"Poplar Tulip" is 36x36," acrylic on canvas.  This is the first piece I've completed during the current stay-at-home conditions.  After we became locked down, I quickly got into the much-needed habit of going for daily walks in my neighborhood.  I find I'm endlessly inspired by the beauty of nature and the incredible spring weather we've had this year.  On one of my walks, I kept seeing poplar tulips on the ground.

I know these are commonplace here, but I think the bright warm green and orange in them is remarkable.  I decided I would attempt to capture those colors in a pouring.  This would also be a chance to test-drive the painting corner I had cleaned out in my garage.  I can't do pourings in my home studio because they are extremely messy; that space is in the middle of my house and shared with my kids.  I prepared my paints and canvas.

Pourings are very much a hurry-up-and-wait process.  I laid down the initial pour, then had to force myself to walk away.  I've been asked why I don't use a blow dryer to accelerate the drying process.  While that works for some types of painting, I don't like how the air pressure from the dryer pushes the paint around.  It fights with the slow evolution driven by the water's motion.  Here was the initial pour, still very wet.

Here is how it dried... quite different!  The piece has been rotated 180 degrees between these two images.

From here, I used my original inspiration photo to carve out my poplar shapes using a light sky blue mask.  I rotated it many times while working on it.  This piece brings me joy because it conveys the feeling I get when I look up at my poplar trees on a sunny, warm day and see them full of those colorful tulips.