Dead tree - Kalmthoutse Heide

 

Last week, as we were walking a signposted walk on the Kalmthoutse Heide, I saw a dead tree that inspired me to make reference pictures. On the bark - what was left of it - were lots of colours, white, shades of brown and orange and more so I tried to capture that in my reference pictures. And I wanted a picture of the whole tree, standing alone against the sky. 

While I was trying to get that right my husband told me to try from the other side, where he was still standing. The colours that inspired me at first were not visible from there, but the tree looked great from the viewpoint he advised me. The sky suddenly looked more cloudy and dark and the tree did stand out beautifully.

Last week I experienced that it could be too dark to paint really early in the afternoon, so now I started my painting in the morning, choosing a large size paper for this scene. Still the weather was against me, something with the humidity, drying time, paper staying very wet and that stuff. The struggle was not very long, I soon found out what was the matter and I have used my hair-dryer very often for this painting.

After one layer was dried, I added more paint, dried it again and repeated until I was happy with the result. Normally I don't need to dry my paper so often in between layers and I can keep adding paint much longer. So today was different, but no problem.

After the sky and foreground (a piece of moorland in autumn) were what I wanted them to be I started painting the tree. As the tree was in backlight, there are only shades of dark and darker brown in the shape of the tree and the remaining branches. Many of the smaller branches have fallen off long ago and what is still standing may stay like this for a long time. Or not, the tree may be very weak by now and fall in the first storm that comes.

I am really happy with the result of my work, I tried to paint the loneliness of that dead tree and I think I succeeded well.

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

If you are interested in my work, please do contact me.