A Sycamore

"Sycamore"

24" X 24" Oil on Gallery Wrapped Canvas

I painted another scene with this same tree that is now hanging in my living room continuing to dry in a pretty snazzy frame. When I finished that painting I had cropped a couple of detail photos of it. One of the detail photos was very similar to the scene in this painting. I decided to crop again from my original reference photo, based on the previous cropped image, and used it for this painting. I also had two 24x24 cnavses I had painted yeyars before that I was never happy with and didn't bother to varnish so I sanded one down and painted over it reusing the canvas.....there is a lot of that going on considering this wonderful economy we're in. Funny, I mentioned to another painter down in Pasadena that right after Christmas I went through all of my old paintings and pulled ones I decided to paint over to reuse the good canvas and she had done the same thing in her studio! Apparently I'm not alone in making ends meet.

I'm really enjoying painting sycamore trees with their spotted bark and scraggly branches. Their bark reminds me of Winter camouflage the military used to use. I wish now that I had taken more reference photos of these trees this last Fall since I've been painting so many of them. I'll have to wait until next fall. In fact, next Fall I will go out to paint some sycamore scenes plein air. Should be fun. Even though this is one Gallery wrapped canvas I'll probably make a nice oak floater frame...or maybe just an oak frame to pop it in...should work nicely like that. I'll wail until it dries to touch and then paint the sides a dark color in case I go with the floater frame.

Sycamore in Eaton Canyon

"Sycamore In Eaton Canyon"

22" x 28" Oil on Canvas

Well, finished up the sycamore tree painting from Eaton Canyon. I like this type of intimate scene from the canyon....unlike the wide spread out canyon vista, a more detailed view of the canyon in a scene such as this brings more of the flavor out of the location. I like the distant faded sunlight posed against the rich colors of the shadowed foreground you see here. I look at this scene now and I think of an old Robert Wood painting my parents had in our house when we were growing up. Wood painted the forests so well.

A detail of the painting....

 

On The Easel

On Thanksgiving I arrived early to Eaton Canyon to snap some reference photos before the rest of the days festivities. Many of the sycamore trees were in half of their autumn colors...green and golds and I actually prefer that period of painting them. There were plenty of fallen golden leaves lining the canyon floor below the sycamores which made for even better shots. I like this scene looking south to Pasadena at the exit of the canyon. Here all you can see is a hazy greenish background but that works perfectly for highlighting the tree.
I'm just about finished with this piece. I'm waiting now to see what changes I want to make....I know they are there and a days wait will point them all out to me. There were a lot of small thin branches off of the tree and I might go back in to add more of those.

This painting was started yesterday afternoon. I painted in the background and base colors of the tree trunks and growth under the trees. Both of those colors were just a dark reddish mixture of ultramarine blue, alizarin crimson and a slight bit of cadmium yellow light. Today all of the foreground was finished up....tree trunk colors, sandy trail, leaves, thin branches, the leave covered ground and vegetation under the trees. So far so good. I'll hopefully finish it off early tomorrow morning because in the afternoon I'll be heading down to Pasadena for the show at the gallery. My hope is the gallery will make some sales...not neccesarily mine...just any sales. If I don't finish it tomorrow I'll finish it on Friday morning for sure....then it is off to another painting...another lesson.