By the final painting, the petals loosen.

Sunflowers Vol. 2 is a collection of six mixed media sunflower paintings created on black backgrounds. This series explores texture, layering, and the evolution of a subject through repetition, using paper, acrylic, and dimensional materials

This collection began while I was pregnant, and was finished nearly eight months postpartum. A quiet lesson in pause, and in returning to ideas that were important enough to begin.

Sunflowers Vol. 2 is a series of six mixed-media sunflower paintings, each created on a black background and exploring repetition, process, and evolution.

At the time, I was still painting in long stretches in my basement studio, moving between different collections and working in hours-long sessions. I thought I had a clear idea of what this series would become.

But by the time I finished the final painting, everything about the way I worked had changed.

The space.
The time I had available.
The way I approached the subject.

And the paintings changed with it.

A few months postpartum, I found myself in a season that asked me to slow down in ways I wasn’t used to. I was navigating recovery—physically and mentally—and beginning to understand that if I didn’t take care of myself, I couldn’t show up fully for my family.

So I made a small shift.

Instead of reaching for my phone in those quiet moments, I set up a mini studio at my dining room table. Materials left out, ready to go, something I could return to in small pockets of time.

And I returned to the collection in a completely different rhythm.

Working in short, in-between moments, sometimes no more than 15 or 20 minutes at a time.

At first, I thought I would move quickly through the rest of the series. The paintings were smaller, focused on a single subject, and felt straightforward.

But as I continued, something shifted.

I started studying the flower more closely. How the petals actually move, how they overlap, how they begin to soften and change as they age. I adjusted my materials, layering different papers to create more dimension in each mixed media sunflower painting, I refined my color palette, mixing deeper, more complex tones instead of relying on color straight from the tube.

And gradually, the paintings began to change.

The petals became less uniform, crossing over one another and taking on more natural variation.
The stems gained movement and weight.
The colors deepened, especially against the black backgrounds, giving each sunflower painting more contrast and depth.

By the final painting, I wasn’t working from a reference anymore. I was working from what I had learned through the previous pieces, pulling together the shapes, colors, and movements I discovered along the way.

That’s when I could see the shift clearly.

The sunflowers had changed, but so had the way I approached them.

By repeating the same subject and studying it more deeply, the work moved from what I thought a sunflower would look like to something more honest. Maybe less polished in a traditional sense, but more real.

That’s one of the things I love most about working in series. A single painting captures a moment, but a collection reveals the process of learning over time.

Sunflowers Vol. 2 is made up of six mixed-media paintings, each exploring that evolution in a slightly different way.

This collection isn’t just six sunflower paintings.

It’s a study of the sunflower through repetition and evolution.

The full Sunflowers Vol. 2 collection is available to view here. Each original sunflower painting can be collected individually or as part of the full series.