For the sixth and final painting in my mini art show series, I decided to do something a little outside my comfort zone — I went red. I'm usually a blue, green, and pink kind of person, but I'd been feeling the color red lately, and I wanted to lean into it. The result? A trio of barred owls painted with just two colors on a four by six inch block of hot press paper. Here's how it all came together.

What happens when you take a bearded iris flower and a bearded man and merge them into one painting? A whole lot of fun — and a pretty satisfying pun. In this post, I'm walking you through my process of creating a surreal watercolor portrait, from mixing complementary purples and yellows to painting without a sketch and just winging it with shapes, edges, and instinct.

I don't usually paint this way. Wetting both sides of the paper, working entirely in negative space, carving out light rather than painting it — this was a departure from my usual process in almost every way. But that's exactly why I loved it. Here's how I painted a glowing stalk of wisteria and what I learned along the way.