Tag: tree

Winter Sunset

I took this picture awhile back in the local botanical garden.  It is an oak against the sky, with the Santa Monica range in the distance.  In the photo, the tree is silhouetted against a yellow sky, and the foreground is mottled with dried grasses.  The California oak is not deciduous, but shows leaves year round.

The process here is along the lines of yesterday’s post, and is more successful I think.  It is very simple.  The steps I took began with a wash on the entire paper (8×10) in raw sienna.  The mountains on the left were done next using a bit of sap green with the raw sienna, followed by some cobalt blue for the darker range.  After that, the lower half of the painting had a wash of a greenish color, later followed with a darker green of sap green and cobalt blue.  The tree and brush in the center were of burnt sienna and cobalt, with perhaps a bit of ultramarine as well.

That’s it.  Fairly successful in moving from light to dark, general to specific.  The simplicity of the subject matter makes it an easy painting to do – yesterday’s fig tree through the window was more complex, and accordingly more difficult.  I really wonder if I will ever successfully paint complex scenes, such as a forest and creek or a city street filled with cars, people, buildings, and whatever – rather daunting, actually.

Redbuds in Bloom

Outside my studio window is a small California Redbud.  It really needs more sunshine to show off its flowers – there is too much shade on the western side of my house, and so it does not bloom very often or very much.  Still, it is a lovely tree.  Slender branches, heart-shaped leaves that change color and drop in the autumn.  Local birds like to hang out in its branches.

Today, I tried to express the beauty of several redbuds in bloom, with spring growth abounding in new leaves.  I drew the trees first, then used frisket – a lot of it – in the forms of lines and dots.  From there, the background was laid in, using varying colors to represent leaves, flowers, and other trees or branches.  The frisket was then removed, and trunks painted using warm and cool greys.  Afterward, magentas and yellow greens, warm and cool.  It was all rather splattery!  Finally, after everything dried, white dots applied to suggest spring insects and twinkling sunlight.

Not entirely pleased.  As a realistic painting, it fails; however, as an abstract, it has potential.