A Tree of Sorts

That tree I was talking about painting onto the stinky canvas?  I finished it!  It took two days.  but I think it could have been done in just one day.  Acrylic paint dries fast even though I use an additive to slow the drying.  But before I show off my work, here is my inspiration.

What you need to notice in these images is the detailing.  I wanted to have my tree filled with detail like that.  Not too colourful.  My image is much more simple because I wanted something a little more streamlined, less busy.  And here it is!

It isn’t perfect.  I loved the background at first.  I wanted a greyed blue (I added a dash of yellow to warm it up too) and I wanted to have a bit of an ombré effect.  Darker at the bottom, lighter at the top.  But then, I painted the tree on top and now I think the background needed to be less blue, more grey.  Oh well.  The tree itself is three colours but Mr. Mouse can’t tell (he’s a bit colourblind, no, really, he is).  The trunk is raw umber with a fair bit of black added to it.  The swirly leaf part is green with black added to it.  And the apples are red mixed with gold and guess what? Black added in!  My goal was to have three colours that were very closely related so that the lines would be more obvious than the colours.  Straight black felt too harsh and any other uniform colour felt unnatural.  I think that’s why the background is too blue for my liking.  It’s too much colour. It also feels a little like the tree is floating in the air.  It may actually need a busier background, like the inspiration pieces.

Otherwise, I love the lines I drew for the tree.  The swirls are classic me (they appear in the Klimt piece too but I swear I didn’t copy).  Give me a pen and a piece of paper and those swirls will just magically start to appear.  I find them so soothing…  The trunk was harder.  I started with just waves but it looked weird, not finished somehow.  When I connected the waves to each other, it all came together.  At that point, I was supposed to add the apples.  I was happy with the tree and was so afraid of ruining it with little circles all over.  But I love them!  They really add life to the tree.  Actually, no.  They add magic to the tree…

I’m seeing more iterations of this tree in my future.  I bought a set of watercolour pencils and a set of graphitint pencils about a month ago and I’ve been dying to use them.  I think I’ll be breaking out my watercolour paper and drawing my tree over and over.  I’m going to try a busier background too.  Maybe juste make sure I have something like earth and sky so it doesn’t look like it’s floating in the air.  Ha, I guess that’s what I should have done before the big painting, right?  That’s what artists do, isn’t it?  Small practice pieces before doing the big one?  But I was in such a hurry to get this done and I didn’t expect to want to make more…

And the original?  I’ll be using it as a prop for my photos. We’ll see how it goes…

About deuxsouriceaux

Creative mommy at home to two wonderful little girls, trying to juggle family, sewing, exercise, family, knitting, photography, and did I mention family?