New Iris Paintings

I have a show coming up in June that I am trying to get some paintings ready for. I have been wanting to use some of the photos I took last April of my irises.  So I finally started on a pair of new 10" x 10" paintings today. Above is the first painting.  I am going to work on it some more tomorrow.  I am not totally happy with the dark purple areas.  I will probably work on the background also.  I don't know if the light green works with this iris' color.

 I worked on it a bit more.  The photo isn't great but you can see the added details a bit.  I brightened the edges and darkened the shadows a little also. I also washed a dark blue over the background.

I worked on the other canvas today.  I found a great photo of my favorite light blue iris.  I like the profile perspective.  It looks nice with the top view of the purple iris.    I am still going to work on the background colors of both to unify them.  Right now the purple one's background is darker because of the blue wash I did.  I am tempted to just go with a dark brown on both.  I love the contrast it gives, but I have done a lot of paintings with dark brown backgrounds and I think I want to experiment with something new.  The blue iris still needs some definition but it's mostly done.

 Well, I decided to go light blue on the background of the pink iris.  I ordered more canvases of this size and will be doing at least two more for this series.  I will most likely sell them together as a set.  I like the look of these two so far.  I think I will probably do a yellow iris with a pink background and a white or purple/lavender iris with a yellow background.  It should make for a nice set hopefully.

UPDATE:  I got the canvases in this week!  I am 99% finished with the paintings.  I will set them up in my living room and look at them for a few days to be sure there isn't anything else I want to change.  I find that if I "live" with a painting for a few days I can usually pinpoint any changes I want to make.   I really like the way these are turning out. 

UPDATE:  I did make some new changes. I wanted to bring out some deeper color in the blue iris.  I also lightened the purple/pink iris and added some highlights to the lavender iris.  The yellow iris got the most new work done.  I added a lot more detail to the upper petals portion.  I think I'm really finished this time.