An almost perfect day

One fine spring day earlier this year (and needless to say, it was pretty wet), I was walking somewhere SE, and the sidewalks were just covered, I mean COVERED, in maple seed pods. Bright chartreuse over wet, dark, shiny cement sidewalks. I've been waiting to paint that ever since.

So after almost 3 weeks away from the studio, I've started 2 more of the 7x7 panels, two different types—a paperbark maple and a vine maple. I'm not finished, but here are a couple of progress shots of each.

First one, paperbark maple. I created the background a few months back with some gray and bright color spots. Today, I added the pods, first in ultramarine. The pods are about actual size...you can see a real pod on the left:



Then I layered a light green and a yellow on top. They kind of look like bugs:



Then the vine maple. Until I decided to paint them, I hadn't really paid attention to how different the different maple pods are. Not only in shape, but also in color and texture, and some are really tiny. So these are starting out the same as the paperbark maple, but there's a lot more red in these pods. The wings are also a lot thinner:



This is as far as I got today. They almost look like peas. I guess they're rather similar ideas: