Sometimes when working within a theme, after you get the obvious stuff out of the way, you can surprise yourself.

I first experienced this when I decided to create and post on Instagram “14 Days of Valentine’s Day” artwork. The first couple of days were easy – hearts! red! Then it started to get a little harder. “What am I going to paint?!” But even though it was harder I found that some of the later pieces were the best ones. (My favorite is the “He loves me…” one.)

The same thing happened with my “17 Days of St. Patrick’s Day” posts on Instagram. At first it was easy – shamrocks! green! Then it got hard. I started thinking, “17 Days is a long time!!” But again, some of my favorite illustrations were created in those later days. When I had to dig a little deeper into the theme. (My favorite is the grouchy leprechaun.)

Yesterday I posted my watercolor American flag for the 4th of July. The weather wasn’t great – cloudy and rainy – so I started to think about what else I could draw. Hmmm. “What do people do on the 4th of July?” BBQ! And so another idea was born.