Silverbark at Sundown ~ complete (acrylic and collage on paper)

I'm going to call this done now. It doesn't look like I've done much since my last post but I spent a lot of time just looking at the painting and deciding how I wanted to create the leaves. I finally settled on a paste paper that I copper leafed on one side, painted on the other. I used tracing paper so the copper leaf would show through and tone the yellow. This produced a fairly accurate representation of birch leaves in Fall. Then the issue was where to place the leaves and how many wouldn't be too many. Did they distract or benefit the painting? Branches were never where I needed them and I knew I should've added the leaf placement to the original drawing. Dang! Ah well, a Chinese white pencil and a violet Prismacolor Verithin solved the problem. Cutting those teeny, tiny leaves was a chore, as was using tweezers to handle them. I think it was worth the effort and time, though. I'm pretty happy with it. :) The final size is approx. 6 1/2" x 29".

Work in progress

Red Screech Owl ~ WIP 2

Please disregard the odd shadow in the upper righthand corner of the image. I just noticed it. It won't be there when I post the final.

I think this is close to complete. There is still work to be done on the birch trunk but overall I'm fairly satisfied with my first attempt at an owl. I did run into a problem with the background. In a spot near the owl's head my w/c paper grabbed the paint and created a dark 'blob' that I could not blend nor remove so I decided to go much darker in that area to cover it. I feel I was able to balance this by adding an equally dark area to the birch trunk in the opposite corner of the comp.

My palette consists of Quin. gold deep and light red for the bulk of the feathers, burnt umber mixed with indigo for the other markings on the bird. My background is straight DaVinci Payne's grey and the birch bark is made of up of various mixtures of all this palette's colors.

Berries & Birch~photo

Because of the odd weather last summer there were no ash berries. This year the mountain ash that flanks the birch trees across my drive is loaded with berries and I snapped this shot which I wanted to share. I love the colors of the berries and mountain ash leaves, the white flash of the birch bark and the Fall colors of the birch leaves. The color combination is amazing and looks bright, even on a rainy day. This may be inspiration for a future painting or just give me ideas for color combinations.

Berries & Birch~Version #1 Completed

SOLD

I spent far more time than I intended on this but one thing lead to another and I got caught up in painting berries, adding twiggy little branches and general overall tweaking. Oddly, the berries turned out to be the biggest challenge. I mixed a combo of pyrrol red and perm. yellow for the orange. Pyrrol red, if you haven't tried it yet, is a potent color and it completely overtook the perm. yellow on the gesso. I waited until the first application of paint was dry, then gently lifted out the berries with a damp brush. The perm. yellow held onto the gesso and the pyrrol red stained just enough to create the shade of orange I was shooting for. I used some of the color mixture from the trunks to add shading and depth to the berry clusters. I created the twigs with the pointed tip of a bamboo skewer soaked in water, then dipped in undiluted tube paint.

Btw, the mystery tree with the berry clusters is a form of Mountain ash.