In the forest - four different moods

 During my painting vacation our teacher and coach Ad van Aart invites us all to find a theme for the week and try to improve our skills in drawing or painting using that theme. My theme was painting the forest and I wanted to improve my skills in painting different moods. To achieve that a reference picture was selected with only a forest ground and trees in it. The trees are much taller than the paintings and the forest ground is not really that empty, but it is very close to the reference. The different moods are created using different colour schemes. 

The first painting was not the first made, but as there were more paintings, we started to create a sequence - without much success as there are many possibilities here.

So the seasonal sequence is used in this blog post and this one, with some dark greens where the branches might be and on the forest floor is the end of Summer.

This second painting, with shades of yellow where the branches might be and on the forest floor is Autumn. In fact, this one was painted without blue colours as I wanted to investigate that possibility. Brown and blue is a combination I have used before so I wanted to try something different. The result is a gentle Autumn mood.

The third painting of this blog post was to be a November mist day, as we have often in The Netherlands. This was quite a challenge as I painted trees, made them fade with water, dried this all and repeated this two more times before painting the big dark (wet trees are very dark) trees in the foreground. I noticed that I have lost the trees of the background, the first layer, in the process. Then I realised that during one of these misty days this is exactly what happens - the trees that are a bit further away ar not visible any more. So I think this is what had to happen in the painting too.

The fourth painting is Winter, the dark shade of blue that is chosen for the background does suggest that time of the year.

Painting this series of four moods was a nice challenge. It was great to see the difference a shade of blue or yellow could make and these four paintings are an important part of my learning process of the painting week.

The information about the materials I have used, the size of the watercolour paintings and their availability can all be found in my Tumblr blog.