After painting my Blue Orchid, I felt like painting another blue flower.

A hibiscus was still on my painting list, so I decided to combine the two ideas. My boyfriend also wanted me to include a bee in one of my paintings, and it ended up becoming the little highlight of this piece.

That’s also why I chose the simple title Bee.

I actually struggled the most with the background. I tried red first, but it felt a little too bold.

Then I went with yellow, but the bee somehow got lost in it. In the end, I returned to my signature black background, and I’m really happy with that decision. I intentionally left a few little red and yellow accents visible in the painting as traces of that process. I think there’s something beautiful about letting parts of the journey show instead of painting over everything as if it had never been there in the first place.