Saturday, July 14, 2012

Autumn Birches 1

It looks like today is going to be another hot and humid day at the Bobcaygeon Art Show, with the temperature climbing up to 92F (33C) for this afternoon.

Hopefully we will get a breeze to keep things a little cooler in the school house.

Using a pencil I lightly drew in the boundaries of my birch tree trunks, to give me a guideline when bringing the background colour over to the white area.

First I lifted some birch trunks out of the background using water and added the birch markings on them with a light wash of colour.

Then I started adding a few maple tree trunks into the background with a grey brown mixture.

Using mixtures of burnt sienna, raw sienna and alizarin crimson the background colour was brought over to the trunks of the main birch trees to give them shape and definition.

Gradually building up layers of background tree trunks, branches and leaves to give depth the background.

Growies were painted into the foreground and slightly more defined leaves were added to the small branches.

Finer markings were put onto the birch tree trunks using various mixtures of French ultramarine blue, burnt sienna and raw sienna.

A couple of branches were added to the two smaller birch trees.

After looking at the painting for a little while, I added a wash of new gamboge ad alizarin crimson to give the painting a little more of an autumn glow.

This original 4" x 6" watercolour painting is available for $40.00 unframed.