Thea

The source photo had a lot of dark, shadowy areas, so I started with some quite thick shading in bark in those areas.  Then I put some willow pencils in the slightly lighter shadowy areas.  And then I got to the  usual point when I fancied putting in some colour, so I added sea blue to the right facing edges, fuchsia to left facing edges and leaf green wherever else I fancied some colour.  This included going over some edges in sea blue and fuchsia lines and adding all three colours to the shadows.  Here’s what I ended up with:

I admit the pencils do look a lot heavier than optimal on this one.  I can already sense this won’t be a masterpiece.  Anyway, the next step was to add the water following my usual rules: detail with the small brush first, try to make strokes follow curves, brush light coloured pencil marks into dark rather than the other way round.  And this is what I ended up with:

I wasn’t happy with this.  There wasn’t enough contrast between the dark and light values.  And in those dark areas the bark is dominated by fuchsia and sea blue.  So I took what for me is a very rare third step of adding a second coat of inks.  It didn’t feel right to add more bark to darken the shadows, so I reached for the indigo, which is a dark colour that fits better with the other colours.

The final painting is at the top of the post.  The indigo has improved the painting but still feels like an outsider.  Maybe if I’d started with indigo rather than bark, everything would have hung together better. There are some other problems with this though.  The shadow area in the bottom left is too big.  With the inktense pencils, I need to avoid big, monotone, dark shadowy areas like this.  Just lighten them up.  Save the big monotone dark areas for the markers where they really add something.  And obviously the hand isn’t great.  So not a success, this one, and it’s not going up for sale.