Before I start, I should say thank you to Liron Yankonsky for a Video he posted on YouTube recently. The study he did helped me a lot. I really focused on clean washes, and simple composition as a result of watching that video.
I decided to paint another autumn tree today. This time I wanted to work some perspective into the image. So I decided to paint a windbreaker tree in a recently harvested farm field.
To start, I laid in some initial washes. The sky is Prussian Blue, and a smidge of Raw Umber, just lightly brushed, leaving white to suggest clouds. I could go back over these later to define them, but the painting is about that tree, and I’m working on trying to simplify, so I left the sky as it was.
Toward the horizon I worked in some very light Yellow Ochre. I increased the saturation of the Yellow Ochre below the horizon, and worked in some Quin gold and Ultramarine Blue toward the bottom. I painted these colors loosely, in diagonal lines, which later will became the harvested field.
I thought about including some hay bales, but at this time of year, they tend to be collected, and again, I need to work on simplifying. So I left the hay bales out.
When that was still wet, I used Quin Red and Anthraq Red to paint the base of the trees. I blended Quin Gold and Perinone Orange on the left side, wet-in-wet to suggest directionality to the light. I then used a clean brush to lift color for the tree trunks, and did the same in the field.
Then, it was time for work, so I let it dry. The whole process took about twenty minutes.
Over my lunch break, I added some more definition to the tree and grasses. I don’t know what pigments I used, I was just trying to darken the base of the tree, and suggest texture to the field by adding pigments. The tree was painted almost entirely wet-in-wet, though with small calligraphy lines that I let run into each other. At the base, I painted mostly Anthraq Red, and some Quin Purple lines, being careful to paint negatively around the tree trunks. As I painted these lines upward, I used more Quin Gold, and Perinone Orange.
The field was painted with diagonal lines of Quin Gold at the bottom, which I neutralized with Raw Umber, Burnt Sienna, UM Blue, and Moon glow as I moved toward the horizon. While these were wet, I dabbed in a spot of Quin Gold, our Moon Glow here and there, and let that absorb into the wet diagonal line. Then, when these lines dried a bit, I used some neutral tint and Quin Gold, and Raw Umber to paint vertical lines with a dry brush to suggest harvested corn stalks.
Finally, I mixed a neutral on my palette by just adding blue and yellow and red to the colors that were already on the palette until I had a relatively neutral grey. I painted this in horizontal lines too suggest shadows.
And that was it. The whole thing took less than an hour, and I’m actually reasonably happy with it.