The Pine Tree

My husband and I have enjoyed cross country skiing while we've been married. We went to the mountains near our home the other day and I took some pictures of a few things I'd like to paint. This is a pine tree on the cross country ski trail that I loved. 

I started by drawing a simple sketch of the painting.

                                             

                         

I painted some masking fluid on the places I wanted bright snow.

I dried the masking fluid and began mixing colors. I wanted to show light in my painting that was missing in the photo. The canyon that we ski in is deep and the ski trail rarely sees the sun.

This is my palette. I have it divided into cool and warm colors. I'm not sure I like it this way. How do you organize your palette?

I painted the sky. I've been using a staining blue and I thought that the yellow would blend a little better. Not really happy about the sky but it brought some light that I was looking for.

I filled in the rest of the background with the same colors to bring unity to the painting.

I started filling in the trees with some light colors.

The stream is frozen over on the trail and I tried to leave white spaces in it to make it looked covered in snow. It also gave it motion. I removed the masking.

This is the finished product. It was really fun to paint and when I posted it on facebook lots of my friends liked it. What do you think? What would you do differently?

I actually painted this scene first before the step by step one above. My family really enjoyed it. I didn't think the tree stood out enough and I really want to be able to show light in my paintings.

Here's a fun pine tree I enjoyed painting today. I didn't use masking fluid on it. I just painted dark green around the areas that I wanted to remain white. I used several different greens and painted some of it wet in wet. I really liked it after I splattered white gouache on it for snow.

This was a fun little pine tree too. I splattered white gouache on it when it was wet. It gave it an icy feeling.  

Hello!

My reading desk where I paint pictures from my reading in a watercolor notebook. I use a travel watercolor set and a travel watercolor brush.

I used warm colors to represent a cool scene in winter.

I tried a new way of doing leaves on the trees. I painted a spot of paint directly onto the branch. I stroked it with a wet sponge to create the evergreen leaves. I also used Pthalo blue for the sky. I painted wet in we so it wouldn't stain so much.

These are some trees I painted for the different seasons.

Autumn

summer

winter

spring