Just completed this spring painting of a house in Rockville with tulips and a few azaleas in the background. I am not a springtime painter!  While I love the beauty of the cherry blossoms, dogwoods, and azaleas that the Washington area is blessed with every April and May, they don’t inspire me to paint them.  I much prefer the color of the early buds on the trees, perhaps a sprig of dogwood amid woods, and that sort of thing. The blaze of azaleas is just too much and the cherry blossoms are primarily white!  I kept coming back to this picture because I liked the shape of the simple bungalow house, the angle of the tree, and the shape of road and angle of street sign.  The stones in the garden also added a nice curve, leading the eye into the background.  These are the things that excite me!  I changed the color of the house. It was a light blue and I didn’t think it would add much to the picture, so I changed it to a grayed orange. My students think this looks more like Bermuda than Rockville, but I like it the way it is!  I did an underpainting with some of the local color and some warm browns in the foreground.

House with Tulips, 16 x 20, Pastelbord