What's on the drawing board

My apologies for not posting in nearly a week. Good grief but where does the time go? Actually I have been enjoying some quiet time over the holidays, and I hope you have been enjoying your holiday time too.

I thought I would share this work in progress, so that you can see a bit of the process. It is colored pencil on Rising Museum board, 8 x 8 inches. Right now it is titled "Roots".

Here it is in the initial stage, what I like to call my "map".  After drawing in graphite a basic outline of the main shapes in the composition I begin by filling in areas of very light color. In fact, it is so light you almost can't see it here although it does show up well enough in real life. I used cool reds and blues for the areas of ground, a peachy color for tree bits and a creamy yellow for the spots that will be the dappled sunlight. The reason I didn't stick to monochromatic or analogous colors overall for this one was that I wanted to create a slight separation of figure and ground with the underpainting of warm colors for the figure (tree) and cooler colors for the ground (ground, in this case).

And here it is after beginning to add local color to the tree. As I did this I also dropped in a little more color to the ground portion at the top. It's really a back and forth kind of dance as I add a new color, extend color along the tree trunk, go back and adjust color in previously worked areas. . .

 This is what I did yesterday, which is the same as the image at the top. I continued that back and forth dance down the trunk and into a couple of the roots. Since I was uncertain just how I wanted to handle the ground portion of this composition, I went ahead and started in one of the smaller sections at the bottom left, to see how it would read. Once convinced that what I had going was okay for now, I continued with that as I moved around the base of the tree. This is a fun, although challenging piece to work on. Having done this much I am now really motivated to see it finished.

With the new year just around the corner, I have lots of new ideas and plans, as well as a renewed commitment to projects already in progress. Next post I'll give a run down of all that's in the works here at BlueBird Hill for 2011. Stay tuned.