The Tree Of Life

My second painting of the day was a lot more successful.

The underpainting was again in ultramarine blue, raw sienna and burnt sienna.  With two Earth colours in there, I can’t claim to have painted it in a particular key. I tried to paint some sort of branches using the burnt sienna, just to give myself something vaguely concrete in there.  The three colours looked a little calm, so I added in some quinacridone magenta as an afterthought.

Once it dried, it was all quite light valued and the branches didn’t really stand out.  So rather than spattering or painting whole cliffsides with inks, I used the inks to bring out the branches.  I used a lot of sepia but added Earth red and Indigo in places for variety.  And I added in a lot of gold ink, which doesn’t add colour but does add sparkle.  I also used a bit of white but was careful not to overdo it and create milk.   After adding granulation medium, I found the inks were wanting to add new branches of their own, so I encouraged this.

The last step was the spattering, but rather than using inks again, I used the four heavy duty opaque watercolours in my collection: titanium white, cadmium red, cerulean blue and cadmium yellow.

The end result isn’t too bad.  I don’t know which of the four possible ways the painting should hang but I find myself leaning towards the way I show it here.  It feels like the white bits and the bigger red lumps belong on the tops of branches.  Whichever way it hands, though, the inks and paints have created strange ambiguities in there that could be weird forest creatures.  For a start, it looks (this way round) as if there’s a huge creature standing on the branch with its arms in the air, and something smaller down in the bottom right, dancing in flared trousers.

I think this counts as a return to form.  It was given away as a present to my sister in law.