Orchids on Blue Transparent Watercolor and Time-lapse Video

I had so much fun with my last orchid painting that I thought it would be worth revisiting such a diverse and fascinating subject again. This one took a long time to design. I spent days monkeying around with all sorts of possibilities. At one point I got frustrated enough that I was ready to put it away for a week or two and start on a more straightforward painting. I kept having trouble coming up with ways to unify all the smaller images in an interesting way. While sleeping, the idea of the “oval-ized” shapes in the background came to me. When I woke up I figured it was worth a shot! I was pretty pleased with the new oval background versions I made in Photoshop, so I moved on to transferring the sketch and painting.

It’s funny that over the years I’ve had that happen a lot. I’ll go to sleep with a design, 3D modeling/animation, wood-working or other problem on my mind, and in the middle of the night, while the old grey matter is still churning away at the problem, up pops a solution.
Ok… on more than one occasion I’ve had a fantastic, incredible solution to a problem in my dream and awakened excited, but the next morning in a more lucid state, I realized how utterly moronic my sleep idea was. Oh well, you can’t win them all. You also can’t bank on sleep ideas happening at all. Most of the time I wake up with the same unsolved puzzles rattling around in my head. I am a firm believer in letting things percolate in the synapses for a few days, just in case.

Like my last orchid painting, I wanted to do something that was not a typical floral painting or botanical illustration. I decided to only paint the flowers for the most part, not stems and leaves. The stems, leaves and roots of orchids can be beautiful, but I wanted this to be really different from most of the botanical paintings and illustrations I see, which are cut flowers or specimens on stark white.