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.