And more trees

Once you get a theme running through your paintings it can inspire you to keep producing more work. The painting you’re working on feels like the child of the one you’ve just done, and so on.

Here are some more trees that I’ve painted in the last week or so. Once again using Indian ink on 300lb weight paper, but this time with sunset colours of Ultramarine Blue, Burnt Sienna and Quinacridone Red.

Three Trees at Sunset
Three Trees at Sunset – Ink and Watercolour 10ins x 10ins

Paintings of this style work quite well in a square format I find, this one being around 10 inches square. I float frame the work to leave the edge of the paper showing. This makes the whole thing more interesting and works particularly well with fairly small works.

Now for some trees

In my last post I mentioned that, if I’m stuck for inspiration, there are two subjects that I can always rely on – mooring posts and trees.

In that post I showed, well some posts! So, here are some trees that I’ve done recently.

Three Trees
Three Trees – Ink and Watercolour 10ins x 10ins

Using a photograph as the initial reference, I lightly sketched the basic shape of the tree trunks onto a piece of 300lb Arches rough paper about ten inches square. This just makes sure that I get the trees in the right place on the paper for the best composition. I don’t make any attempt to draw in branches or detail at this stage, that happens when I get going with the ink. Using a number 4 round sable hair brush I draw directly onto the paper with Indian ink from a bottle. By dragging the loaded brush across the paper it’s possible to get some nice effects of texture, while the number 4 is fine enough to ink in the branches and a few twigs. I take care not to put in too many!

When the ink is dry, I paint the colours on using normal watercolour paint. The ink is water resistant so that it does not dissolve when painted over. Effectively there are only two complimentary colours used, blue and orange. The blues are Prussian Blue and Manganese Blue Hue, while the orange is mixed from Burnt Sienna and Lemon Yellow.

Try using this technique yourself, it makes a very striking image.