Spring Apples

Here is my latest studio painting. I began this painting on my birthday and had a wonderful time with it. It’s a grouping of several types of flowering trees. One was definitely a regular apple tree, the other I think must be crabapple. It was quite amazing! I’m sharing the underpaintings with you and thought I’d talk about the surface and color choices for the underpainting. I didn’t change the composition or color scheme for this painting. My main challenge was dealing with the large amount of detail. So I decided it was time to return to the Reeves paper, which I have enjoyed working on so much. It turned out to be perfect! I applied two coats of liquid primer, toned with sienna and umber (you can see the color on the upper right of the underpaintings where there was no pastel added). I did an underpainting using Holbein sticks, which I’ve found to be quite useful for this purpose. Given the complexity of the subject matter, I decided to go with the local color and not the opposite. It might have been nice to have green under the red, but I found it a lot easier having mapped out the reds ahead of time. Remember that an underpainting is there to help you! For the grass, however, I used several oranges as this was relatively straightforward.

In applying the greens and reds of the foliage, I used primarily soft pastels. I find that they work better on this surface than the Giraults. I did a lot of “hitting” the pastel against the paper to leave small marks. I really liked how the surface allowed the undercolors to show through. The fence was probably the most difficult part. It’s going at several angles and in the far left, it’s just wire. I thought about adding more fence posts or slats, but didn’t want to cover up the grass and decided to go with it as it was. I added a hint of the wire, which I think you can see. I mainly loved the angle of it and light hitting the back side.

Yesterday I entered this painting, Spring Stream and another in the PSA show. It’s getting a lot harder to get into it, but I’m giving it my best shot!