Today was a hot day. Certainly felt like summer, even though technically, the solstice is a couple days away. We are fortunate that we have a newer air conditioner so our house stayed comparatively cool. I cooked dinner out on the grill to keep it cool in the kitchen. While cooking dinner, I was revamping my meal plans to cook as much as I can outside this week. The summery weather, though, helped to inspire me to paint some flowers in a blue vase. As I haven’t any flowers inside at home, I pulled up a previous painting for a reference.

As is probably quite clear, I didn’t actually use it as a reference, and instead just started painting. I styled the vase with a carafe type shape but wanted it blue. It felt pretty cool, with the blues and the purples, so since this week we have extreme heat advisories , I added a yellow background to make it a little less frigid.

How do you handle the extreme heat days which are becoming more frequent?