Thursday, June 15, 2017

A new series of native pollinators

I've begun a new series on native pollinators. All circular images are 5.25 inches across. I believe it is very important as a nature artist to spend numerous hours out in the field gathering reference material for  paintings.  I only work from my own reference material, so a painting already has many hours of work put in before pencil and paint ever touch the paper.

Update: All Paintings are now framed.
All paintings in circular mat & wood frame 10x10" $184.00 each.

 Native bumblebee on aster, watercolor.
It is a challenge to capture clear photos to work from as bees and flies need to keep moving to gather pollen and sip nectar. 

 Tiger Swallowtail. 

 This is my personal favourite, a female sweat bee. This minuscule metallic green bee is a female, the male has a striped abdomen. These wee bees are hard to photograph as they are 0.12 to 0.40 inches, very tiny, so you can imagine why I love this painting. 

 Hummingbird Clearwing Moth. Found along the Whitemud nature preserve trail where I spent half an hour watching this moth and a swallowtail dine. These daytime moths hover while sucking nectar just like a hummingbird does.

 Hover fly.
I find delight in the variety of color and markings on these sweet little flies. Hover flies are beneficial pollinators and their larvae eat aphids.

Mountain Retreat, watercolor, 4x7.5 inches
This painting is of course not part of the series, its a style I was working off and on from over thirty years ago. Over the years I created various paintings this style but left off doing them in recent years as I saw so many other artists using the same idea. This piece was started long ago and never finished until this month.