will give a uniform color on all the petals. That worked, what a relief.
 
When I got through with the painting and hunting for things needing to be fixed, I noticed a small white speck at the edge of one of the yellow petals. In trying to get the small speck to be the same shade of green as the lily pad below, which was a solid green, fixing the small speck quickly became a big problem in that the shade of green was never just right. Quickly the whole lily pad looked wrong. Oh my, I now had to repaint all the lily pads and try not to damage the finished yellow lily.
 
Sometimes fixing these accidents and problems can lead to making a better painting as it did with this painting.
 
This morning on the way back from getting the original scanned, I stopped at Pets Mart. After unloading $151 of pet food in the SUV I got in the drivers seat to start the engine. I noticed that the sun shade was down which I rarely put down. A lot of the stuff that is supposed to be in the console was scattered around on the seats.
Finally it began to dawn on me that somebody had been in my SUV while I was shopping. Then I noticed my radar warning device and my new GPS device were gone. Good grief, I had been robbed!!!!
They got in by breaking the lock on the door.
 
The good news is that they did not take this painting of the yellow water lily or damage it, so in a way I feel luckly.