Two years ago, ChildOne stopped by after going to the farmers market. She brought a beautiful bouquet of flowers she’d picked up which I promptly took to paint. The painting itself took me around 40 hours to complete.

And here’s where the happy accident comes in. I don’t know why but I have a hard time deciding background colors. I know I should set up the still life with the actual background but I get excited and start painting and don’t do it. So I painted the background pale yellow and a white table cloth. I stood back and thought, “well that’s bland.” And then there’s the vase being too high leaving a big white space at the bottom of the painting.

So I looked for a beautiful tablecloth and mocked it up in Photoshop and even painted it. And really hated it. The pattern on the tablecloth competed with the flowers. The eye had no hierarchy of subject.

I scraped as much of the paint off as I could and started again. I eventually settled on a dark green tablecloth showing the edge of the table to give the painting vertical balance. But by that point, there were numerous layers of paint in that section.

In oil painting, one of the cardinal rules is “fat over lean” which tells you which layers should have medium added to them so they dry in the correct order. Oil can take months to dry and if they layers underneath dry slower than the layers above, the paint will crack. Generally this takes a long time to happen.

With the amount of paint I’d put on the tablecloth area, the final green started cracking within a week!

Here’s the interesting thing: the textured tablecloth is the thing people gravitate to and say they love most about this painting. While I probably won’t add that much paint to a layer again, it was a good lesson to learn and added beautiful texture and movement to this still-life.