#8 The Insubordinate Tree

     Alright, I am crazy behind. I can't be flexible with my time line or I'm not gonna finish in 79 days like promised.  I also can't just not have a schedule because I need the pressure to keep me on task. The only thing I can think to do is just redo the schedule, repost and refocus.  So I'll figure that out for next post, but first I want to talk about my most recent piece. 

     The original description for his piece said "Tree of Life" it was a concept that has been rattling around in my head for a while. Just trying to capture light filtering through the branches of a broad, majestic tree.  I put this one off for a little bit because I really didn't know how the heck I was gonna pull this one off.

     I just did a little thumbnail sketch on a break at work, no reference photos or overthinking, and then when I got home I just went for it.  I laid in an acrylic sunset kind of background with these liquid acrylics I have.  They behave a lot like watercolour except that when you're working  on a gessoed surface they don't life back off when they're dry like watercolour does, which makes them totally ideal for what I'm doing here.  When I went back to wet my brush, I slopped some water onto the not-quite-dry surface and when it pooled it lifted the color and left a really cool splotch.  When I'm at a loss with what to do in a project, I look for little happy accidents like this as a guide, so I proceeded to speckle the whole surface with water and came back with a nice surface that really had some character.  I'll go ahead and take a note here because maybe in the future I'll do a piece that stops at this point with the cool, streaky splotchiness, but right now, I have a tree to paint.  I projected my thumbnail up and sketched it in and now I'm ready to tree.

Yep, another case of "stop now 'cuz it's already cool, or go ahead as planned and risk ruining it"            ...Let's risk it!

     So I painted the tree in with a combination of burnt umber and ultra marine (a mixture I got from from one of my newly acquired art books *Thanks Jan and Don!*) purposely so that if it got thin in spots it would still have some color to it without just being a muddy black.  once I got the thing laid all in it really just looked too basic.  I tried to thin the branches where the light was coming strongest from behind to simulate the light obscuring the edges like it did in the UFO Landing and the effect sort of worked, but what I was really drawn to was the softness that I got from overworking those edges

   But I was not about to go through and soften every branch individually so I decided to try a trick that has served me well with watercolour.  I take a little spray bottle and soak the the whole thing down with water (or, since this is oil paint, I used paint thinner) get it just wet enough and the paint runs a little bit and viola! soft bluriness.  Unfortunately, unlike watercolours, the oil paint on gesso didn't have the little capillaries that paper has for the watery paint to soak into and cause the fuzzy effect, so it just kind of sat there and congealed in on itself.  When I looked at the smaller branches at the tips, I noticed something cool was happening.  The paint was running along the branches and running out the end, my tree was growing! So I just expanded on that.  I sprayed portions of the branches down and then held the painting upside down to allow gravity to make the paint run even more drastically.  When it got to where I wanted it, I laid the painting back down and hit it with a hair dryer to keep it from running any further.

Whoa there buster, you stay put

       I repeated this step with 7 different angles so that my painted branches would run in all directions from the center like it would in nature.  Then I sprayed down the trunk.  Every time I sprayed it down the paint would retreat further on itself and make this really awesome tar-like effect.  Lastly I just went through with a rag and cleaned up the areas where the paint really ran out of control.  In this process, The tail of the rag was hanging out of the back of my hand and while I was carefully using my fingertip in the rag to do surgery on the branches, the other end of the rag was dragging all over the trunk in the overly runny paint and making a God awful mess!  Since I have been rolling with whatever came my way so far, I saw no reason to stop now.  I tidied up a few unwanted blobs, but mostly just left it and I got my thin paint coloring effect that I had given up hope on an hour ago so it worked out really great!

So it's more Tree of Death than Tree of Life now, but whats in a name anyway right?

Dislikes: Now that it's a tree of death, the background coloring seems too bright and shiny now.  If I were in an art school critique, I would say that the juxtaposition makes it more interesting but that's just B.S. to cover the fact that I didn't plan like 85% of how this painting went.

Likes: That like 85% of this thing did whatever the heck it wanted and I just rolled with it until cool stuff happened, you gotta love when that happens.  I learned from this piece that taking my hands off the wheel now and then has it's rewards...in a metaphorical sense. When actually driving, always keep your hands at 10 and 2 kids, 10 and 2. 

Hello Old Friend

I know, I know, It's been WAY too long since you've heard from me, over a week! Obviously this is unacceptable and I know it.  But there was ...an emergency?  Yes. Yes, an ART emergency.  See, my building was on fire and all the fire hydrants were in use due to another giant water slide they put up in Grand Rapids so I had to paint the water and then it magically became real like that episode of 1985's Amazing Stories (the one with the wheel on the B-52 bomber?) and so I had to paint and paint for days to make water but the flames. Just...um.  Ok, that's not true. Well, the water slide part was, astoundingly, sort of true.
      The real art emergency was ArtPrize venue matching starting without me.  I had to throw together some sort of presentation to convince a venue to allow me to hang my work and that kind of hogged up a bunch of my time for a few days.  Still waiting to hear back on that.  15 requested venues, 2 have declined, 13 are still thinking, they have, like 3 more weeks to mull it over. the waiting is aggravating!
        Anyway, enough excuses.  I have been working and I went WAY over on my allotted time but I think that just this once it was worth it.  I am prepared to scramble my butt off to catch back up on the TWO paintings I am already supposed to have DONE in order to have this painting that I am so proud of.  Toward the end of this one I was really able to pick up some speed too.

I laid in the background with acrylic again since that dries a heck of a lot faster so that I can get to putting in my foreground sooner.

The thumbnail of this looks a lot like a Bob Marley T-shirt I saw a guy wearing one time with some kind of big leaf on it

    Then I moved on to laying in the tree trunks.  The reference I used said these were sequoias, but they look like birches to me.  I chose these because they are definitely trees but I could get some good texture into them without having to paint every little chunk of a rough bark like an ash tree might have and then go through the trouble of trying to miniaturize that texture at an even rate as I went up the tree.  If you put a lot of effort into being lazy, does it still count as being lazy? The world may never know...    
     I tried to stay pretty true to the local color from my reference photo but I really wanted to punch up the contrast between the violet trunks and the green leaves.   
       When I say that I was able to put on a little speed toward the end of this painting, I noticed because the first 3 tree trunks took an hour a piece to paint, but I was only 2 hours finishing the last 4.  Moving twice as fast is pretty good.  It does kind of go without saying that I got into a groove painting the same things over and over and by #4 I definitely had my color mixtures figured out, so that saved some time too, but I like to think that I was moving with a little more confidence and painting more boldly. I feel like I'm finally getting some of my painting chops back.  The best part is, there is no marked improvement between the 1st and last trunk I did.  I hate that when the first or last of any repeated object in a painting looks different because I either A: figured out how to really paint it right by the last one, or B: started getting sick of repeating and totally phoned in the last couple.  I know that I have a tendency to do this so I try to complete repeating objects in a random order so it's not so easy for the viewer to see a steady progression/regression in quality as they look.  I did do these trunks randomly, but I don't think it was necessary since it's not too obvious where I stopped and started...I don't think.  Care to venture a guess? C'mon, it'll be fun!

     I don't have a whole lot else to say.  This is going to have to be a short entry because I have a lot of catching up to do.  So, Without Further Ado, here's the final product:

Dislikes: It took forever to finish, the acrylic leaves looked more realistic before I added the light coming through from behind, and I didn't measure my board before I started so now I have to try to cut an inch off this thing without ruining it, before I can frame it. 

Likes: My punched up color turned out exactly as I intended.  I am happy that I spent the extra time.  This is probably my favorite piece since the initiative began.