Trying Trees

OK, the trees are not testing my patience. I'm actually trying to paint trees. One of the reasons I didn't pursue art after high school was that to be good at it you have to practice, practice, practice and paint/draw, whatever, the same things over and over until you get them the way you want. I never could talk myself into that.

But here I am. This is four attempts at spring trees. Specifically, spring aspen trees. I need to keep trying until I get a style I'm happy with. This one is paper towel blobs with the black lines added after the paint. I like how the leaves look, but the trunk and branches are wrong for aspen.

This one is paintbrush with the black lines added after the paint. It's an OK tree, but it's not looking like early enough spring, and it's definitely not an aspen. It has good depth, but that also means it has too many leaves for the season I'm trying to capture.

Try number three is doing the black lines before the paint, and the paint is sponged on with the "wrong" kind of sponge. I watched some videos with this technique, and i like the result in theory, but this tree isn't right. The trunk and branches are too solid. The shape and branches are more aspen.

This one looks the most spring-like and it is beginning to look like an aspen, although I can't find my black paint, and the trunk needs to be gray. This was done with scrunched up tinfoil with the black added afterwards. Needs more layers of paint for depth, but the cheap paint is too translucent, and the tinfoil too "sparse," but I think I'm getting there. I've ordered the "right" kind of sponge and some pens that won't run in varying tip widths.

You need to know that these are done with el cheapo watercolors and paper from the box store. I'm not going to buy better paint and paper until I get better with technique.

There is a point to all this. If you've been around long enough, I last was working seriously on this project over ten years ago, but it made it on the blog if you remember that far back. Not quite ready to commit myself enough to post the goal yet. It's one of my many (embarrassing number of) unfinished projects.

In other news: I had a zoom meeting this morning and there were tech problems getting ready for it, so that took all morning. I put away the last of the Christmas decorations. I worked on most of the other projects a little bit each. May try to write a few more words more tonight.

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