When you look at an artists’ work, you can often get a sense of not only their style, but also their color palette, the subjects they enjoy painting – such as landscape painters, floral artists, animals, etc. You may also notice similar items in many of their paintings. If you look through my art and illustration work that I’ve done over the past 35 years, including my published illustration books and editorial work, you will also notice a trend.

Like many artists, I tend to paint and illustrate things that I am familiar with and that are of interest to me. My work is almost always nature-related and is very colorful. An example of some of my favorite things to illustrate can be found by looking at the paper sculpture illustration, “Bunny in My Garden.“

The first thing you may notice about this 3D paper sculpture illustration is that it is quite colorful. It is a good example of my color palette, which includes pinks, purples, magentas, coral and blues. The next thing you probably will notice is the bunny rabbit.

Instead of painting a typical brown wild bunny, I wanted to depict one of the pet rabbits my daughter had when she was growing up. It is no coincidence that this bunny is sitting in the flower garden. You may think this is where she would run off to when not in her hutch, but that is not it at all. I will often include a little secret or a hidden play on words in my paintings (that only my family members would catch onto) and this is actually a small play on words.

Our family bunny never ran into the flower garden. The bunny’s name was Flower. So of course she needs to sit among these beautiful colorful flowers. (Although I must admit I had imagined that if she did get into the flowers, she would have eaten them all.) The other thing about Flower is that she was the cutest little dwarf bunny rabbit — soft bright white with dark black spots — just like in the illustration.

At the top of the oval picture are one of my favorite flowers, the bleeding hearts. I really like the shape of the flower and the plant and I like drawing them and paper sculpting them as well. The pink heart-shaped flowers curve nicely on the stem, which I can use to my advantage to help to create a frame around the subject, as I did in this painting. I used the curved flower stem to bring your eye back to the cute little bunny rabbit.

I’ve also loved seeing and watching butterflies since I was a little girl and have many reference books, photographs and books about butterflies. This spring I even had the opportunity to visit the butterfly pavilion in Los Angeles at the Natural History Museum. I will often include butterflies in my work and the ones in this picture are three dimensional and pop out of the paper instead of being just a flat painting.

The last thing I want to point out about this “Bunny and Butterflies in My Garden” design is that if you look closely, you will notice a little ant “hiding” in the leaves of the flower garden. I’ve drawn hundreds of hidden object pictures over the years and will often have little things hiding out in the background of my work, waiting to be found.

If you have the time, I hope you will take a look through my portfolio to see if you can notice any other similarities in my work. Can you find other illustrations with bleeding hearts, bunny rabbits, ants and flowers?  I hope I have also encouraged you to look through other artists portfolios and gallery work to see if you can discover their color palette and the similarities they may have in their work.