The Stages of Painting

Recently I made a large 3 canvas painting for my sister in law. It's been quite popular as I've now made 3 in total (one smaller, on 2 canvases, and the next the same size). All of them are different, as can be expected when something is handmade.

The large scope of this painting (3 canvas combined at nearly 3m long!) meant that I had to paint fast as I work with acrylics (which dry faster then oils) so to blend my levels of color, I needed to be on the ball.

The effect works out well, as I have always been a fast painter, but it leaves me exhausted once I'm done the first layer.

So here's how it goes. To do something this big you need to set up the canvases. I learned from my 1st try at this painting and enlisted 3 easels instead of the two I was trying to get away with.

After that you can start painting!

I've got the base done (above). When doing something this big I forgo using my nice clean separated pallet and instead go for a big plastic plate. Since the colors are blending, I have to work from the first color (dark brown) and blend towards the beige in the middle. It's always worked better in my mind to just keep adding whatever I needed for each layer.  It always goes a whole lot faster.

When you are working as fast as I was, it tends to get messy as well! So be prepared, paint will fly!

After this I have to wait for it to dry then I can move on to the tree!

You start with the base, the main limbs as I view them. I love painting trees because of how organic the branches are (well that's an obvious statement!). Don't paint a tree perfectly straight. Trees bend, they buckle, the bulge. And where those bulges are there' usually a stick or a new branch, something growing out of it.

You just keep working bigger branch to smaller branch and so on and so forth. I find there's rarely a branch is naturally alone. it is always connected or connecting, moving to divide into 2 or 3 new branches!

The finishing touches are then added. For me, white flowers. I don't get too specific, when you look at a tree you're eyes will "assume" what they are seeing - if that makes sense. Things become an overall picture, try not to concentrate on ALL the detail, but rather do an overall, and add details as needed. It is often needed only a little bit.

I chose to do the flowers smaller on this one, though later I added large white flowers - still not as large as the first one I did.  Even when paintings are meant to look the same, they never do. It's too hard, each painting has a mind of it's own, it's tree (in this particular group of paintings) goes it's own way and flows it's branches out a different way.

Here's an example, the above is the last one I did. Below you will see the smaller piece I did, and then the first one I did. Each changes, but they are all meant to be one and the same.