Daisies and Butterfly Bushes

Daisies and Butterfly Bushes/ oil on canvas board/ 10 x 8/

This is the first painting of daisies that I have liked recently. (The others are "wipers"). The daisies in this painting are surrounded by beautiful stems from the butterfly bushes from my yard. These rich darks make the whites on the daisy petals appear whiter. Even as I surrounded the whites to get them to "pop" out,  I worked to connect my lights., If you squint at this, I want you to be able to follow a path from the right lower corner up through the large daisies, back to the back-facing daisy and across and back down to complete a circle through the composition. I was also remembering to vary the centers of the daisies with different intense colors, to keep the brushwork loose and the paint thick in the later layers. I found the best way to get the petals on the daisies to work was to have a thin surrounding underpainting just outside the centers. Then I placed the petals on top of this.