Orange Star

Orange Star     16x20  oil on linen

Native to South Africa, this flower really is an "orange star".  It is such a wonderful spark of color in the long enduring winter.  

I worked a combination of brushwork and palette knife for this painting.  I'm having fun pushing the textures ever further.  I love the feeling of dimension you get when you build up the paint.

I'm learning more all the time about creating dimension also with shadows.  Probably the single most valuable lesson I took from the workshop with Laura Robb.  She told me to always be looking for those areas where you can push the value of shadows to give the sense of one thing in front of or on top of another to create that depth.