During my painting vacation I made several reference pictures of trees and tree bark hoping I could use them that same week. One of the pictures is of a beech tree that had several dark spots at eye level (my eyes) so I made the picture. When looking at my pictures our teacher and coach Ad van Aart suggested I would make a watercolour painting of that part of the tree including a bit of the background.
So I tried to do that, on the hottest afternoon of the month. Of course I failed being too tired with the heat and humidity and my paper (I selected Grain Torchon) would not dry because of that same humidity. At last I gave up and when I did show the work everyone mistook the tree for a birch, the tree trunk was too light and the dark spots were too dark, as you can see below.
As I wanted to paint the beech tree, I tried again at home on Grain Fin paper and I started differently. Now I succeeded to make it look like a beech tree.
This tree stands in the shadow of other, large trees all the time and did not grow upright.
The tree bark is dark grey with patches of green that are caused by some algae growing on the tree bark. The dark spots are not all dark brown (my mistake in the first version) but just darker grey with a touch of the green I mentioned. For this version I also changed the composition a bit, the left side of the tree - with some extra dark structures - is now visible so the structure of the tree trunk is more comprehensible.
The second painting (the one above) is what I hoped for. Beech trees do not have a very structured bark and this is the best I could do.
The information about the materials I have used, the size of this painting and its availability can all be found in my Tumblr blog.
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