Everglades Palmetto

10x10 acrylic on Raymar panel
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Tree is this month's Girls Just Wanna Paint challenge topic.
I've included the reference photo this was painted from.
It's easy to see that I edited the scene quite a bit, adding the clump of background trees and creating water in the foreground.
I painted this in acrylics, which I find that I really love working with.

Sunlit Palms

"Sunlit Palms" 6x6 oil 
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This month's Girls Just Wanna Paint challenge is 'sunlight'. Plenty of sunlight here in Naples. These palms are next to my house and glow in the late afternoon sunlight.

California Palm

$100 plus $10 S&H

This fabulous scene from the mountains of California was painted from a photo by one of my blogger friends, Shelley Smart who kindly allowed me to use it as reference. Shelley is originally a Maine girl who resides on the West Coast and paints and photographs the beach out there.

I am enthralled by the beauty of the greenery against the snow capped mountains. I rarely do this but I'm posting two photos of this because much of the subtlety is lost in the photos. One is untouched and is warmer and one is Photo Shopped for contrast and it cooler. The actually painting is somewhere in the middle.

Photo Shopped

Palmettos

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 The plan today was to go out to the Everglades and paint with another artist/blogger but, it's raining so we bagged it and will try for another day. Last night, in anticipation, I decided to paint some palm trees just for practice.  I kept my  brushwork really loose combining lessons I've learned from Carol Marine and Colin Page. Two of the BEST whose edges and brushwork make their paintings exciting no matter what the subject.

Palmetto Palm watercolor study

Here in Naples it's getting hotter and yesterday, around three o'clock, I took myself to the beach. I broke out the watercolors and did a little study of these Palmettos standing guard. I also noticed that the seagull swarm starts just before sunset. Hundreds of gulls fly in and land on the beach. I left about 7:20, the sun still up, and headed for Publix to do some grocery shopping at the perfect time. Everyone else is home having supper :D

Beach House 6x8

In reality this is more than a 'beach house'. It's a mansion actually, as are most of the beach houses here in Naples,Florida. I resolved the awkward angles by working out the foreground. Again, I'm not able to get a really good photo of this. What do you think ? This painting is listed on eBay as item number 170199655887. I have to figure out how to create the link.

Beach House detail

I'm posting this detail of an almost finished painting because there is a design flaw in another part of the painting that needs to be fixed. The flaw is that there are several angles that converge too abruptly as well as a few shapes in the foliage (grrrr) that repeat themselves too statically. Part of the problem is that I didn't stop to figure out where I was going off and kept painting. WRONG ;) I think I know what I have to do to get out of it with the painting intact. I'll post the before and after when I finish it and you can decide. There will be some for whom the detail was the whole painting and they might not see the need to add anything ;)