Sparkly Tree

After four paintings in a row based on the tried and trusted abstract silhouette style, I thought it was time for something different.  I was in the mood to experiment and I’ve learned a lot from this one.

I started with an underpainting using three primaries: French ultramarine, quinacridone magenta and transparent yellow.  Rather than just leaving it to dry, though, I covered it in some crinkled up aluminium foil and rested a paving slab on it while it dried.  The sky looked as normal (it was probably already dry before the foil was added) but the foreground had an interesting spotty texture.

Next, I put in a tree using acrylic inks and granulation medium.  I used all of my ink colours except waterfall green for this.  At times, the inks were behaving even worse than normal and I used kitchen paper to dab some bits dry and to smear the ink in places – that worked well.  The leaves in the tree were added by flicking inks onto the paper using a palette knife; this worked out quite well, adding a lot of energy to the painting.  As the tree dried, I saw that there was a hint of a woman trapped inside the tree, which I really liked.  The small branch on the left of the tree pointing downwards was an attempt to make the woman clearer by adding a branch that looked like a second arm.

Then I added some cadmium red spatters in the field and some grasses along the bottom using various inks.  At this stage I should have stopped, but I felt the painting was unbalanced with a big tree on the left and nothing on the right.  So I added some middle ground trees on the right.  But then they needed a hill to sit on, so I covered up most of the foreground (and the texture effects from the aluminium foil) with more inks.

But then the tree wasn’t distinct enough against the background.  What could I do?  All that was left in my armoury was the waterfall green ink.  I added some of this to the tree in an attempt to brighten it up against the background.  But the ink didn’t run.  It just sat there, so I brushed it over the tree.  But it was too opaque, so I dabbed as much of it off as I could.  And what I ended up with was the glittery tree that you see here.  If you look at it at a certain angle, the tree sparkles with light.  But the woman trapped in the tree is gone.  Maybe I only imagined her.

So I learned a lot from doing this one, but was it any good?  Well, there’s a lot of energy in the leaves.  A the colours of the underpainting are good – the purple in the sky and the yellow in the background offer good contrasts against the rest of the painting.  Is the sparkliness of the tree a success though?  I’m not sure.  The painting is definitely muddy on the bottom half and I’m finding it hard to separate the sparkliness from the muddiness.

This one was picked out by my kid brother as a housewarming present.