This summer I had my painting week again and out teacher and coach Ad van Aart did send me to a beautiful sequoia tree for my first painting. The tree is too big to paint completely, but I wanted to concentrate on details this summer, in this case the beautiful structured bark.
First I made some reference pictures, then I made a charcoal study:
After that I made the watercolour on top, using the original colours as good as possible. Something went wrong with the composition, the study has the tree placed nicely on the paper, leaving white spaces but the watercolour ended up on the whole paper, the wite spaces at the bottom of the tree were gone. The difference in proportions of the watercolour paper and the paper I use for the study made the mistake possible.
So we decided that I had to make at least one more watercolour painting and I changed the size of the watercolour paper I am using so the composition would be placed better on the paper.
The first watercolour was made using only shades of brown - not the original colours of the cedar tree, but the result is really nice.
For the second watercolour I used a very different idea, I made a monochromatic painting using indigo.
The results are nice, this is mostly done as a series of studies, to compare the effect of different paper sizes, composition and colour schemes.
The information about the materials I have used, the sizes of the study and the watercolours and their availabilities can all be found in my Tumblr blog.
