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.